If it’s so great for Privacy, why does it support DNS over HTTPS?

DNS queries can be and are logged by public WiFi access points and ISPs. DoH cannot.

Taking name resolution control away from the user and the OS is NOT a benefit to your privacy.

It doesn’t take anything away. It’s just a default. If you don’t want DoH, then just turn it off.

(And yes, you can disable it… FOR NOW.)

So you’re okay with the current situation and are complaining about some hypothetical future that you are theorizing might materialize?

“Because of our long time history and allegiance together, it is a great honor to have the United Kingdom as our FIRST announcement. Many other deals, which are in serious stages of negotiation, to follow!”

“Allegiance” and “alliance” aren’t synonyms. Neither of us has held allegiance to the other since we were part of the British Empire in the colonial era. How do you manage to dick this up? Literally all you have to do is have someone write things on paper and open your mouth and say them without improvising.

You have to have a speechwriter on-staff.

kagis

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

Ross Worthington.

kagis

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/01/14/congress/trump-worthington-00198301

Ross Worthington worked on many of Trump’s policy speeches, but the president-elect often veered off-script.

Trump praised his speechwriters but frequently went off script and had a habit of freelancing large portions of his speeches before returning to the teleprompter.

Yeah, no kidding.

It’s the first of any Bethesda title, to officially use procedural generation extensively.

There’s Daggerfall.

TWZ’s coverage:

https://www.twz.com/news-features/india-strikes-pakistan-responds

I just added one other followup – you might want to try insmod instead of modprobe, since modprobe expects more than just the single module, expects to have the other modules that that new-lg4ff might depend on visible to it…you might need to go set up a “duplicate module root” to make modprobe happy, but with insmod just be able to insert the module file without any other mucking around.

DKMS is not supported on bazzite.

I mean, not having DKMS sounds like it’d be obnoxious for gaming to me.

But if all you need is a kernel module, you shouldn’t have to have it built via DKMS.

I don’t use Bazzite, but the driver project has instructions for a non-DKMS build:

https://github.com/berarma/new-lg4ff

Manual method

Use only if DKMS doesn’t work.

You’re going to need to manually do a new build and install if you update your kernel, though, since otherwise the new kernel won’t have that driver (well, unless the Bazzite people include it in the new kernel).

EDIT:

I was under the impression that new-lg4ff cannot be installed due to the immutable nature of the system.

I haven’t used an immutable distro, but if it’s a problem, I’m sure that there’s a way to defeat the immutability. If it just mounts the root filesystem read-only, then

# mount -o remount,rw /

Will probably do it.

I’m also pretty sure that you can use a non-standard directory with modprobe and if you want to manually load the module out of some other directory. Looking at the modprobe(8) man page, looks like it takes a -d flag and an alternate module root directory.

EDIT2: Hmm. insmod might be simpler than modprobe, since then you don’t have to worry about dependent modules, especially if new-lg4ff is just a single module. It’s been ages since I’ve insmodded something, but if it can take a path to a kernel module file, then one doesn’t need to worry about having modprobe see both new-lg4ff and any modules that it depends on.

EDIT3: Just realized one other bit of complexity. This isn’t just loading a driver that isn’t present. If some other driver is “claiming” the steering wheel first — you say that it’s working, but not with all the functionality you want? — then you might need to prevent that other driver from doing so, or make it release the device, as I don’t think that your steering wheel driver can claim the device if another already has it.

I’m gonna bet that it’s usbhid. I think — honestly, never looked into whether anything’s changed since the udev daemon showed up — that as soon as a module is loaded, it grabs all the devices that it recognizes. And another complication — you don’t want to prevent usbhid from loading, which is one approach that’s used when an old, broken driver is used, because it gets used for all sorts of other things like your keyboard and mouse.

If you run:

# evtest

You’ll get a list of all of your event devices. On my system, for example, I have:

/dev/input/event22:     8BitDo Pro 2 Wired Controller

If you want to know which driver is associated with a given event device:

$ ls -l /sys/class/input/event22/device/device/driver
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  4 22:50 /sys/class/input/event22/device/device/driver -> ../../../../../../../../../bus/usb/drivers/xpad

The xpad kernel driver owns that device for me. In your case, I bet that it’s gonna be something like: “…/…/…/…/…/…/…/…/…/…/bus/hid/drivers/hid-generic”.

From this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51858074/preventing-usbhid-from-claiming-device

It sounds like doing an unbind will work to make the usbhid module release the device. That guy has a udev rule written, which will cause the udevd daemon to cause the usbhid driver to automatically release the device.

goes looking for an example of adding a udev rule

https://linuxconfig.org/tutorial-on-how-to-write-basic-udev-rules-in-linux

I was listening to an interview with a senior EU translator several years back, and he said that these days, he normally does the first pass with Google Translate, then manually cleans things up. My guess is that to some extent, most human translations likely incorporate some AI translation already.

There is no stronger bond of friendship than a common enemy.

— Frank Frankfort Moore

I tend to like games that have lots of “levers” to play with and spend time figuring out, so I think that tends to be the unifying factor in the above games.

I don’t know of anything really comparable to Oxygen Not Included in terms of all the physics and stuff. I’d like something like it too (especially since Tencent bought ONI and now has some locked graphics for some in-game items that you can only get by enabling data-harvesting and then playing the game for a given amount of time, which I’m not willing to do. They don’t have an option to just buy that content. At least it’s optional.)

For Rimworld and Oygen Not Included, both are real-time colony sims. Of those, the closest stuff on my list is probably:

• Dwarf Fortress (note that the commercial Steam build looks quite different from the classic version, has graphics and a mouse-oriented UI and revamped the UI and such, which may-or-may-not matter to you; if the learning curve being steep is an issue, that makes it a tad gentler). Rimworld is, in many ways, a simplified Dwarf Fortress in a sci-fi setting and without a Z-axis.

• Kenshi. Not a colony sim. You control a free-roaming squad (or squads) in an post-apocalyptic open world. That’s actually a bit like Rimworld. However, you can set up one or more outposts and set up automated production there. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and the early game is very difficult, as your character is weak and outclassed by almost everything. Focus is more on the characters, and less on the outpost-building – that’s more of a late-game goal. I find it to be pretty easy to go back and play more of. There’s a sequel in the works that’ll hopefully look prettier. Not really any other game I’m aware of in quite the same genre.

The other things on my list don’t really deal with building.

Oxygen Not Included has automated production. If you’re willing to go outside “colony sim”, there is a genre of “factory-building games” where one controls maybe a single character or base element and just tries to create a world of automated production stuff, maybe with tower defense elements. I’d probably recommend Satisfactory if you want 3D and a first-person view. I like it, but in my book, it doesn’t really compare with the games that I’ve racked up a ton of time on, winds up feeling a bit samey after a while, looks like I have thirty-some hours. Mindustry is a free and open-source factory builder that you can grab off F-Droid for Android to play on-the-go; that and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are probably my open-source Android favorite games. Dyson Sphere Program has outstanding ratings, but I have not gotten around to playing it.

There are a few colony sim games sort of like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. I tried them, and none of them grabbed me as well as they did, but if you want to look at them:

• Rise to Ruins is a colony sim and does have combat, but less focus on individual characters than Rimworld. I don’t like it mostly because the game is not really designed to be winnable, which I find frustrating. There’s growing “corruption” coming in from the edges of the map, and the aim is to try to last as long as possible before becoming overwhelmed; you can flee from it to other colonies. Technically, there are some ways to defeat the corruption, but not really how the game is intended to be played.

• Prison Architect. This has somewhat-similar graphics to Rimworld. You build and manage a prison. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t really have the open-world scope of Rimworld.

• Timberborn. This was in fairly Early Access the last time I spent much time on it, so I’m kind of out-of-date, and it looks like it’s still in EA. Doesn’t have the combat elements from Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress.

• Gnomoria is kind of like a much-simplified Dwarf Fortress. It didn’t really grab me, but maybe it’s your cup of tea.

https://enews.hamariweb.com/pakistan/heavy-rain-and-storms-expected-across-pakistan-stay-safe-till-may-5/

The Pakistan Meteorological Department has issued a countrywide weather alert, forecasting widespread rain, hailstorms, and thunderstorms from today through May 5, 2025. In response, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has urged provincial and local authorities to take preemptive measures to deal with potential emergencies such as urban flooding, flash floods, and landslides.

Well, sounds like they’ve got water for a bit.

https://www.techradar.com/computing/virtual-reality-augmented-reality/latest-meta-ar-smart-glasses-leak-has-killed-my-interest-before-theyre-even-official

Bloomberg has shared reports from unnamed insiders that the device, codenamed Hypernova, is expected to launch later this year and will feature a monocular design, as in it will use only one display rather than a pair of screens – two details we’ve already heard.

This single panel would sit in the lower-right corner of the right lens, so it should allow you conveniently see information by looking down without obscuring your vision greatly.

It sounds like they’re kinda trying to compete with the watch market or something. Like, not trying to display something that you’d spend your whole time looking at, or even a virtual overlay, but just some status information that you can glance at without being super-obvious about it.

They also have cameras. I don’t totally get the use case for cameras plus single screen on lens. I guess maybe you could take a picture of someone’s face, upload the photo to Meta, do facial recognition on it, and then have personal details sent back to the screen at the bottom of your right eye. Like, maybe that’d be useful for people who don’t want to be in a position of awkwardly forgetting names or security personnel or something.

EDIT: Or maybe people who want to photograph people without it being obvious that they’re doing so, and want to have some kind of status display that they can use to see what their camera is doing?

Just seems like an odd combination of features.

EDIT2: Not to mention whatever they’re paying for the Ray-Ban branding, so they’re probably not pushing for a really price-sensitive use case.

Meta helped fuck over the global economy.

What?

EDIT: You mean them spending a lot of money on VR stuff without it really generating a return?

There’s plenty of jrpgs half that price point with twice the length though.

Gotta like the JRPG genre for those hours to be fun, though.

I think the last major JRPG I was willing to play to completion was Final Fantasy V.

I’ll play the occasional CRPG, but JRPGs aren’t really my cup of tea.

Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, if you want to have a useful sense of what kind of value you’re getting, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn’t some sort of fixed quantity per game – it colossally varies.

If the way one rates a game is to simply use the price of the game, and disregard how much you’re going to play the thing, then what you incentivize developers to do is either (a) produce games coming out with enormous amounts of DLC, as Paradox does, if you don’t count DLC price, (b) short games sold in “chapter” format, where someone buys multiple games to play what really amounts to one “game”, (c) games with in-app purchases, data-harvesting or some form of way to generate an in-game revenue stream, or simply (d) short, small games.

I have a lot of games that I could grind for many hours — but I haven’t done so, never will do so, because I’ve lost interest; they’re no longer providing fun gameplay. I’ve gotten my hours out of the game, though that number is decoupled from the number of hours to complete the game. I have other games that I’ve played to completion a number of times, and some games — particularly roguelikes/roguelites — which aim for extreme replayability. The hours matter, but it’s not the hours to complete the game that’s relevant, but the hours I’m interested in playing the game and have fun with it.

For some genres, this doesn’t vary all that much. Adventure games, I think, are a pretty good example of a genre where a player has to keep consuming new art and audio and writing and all that. They aren’t usually all that replayable, though there are certainly adventure games that are significantly shorter or longer. But you won’t be likely to find an adventure game that has ten, much less a hundred times as much reasonable gameplay as another adventure game.

But there are other genres, like roguelikes, where I don’t really need new content from an artist to keep being thrown my way for the game to continue to provide fun gameplay. There, the hours of fun gameplay in a game can become absolutely enormous, vary by orders of magnitude across games in the genre and relative to games in other genres.

and Terraria are all close to 500h as well.

If you like Terraria, have you tried Starbound?

Well I’m not them, but for me: KSP1: 1800.8 hours. Current cost $40 = $0.02 an hour

My electricity costs to run the game are higher than the cost of the game itself at that point.

EDIT: Keep in mind that some of these have DLC, and if you buy them, it increases the price. Kerbal Space Program with all DLC is $70; that’s still an extremely good value at 1800.8 hours, but does bump the number up. Fallout: New Vegas has (good) DLC that I would want; all DLC would take the game to $45. Civilization VI would go to $230 (and I assume that they’re still turning out DLC). I listed Stellaris myself, along with a lot of other people. I really liked the game, and even the base game is a good game, IMHO, but in typical Paradox game fashion, if you buy all the DLC, it adds up to quite a bit — $470 currently, and they’re still turning out DLC. Someone listed DCS, I have The Sims 3 on my list, Total War: Warhammer II. All of those games have pricey DLC libraries that, if purchased in total, run multiple hundreds or over a thousand dollars (with the Total War: Warhammer series using an unusual take on this, where prior games in the series also act as DLC for the current ones). They can still be pretty cost-competitive per hour with other games, but only if the person who buys them is actually playing them a a lot.

• Oxygen Not Included

• Caves of Qud

• Fallout 4. A lot of this is going to be due to mods.

• Wargame: Red Dragon. Intended to be played multiplayer; I played it single-player. Steel Division II is a far better single-player choice if you don’t mind the different setting, as the AI is much more interesting.

• Skyrim. A lot of this is going to be due to mods.

• Rimworld

• Civilization V

• Fallout 76, the only entry here I actually play multiplayer (and even that to a minimal degree; that game tends to have players having pretty minimal interaction with each other unless they’re actually trying to play with each other). I would recommend playing Fallout 4 over Fallout 76 unless you specifically want multiplayer; Fallout 76 is just the closest thing to “more Fallout” short of a Fallout 5.

Not run through Steam, so no Steam stats (though available on Steam) but I’m sure that they’re way up there:

• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Free and open-source, though there’s a commercial build on Steam if you want to effectively donate. If not, can download from their project page.

• Dwarf Fortress. Free, though there’s a commercial build on Steam with a fancier, more-approachable UI and such.

• Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, though that’s going back a few years. Free and open-source.

Some others with a fair bit of playtime:

• Steel Division II. Primarily a multiplayer game, but I only play single-player.

• X3: Reunion

• Mount & Blade: Warband. The Prophesy of Pendor mod adds a fair bit of time to this.

• Elite: Dangerous. Though I don’t remember how I accumulated that many hours. Wasn’t super-impressed with the game. Probably pretty in VR, though.

• Stellaris

• Noita

• Kenshi

• Nova Drift

• Starfield

• The Sims 3

• Starbound

• Rule the Waves 3

• Wasteland II

• Fallout: New Vegas

• Carrier Command 2. Primarily intended to be played multiplayer, but I play single-player.

• Kerbal Space Program

• Total War: Warhammer II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackout

I don’t know how much more pressure can be applied absent direct conflict between the US and Russia, which I don’t believe the US will do.

Almost all US-Russia trade is gone, so not much to take away in economic terms.

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4621.html

In 2021, the US imported $29.6 billion from Russia and exported $6.4 billion.

In 2024, the US imported $3 billion (90% gone) and exported $0.5 billion to Russia (92% gone).

It might be possible to pressure other countries not to trade with Russia via use of secondary sanctions.

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

The top party there is China (who I don’t think that we’re in a position to compel to cut off from Russia).

There’s Belarus, which I doubt is going to be compelled to cut off trade from Russia given the state of affairs.

The other top countries are all EU members. I mean, we could try and put pressure on them, but theoretically they should be doing this themselves.

Like, I can understand criticism as to Trump’s interactions with Zelenskyy, but I don’t think that there’s some magic, easy-to-use lever to compel Russia that the White House has in reserve. Maybe weapon supplies to Ukraine are the most-influential left.

No prob. I’m reasonably confident that there are other multiple projects that have also done this; I just tried to list what looked like the most-currently-viable ones.

kagis

The first I think I remember seeing chronologically was FIFE, which IIRC was renamed from some slightly-different acronym from when it was intended to only run Fallout games. It looks like they’ve focused on becoming a generic RPG engine:

https://www.fifengine.net/

FIFE is a free, open-source cross-platform game engine. It features hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, integrated GUI, audio support, lighting, map editor supporting top-down and isometric maps, pathfinding, virtual filesystem and more!

The core is written in C++ which means that it is highly portable. FIFE currently supports Windows, Linux and Mac.

Games utilizing FIFE are programmed through Python scripting layer on top of the base C++ API. Games can be also programmed using the C++ layer directly.

FIFE is open-sourced under the terms of the LGPL license so you can freely use it in non-commercial and commercial projects.

It sounds like they may have not taken it to full playability of the first two games; IIRC, the original intention was to do so:

https://falloutmod.fandom.com/wiki/FIFE

FIFE stands for Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine and is an open source project for the creation of cross platform ISO/top-down 2D games (e.g. RPGs & RTS’). The assets of Interplay’s RPG classics Fallout 1 & 2 are supported as test implementation but are not required to work with FIFE. It is not a Fallout emulator and you cannot play Fallout with it. The project’s goal is more universial. You can read graphics from fallout data files and create your own mods or draw you own content and make a completely new game.

Then there’s Falltergeist:

https://github.com/falltergeist/falltergeist

Falltergeist is an opensource alternative for Fallout 2 and Fallout 1 game engines. It uses C++, SDL and OpenGL. Falltergeist requires original Fallout resources to work.

But the last GitHub commit was three years ago, and the main site’s last blog update was in 2018.

There’s darkfo:

https://github.com/darkf/darkfo

A post-nuclear RPG remake

This is a modern reimplementation of the engine of the video game Fallout 2, as well as a personal research project into the feasibility of doing such.

It is written primarily in TypeScript and Python, and targets a modern (HTML 5) Web browser.

However, the last commit was six years ago.

There’s Harold, which is apparently a project continuing darkfo:

https://github.com/OldGamesLab/Harold

The project is based on darkfo codebase, but is modernized for Python 3, potentially with more improvements and bug fixes coming in the future.

Its last commit was three years ago.

There’s Fallout Equestria Reloaded — which apparently is some sort of unholy mating between My Little Pony and Fallout:

https://github.com/Plaristote/fallout-equestria-reloaded

Qt-based game engine for Fallout-like RPGs, developed for the Fallout Equestria RPG project

I don’t think that the goal was so much to play Fallout as to use the assets to bootstrap a playable MLP RPG.

There have been commits in the past two months, so apparently someone is actually seriously plugging away.

Then there’s FOnline, another engine reimplementation, this one intended to be played multiplayer online:

https://github.com/cvet/fonline

Looks active.

https://www.fonline-reloaded.net/

FOnline: Reloaded is a free to play post-nuclear MMORPG based on FOnline: 2238, an award-winning game set three years before the events of Fallout 2. FOnline: Reloaded provides you with a unique opportunity to revisit the ruins of California and explore the familiar locales from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

FOnline: Reloaded is a player-driven, persistent world MMORPG that allows you to participate in a wide range of activities, which range from faction wars to exploration, mining, scavenging for resources, caravan raids and more. The game puts a lot of emphasis on team play and dynamic, unscripted PvP action, but there is absolutely nothing to stop you from focusing on PvE dungeons or role-play.

FOnline: Reloaded is powered by the latest iteration of the FOnline Engine, which was created from scratch by Cvet and which is capable of utilizing assets imported from the original Fallout games, as well as Fallout: Tactics, Arcanum and Baldur’s Gate. The development of this engine started back in 2004 and continues to this day.