I have trouble feeling sympathy for any company which didn’t greet the Broadcom buyout of VMWare with a firm plan to migrate. Expecting anything other than “abusive conduct” out of Broadcom is like expecting to jump in the ocean and not get wet.

Edge is just Chrome with a Microslop skin. They went from crushing Netscape so hard it got open sourced (mostly via monopoly shenanigans) to copying Google’s homework. And their attempts at mobile anything has been failure (Windows CE) after failure (Windows Phone) after failure (Windows for ARM).

If it weren’t for Office and companies’ undying love of Active Directory and Exchange, Microslop would be a memory and little more.

Sadly, a reluctance to install patches isn’t unique to Windows administration. I worked at a site with a well functioning Satellite infrastructure and support contracts with Red Hat. And we (InfoSec) were still chasing down admins to get their shit patched. Thankfully, we had NAC and authorization to disconnect systems that feel out of compliance. Most departments got with the program pretty quick when they ignored the "please patch all critical vulnerabilities in three days’ email and ended up with a “you are out of compliance and have been disconnected” email.

And Docker had made the whole Linux situation even worse. So many devs love to spin up containers, basically disable any sort of firewall, don’t bother with IP filtering. Oh and let’s just use passwords for ssh. Also, who needs logs? It’s a container, right. So, let’s disable all logging and not forward those anywhere. Then they promptly forget about the container until we run a vuln scan and find it’s got half a dozen RCE vulns and have to run them down and ask why the fuck it’s still running.

Linux is a much better base to build on. But bad security hygiene is still rife and still really bad for security.

Wow. Learn something new everyday.
Thanks for sharing.

Then they transfered a file to /tmp/exp which was linux kernel CVE-2026-43500, nicknamed ‘Dirty Frag’, an RxRPC local privilege escalation. I had not patched these internal servers that nobody should have access to against this.

Lessons Learned #1:
Install your patches.
“But I have a firewall!”
That is not a sufficient control.
Install.
Your.
Fucking.
Patches!

Thanks for sharing.

But, please stop using the curl command piped into a terminal pattern. Malicious actors have been abusing the fuck out of this pattern ever since the idiots at Anthropic decided that would be the official install pattern for Claude. I’ve been cleaning up infections based on people just blindly running shit like that constantly over the last couple months.

Folks, never run a random script from the internet, without being sure what you are actually about to run. If using AUR packages is considered risky. Random scripts being piped into a terminal ranks right up there with sticking your dick in a blender.

LLMs are a tool. Like all tools, we are going to go though a learning curve as we adapt to safe usage of that tool. LLMs cratering companies would be a really tame way to learn those lessons. Usually, we don’t start writing regulations around tools until we have buckets of blood to write those regulations with.

I still break out the old Sierra games (specifically the Quest for Glory series) from time to time. Those are still a lot of fun and ScummVM makes them run damn near perfectly.

Most non-indie stuff is complete and utter trash.

Ya, it’s telling that some of my favorite games these days all started as indie games. I do worry about them as they get in bed with larger producers, but I also understand the draw. E.g. I still love Valheim, but they were Embracer’d by private equity. And I’m waiting for that relationship to push them to shit all over their players. Though I understand that publisher backing lets them focus more on development and less on the marketing and distribution of the game.

So now I expect it will be just a patronising nostalgia IP reboot fest designed to extract as much cash as possible.

Ya, this is one of the big turn-offs for me. For example, I really liked Prince of Persia: Sands of Time back in the day. I’ve got exactly zero interest in the remake. Ubisoft’s logo now looking like a neat pile of dogshit, viewed from above, is pretty apt.

I think it’s pretty telling that so many of the people they talk to and a lot of the focus of the article isn’t really about older gamers, it’s about their money.

The opportunity is substantial. The 40+ segment in the US is on track to grow from $19 billion in 2022 to $43 billion by 2030, a 132% expansion at a moment when the rest of the industry is shrinking. These are players with the most disposable income, the longest gaming literacy, and the highest brand loyalty.

I’m in that “40+ segment” and I suspect part of the “problem” these companies face is that older gamers have seen the enshitification of so many of the brands we love. Our tolerance for bullshit is basically gone at this point. Micro transactions, season passes, fucking ads in games, all of that bullshit is a quick way to not get our money.

I also suspect “brand loyalty” is basically gone for the same reason. As a kid, I looked for the Electronic Arts logo. If I saw this logo on a game package, I knew I was looking at a good game. I haven’t bought an EA game in years. I don’t expect to buy an EA game any time soon and I basically ignore everything they do. Sure, if a trailer for Starflight 3 dropped, I’d sit up and take notice. I’d also expect it to be an enshitified mess wearing the skin of a beloved series to sucker me in, before pouncing on my wallet.

So ya, maybe just make good games and older gamers will inevitably buy them. I mean, Larian can pretty much say, “hi we’re making…” and I’ll have my wallet out and be pulling bills before they get any further. And maybe that’s your “brand loyalty”. Game companies who make good games and aren’t private equity firms wearing the dead skin suits of brands we used to love.

Soldiers give up a lot of rights when they sign their enlistment contract.

He might be right. He’s a complete ass for pointing it out. And the fact that he would think he might need to point it out should be cause for some serious self reflection. But ya, disparaging someone above you in the chain of command is going to run afoul of the UCMJ. I’m just not sure of the VP is considered in the chain of command.

I’d wonder how in the world such a young kid could have made that much money. And did so without me noticing.

More seriously, assuming this happens well into the future, I’d congratulate him and just ask that he be sure to take good care of his mother when I die.

My company has let us get Enterprise Copilot and has been pushing us all to “use AI”. So, I now use it as a a semi-functional search for SharePoint/Outlook/Files on an almost daily basis. I also ask it questions about Microsoft documentation on a regular basis. I wonder how long it’s going to be until they yank my license.

Seems like this would be a good place to treat those stocks (and options) as real property and tax them accordingly. With a properly progressive rate on them, we could set the lower end such that normal retirement funds won’t be impacted, with the high end discouraging hording assets.

Next up, we turn The Ellipse into the Circus Maximus. I mean, it’s already got the right shape for the chariot races.

The base is taking about Iran and not the Epstein files. I’d say Trump’s done a fine job fooling his base.

There is a reason I always say, “backslash, the one without the question mark”.

how would it put more dollars on the market than there was always going to be anyway?

Specifically printing money (as you proposed, or more realistically, the Fed giving more money to the US Treasury) means increasing the Dollar supply. Something kinda like that happens all the time and, in a much more controlled fashion, and is probably a net good. But, the Fed could just add $39 Trillion to the US Treasury’s bank account, it’s just a database update command anyway, and that would increase the Dollar supply by $39 Trillion. Sure, no actual bills would be created, that isn’t really important. At the scale those investments operate at, no one is handling cash, it’s just numbers in a database. But, it’s numbers in a database which are very carefully tracked and those numbers mean something to people. If I move $100 from the database at my bank to the database at your bank, you will have the ability to obtain more goods and services based on those database transactions. The whole thing is absolutely a house of cards, but it’s a house of cards that most people trust because if anyone fucks with that house of cards the US Government will show up and start shooting them. People also trust it because the US Government (US Fed, really. But that’s a whole different can of worms) is very careful about how it grows the money supply.

If the US Fed started just adding large amounts of money to the US Treasury’s account, people would notice and people would freak out.

The total Federal debt is $39 trillion, but there’s only something like $20 trillion actually in existence, if I’m not mistaken. Even if we collected every single existing dollar out there through taxes, we’d still have a shortfall of almost $20 trillion.

Wikipedia puts the number in actual bills and coins around $2T. But ya, the number of physical Dollars is dwarfed by the US debt. And no one cares. Most money exists as numbers in databases. But, those digital Dollars are every bit as real as the physical ones in the sense that they can be used to obtain goods and services.