Category Archives: News

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The D.N.C. Is Scrapping Its Report on What Went Wrong in 2024

Source: NYT > U.S.

Article note: Cue demented goofy "I'll Fucking Do it Again" meme.

Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chairman, ordered the autopsy months ago but is now said to believe that its release would be counterproductive for the party.

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The D.N.C. Is Killing Its Autopsy of What Went Wrong in 2024

Source: NYT > U.S.

Article note: Cue demented goofy "I'll Fucking Do it Again" meme.

Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chairman, ordered the report months ago but is now said to believe that its release would be counterproductive for the party.

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Coursera to combine with Udemy

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The whole MOOC / independent online course thing really speedran the "Technological utopianism to grifting by established players" arc that is the doom of so many things. Also, ITT, people who think LLMs will make good personalized instruction tools (because they don't have the expertise in any area to know LLM slop is slop, or have Gell-Mann amnesia about credible slop outside their area of expertise) vs. people who have ever looked at LLM slop in an area they have any semblance of expertise in, and know that it's way too unreliable and not meaningfully improving.
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Reporter suggests Half-Life 3 will be a Steam Machine launch title

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: This would be the funniest thing. They launched their last software platform via HL2.

If you can take your mind way back to the beginning of 2025, you might remember a fresh wave of rumors suggesting that Half-Life 3 was finally reaching the final stages of production, and could be announced and/or released at any moment. Now, though, 2025 seems set to come to a close without any official news of a game fans have been waiting literal decades for.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a Half-Life 3 announcement and/or release isn’t imminent, though. On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that “everybody I’ve talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine.”

Straw—who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources—said this Half-Life 3 information is “not [from] these run-of-the-mill sources that haven’t gotten me information before. … These aren’t like random, one-off people.” And those sources are “still adamant that the game is coming in the spring,” Straw added, noting that he was “specifically told [that] spring 2026 [is the window] for the Steam Machine, for the Frame, for the Controller, [and] for Half-Life 3.”

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Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: ...could you not? I feel like the differentiating move right now would be to go hard on privacy and doing-what-the-user-says instead of trying to become yet another unreliable data vacuum.

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to fin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More)

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The recovery of lost media from ephemeral platforms is always fascinating. We've done pretty well with that era of proto-online broadcast stuff Satellaview is ...mostly... preserved, Sega Channel is now pretty well preserved, so on. The commercial-mass-online-distribution era is going to be interesting - the free stuff (flash games and java applets) are largely done, and even a few weird things like the ipod game library have happened, but it seems like things get thinner as time goes forward.
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D-Bus is a disgrace to the Linux desktop

Source: Hacker News

Article note: He's not wrong, dbus is a _vile_ protocol in almost every imaginable way. It's probably why years of lobbying for kernel-integrated kdbus/bus1 from people who have a history of bullying their way to success on plumbing matters went nowhere. None of the bolted-on security proposals have been credible. The specs and documentation are frequently nonexistent, and most implementations don't follow them anyway. It's also probably so entrenched into the systemd gordian knot and constellation of shit that had to be bolted onto Wayland before even the most enthusiastic folks could pretend it was feature complete that it will require another major plumbing upheaval to unseat.
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Rethinking sudo with object capabilities

Source: OSNews

Article note: I find it interesting that unix basically exists because the ACL system in multics was too unwieldy, and folks have been trying to graft it back in since. Its not necessarily wrong.

Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill has published a very interesting blog post about the shortcomings of both sudo and doas, and offers a potential different way of achieving the same goals as those tools.

Systems built around identity-based access control tend to rely on ambient authority: policy is centralized and errors in the policy configuration or bugs in the policy engine can allow attackers to make full use of that ambient authority. In the case of a SUID binary like doas or sudo, that means an attacker can obtain root access in the event of a bug or misconfiguration.

What if there was a better way? Instead of thinking about privilege escalation as becoming root for a moment, what if it meant being handed a narrowly scoped capability, one with just enough authority to perform a specific action and nothing more? Enter the object-capability model.

↫ Ariadne Conill

To bring this approach to life, they created a tool called capsudo. Instead of temporarily changing your identity, capsudo can grant far more fine-grained capabilities that match the exact task you’re trying to accomplish. As an example, Conill details mounting and unmounting – with capsudo, you can not only grant the ability for a user to mount and unmount whatever device, but also allow the user to only mount or unmount just one specific device. Another example given is how capsudo can be used to give a service account user to only those resources the account needs to perform its tasks.

Of course, Conill explains all of this way better than I ever could, with actual example commands and more details. Conill happens to be the same person who created Wayback, illustrating that they have a tendency to look at problems in a unique and interesting way. I’m not smart enough to determine if this approach makes sense compared to sudo or doas, but the way it’s described it does feel like a superior, more secure solution.

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After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Holy shit the memory market is fucked right now, hyperscalers are buying up _everything_ for their applications of questionable value.

On Wednesday, Micron Technology announced it will exit the consumer RAM business in 2026, ending 29 years of selling RAM and SSDs to PC builders and enthusiasts under the Crucial brand. The company cited heavy demand from AI data centers as the reason for abandoning its consumer brand, a move that will remove one of the most recognizable names in the do-it-yourself PC upgrade market.

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, EVP and chief business officer at Micron Technology, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”

Micron said it will continue shipping Crucial consumer products through the end of its fiscal second quarter in February 2026 and will honor warranties on existing products. The company will continue selling Micron-branded enterprise products to commercial customers and plans to redeploy affected employees to other positions within the company.

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Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I can't wait to start getting assignments with embedded ads turned in to me. (But seriously, the coercive potential of convincing sounding un-sourced bullshit riddled with paid interests' promoted content is a public menace)
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