NelsonMinar

One of my favorite easter eggs in Nethack was the way a Mailer Daemon would arrive in-game and deliver a scroll when you received an email on the host Unix system. Which then became a game exploit because there were some obscure in-game uses for the scroll items.

Bazzite mostly suggests installing stuff via Flatpak or Homebrew. (No, really, brew on Linux lol). You can also layer in things with rpm-ostree but it's clunky. I think the immutable OS makes sense for a consumer but not for a developer.

So I'm using Nobara instead. It's a different Fedora-for-gaming but has most of the same improvements. It is a traditional system, not immutable. CachyOS is also very popular and that gets you an Arch-for-gaming. Just yesterday I learned of PikaOS, a Debian-for-gaming.

The main thing all these gaming-customized systems are doing is getting graphics drivers and proprietary codecs installed for you easily.

One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.

I recently switched to Linux after years on Windows desktop, mostly because the KDE Plasma desktop feels snappier than Windows 11. Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it. It's been really nice. If you haven't tried Linux desktops in awhile give Bazzite a whirl: it's a Fedora customized for gaming. Even if you don't game it's an easy way to get a very functional Linux desktop in no time at all.

Grok is many things but it is not "neutral". https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/06/25/ai-models-valu...

People give them money because of the moral stance. They are either actively fine with the CSAM or just don't care.

The premise of this statement is wrong.

I realize as a Californian we may not count as "American" in this particular zeitgeist stereotype. But FWIW we have a firework ban in Nevada County that is widely respected. There are very few violations and the law is actively enforced.

The difference is we are in a no-joke dangerous fire situation and everyone recognizes it. Most people know better than to set off incendiary explosives in a forest. Anyone who shot off illegal fireworks would immediately be shamed and censured by their neighbors. I guess it's a form of commune-ism.

numerous vulnerabilities in secure boot deployment over many years. e.g. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/secure-boot-neuteri...

I'm surprised more people aren't freaking out about this. It seems likely a whole lot of Linux machines are going to fail to reboot in the next few months. The problem affects VMs too. I was grateful Proxmox put a little warning in its hypervisor GUI with a button to press to fix the BIOS of its VMs.

Secure Boot has been deeply broken for years, not providing meaningful security on most consumer machines.

I love stuff like this. But if it's serious as a thing you might use, would be nice to see some example programs and evaluation of how well they work. Also a test suite.

If you like the idea of smart corvids, Adrian Tchaikovsky's scifi novel "The Children of Memory" is a fun read.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60850767-children-of-...

Backrest is so good as a frontend to Restic I stopped looking for anything better. Is there anything better now?

We once deleted the lost+found folder on an old Unix system* by accident. Things went very badly the next time the system rebooted, fsck did not handle it at all well.

* Probably DEC Ultrix 2.2, a BSD 4.2 derivative.

Summary from the study author: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2026/06/02/the-quiet-numbers-st...

PDF of article (page 62) https://cdn.coverstand.com/61061/865273/2c88ea662e2b57478723...

This is the classic Terry Moore 3 minute video. It boils down to "tie a square knot". It changed my life too!

I love this video because it's both the perfect TED video and the perfect parody of a TED video.

Is Start9 a well known company? The page by itself seems indistinguishable from a scam, but maybe they have a reputation that justifies their asking for $250,000?

I like TopoJSON and have used it in projects. But it's weird to set it up as opposition to GeoJSON. It's a complement. GeoJSON is a general data format meant to replace uses of ESRI Shapefiles and other complex formats. TopoJSON is more of a solution for a particular application need.

Is there much work developing or using TopoJSON these days? I haven't seen much about it in a few years.

This reminds me ChromeOS has some USB-C cable identification superpowers: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1pyojjd/comme...

Not sure if it's using the same thing this MacOS thing is doing. In the link the author explains that the cable e-Marker contains a "Discover Identity" message that you can read and display in ChromeOS. Most ordinary Windows hardware can't read it because of BIOS limitations, but Chromebooks can. I'm guessing Macs can too.

How did a bug like this get past their testing?

I keep hearing a lot of good buzz about their product. Haven't tried it myself but I mean to.

This video is another good demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJLncut79vE

Most old-timers here are familiar with a Prolog-variant: make. Anyone who's struggled over a complex Makefile wishes they had a more sane declarative language!

Every time I read about ancient DNA work, it's about Reich's research. Can anyone expert in the field shed light on that? He certainly seems to have a successful research group. And he's a good communicator, I got a lot out of his 2018 book. Who else should I be reading or reading about?

I'm a little surprised it's not ZFS. Too difficult to add to their Linux environment? That's still a problem here in 2026.

I miss the old days when the choke was built into the (analog VGA) cable.

I wish they'd just switch to fuzzing the location instead of stripping it entirely. Instead of specifying 6 digits of lat/lon, publish 1 digit to identify what rough area you're in (to about 10km).

I've done a lot of neat projects with geolocation over the years. Including a personal travel diary, a bunch of visualizations of tweets and Flickr photos, etc etc. I am sad that's become nearly impossible but I do respect that most people don't understand the privacy risk.

Meanwhile on the advertising backend Google knows your exact location and is using it to help third parties target ads to you. And sleazy apps like Grindr sell location streams to anyone who asks. The bad guys get this data, just not the useful apps.

I've recently switched my personal email to a brand new domain and am struggling with getting it delivered. And all I'm doing is ~100 emails a week hand written by me to other individuals. I've been doing Internet email for 35 years now, I used to handwrite sendmail.cf for my college. I'm worried the medium is going to fail entirely in 5-10 years because of complexity in spam fighting.

Receiving mail: I was using Google Workspace to accept email to my domain and then forward it to my personal @gmail.com address. And Gmail was blocking emails forwarded from Google Workspace. Not because the original email was suspect, no, but because Google Workspace isn't forwarding email correctly (ARC or SRS related) and so the SPF check failed. The solution for that was to use Cloudflare to forward my incoming email instead. They are doing ARC right, or in some other ways the signatures arrive intact so Gmail sees valid SPF instead of invalid. Now my mail gets delivered reliably.

Sending mail: I only ever send mail to Gmail. I have DKIM set up and just set up a strict p=reject policy with DMARC. This seems to be working pretty well. I did have to add Cloudlflare as another authorized DKIM source so the mail forward works, but that's OK too.

Basically we've shifted the trust problem from "does this email look legit" to "do I trust the companies that are sending this email?" This all works only if Gmail and Cloudflare don't screw up and allow spam. (Which is already failing: I get a lot of Gmail spam.) So email is now consolidating into the hands of a few companies. It is not working well as a peer to peer Internet medium anymore.

I tend to think this, too. Or rather a small group of cryptographers working for a nation-state. It's the only way to make sense of the fact that Satoshi is enormously wealthy. I don't think any individual could sit on this kind of wealth and not cash out visibly.

I quit here too. This article is an embarrassment that should never have passed the editorial process.

You should see Tesla's rooftop solar business!