Scramblejams

The Grid Compass series (especially the II models with the big screen) looked like it came from the future. Stunning in its era. Wouldn't mind seeing a reboot.

I doubt that very much. 20ish years ago I read about the Indians being very upset that the engines in the Sukhoi fighters they bought weren't even making it to the promised (very modest) 300 operating hours between overhauls. That's far less than Western engines routinely achieve. And with the hollowing out of the Russian industrial base that's occurred since then, I'd be surprised if it's gotten any better in the intervening years.

Maybe more than a headwind. From my time in AAA here are two things I learned that were true in that environment:

1. Artists hate Perforce.

2. You will never get them to try anything else.

I'm exaggerating, but not by that much. I lost count of the number of artists who are deeply uncomfortable with technology and just manage to learn the bare minimum to do their job, and then will take no more.

So besides everything else Lore needs to nail to be acceptable, they need to make it easy for artists to switch. Maybe when UnrealGameSync grows enough knobs and switches to make it unnecessary for an artist to ever touch P4V, Epic can roll Lore into UGS as an unobtrusive option. And if by then there's good support in Unity, in JetBrains, in Maya, etc., then maybe they'll have something.

I’ve long wanted that amazing uptime and virtualization and huge I/O and all that cool stuff mainframes offered, but on the desktop or in the closet, with modern CPUs.

I think I’m gonna hafta keep waiting...

Of course, but all those things (including upgrading during business hours) require budget. So, back to my original question...

I'd love to see this in the bootloader, along with a selection of binaries useful for recovery. Might sound silly but over the years I have had many a remote system get to the bootloader and then no further after an upgrade. Nowadays we've usually got a nicely sized EFI partition, why not stuff it all in there? Gimme a full Linux userspace from the bootloader, it would feel luxurious when I'm up at 3 am trying to recover a broken system halfway across the country.

Or is there already a solution to this that I've been missing? (Yeah, KVM/IPMI/etc, I know, but not all hosters make it easy to get to that.)

Congrats on your release, Aardappel! Bought a copy to support the dream!

You're right, packaging would definitely be a challenge. The cylinder head would need to be low profile, conformal exhaust headers, dry sumped, and put all the plumbing you can (including the turbo and wastegate) behind the block. Maybe it’s not feasible, but it sure would be an interesting puzzle to try!

The peeps I've talked to who've done LS swaps seemed more interested in the economic, technological, and fuel economy leaps made versus the certified air-cooled default choices rather than the power, but YMMV...

Upsides are that they're both first- and second-order naturally balanced, requiring no balance shafts, which reduces weight and makes them very low vibration. I keep waiting for someone to come up with a lightweight, turbonormalized straight six that runs on Jet A to replace old turboprop engines on aircraft, but I digress...

Microsoft can really get it wrong, but getting streaming wrong after Stadia and Luna would be very, very impressive.

I disagree, for me desktop (K)Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle works great. Feels like a nice balance between stability and freshness.

Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers.

Brutal! Is that true even for Japanese companies with a traditional sales force?

Got a list of those bloggers you like?

In other disciplines, yes. Very common to hear it in mechanical or aerospace engineering, for example. They'll say "codes" to refer to multiple programs or "a code" to refer to a single program. It's amusing, when I was in the field I just went with it.

That’s awesome! But not everyone’s library is the same, so YMMV. I regularly see problems with flight sims that are Nvidia-specific, for example.

Many of the replies completely missed the part about Nvidia, sigh.

I unfortunately still see a lot of Proton bug reports that don’t repro on AMD cards. Hoping that improves soon, I’m sure Valve would love to tell hardware makers that Nvidia GPUs are supported.

Check out Jai, apparently if you ask nicely its author will let you use it. Unofficial docs here: https://pixeldroid.com/jailang/

Cool project, but I'd use the first mode to look for hidden cameras at Airbnbs!

Tried Mint?

It can be helpful to look at it less in terms of what it costs Valve to run their service and more in terms of what value developers get from Valve for the money.

I'm in the business and I've asked two different heads of large, very well-known AAA studios how they felt about Valve's percentage, and they basically told me the same thing: They had their teams do rigorous analyses of what it would cost them to 'replace' Valve for their games, and concluded it would cost roughly what they were already paying Valve. So they had no incentive to move off the platform. Look at how many publishers have come slinking back to Steam after trying to go solo -- there are good business reasons for that, and it isn't just about the stubborn fact of their huge social graph.

If it costs that much to replace Valve for your game, it's hard to argue that what they're charging isn't fair.

As others have pointed out, Valve does far more than just host. Shipping a multiplayer game and want comprehensive protection from DDoS attacks? Use Valve's datagram network for no additional fee. Don't want to host your own lobby servers? Use Valve's for no additional fee, they'll accommodate hundreds of thousands of players with no complaints. Want to sell your game in a zillion countries? Valve's got you, easy peasy. And discovery is a thing -- Valve sells a whooole lot of games just by putting them in the carousel in front of players. This is huge, huge value.

And as a player, I'm actually really happy, super happy, did I mention how incredibly happy I am with what they're doing with some of their cut: They saved gaming on Linux -- it's often better than Windows -- and I love my SteamDeck. So that cut is benefiting me directly as a consumer because they're spending it on initiatives I'm really passionate about.

Valve delivers a ton of value for the cost. If someone wants to try to do better, Valve's not stopping them, but I can tell you that as a player and a gamedev, none of the other options are remotely enticing to me. In my view, that's not Valve's problem to solve by cratering their own revenue.

159! Staggering. Got a source?

"The best camera is the one you have with you." Looking forward to the next buildout post!

Fun piece, thanks to the author. But for vicarious thrills like this, more pictures are always appreciated!

Same. What flavor of ML would be the most appropriate for that challenge, do you think?

Is it the desktop environment or background stuff that’s getting worse for you? If the former: FWIW I was pleasantly surprised when I switched back to Kubuntu. KDE’s surprisingly resource efficient these days, actually seems pretty close to XFCE.

Long-time Navy jet jock finds it "cringe" when people try to get a little break from the stresses of their life by attempting in a very small way to emulate what he achieved.

I get your point but come on man, ease up. At least remember that some of those DCS-playing wage slaves helped fund your adventures.

I did apologize, didn't I? :-)

Perspective is everything, I guess. You look at that three year old comment and think it's not particularly informative. I look at that comment and see an experienced infosec pro at Fly.io, who runs billions of container workloads and doesn't trust the cgroups+namespaces security boundary enough so goes to the trouble of running Firecracker instead. (There are other reasons they landed there, but the security angle's part of it.)

Anyway if you want some links, here are a few. If you want more, I'm sure you can find 'em.

CVE-2022-0492: https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/cve-2022-0492-cgroups

CVE-2022-0847: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/dirty-pipe-contai...

CVE-2023-2640: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-discovers...

CVE-2024-21626: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2024-21626

Some are covered off by good container deployment hygiene and reducing privilege, but from my POV it looks like the container devs are plugging their fingers in a barrel that keeps springing new leaks.

(To be fair, modern Docker's a lot better than it used to be. If you run your container unprivileged and don't give it extra capabilities and don't change syscall filters or MAC policies, you've closed off quite a bit of the attack surface, though far from all of it.)

But keep in mind that shared-kernel containers are only as secure as the kernel, and today's secure kernel syscall can turn insecure tomorrow as the kernel evolves. There are other solutions to that (look into gVisor and ask yourself why Google went to the trouble to make it -- and the answer is not "because Docker's security mechanisms are good enough"), but if you want peace of mind I believe it's better to sidestep the whole issue by using a hypervisor that's smaller and much more auditable than a whole Linux kernel shared across many containers.

Apologies for repeating myself all over this part of the thread, but the vulnerabilities here are something that Podman and Docker can't really do anything about as long as they're sharing a kernel between containers.

The vulnerability is in kernel syscalls. More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319067

If you're going to make containers hard to escape, you have to host them under a hypervisor that keeps them apart. Firecracker was invented for this. If Docker could be made unescapable on its own, AWS wouldn't need to run their container workloads under Firecracker.

I did not!* Through many Pis serving many years and experiencing many power outages.

But I'm using CanaKit power supplies (which supply 5.1 volts, Rpis are notoriously flaky if the voltage dips just a little below 5v) and ATP industrial automotive-grade flash cards (not a big premium in absolute terms, I think 32 gig cards are $13 on Digikey).

* Okay okay, before I switched to those accessories I did have problems.

Better not rely on unprivileged containers to save you. The problem is:

Breaking out of a VM requires a hypervisor vulnerability, which are rare.

Breaking out of a shared-kernel container requires a kernel syscall vulnerability, which are common. The syscall attack surface is huge, and much of it is exploitable even by unprivileged processes.

I posted this thread elsewhere here, but for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319067