I’m laughing that the committee awarded the prize to a Venezuelan. Trump is going to be raging all day - all caps screeching about how he deserved to win, how Maria Machado is a loser, about how many conflicts he resolved etc. His government is going to be striking out against Venezuela (despite the winner being an opponent of the regime), Norway and the Nobel Prize organization. Fox will be on a rage fest too and all his proxies too. I guarantee that we’ll see esteemed members of Nobel getting detained at US borders, being deported etc because Trump is a sore loser little bitch.

Why the fuck should they hold a minute’s silence for this piece of shit anyway. He was an asshole in life, he got shot for his troubles and now the far right are trying to make a martyr of him Horst Wessel style. And that includes some some fellow traveller who happens to be an MEP in this instance.

Code signing offers slight protection from malware but not as you might think. If a company signs an installer, or executable then it tells you it came from them but not what it does. It could still be malicious, or it could be inadvertently bundled with malware in DLLs or scripts and you wouldn’t know. You’re just hoping the company has done its due diligence and you trust them to run.

Microsoft does have an antivirus system on top and fingerprints downloads too and applies some kind of trust score that is better if an exe is signed. There is probably no single mitigation that stops malware infection but apply lots of smaller mitigations in in depth and most people will be safe.

The irony is Microsoft still lets people run files ending with .scr way too easily. Much of the malware on torrent websites is a file ending with .scr knowing the OS will hide the extension, e.g. movie.mp4.scr appears as movie.mp4 in File Explorer and people click through and get infected.

It really should be a 3 level setting, disallow/allow & check/allow. Where the latter option is available but users are strongly advised to only select it if they are sure. Because I would not be surprised if a lot of sideloaded content comes from warez sites and is infested with malware so allowing & checking is still preferable and protects people to some extent.

Some people just don’t appreciate the irony of killing turtles with fish-shaped plastic, what can you do

PLA isn’t food safe in 3d printing mostly because of layers on a print trap foreign material / bacteria and water can also seep into microscopic gaps into infill and it becomes a breeding ground. I doubt it would be useful for anything squeezy but it might be useful for single use forks and other utensils. But paper / wood can do those things already so I don’t see PLA being much use. For sachets I expect the answer is paper with some kind of biodegradable lining which gives a product a shelf life of a few years but does degrade in time.

Also, some “biodegradable” products are only compostable in specialist facilities where it can be shredded and broken down with water / heat / pressure. I think PLA is a bit like that. If you print something out of PLA and stick it out in the garden or even toss it into a compost bin it’ll still be there in 10 years although it might be faded, warped & brittle. Maybe it eventually biodegrades but it’s not quick enough.

I’ve never seen these things before but it does seem like a waste of plastic. Even sachets of sauce shouldn’t be handed out in most circumstances, at least for dine-in food in fast food places - use dispensers and paper cups. I wonder if there is a biodegradable sachet material which has a couple of years shelf life but degrades thereafter.

It is good to know this guy is terrified of the consequences of his own actions. I’m sure his hired meat shield will stop and mitigate some threats. I doubt they will stop and mitigate them all.

I just took an old Optiplex with a GTX1650 and got it going with Ubuntu 24.04 and my experience was mostly okay but I saw a number of issues which could confound a newbie. Firstly, I had to go to the command like to run the ubuntu-drivers auto install because the card wasn’t set up properly. If I hadn’t then games wouldn’t run properly. But then I was able to install Steam and get some games going. Acceleration looked okay and I tested games which were running under Windows emulation and natively with some success - however there was a long delay launching some games, like it was having to transpile shaders or something. Still, when they worked they seemed to work well.

The most egregious issue I had is that Ubuntu defaults to an X11 desktop and the desktop is slightly off but the games work well. If I change to a Wayland desktop, then the desktop is buttery smooth but the games are very choppy. I suspect that’s the driver for this old card just doesn’t work properly with the window manager for some reason in that mode, that the wm is not giving the game a proper surface to render in or is somehow interfering with performance.

Someone should launch a Project Poison which offers information to websites to protect themselves from scrapers and to poison and devalue AIs and companies that ignore their restrictions. I’m sure there are plenty of ways it could be done - nonsense about niche subjects, libelous facts about celebrities and people with money, false attribution for quotes & art, images captioned with things they do not contain, offensive slurs. Just feed AIs with sufficient trash and it will output trash.

Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission

My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this “.run” file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.

Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.

I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it’s still not supported properly by all vendors.

The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren’t tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.

As an addendum I think the “seasoning” was some kind of matt black enamel layer on the inside of the pan. I wouldn’t have touched it but even in regular use flakes detached and I had about 6 divots in the pan because of it. Oven cleaner did nothing to remove this layer so I used by angle grinder and a sanding attachment. It was painfully slow (my grinder is cordless and needs recharging) but I cleaned it eventually. Once I was down to bare metal I cleaned it and seasoned it with a few layers of oil. I think it will be far easier to clean from now on. The outside of the pan and bottom are still coated in whatever the inside was when I bought it.

I cleaned a cast iron pan over the weekend. “Oven cleaner” the voices on YouTube said. In reality I needed an angle grinder and it took me the better part of 3 hours to do. My pan had some kind of matt black factory “seasoning” that was definitely not just oil and it took that long to chip it all off. Anyway pan is back in action now.

I’m sure when atheists and satanists start proselytising there will be outrage - “we really meant Christians should allowed to bother their co-workers not you guys”

Of course it was piracy but it was friction free piracy. Not just the price which was low but having a really cool webstore and client application. There was nothing that the music industry offered that was remotely comparable in terms of the convenience that allofmp3 offered at the time.

The best Russian music service ever was allofmp3. Sadly long gone but fondly remembered.

It would have been smarter for the UK to mandate that every ISP must provide a family filter for free as part of their service. Something that is optional and can be turned on or off by the account holder but allows parents to set filters (and curfews) if they want. They could even require that ISPs require new signups to affirm if they want it on or off by default so people with families are more likely to start with it enabled.

People really, really need to learn to cook for themselves. Nothing wrong with the odd takeout, or even delivery but I sense a lot of people live on deliveries all the time and waste a fortune

Make bigger batches and freeze portions. And whatever expense groceries are, you can expect food cooked by someone else and delivered by someone else to be 3x as much.