At least in the US, from past reading, I believe that there’s no legal requirement for a signature to actually be your name written in cursive.

If you get past the cazadors, then there are deathclaws on that route.

I don’t know where the best options are for sure, but one perk of a (sail) yacht is that, unless port facilities are specifically a problem, even if some place other than a yacht is the best place to be, the yacht is probably one of the better places to get at least near the place in question.

One downside: I don’t know how much maintenance a sail yacht requires. Like, I don’t know long long one could last without access to spare parts. The ocean puts physical stress on boats, and saltwater is corrosive. Boats aren’t usually designed for long-term operations away from land.

Another perk is that if the fuel production and distribution system breaks down, if what you have is a sail yacht, you probably have one of the present-day sailing vessels available, and I’d imagine that some level of sail-based trade could show up again; it was historically an important way to move goods around. You’re probably comparatively-well suited to an “apocalypse economy” where transportation and distribution is degraded.

From a security standpoint, if we’re just talking zombies and assuming that the zombies can’t climb, maybe a pre-cannon-era castle or similar fortification. I think that most of the things that obsoleted historic fortifications wouldn’t really apply to zombies.

I don’t mean one of the castle-themed buildings, like a folly. But something where you don’t have any ground-level windows aside from slits, and probably has walls around it.

You may have defense-in-depth (multiple layers of walls or building structure, with the building and walls designed to permit a retreat to an inner area if an outer area is compromised).

Cisterns for freshwater storage are likely already present (though I’ve no idea what condition they might be in) so you don’t need to get ahold of more storage.

Ample room for storage.

I guess the major issue might be the degree to which any fortifications might have been converted for public-access use. I don’t know how many gates and porticullises might have been removed or disabled over the years because they aren’t really necessary if the fortification is essentially a museum.

I get the concept, but:

• Will you have the security benefits that I think are being assumed? If your threat is human, then, yeah, being on an island is a big deal. But…if zombies don’t need to breathe, can they just walk under the sea to an island?

• Setting aside the direct issue of, say, being chomped by a zombie, one of the larger, immediate problems you face in a situation where you have infrastructure break down — which I imagine a zombie apocalypse might cause — is loss of potable water. Islands may not be the best place to go to get fresh water (though you could get salt water, and I imagine that one could use, oh, solar stills or whatever to desalinate).

  There was a point in time where US military war planners did up a zombie apocalypse plan — to have a fun theme, but the problems that a zombie apocalypse would pose aren’t terribly far off the same kind of problems that you have to solve when doing war planning. Drinking water access played a prominent role.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONOP_8888

  CONPLAN 8888, also known as Counter-Zombie Dominance, is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Command CONOP document that describes a plan for the United States and its military to defend against zombies in a fictional military training scenario.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

  https://www.stratcom.mil/Portals/8/Documents/FOIA/CONPLAN_8888-11.pdf

  ii . (U) The following environmental factors apply to humans in this plan:

  I. (U) Rain will be vitally important to human survival. If civil water supplies are cut off, humans will have to rely on other means to obtain water. Ground water from streams and rivers will be unreliable since it will be difficult to determine if ground water is a vector for zombie infection.

  b. (U) Operational COG #2: Potable water sources (PWS)

  i. (U) Zombies do not drink water, but humans do. Humans typically cannot survive longer than 10 days without fresh water. Zombies will likely be drawn to potable water sources by the presence of human food sources that zombies prey on . Zombies can be expected to contaminate potable water sources with various contaminants during these attacks further limiting the supply of available potable water for humans.

  iv. (U) CR #4-Safe food, water, and fuel distribution network: Ultimately, healthy human populations and the forces protecting them will require the means to acquire, purify, and distribute foodstuffs , water and fuels for heat and machine operations. Failure to maintain security supporting the distribution networks and nodes for food, water and fuel will compromise the longevity of healthy humans; decrease the amount of time that humans can remain sheltered in place or barricaded from zombie threats and could cause competition for resources that will undermine law and order. If compromised, the capabilities in this CR could undermine all the CCs in this plan.

Game streaming serices are never going to catch on because the capital needed to build out the infrastructure is ridiculous.

I don’t know about “never”, but I’ve made similar arguments on here predicated on the cost of building out the bandwidth — I don’t think that we’re likely going to get to the point any time soon where computers living in datacenters are a general-purpose replacement for non-mobile gaming, just because of the cost of building out the bandwidth from datacenter to monitor. Any benefit from having a remote GPU just doesn’t compare terribly well with the cost of having to effectively have a monitor-computer cable for every computer that might be used concurrently to the nearest datacenter.

But…I can think of specific cases where they’re competitive.

First, where power is your relevant constraint. If you’re using something like a cell phone or other battery-powered device, it’s a way to deal with power limitations. I mean, if you’re using even something like a laptop without wall power, you probably don’t have more than 100 Wh of battery power, absent USB-C and an external powerstation or something, due to airline restrictions on laptop battery size. If you want to be able to play a game for, say, 3 hours, then your power budget (not just for the GPU, but for everything) is something like 30W. You’re not going to beat that limit unless the restrictions on battery size go away (which…maybe they will, as I understand that there are some more-fire-safe battery chemistries out there).

And cell phone battery restrictions are typically even harder, like, 20 Wh. That means that for three hours of gaming, your power budget because of size constraints on the phone is maybe about 6 watts.

If you want power-intensive rendering on those platforms doing remote rendering is your only real option then.

Second, there are (and could be more) video game genres where you need dynamically-generated images, but where latency isn’t really a constraint. Like, a first-person shooter has some real latency constraints. You need to get a frame back in a tightly bounded amount of time, and you have constraints on how many frames per second you need. But if you were dynamically-rendering images for, I don’t know, an otherwise-text-based adventure game, then the acceptable time required to get a new frame illustrating a given scene might expand to seconds. That drastically slashes the bandwidth required.

What I don’t think is going to happen in the near future is “gaming PC/non-portable video game consoles get moved to the datacenter”.

I don’t know what the situation is for commercial games — I don’t know if there’s a marketplace like that — but I do remember someone setting up some repository for free/Creative Commons assets a while back.

goes looking

https://opengameart.org/

It’s not highly-structured in the sense that someone can upload, say, a model in Format X and someone else can upload a patch against that model or something like that with improvements and changes, though. Like, it’s not quite a “GitHub of assets”.

I haven’t looked at it over time, but I also don’t think that we’ve had an explosion in inter-compatible assets there. Like, it’s not like a community forms around a particular collection of chibi-style sprite artwork at a particular resolution, and then lots of libre games use those assets, the way RPGMaker or something has collections of compatible commercial assets.

I’m sure that there must be some sort of commercial asset marketplace out there, probably a number, though I don’t know if any span all game asset types or if they permit easily republishing modifications. I know that I’ve occasionally stumbled across a website or two that have individuals sell 3D models.

You mean because indie games tend not to have high minimum memory requirements, like?

Or, to put it another way…if you aren’t spending your assets on modeling and texturing and animating a bear for the thirtieth time the industry has done so, you can be off modeling and texturing and animating a space squid or something new, and having both it in game as well as a bear that looks kind of like bears in other games.

And if you have One Bear Model that lasts for N years that most of the industry uses, it can be a really good bear model.

Like, there are a lot of ways that efficiency gains could be expressed.

I think that you have two factors here. GDC isn’t specific to PC gaming, and additionally, a lot of titles will see both PC and console releases.

For a game that is intended to see only a PC release, my guess is that that that might affect system requirements of the game.

For games that see console releases, things like “will fewer people have consoles” — because current-gen consoles are very unlikely to change spec, just price, is how this manifests itself. “Is the Playstation 6 going to be postponed” is a big deal if you were going to release a game for that hardware.

The title is a little more dramatic than the body — in fact, the article is mostly more of a “yeah, this is something that we’ve seen before, more-or-less” take — but it is interesting to get some actual perspectives on impact from the developer side on what the likely changes are. It does also confirm that some studios are working on reducing the memory requirements for their upcoming games.

I bet that if someone went to The Internet Archive, they could pay them to get timestamped snapshots of professionally-spidered stuff at zero load to the websites. I’m sure that it’d cost something for all the hard drives and probably something for labor, but so does spidering the whole Internet yourself. The people running the bots clearly have the funds available to run them at massive scale.

“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so “88” is often used as a shorthand for “Heil Hitler”. It sometimes gets incorporated into usernames.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)

In neo-Nazism

Neo-Nazis use the number 88 as an abbreviation for the Nazi salute Heil Hitler.[11] The letter H is eighth in many European Latin alphabets, whereby 88 becomes HH.[12]

Often, this number is associated with the number 14, e.g. 14/88, 14-88, or 1488; this number symbolizes the Fourteen Words coined by David Lane, a prominent white supremacist.[13] Example uses of 88 include the song “88 Rock ‘n’ Roll Band” by Landser, and the organizations Column 88 and Unit 88.

The number is banned on Austrian license plates due to its association with “Heil Hitler [and] where H comes in the alphabet”.[14] In June 2023, the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and the Italian government announced that the number 88 would be banned from use in Italian association football, as part of a joint initiative to combat antisemitism. This followed an incident in March of that year in which a Lazio supporter wore a club shirt bearing the name “Hitlerson” and the number 88, which led to the supporter receiving a lifetime ban from attending Lazio matches.[15]

In the US, former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi declared in 2019 that something as innocuous as raising a flag on the White House to full staff on 8 August (i.e. 8–8) is a “messaging” problem because “the numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement.”[16]

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/88

88 is a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.” H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 = HH = Heil Hitler. One of the most common white supremacist symbols, 88 is used throughout the entire white supremacist movement, not just neo-Nazis. One can find it as a tattoo or graphic symbol; as part of the name of a group, publication or website; or as part of a screenname or e-mail address. It is even sometimes used as a greeting or sign-off (particularly in messages on social networking websites).

Yet using an AI is bad enough to get you called a fascist, an eugenicist and other fun things. The lack of perspective is staggering but certain section of Lemmy users have just decided that AI is evil and any nuance is wrongthink. Even just accepting the reality that AI isn’t going to go away is seen as evil comparable to murder.

I’d buy into the potential for eventual advanced AI being potentially a very serious, existential threat to humanity.

But I’m not especially worried about AI in the near term. I’m pretty sure that a substantial chunk of people upset about present-day AI systems are worried about economic shifts from AI putting their job at risk one way or another, which is something that I don’t agree much with — technological advancement has always caused changes in what people do. People in today’s society in, say, the US, do almost entirely different things than they did two hundred years ago, for example. That change is nearly always considered to be a positive in retrospect. There are very, very few people in 2026 who are going to seriously say “everyone should drop what they are doing and society should go back to farming small farms with horses and oxen the way we did around 1800”.

However, if you look at, say, the Luddites, we’ve had a history of people being worried about that change as it occurred, so I don’t much think that people will stop. It’s just human nature to fret about that sort of thing, I think. I’d be inclined to just let people have their say and move on. It’s not that I agree with the people who are yelling about it, but that I don’t realistically think that there’s going to be a world where you have technological development and don’t have people worried about how changes from that technological development might affect their place.

I also think that people who are worried about that are also a lot more likely to be vocal than people who aren’t worried about it. I mean, only stands to reason — if there’s something that you are really, really worried about, you’re probably going to talk about it. If there’s something that you don’t see as a particular concern, then you’re probably less likely to talk about it.

As it currently exists on other platforms, Gaming Copilot lets you ask guide-like questions about the game you’re currently playing. Microsoft’s official site offers an example question like “Can you remind me what materials I need to craft a sword in Minecraft?”

I haven’t used consoles for a few generations, but historically, switching between a game and a Web browser on a console wasn’t all that great, and text entry wasn’t all that great. I dunno if things have improved, but it was definitely a pain in the neck to refer to a website in-game historically.

On Linux, Wayland, I swap between fullscreen desktops when playing games, and often have a Web browser with information relevant to the game on another desktop. If it helps enable some approximation of a workflow like that for console players, that doesn’t sound unreasonable.

There are other objections I’d have, like not really wanting someone logging what my voice sounds like or giving Microsoft even more data on me to profile with via my searches. But it sounds to me like the basic functionality has a point.

looks at slides

I see where the anime catgirl logo that Anubis uses came from.

What makes this worse is that git servers are the most pathologically vulnerable to the onslaught of doom from modern internet scrapers because remember, they click on every link on every page.

The especially disappointing thing is that, for the specific case that Xe was running into, a better-written scraper could just recognize that this is a public git repository and just git clone the thing and get all the useful code without the overhead. Like, it’s not even “this scraper is scraping data that I don’t want it to have”, but “this scraper is too dumb to just scrape the thing efficiently and is blowing both the scraper’s resources and the server’s resources downloading innumerable redundant copies of the data”.

It’s probably just as well, since the protection is relevant for other websites, and he probably wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been getting his git repo hammered, but…

EDIT: Plus, I bet that the scraper was requesting a ton of files at once from the server, since he said that it was unusable. Like, you have a zillion servers to parallelize requests over. You could write a scraper that requested one file at once per server, which is common courtesy, and you’re still going to be bandwidth constrained if you’re schlorping up the whole Internet. Xe probably wouldn’t have even noticed.

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

The National Helium Reserve, also known as the Federal Helium Reserve, was a strategic reserve of the United States, which once held over 1 billion cubic meters (about 170,000,000 kg)[a] of helium gas.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) transferred the reserve to the General Services Administration (GSA) as surplus property, but a 2022 auction[10] failed to finalize a sale.[11] On June 22, 2023, the GSA announced a new auction of the facilities and remaining helium.[12] The auction of the last helium assets was due to take place in November, 2023.[13] Though the last of the Cliffside reserve was to be sold by November 2023, more natural gas was discovered at the site than was previously known, and the Bureau of Land Management extended the auction to January 25, 2024 to allow for increased bids.[14] In 2024 the remaining reserve was sold to the highest bidder, Messer Group.[15]

Arguably not the best timing on that.

Sure. What that guy is using is actually not the most-interesting diagram style, IMHO, for automatic layout of network maps, if you want large-scale stuff, which is where the automatic layout gets more interesting. I have some scripts floating around somewhere that will generate very large network maps — run a bunch of traceroutes, geolocate IPs, dump the results into an sqlite database, and then generate an automatically laid-out Internet network map. I don’t want to go to the trouble of anonymizing the addresses and locations right now, but if you have a graphviz graph and want to try playing with it, I used:

goes looking

Ugh, it’s Python 2, a decade-and-a-half old, and never got ported to Python 3. Lemme gin up an example for the non-hierarchical graphviz stuff:

graph.dot:

graph foo {
    a--b
    a--d
    b--c
    d--e
    c--e
    e--f
    b--d
}

Processed with:

$ sfdp -Goverlap=prism -Gsep=+5 -Gesep=+4 -Gremincross -Gpack -Gsplines=true -Tpdf -o graph.pdf graph.dot

Generates something like this:

That’ll take a ton of graphviz edges and nicely lay them out while trying to avoid crossing edges and stuff, in a non-hierarchical map. Get more complicated maps that it can’t use direct lines on, it’ll use splines to curve lines around nodes. You can create massive network maps like this. Note that I was last looking at graphviz’s automated layout stuff about 15 years ago, so it’s possible that they have better layout algorithms now, but this can deal with enormous numbers of nodes and will do reasonable things with them.

I just grabbed his example because it was the first graphviz network map example that came up on a Web search.

We faced an unprecedented bot problem

When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.

It’s a social media problem. It’s going to be hard to provide pseudonymity, low-cost accounts relatively freely, and counter bots spamming the system to manipulate it. The model worked well in an era before there were very human-like bots that were easy to produce.

It might be possible to build webs of trust with pseudonyms. You can make a new pseudonym, but the influence and visibility gets tied to, for example, what users or curators that you trust trust, so the pseudonym has less weight until it acquires reputation. I do not think that a single global trust “score” will work, because you can always have bot webs of trust.

Unfortunately, the tools to unmask pseudonyms are also getting better, and throwing away pseudonyms occasionally or using more of them is one of the reasonable counters to unmasking, and that doesn’t play well with relying more on reputation.