Comments like this really don’t add anything to the conversation

I bought dragon’s dogma: dark arisen for the switch a year or two ago. It’s pretty fun and the pawn system is a good innovation over npc party members in other games. I liked the voice lines they’d rattle off every so often… “goblins ill like fire!”

I’m currently working my way through Elden ring on PC, which is a lot more punishing combat-wise, but definitely has superior level design. I’ll come back to DD to finish the story at some point.

Dang, that’s a really cool phenomenon, thanks for sharing!

I’m sorry you had to go through that. Reddit really is a shadow of its former self these days.

I have a few Callistemons in my garden, hoping for some flowers one day, but for now I’m just happy they’re growing :)

Australian native plants are beautiful, I hope to have a fully-native garden at some point.

Exactly right! Thanks, and enjoy your winter, I hope it’s not too cold!

Hi beeple,

I wanted to get my hot water heater fixed with a $50 thermostat, but the plumber wouldn’t touch it and wanted $3000 to replace it. Ouch! I might try to find a replacement thermostat via Google, but it’s an ancient model and the part numbers don’t turn up anything. Really don’t need more bills right now!

It is starting to heat up in Australia, and the bushfires have already killed 2 people in my state in the last week. I’m not looking forward to another black summer. However, on the bright side, there seems to be a shift in the views of our Nationals party regarding climate change - they’ve always been conservative but now it seems they’re getting on board with climate action, since they’re being affected by the heat, droughts etc. I wish people would take action for things before it affects them personally, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

I hope everyone gets through their struggles and has some time to relax and enjoy themselves this week.

I feel you on the Christmas tradition! My family sets price caps on presents and I think it saves a lot of stress. Ever since I was 21 or so, the best part of Christmas was the food and the celebration, not the presents.

Sleep is so important and it’s great you’ve got a solution with a cpap machine now. Well done!

As for your techie child, it may be part of an ongoing trend in tech that things are getting worse instead of better - I feel that myself, and I know my friends do too - but they could also just be growing out of their hobbies and exploring new aspects of life. After working at a tech job I don’t want to spend my evenings at a computer any more, so I’ve started riding motorbikes and getting into photography, gardening and other outdoorsy stuff in the last few years.

Libvirt is great, been using it at home to run VMs for ~10 years now.

There may have been some restriction or legislative reason regarding ipv6 until recently - China has gone from <5% to nearly 30% IPv6 capable since 2019: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN

I really wanted to enjoy doom 3, but even 20 years later I haven’t finished the main campaign. Too many cheap jumpscares and the switching to the flashlight just to see, really put me off in the end. However, it was a pretty game for the time.

Amnesia is great, I haven’t finished that one either but it’s the good kind of horror, much more creepy and slow-burning.

I mentioned this in discord a while back, but there are image-matching databases for known instances of CSAM that you can apply for access to, as an admin of a forum or social media site. If you had access, you could scan each image uploaded or linked to in a post or comment, and compare to the database for matches. I think that mastodon is adding some hooks for this kind of checking during the upload phase, but I’m not sure what the status is with Lemmy.

I’m happy to help facilitate a solution like this, as it’s something I also care about. Feel free to find me on discord if you want to talk.

Also, as others have said - I’m sorry you had to go through that. The same thing happened to me many years ago and it definitely affected me for a long time.

Impossible Creatures - an RTS where you slurp up DNA from local wildlife and use that to create weird hybrids of multiple animals, then produce those as units that you control to complete missions. Great concept but I think it ended up being a bit unbalanced.

Papers Please - pretty unique gameplay in that you had to literally read through paperwork and approve/reject people at a border crossing. Good social commentary.

Someone also ported it to the browser, just saw it on mastodon: https://wavacity.com/

The idea behind user mode and kernel mode is that it gives the operating system a framework to establish security permissions etc. some operating systems might take this more seriously than others, but the point is that the modes are a feature of the cpu, provided by the manufacturer.

Also, when you’re talking about “harming” the system, you should consider what’s possible in user land vs kernel mode. Kernel mode is where drivers manipulate hardware - these days, there is an additional layer of safety/abstraction done in the firmware level, so software can’t create physical damage to the hardware (like the classic “hackers can turn your computer into a bomb” advertisement).

However, the kernel can:

• trash a filesystem by writing data directly to the drive
• trash system memory (RAM)
• trash cpu registers

In kernel mode, it’s very easy to cause the OS to crash via these methods. A user mode program will have much higher level access to the system and won’t be able to cause damage so easily. Programs often crash themselves - maybe you’ve seen null pointer exceptions, or out of bounds memory exceptions - these are caused by a userland program doing something it shouldn’t (even unintentionally), and the OS intervening to stop that. However, a userland program shouldn’t be able to crash the whole OS (e.g. cause a BSOD on windows, or a kernel panic on Linux). Usually when you see that, it’s caused by a driver. Drivers run in kernel mode.

As for being able to do bad things with syscalls, you’re exactly right, and that’s why we have permissions around syscalls :)

On Linux there’s systemd.exec, seccomp, the capability framework, and of course selinux. On openbsd they have pledge (which is slightly different, but their threat model is also slightly different to begin with). I’m not sure what windows offers in this regard, from a quick search it seems there isn’t an exact equivalent of the Linux systems, but there are still security frameworks.

There are many frameworks and permissions systems that form an operating system, and each one might cover a different area. OS security is a pretty broad topic but very interesting, I encourage you to keep learning and asking questions!

Also, I just woke up and haven’t had coffee, so please bear with my rambling post.

I recently installed win10 on a 2019 Lenovo thinkpad x1 carbon, and it has similar issues. I don’t use it much, but I’ve wondered how much bloatware is affecting the cpu usage and therefore can speeds. It was running Ubuntu Linux before and while the fan came on sometimes, it was less often and less pronounced.

You could try a live Linux usb to see if you get similar results, that would point to a software issue.

Just wanted to expand a bit on your comment - Dell have a few laptop product lines, and the Latitude line is the business one that should be the most reliable/longest-supported. I’ve had a few Latitude laptops that lasted 3 years each before I changed jobs and left them behind, and was satisfied with them. Worked well with Linux which was a bigger deal back in 2015 than it is now.

Other companies are probably the same - Lenovo thinkpads are good, yoga not so much.

Totally agree about Linux, it’s come a long way in the last 10 years and you can do basically everything there now. Battery life may be affected, I think that’s one of the last areas they need to work on.

You can use both systems, and appreciate their advantages and disadvantages. Cryptocurrency is good for discreet transactions where you don’t mind sacrificing some of the protections of the traditional financial system. So far it seems that it’s mainly used to buy drugs and other illegal stuff, but I’ve also seen web hosting purchasable with crypto, and I’m sure there are plenty of other applications that I can’t think of now. Back in the first bitcoin boom, there were restaurants selling food for btc, but the confirmation delay was a concern. That wouldn’t be the case now with the lightning network, but the novelty is gone.

The web3 stuff built on top of blockchain seems to be 99% scams and grifts. I don’t subscribe to the value of adding artificial scarcity/provenance to digital goods.

I come back to finish off a few more unlocks every so often, and it seems like the list keeps growing. Great little game, very trippy towards the end of the “story” as well.

Really? I just spent 5 minutes searching for the fourteen words, and found a bunch of openly white supremacist/nazi content, with plenty of likes and retweets. Remember, Musk fired/let go most of his content and safety teams after he took the company over. You can report stuff but it won’t get taken down any more.

(Note, I won’t link the content here in case that’s against rules, but it’s really not hard to find. Look at the “ChiefBarony” and “SindriThule” accounts for example)