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This is most annoying

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Riot tells Ars kernel-level system could be removed if vulnerability is detected.

Source: Ring 0 of fire: Does Riot Games’ new anti-cheat measure go too far? | Ars Technica

Given Riot’s labor and cultural practices I’m not holding much hope for them being able to fix issues quickly when (not if) someone breaks their driver and turns it into a rootkit like Sony’s.

Another issue the article does not go into is the fact every major game publisher will develop their own kernel-mode driver or use a 3rd party service (like BattlEye) to do so, leading to issues within the kernel that will be:

  • A pain in the ass to diagnose
  • Hidden from the player
  • Likely will not provide any kind of error message since the developers will be afraid they could be used to break the driver.
  • The risk of collisions between drivers will be increased, with likely both publishers being the cause.

Microsoft can help but there’s only so much they can do before breaking compatibility with previous versions of Windows; Gamers don’t care as much but Microsoft does have to worry about their main customer base (enterprise) who will definitely not like having weird code fuck around with workstation kernels(like this, and what Swift is complaining about is mere user-level applications.

People with time and money will probably want to look at PCI Passthrough to be able to run games in a Windows VM and not have to worry about any of this fuckery. Something goes wrong? Just restore to a previous snapshot of the VM and carry on as usual.

This is most annoying Read More »

Abortion sometimes is necessary

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Because of the nature of the abortion fight in the country, let me say this plainly: what happened to me was not the clinic’s fault. It was not the doctor’s fault. It was not his staff’s fault. There was no error of medical judgment or medical practice. It is the fault of forty years of pushing abortion care out of hospitals and stigmatizing and marginalizing women and care providers to the point where only four doctors in the United States are foolish enough to risk getting shot point-blank every day on their way to work to provide late-term abortions. It is the fault of legislators terrorizing physicians with spurious investigations instead of funding abortion research and finding ways to make the procedure safer. It is the fault of giving extremist, hateful, radicalizing discourse equal airtime with scientific fact and medical expertise. What would it look like, if we truly funded women’s healthcare? I wish I knew.

Source: Rivers Of Babylon: The Story Of A Third-Trimester Abortion – The Rumpus.net

Sometimes it isn’t anyone’s fault but there are people who want to blame someone, so they turn to the mother. “She’s the one to blame!”, they say.

They’re wrong. And they cannot be allowed to win.

Abortion sometimes is necessary Read More »

Biking is THE fucking best

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Bikes may still look roughly the same, but looks can be deceiving.

Source: How bicycles have changed in the last 25 years | Ars Technica

Linking to this as I look at my Trek 2018 FX2 I bought after my trusty Gary Fisher was stolen from my apartment building’s basement; by the looks of it one of the tenants is a motherfucking thief as signs have gone up about parts and bikes being stolen.

Oh right, back to the subject at hand… I remember bikes 25 years ago looked very different from what they look like now. Wondering what bikes are going to look 25 years from now.

Biking is THE fucking best Read More »

Goddamnit, Amazon

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Source: Gordon’s Notes: Amazon reviews now unreliable – negative reviews filtered (Anker example)

I thought I was running into isolated issues as I rarely have to give negative reviews but knowing there is systemic bias in the reviews available makes all of those reviews useless to me. I’ll probably end up having to make use of the return policy much more often now.

Where else might we see this? It makes shopping online that much harder knowing the website you’re shopping at is actively fucking with your perception of it.

Goddamnit, Amazon Read More »

You get retweets turned off! And you! And YOU TOO!!!

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A modest proposal to improve Twitter—and perhaps the world

Source: The Case Against Retweets – The Atlantic

I went ahead and made the change on tweetdeck, the interface I use on the desktop:

tweetdeck settings

But this doesn’t take any effect on my mobile client of choice, Talon, and it’s a total pain in the ass to go hunting down a tweet that scrolled off the screen.

Meaning I had to rethink my approach. In the next few days I’ll be disabling retweets for pretty much everyone I notice retweeting more than they actually tweet or reply to other’s tweets. Just in the time I wrote up this blog post I disabled RTs for ten people. The threshold seems to be when someone hits the RT button for more than 4 tweets out of every 10.

It’d be nice if twitter enabled an option to disable RTs globally and then you decide if you want to turn them on for someone… but this does not favor their advertising model since you’re purposely limiting the amount of viral content making it to your timeline regardless of the client you’re using.

This is probably a good thing, all in all.

You get retweets turned off! And you! And YOU TOO!!! Read More »

The Rise and Fall of the American SRO – CityLab

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The same cities that struggle to provide affordable housing today eliminated their critical-but-maligned flexible housing stock after World War II.

Source: The Rise and Fall of the American SRO – CityLab

This is important. I live by myself and I am paying over a third of my monthly income in rent and the housing situation in Minneapolis only keeps getting worse. It is likely I will not be able to afford purchasing a home within city limits for the next 10 years and landlords keep rising their rents, advancing the gentrification troubling my part of the city.

The Rise and Fall of the American SRO – CityLab Read More »

Code isn’t racist… or so you would think

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I researched white supremacist groups and visited the same sites that my husband frequented. After a month of clicking on platforms that ranged from The Drudge Report to The Daily Stormer and reading about the alleged takeover of Illuminati Elite, my computer turned into a Nazi.

Up until then I hadn’t realized that my computer, like me, was ethnically Jewish. The ads that normally filtered through my Facebook feed were preoccupied with celebrity gossip, yarn sales and timely reminders from Chabad.org advising me to pre-order kosher lamb legs for Pesach.

Source: I Married A White Supremacist – Eugene Weekly

This is what constant optimization in the name of marketing does to computing systems. A never ending echo chamber that will happily keep feeding you the same things over and over as they cannot tell what is “wrong” or “right” or “uncouth” or “proper”. They can only do as they’re told.

Then there is the fact there is software that is inherently racist, misogynist and discriminating in all sorts of ways.

Code isn’t racist… or so you would think Read More »

It’s more fun to yell at people anyway

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A nicely set table, fresh flowers, candles, and music are well and good, but if you have to look at a heap of pots and pans while you’re eating, that special effort you’ve put into dinner into is lost. Guess what? Close the door. Problem solved.

from Why I Will Never Switch to an Open Kitchen

The author raises a very good point, and this is one of the reasons why people just love to go out for dinner. You don’t have to worry about buying the ingredients, prepping them, cooking them, and then washing those dishes to be put away at some later time.

Hell, I like to cook and I felt tired from just writing that. So people go out for dinner.

Another benefit of an enclosed kitchen: When you burn something — which you will if you cook for long enough — you don’t risk having the entire studio/apartment fill up with smoke and then smelling weird for days, possibly weeks.

It’s more fun to yell at people anyway Read More »

Clean up as you go

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There really is no solution, I think. There’s only the frankly awful act of dragging your sorry ass into the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, and wiping down the counters, after dinner, before you land on the couch like an anvil and give up the last of your energy for the day. Just start there. I’m sorry. It’s terrible. It’s a nightmare. But just do it.

Source: Clean Up Now

Life as a Kitchen.

Clean up as you go Read More »