The Stochastic Game

Ramblings of General Geekery

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.


The fluffy good boy is always proud of the bandana they give him after a grooming session.

A golden retriever with a bandana lying down on a couch in a very cute way.

For our latest family trip I busted out my old Canon camera for the first time in a couple years. I had forgotten how much more fun it is to take pictures with it than with my phone! Muscle memory kicked right back in (physical buttons FTW!) Love it.


Review: Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

I didn’t really expect to be interested in this book. “Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground”, by Stu Horvath (of the Vintage RPG podcast, among other things), is a book that looks at the history of tabletop roleplaying games “from D&D to Mothership”, as it says on the cover.

It’s not that I’m uninterested in the history of roleplaying games — I’m very much interested in it, and I have at least half a dozen books on the topic. I just wasn’t necessarily interested in having one more book on that topic. But I got it as a gift a couple months ago, and… I love it. It’s been sitting proudly on my living room table since then, ready to be picked up every now and then for a few minutes of reading some pages picked at random. Let’s dive in!

Read more…

So, I had a look at a handful of competitors to Adobe Lightroom and they rank from mediocre to bad. No wonder Adobe can continue being Adobe. Does anybody have any good recommendation I might have missed?


Seeing people defend big tech companies against government regulation reminds me of the research into why lower-income people vote against policies that would benefit them (for instance, this one). But also, I guess, a lot of tech pundits are simply free market capitalists 🤷🏽‍♂️