Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • Tom Steyer, a hedge-fund billionaire and philanthropist, won the group’s endorsement on Monday. Our Revolution said its decision to back Steyer was driven in part by the shakeup over Rep. Eric Swalwell’s exit and fear that if progressives fail to consolidate around a candidate, they’ll hand the gubernatorial seat to a Republican.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Steyer

    Thomas Fahr Steyer (/ˈstaɪ.ər/; born June 27, 1957) is an American businessman, philanthropist, and environmentalist. He is the founder of Farallon Capital, a San Francisco-based hedge fund, as well as NextGen America, a progressive political action committee, and Galvanize Climate Solutions, a climate change-centered investment firm. A member of the Democratic Party, he unsuccessfully ran for the party’s nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election.

    Steyer is a graduate of Yale University (BA) and Stanford University (MBA). He is the founder and former co-senior managing partner of Farallon Capital. Following his departure from the company in 2012, he became an advocate for climate action and founded NextGen America. His book, Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War, appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2024.

    A billionaire, Steyer has been one of the largest donors in American Democratic Party politics, using his wealth to fund both environmental causes and political campaigns. In 2020, he ran for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. After spending $253 million on his campaign, he withdrew from the race in February 2020 without having received any pledged delegates. In 2025, Steyer announced his candidacy in the 2026 California gubernatorial election to succeed term-limited governor Gavin Newsom.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Swalwell

    Eric Michael Swalwell (/ˈswɑːlwɛl/ SWAHL-well; born November 16, 1980) is an American politician who served as a U.S. representative from California from 2013 until his resignation in 2026. A member of the Democratic Party, Swalwell was a candidate in the 2026 California gubernatorial election and was an impeachment manager during the second impeachment of Donald Trump in 2021.

    A graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park and University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Swalwell worked as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County from 2006 to 2012. In 2012, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating 20-term Democratic incumbent Pete Stark. Swallwell ran unsuccessfully for the party’s nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election, during which he never polled above 1%.

    In April 2026, Swalwell resigned from Congress and suspended his gubernatorial campaign after allegations he had raped a staffer and sexually harassed three others, which he denies.[1][2]


  • The traditional first program for a language is one that displays the text “hello, world”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello,_world

    A “Hello, world” program is usually a simple computer program that displays on the screen (often the console) a message similar to “Hello, World!”. A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language’s basic syntax. Such a program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language,[1] but it can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.

    https://riptutorial.com/excel-vba/example/13182/hello-world

    Now, you might want to do something more-elaborate too, but maybe make that the second program rather than the first.


  • tal@lemmy.todayOPtoNot The Onion@lemmy.worldAt Long Last, InfoWars Is Ours
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    3 hours ago

    The article itself is satirical, but it’s reporting on a real event — that The Onion has just reached an agreement to buy InfoWars. It’s maybe marginal for the community, but this is basically the only time that one gets to have a single article on both The Onion and Not The Onion — the initial attempt some time back, which fell through, made it to both — so I couldn’t resist.

    EDIT: For good measure, link to NPR’s coverage.









  • tal@lemmy.todaytoLinux Gaming@lemmy.worldintel hd2500
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    24 hours ago

    Ah, gotcha. Well, so, for Metal Slug in particular, I’m pretty sure that there’s Metal Slug releases on Steam.

    Yeah.

    https://store.steampowered.com/search?term=metal+slug

    If you’re wondering about a Steam game, you can check ProtonDB to see comments from Linux users as to any compatibility issues.

    https://www.protondb.com/search?q=metal+slug

    The Steam installer is in Ubuntu. So install that, run it, and stuff in Steam should be available.

    For MAME, I can’t personally recommend a frontend. MAME iteself is already packaged in Ubuntu. You’re going to need the ROM files, which are floating around out there on the Internet (probably something like mslug.zip, mslug2.zip, etc, and there will probably be some dependent ROMs for the system in question. checks Probably called neogeo.zip, the system ROMs, since it’s a Neo-Geo game. On my system, the roms are stored in ~/.mame/roms (the tilde representing one’s home directory, if you’re not familiar with the convention).

    RetroArch is also an “emulate many different types of hardware” emulator in Ubuntu, and you might consider it to be more-approachable; it can apparently also act as a frontend for MAME, though I haven’t used it as such.

    For games kind of like Metal Slug…hmm. I haven’t really played much in that line recently, though they used to be popular in the 1990s. These recommendations are gonna be pretty old, but I guess side-view platformer shooters, like Contra. Bionic Commando. You could probably emulate these, and I’d guess that they’ve likely also seen Steam releases. I’m wildly out of date when it comes to current games in the genre, though. “Metroidvania” games might fit this too; they tend to be a more-slow-paced genre, with backtracking and traveling all around a large map while a character gains abilities and powers, but they do the side-view shooter thing, but they have the platforming and shooting aspect. Those have seen a lot more development in recent years.

    Older Contra games:

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1018020/Contra_Anniversary_Collection/

    https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1628%2C5379&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

    There’s a list of Metroidvania 2D platformers on Steam sorted by user reviews; I’ve generally found Steam review score to be pretty accurate as to how much I like a game (though there are a few exceptions). I…actually own a copy of Rain World, though I haven’t played it, but that should run on your system and I’ve seen a lot of people praise it, and it’s highly-rated there. It is considered to be difficult (which arcade Metal Slug games aren’t, if you throw enough quarters at them).

    I haven’t played Captain Commando or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, but both look like isometric beat-em-ups. I haven’t played anything there in a long time either; I think the last game in the genre I played was probably the arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, from something like the 1990s, when they were a popular genre in the arcades. Here’s a list of Steam beat-em-ups sorted by user review, though:

    https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4158&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

    That’ll mention the release year, and I’d guess that anything aside from new, 3D-perspective games would be fine.

    In general, fast-paced, drop-in-and-play type games have a genre — albeit a very broad one, “Arcade”, and while my experience has been that it’s something of a grab-bag for a lot of different types of games.

    Here’s a bunch of Steam “Arcade”-tagged games sorted by user reviews.

    https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1773&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

    On that list, of the games near the top, I can say that I enjoyed HoloCure and Vampire Survivors, which are in a fairly young genre of video games kicked off by Vampire Survivors — games where the main character keeps automatically-attacking and getting increasingly powerful while increasingly-powerful waves of enemies come at them. Geometry Arena. Nova Drift, which is kind of a modern take on Asteroids. Both of those have one guiding a ship around the screen dodging attacks and shooting back; they shouldn’t be particularly graphically-intensive, don’t require much from 3D hardware.

    EDIT: You don’t mention them, but shmups were also popular in the arcade (maybe a little prior to the era with the games you mentioned). These have a constantly-vertically or horizontally-scrolling level with a little spaceship that shoots enormous amounts of firepower at enemies. In recent years, “bullet hell” shmups have become more-popular, which tend to have extremely large numbers of projectiles on the screen at once; not quite my cup of tea, but many people like those. Shmups have remained a genre that is very gentle in terms of hardware requirements. We have a dedicated shmups community on the Threadiverse, [email protected], so if you have specific interests, they might give better recommendations.

    EDIT2: Nova Drift lists Intel HD 4000 as their minimum system requirement, so I might want to forego that or be prepared to return it if it doesn’t start; I don’t know if it’ll run. Intel HD 4000 looks like it supports DirectX 11.1, and Intel HD 2500 apparently does 10-point-something in terms of hardware functionality.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoLinux Gaming@lemmy.worldintel hd2500
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    24 hours ago

    Do I have to use steam?

    No, but it’s a relatively-plug-and-play way to get access to a lot of commercial games.

    GOG.com is another alternative, and there are a few other stores.

    There are also free games in your existing distro. They aren’t generally comparable to commercial games, but they’re there.

    Which tittles do you recommend for integrated intel hd2500 graphics on linux

    I mean…that’s pretty broad. Maybe if you could list some games that you like, or a genre at least?

    I can list games that I like, but they might fall completely flat with other people.

    From a performance standpoint, that’d be probably any 2D game and…let’s see. The HD 2500 was released in 2014, and wasn’t a stellar performer at that time, so probably any 3D game that was released prior to that date?

    Like, you can probably look at any list of popular older games for ideas; doesn’t need to be Linux-specific.

    searches

    https://gamesreq.com/50-best-games-for-weak-pcs-2025-edition/

    From that list, games that I’ve played that I enjoy are Half-Life 2, Hades, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry 3, FTL: Faster Than Light, Bastion, Transistor, Don’t Starve, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Max Payne 2, Factorio, and Rimworld, all of which you can get on Steam and have worked fine for me on Linux, but…again, it really depends on what sort of games you like. There are games on there that are popular that didn’t particularly rub me the right way (e.g. Dota 2 is popular, but realistically should be played multiplayer, which I don’t want to do. Ori and the Blind Forest is pretty, but didn’t grab my personal interest). But…they might be exactly what you’re looking for.

    Also can i get a recommendation about using mame emulators.

    MAME is a particular emulator, which emulates many different types of hardware. There are a number of different frontends to it — setting up MAME manually takes a bit of work, though it’s how I’ve used it — but I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you just want recommendations for an emulator and not specifically MAME, then maybe list a system that you’d like to emulate (e.g. Super Nintendo, or whatever). If you want a frontend recommendation, I haven’t used other frontends myself, though you might get recommendations from others. If you want a recommendation as to games for older systems that you could run emulated in MAME, that’s another possibility, but again, I think I’d ask what sort of games you’ve enjoyed or a genre or something.



  • QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.

    SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol

    Features of SCTP include:

    • Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.

  • Such an entrenched technology that would take decades to replace across the planet.

    I don’t think that it’d really be necessary to alter the underlying protocol (well, you could make something a lot more elaborate with designated “receivers” and acks of transmissions, but I’m talking about something analogous to what humans already do, retransmitting in the event of collision). Humans do have to figure out whether someone’s transmitting, but the reason you don’t hear static on analog radios constantly is because they have a squelch feature, detect when there’s a transmission present; the radio is already looking at the signal sufficiently to do the necessary work.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldAre the homelab communities dead?
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    Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in [email protected] when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.

    However.

    End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.

    Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like [email protected] still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like [email protected].

    I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.


  • I bet VASAviation has it. They’re pretty good about having ATC recordings of anything in the news up.

    searches

    Nope, but it is on YouTube anyway.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

    EDIT: Though they do have a recent recording of ATC and pilots talking about pizza toppings, which is more-or-less in the same “it’s technically not necessary to have on the air and shouldn’t really be there, but it’s at a level where it’s not really causing a problem”.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

    I suspect that if the airwaves got too crowded, they’d transmit “break, break” until they got through and ask people to tamp it down.

    EDIT2: Though…you can still get someone stepping on a transmission. That is, it’s not just inability to get through, but sometimes someone will transmit and not realize that someone else is transmitting. That’s caused some real problems in the past, including partially contributing to the Tenerife disaster.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

    On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on a runway at Los Rodeos Airport (now Tenerife North–Ciudad de La Laguna Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife, killing 583 people and injuring 61 others in the deadliest accident in aviation history.[1][2][3][c]

    The controller then immediately added, “Stand by for takeoff; I will call you”,[4] indicating that he had not intended the instruction to be interpreted as a takeoff clearance.[25]

    A simultaneous radio call from the Pan Am crew caused mutual interference on the radio frequency, which was audible in the KLM cockpit as a three-second-long shrill sound (or heterodyne). This caused the KLM crew to miss the crucial latter portion of the tower’s response. The Pan Am crew’s transmission was “We’re still taxiing down the runway, Clipper 1736!” This message was also blocked by the interference and inaudible to the KLM crew. Either message, if heard in the KLM cockpit, would have alerted the crew to the situation and given them time to abort the takeoff attempt.[26]

    I guess maybe radios could be made to be capable of detecting conflict, buffering a voice transmission, and then immediately transmitting it afterwards.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoxkcd@lemmy.worldWhy is the sky blue?
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    In astronomy, you first enjoy three or four years of confusing classes, impossible problem sets, and sneers from the faculty. Having endured that, you’re rewarded with an eight-hour written exam, with questions like: “How do you age-date meteorites using the elements Samarium and Neodymium?” If you survive, you win the great honor and pleasure of an oral exam by a panel of learned professors.

    I remember it vividly. Across a table, five profs. I’m frightened, trying to look casual as sweat drips down my face. But I’m keeping afloat; I’ve managed to babble superficially, giving the illusion that I know something. Just a few more questions, I think, and they’ll set me free. Then the examiner over at the end of the table—the guy with the twisted little smile—starts sharpening his pencil with a penknife.

    “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”

    My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”

    “Could you be more specific?”

    Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.

    “Could you be more specific?”

    I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and…

    “Could you be more specific?”

    An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy.

    The Cuckoo’s Egg




  • change the default SSH port

    Any port scanner — take nmap — is going to turn this up. $ nmap -p0-65535 <hostname> takes a little longer than checking a single port, but what’s the threat that you’re worried about? Someone brute-forcing a password? That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer than that, and you use strong passwords that will make that wildly impractical, right? A zero-day remote exploit in OpenSSH’s sshd? If someone gets one of those, they probably aren’t going to waste it on you.

    SSH is also trivial to fingerprint as a protocol. Here’s me running netcat to my local SSH instance:

    $ nc localhost 22
    SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u2
    ^C
    $
    

    It ain’t rocket science to identify an SSH server.

    I personally think that port-knocking isn’t a great idea and just adds hassle and brittleness to something, but I’d do a port-knocking setup before I tried running sshd on a nonstandard port.

    If you honestly don’t trust SSH, then okay, fine, wrap it with a VPN or something with real security so there’s another layer (of course, that raises the issue of whether you trust the VPN software not to have remote exploits). Or have one host that you can reach and bounce from there to another host or something.

    There are ways that I’d say are useful to try and secure an SSH instance. Use keys rather than passwords. Whitelist user accounts that can be connected to remotely.

    But anyone who is likely to be a real risk to your system is going to be able to find an ssh server running on a nonstandard port.