The Stochastic Game

Chewing is good!

Hello Vancouver!

They said it wouldn’t happen but the local malls (Metrotown and Crystall Mall in Burnaby, BC) are back to pre-pandemic crowds. Possibly even more crowded…

I just realized that Affinity/Canva sent some “pledge” by email to all their customers (also available here), including a promise to keep the perpetual licenses to Affinity products. Do I trust this to hold for years? Absolutely not. But hey, at least it’s a good gesture, I suppose.

The news about Roku these past couple years have been increasingly terrible, and this one is quite something. When our current Roku breaks down I’ll probably move over to an Apple TV now that those come with a decent remote.

If you want to check out the old curiosity that is the Discworld #TTRPG Powered by GURPS (of all things), there’s a new Bundle of Holding for that! This is the game that Sir Terry Pratchett himself contributed some writing to!

The struggle is real.

Of course there are a couple of XKCD comics for this XZ backdoor thing, but this one is probably the most appropriate.

I finally read through a couple breakdowns of that XZ hack that almost compromised SSH in several distros (Ars has a good summary) and it’s absolutely bonkers. Andres’ perseverance is heroic. I guess state actors will now get trained on coding for performance?

“The EU is punishing businesses for becoming too successful!” Well, yes, that’s what governments are supposed to do. See also, I don’t know, phone and internet lines, train tracks, fire-fighters? It’s not that hard to think for two minutes about this.