Monthly Archives: May 2023

Article note: Wow, reddit really is trying to suicide. $12,000/50 million requests and no access to marked NSFW content through the API basically kills 3rd party clients, their first-party client is such a shitshow of bad UX, privacy invasion, and advertising I don't think many core users will stick with them if that's the option (and the structure of reddit means if the mods and high-activity users leave and/or are replaced by corporate scambots, they're done). We've seen it happen to Digg and Tumblr and Twitter. It's a shame, there's a ton of relatively good content (particularly in the sense that it isn't _entirely_ overrun with marketing spam like many quarters) locked up in reddit, I wonder where the great nerd migration will go next. I'd be kind of pleased if it were a cluster of major Lemmy instances or something similarly more open.

Article note: The argument that making a copy of someone's machine and trying to hack it forever [Is | Is Not] a violation of a time limit on a search warrant is interesting. I'm a little curious about some particulars of this case (eg. they worked on a copy, but iPhones are supposed to have a hardware key to prevent exactly that?) There are many suspicions about certain agencies doing drag collection and storage for later decryption, and there are lots of procedural ways that already exist to be allowed to keep hackin' on copied data, so perhaps this is really just a narrow authority spat between a judge and an agency?

Article note: That is an odd project - while the userland was interesting, Irix's kernel was (AFIK) not particularly special, at least not until later. It has always been Unix-brand-Unix with occasionally some BSD derived extensions before they were folded in. The 5.3 release they're talking about is directly SVR4 derived, and it didn't pick up the interesting in-house scalable MP extensions until 6.4, so the kernel they're working is essentially a MIPS port of SVR4.

Article note: Apparently PlatformIO tried to shake down the Pi foundation for ongoing funding in order to accept community-contributed RP2040 support? I was playing with various STM32 toolchains for the last few weeks (CubeIDE, the two Arduino cores, libopencm3+gnu parts),and it was one I was going to consider but... That's distasteful.

Article note: Looks like they're using the name of their groundbreaking and beloved old single-player story driven franchise for a typical modern lootbox as a service multiplayer shooter.

It's been more than 25 years since the last game in the storied Marathon first-person shooter franchise came out, but developer Bungie is (sort of) returning to its roots by rebooting the IP with a new game simply titled Marathon.

The game was revealed as a PlayStation 5 title in a short cinematic trailer during Sony's not-E3 "PlayStation Showcase" stream Wednesday afternoon. That said, it is also coming to PC and Xbox Series X/S. Bungie says it will support cross-play and cross-save between those platforms, just like the developer's current flagship title, Destiny 2.

The cross-platform nature of it wasn't a foregone conclusion though, as Sony closed an acquisition of Bungie in July 2022. This is Bungie's first non-Destiny title in 13 years.

Article note: This is a solid transparency report: it states that they complied at the advice of legal council, shows reasonably precisely how they complied and what data can be exposed by the process, and says they're revising their data retention policies to manage exposure in the future.

Article note: The hype cycle is fully out of control. Always on, connected, data harvesting, AI enabled ...Clippy.

Enlarge / Windows Copilot is an AI-assisted feature coming to Windows 11 preview builds starting in June. (credit: Microsoft)

A couple of months ago, Microsoft added generative AI features to Windows 11 in the form of a taskbar-mounted version of the Bing chatbot. Starting this summer, the company will be going even further, adding a new ChatGPT-driven Copilot feature that can be used alongside your other Windows apps. The company announced the change at its Build developer conference alongside another new batch of Windows 11 updates due later this year. Windows Copilot will be available to Windows Insiders starting in June.

Like the Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot is a separate window that opens up along the right side of your screen and assists with various tasks based on what you ask it to do. A Microsoft demo video shows Copilot changing Windows settings, rearranging windows with Snap Layouts, summarizing and rewriting documents that were dragged into it, and opening apps like Spotify, Adobe Express, and Teams. Copilot is launched with a dedicated button on the taskbar.

"Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant. It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings, and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps," wrote Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay.

Article note: Woo! SDDM is great, but hasn't had a release in like 4 years, despite major patches in git (like... working Wayland support major). Sending some resources their way would be awesome.

Article note: This is ...more or less exactly what everyone said would happen.

Article note: A new legacy-free x86_64 bring-up path gets talked about from time to time, but I hadn't seen any public work from Intel/AMD. This is a fleshed-out proposal that I could easily see going into production in the near future. (The presser also contains an amusing amount of passive-voice retcon about how things came to be the way they are).