I haven't thought about Realmz in a long-ass time. It had some really crazy tracks and was the only game I know of that used MOD instead of MIDI for its music.
Deus Ex Used MOD, At least I think they were mod, There were a fair number of what was basically MIDI + samples formats.
Also while trying to get my facts straight (All I remember was trying to find a mod player to play the deus ex music found on the cd) apparently Unreal tournament and tyrian2000 used mod music as well, Someone at Epic Megagames must have liked them.
Oh man you're right. How could I forget about Unreal Tournament? I totally forget that mod player I found, but it was fun to cobble together playlists.
By the way if you liked the Deus Ex soundtrack you can check out the Sonic Augmentation ocremix album. Really good.
I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though.
What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...
1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms
2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period
3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in
4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed
5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18
6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18
This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.
I went in expecting yet another screed about how passkeys were not issued by RMS in a FOSS encyclical, and therefore not only were they insecure, but they were also a morally bankrupt abomination. I was pleasantly surprised to read an actual thoughtful critique, albeit one I largely disagree with.
The author's assertion that the greatest risk to an individual is account lockout versus phishing or password harvesting is just not grounded in reality. I get phishing emails and SMSs daily. The criminal ecosystem running these campaigns is extremely active already and set to become even more so with LLMs. These campaigns are by far the biggest threat to normies.
Whereas account lockout happens most often with multiple failed password entries, which passkeys completely eliminate. I just don't know where this risk evaluation comes from.
The author also points out that even with passkeys, if you're able to also log in with e.g. security questions, you still have a much weaker security footprint for that account. This is true, but it's also true of a TOTP second factor. So I'm not sure what the criticism is here.
The exportability argument is a real weakness and something I'd like to see addressed. Passkeys don't have an equivalent for backup TOTP codes that you can just write down somewhere or trivially store yourself. But it probably wasn't in v1 because the people who designed passkeys figured that websites would not go all in on them immediately and would preserve other authentication methods, which is exactly what's happened.
> Before signing, the encoder fills the field with a placeholder (0), repeated for the field's exact length - signs the entire payload including that placeholder, and then writes the real signature over the top of it. To verify, you put the placeholder back.
I hate shit like this. Do not let your crypto layer know about the structure of what it's signing. Keep security stupid.
As far as compact encodings go, this kind of patch-and-fill technique isn't particularly egregious. The alternative mentioned (where the verifier has to be aware of a bitfield that defines the to-be-signed elements) is much easier to mess up!
Counterpoint - every real world crypto algo needs to do somewhat content aware padding or the crypto is much easier to break. Either that, or go so overboard on randomness that it adds a lot of overhead.
When you look at the details underneath more crypto, there is a lot of ah hah - and ‘doh’ - moments due to implementation realities.
There's also "date the rate, marry the price". If you're a buyer and think that rates are going to come down within a couple of years, you can lock in the lower price of your home for property tax purposes and then refinance when rates are lower.
But a lot of people bought in 2024 expecting that to happen.
That's the sense I get from this post. Lots of emphatic proclamations, virtually zero actual argument. There's a statement that "consciousness is very likely biological"... and then that's it. No argument for it, no citation.
If you want to argue that AIs cannot be conscious, that's fine. But the argument has to take the form of something like "Consciousness requires this, this, and this, and these are properties that AI does not have and cannot have for this reason, this reason, and this reason."
I've never seen that argument. Because it basically cannot exist. Consciousness almost by definition is a subjective experience, and the only reason I'm pretty sure that other humans are conscious is that I'm a human and I'm conscious.
About your last point, I thought so too a few years ago, but interestingly the science of consciousness is an emerging field, although empirical testing is still hard to do (see for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2zv4jlo2Nw ).
I don't think that's completely true. When times are good, intelligence and education probably come out in the wash. But when times are bad, and people are losing their livelihoods, intelligence has a lot to do with how blame is assigned. In other words, you're a lot more likely to get scammed the less intelligent and less educated you are.
And that's what we got here in the US -- a conman ran a very successful con on people who just weren't all that smart or educated. And there were enough of those people to supplement the base tribalism and propel him to victory.
It was that lightweight because it provided basically none of the functionality that is essential to a modern OS. Because it wasn't a modern OS.
The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time.
If you ran around disabling random bits of functionality in Windows because you wanted to reclaim some resources for your games, you'd probably wedge the OS, cause random crashes, and prevent your games from even launching. Like you might think "Well my game doesn't need Bluetooth, I only use a wired controller!" but I would not be surprised at all if yanking out the Bluetooth stack from the OS caused random crashes and hangs.
I’m not convinced that it’s impossible to build a modern OS in a way that’s properly modular and allows most functionality to be disabled entirely (as in never even loaded into memory).
Windows almost categorically can’t because it’s only ever been developed organically and is pathologically backwards compatible, which keeps it forever tied to past design decisions.
Linux could get a much closer but is hamstrung by monolithic kernel design which puts more functionality there.
You’d need a clean sheet design which positions most subsystems as discrete components.
"Linux" encompasses everything from microcontrollers to planet-scale supercomputers. You can, in fact, build a Linux that runs in as few resources as you like. No qualifiers.
Technically true, though that comes with the caveat that doing so requires considerable time and technical skill… we're talking compiling your own kernel and assembling your userland and desktop.
The nice thing about classic Mac OS is that its modularity was more accessible. All one had to be capable of to pare down or customize their install was move files in or out of /System Folder/Extensions/ and /System Folder/Control Panels/. I'd like to see a Linux desktop distribution that works that way.
> The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time
It’s not that huge. I use OpenBSD and the code is surprisingly approachable and readable. And even with no support for runtime modules, it’s pretty easy to customize and strip out whole features. Current complexity in something like linux is stretching the subsystems to support a huge array of use cases.
> The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive
Why though? The OS should be the layer between hardware and applications/the user. Provide a GUI SDK+toolkit and a firewall. The OS should be responsible for a dozen different cloud sync bs things that I play whack-a-mole to disable anyway.
reply