Yes, Google Safe Browsing is probably the cause. Anyone curious can read more about it here, but that traffic at browser startup is probably going to Google’s Safe Browsing API servers.

My favorite tidbit about the POW camps for German soldiers in Canada is that the camps generally weren’t fenced. Like, you can escape if you want I guess, but you could walk for weeks and guess what? Still Canada!

Most German POWs were happy to stay because the camps fed them far better than what they’d been getting as German soldiers in the European theater after years of rationing. Some felt guilty about how good they were eating, because they knew their civilian family members back in Germany were getting even less.

That’s how I read it, though clearly others felt the need to ackshually.

They didn’t say TPUSA was founded in 2020, they said one of its founders died of COVID in 2020. Which is true.

It’s an initial proof-of-concept. It’ll be developed into more complex games eventually, that’s not really an issue for it

Except it is an issue, just one being masked by the mountains of cash these companies are burning to provide AI. To increase the depth and complexity and actually store state would require orders of magnitude more energy, compute, memory and storage. The AI bubble is causing very single one of those to become more expensive. At some point the market will call bullshit on these companies (“show us profit, or at least exponential revenue growth, or line go down”), at which point these companies will attempt to download the costs onto their users. When people see the bill and realize what these services actually cost, the whole thing is gonna collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IwLSrNu1ppI

Or the 10 hour version, for true gnomecore madness: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iDNQYJUdxks

There aren’t really prosecutorial appeals for grand jury “no true bill” decisions, so this won’t be going to the supremes at this stage. However, there’s also nothing to prevent the prosecutors from trying again in front of a new grand jury. In practice this is pretty uncommon, likely because the judges presiding over grand juries take a dim view of lawyers who waste the court’s time (much like any other judge).

A common reason to seek a new indictment would be if new evidence has come to light, and thus there are new facts for a new grand jury to weigh. I wouldn’t be surprised if these prosecutors try again, even though it’s a stupid move. Motiviations like “maintain credibility with my peers” and “don’t be an incompetent nincompoop” are clearly foreign to Trump’s DoJ.

On a related note, double jeopard prevents someone from being tried twice for the same crime, but an indictment isn’t a trial. A trial does not start until after a grand jury returns an indictment, so double jeopardy doesn’t apply here.

There is an option to pay for Extended Security Update (ESU) support for Windows 10. It’ll give you access to critical security and Windows Defender antivirus updates, but no fixes or updates to features. There are three ways to pay:

• “Free” if you’re syncing data to their cloud (pay by letting them datamine your data and settings)
• With Microsoft Reward points, which I believe are primarily earned by using Bing (pay by letting them datamine your searches)
• For $30 a year, at least for the first year, though I’ve read the price goes up each year as they want to drive everyone to Win11.

The program would conceivably allow you to kick the can down the road, possibly as far as Oct. 2028. Personally, I opted instead to switch to Linux months ago instead, and don’t regret my choice.

It’s too early to lay blame. Every commercial aircraft has very clear maintenance schedules, including procedures that would have included a through inspection of the part that appears to have failed on this plane (aft lug to which the engine pylon was attached). The NTSB prelim report does not call out any failure to adhere to the maintenance schedule.

The NTSB investigation has found signs of metal fatigue in the part that failed, but the defect was located such that it wouldn’t have been visible on an external inspection. The next inspection procedure that could have caught the issue wasn’t due to be performed until another 8000 or so cycles (takeoffs and landings) on that particular airframe. This looks like it’s shaping up to be an engineering failure, where the manufacturer of the aircraft has significantly overestimated the durability of this particular part.

The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks

I believe this is incorrect. The Steam survey break down GPUs by description and the Deck’s GPU appears in the results as “AMD Vangogh”, which only accounts for 0.39% of respondents. That implies that the vast majority of survey respondents using Linux are actually on PC, not the Deck.

Some of my all-time favorites! I imagine there were precursors in terms of game design, but these were the first games I ever played where the enemy AI seemed actually intelligent. Like, guards would notice if you made noise, or if a torch had been extinguished. If they found the body of another guard they’d start searching for you. Pretty standard stuff these days, but that was a very fresh concept at release.

The studio behind Thief (Looking Glass) collaborated with Irrational Games on System Shock 2. Thief 1/2 and SS2 both used the Dark Engine, which leads me to my favourite piece of game dev lore/trivia. Because Thief was developed first, the game engine had code for sword parries. During SS2’s development they had persistent issues with that parry code activating when it shouldn’t. Testers would be trying to bean a psychic monkey with a pipe wrench and the monkey would parry with an invisible sword.

besides games

Yeah, same here. I haven’t pirated games since I was a broke university student. There’s simply no need to when digital storefronts make it easy to get the games I want in the format I want. Some even offer DRM-free offline backups, or in the case of Steam the games stay in my library even if the publisher decides to remove the title from the Steam storefront.

TV and movies are completely different from this, and so much worse. So many different streaming services, some with intrusive ads, and every one wanting their own monthly subscription. I shouldn’t need to search “where is X streaming.” Ever. Titles disappear from these services all the time. Even if you “buy” a digital movie or show, the rights holder can yank it back from you because… reasons?

TV and movie distribution is such a garbage deal for consumers that open source developers have created a complete software stack (the servarr stack) to automate the process of finding and downloading media. Once you get it set up, it’s about million times more convenient than corporate streaming services.

TL;DR: Getting digital games is easy and feels like a fair deal for the average consumer. Getting movies and TV shows is a pain in the ass and feels like an absolute shit deal for the consumer. I’ll continue to pirate movies and TV shows because as Gabe Newell famously argued, piracy indicates a service problem.

I hate my gas stove

Could you share some details on what you hate about it? I’m super curious. I like everything about my gas range, except for cleaning it.

I did almost the exact same thing, on the same timeline! Installed Bazzite on a second NVMe sometime in the spring, and it’s been my daily driver for months now. For the first couple months I was swapping back and forth due to some graphics driver instability, but that’s because I got a 9070XT at launch and it took a bit for the Linux drivers to get to where they needed to be. That’s pretty much sorted now though, and I can’t remember the last time I booted into Windows.

Guess who just gained a 1TB drive to install more games?

I might use mine to try other distros. Bazzite has been great so far, but I’m not sure I’m sold on immutability and I might try a non-Fedora based distro.

Currently using Bazzite. Wanted something rolling release but I didn’t want to do extensive tinkering, and Bazzite ticked both boxes. Other distros I tried (PopOS, LMDE) struggled with my monitor layout. Main monitor is high refresh rate and VRR capable, secondary monitor is 60hz, not VRR capable, and it’s in portrait orientation. That combination is very not ideal for some window managers, as I discovered the hard way. I’m sure I could have fought through that on other distros, but it all worked out of the box with Bazzite.

Debian Testing is unstable?

Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s

Jokes aside, I don’t think I’d use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I’m gonna look to another distro. For context though, that’s mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.

Apparently! I’d never heard of it either, and I’m pretty sure it’s primarily known for this meme now. Seems like a dumb name for a company, and it’s making for some pretty confusing headlines in this case. I wouldn’t be surprised if they change the company name in an attempt to remove the stain.

In case you’re not just messin’ around: know your meme link

People who are too cheap to refinish old stairs. Source: I bought a house that had carpet on the stairs, and when we pulled up the carpet we discovered a worn out eyesore that cost thousands to update. In our case the previous owners were a cash strapped family of two young kids with a third on the way. They needed a bigger place for their family so I don’t fault them for going cheap on the stairs. The all-white paintjob and industrial grey carpet in the photo scream “landlord special” to me, so I’m less inclined to be forgiving in my assessment of the stairs in the photo.