Because if you disable browser autocomplete, what’s obviously going to happen is that everyone will have a text file open with every single one of their passwords in so that they can copy-paste them in. So prevent that. But what happens if you prevent that is that everyone will choose terrible, weak passwords instead. Something like September2025! probably meets the ‘complexity’ requirement…

A bit like when we renamed all the master/slave terminology using different phrasing that’s frankly more useful a lot of the time, I think it’s about time we got rid of this “child” task nonsense. I suggest “subtask”. Then we can reword these books into something that no-one can make stupid jokes about any more, like “how to keep your subs in line” and “how to punish your subs when they’ve misbehaved”.

Well now. When we’ve been enforcing password requirements at work, we’ve had to enforce a bizarre combination of “you must have a certain level of complexity”, but also, “you must be slightly vague about what the requirements actually are, because otherwise it lets an attacker tune a dictionary attack against you”. Which just strikes me as a way to piss off our users, but security team say it’s a requirement, therefore, it’s a requirement, no arguing.

“One” special character is crazy; I’d have guessed that was a catch-all for the other strange password requirements:

• can’t have the same character more than twice in a row
• can’t be one of the ten-thousand most popular passwords (which is mostly a big list of swears in russian)
• all whitespace must be condensed into a single character before checking against the other rules

We’ve had customers’ own security teams asking us if we can enforce “no right click” / “no autocomplete” to stop their users in-house doing such things; I’ve been trying to push back on that as a security misfeature, but you can’t question the cult thinking.

We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.

Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.

If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from boiling the oceans and committing copyright infringement on an unimaginable scale, it’s that a finger has an 80% chance of being followed by another finger.

Should have used Vim instead, that’s a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.

C

Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.

It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.

Dark Souls’ implementation is something special. Censors your name based on the language settings you have in place at the time, voice-over dialogue remains in English. So change your system language to either another language you know, or play it a few times so you know what things are, and then put the most offensive shit in as your character name you like.

I quite liked all the people complaining about ‘unrealistic’ Russian accents, and every single character in the game is voiced by a native speaker. Many lols. Bit like people complaining about Yvonne Strahovski’s ‘phoney’ Australian accent playing Miranda in Mass Effect.

It’s been a perpetual source of surprise to me that curry houses are so ‘non-specific’. Pakistan and India together make about 1.7 billion people, about a third of the planet’s population, and I’d have thought an easy way to distinguish a restaurant would be to offer something more region-specific, but it’s fairly rare.

Here in the UK, the majority of curry houses are Bangladeshi - used to be the vast majority, now it’s more like 2/3rds. We’ve a couple of ‘more specific’ chains - both Bundobust and Dishoom do Mumbai-style, and they’re both fantastic - and there’s a few places that do well with the ‘naturally vegan’ cuisines, but mostly you can go in to a restaurant and expect the usual suspects will be on the menu.

Same goes for Chinese restaurants - I don’t believe that a billion people all eat the same food, it’s too big a place for the same ingredients to be in season all the time. Why are they not more specific, more often?

Indeed. Here in the UK, people can request that their water company should add it in if their water supply is low-fluoride, for instance from a reservoir, and the water company must add it in.

Back when I used to work in water, that was always the stuff that gave me nightmares. Concentrated hexafluorosilicic acid is what we’d use for dosing. We’d test all the equipment in the chemical room on plain water, drain it out and then literally brick up the doorway. Site would be evacuated during delivery - delivery guy would connect everything up in a space suit, hop in the shower afterwards. Lasted for ages and ages, since you only need the tiniest drip in the water supply to get what you need, but the tiniest drip on your skin would be enough to kill you as well; its lethal dosage is horrifically small.

Made working with all the other halides much less of a concern - we use shed loads of chlorine, but that stuff is much much less nasty in comparison.

When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.

Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.

I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.

Disappointing that there’s no “bridges” count on there, am invested in it now. Hopefully something big to come, once they’ve stopped the ruzzians from being able to supply reinforcements.

It’s a simple alphabet for computing because most of the early developers of computing developed using it and therefore it’s supported everywhere. If the Vikings had developed early computers then we could use the 24 futhark runes, wouldn’t have upper and lower case to worry about, and you wouldn’t need to render curves in fonts because it’s all straight lines.

But yeah, agreed. Very widely spoken. But don’t translate programming languages automatically; VBA does that for keywords and it’s an utter nightmare.

If you move past the ‘brute force’ method of solving into the ‘constraints’ level, it’s fairly easy to check whether there are multiple possible valid solutions. Using a programming language with a good sets implementation (Python!) makes this easy - for each cell, generate a set of all the values that could possibly go there. If there’s only one, fill it in and remove that value from all the sets in the same row/column/block. If there’s no cells left that only take a unique value, choose the cell with the fewest possibilities and evaluate all of them, recursively. Even a fairly dumb implementation will do the whole problem space in milliseconds. This is a very easy problem to parallelize, too, but it’s hardly worth it for 9x9 sodokus - maybe if you’re generating 16x16 or 25x25 ‘alphabet’ puzzles, but you’ll quickly generate problems beyond the ability of humans to solve.

The method in the article for generating ‘difficult’ puzzles seems mighty inefficient to me - generate a valid solution, and then randomly remove numbers until the puzzle is no longer ‘unique’. That’s a very calculation-heavy way of doing it, need to evaluate the whole puzzle at every step. It must be the case that a ‘unique’ sodoku has at least 8 unique numbers in the starting puzzle, because otherwise there will be at least two solutions, with the missing numbers swapped over. Preferring to remove numbers equal to values that you’ve already removed ought to get you to a hard puzzle faster?

In which case, the job becomes transferring the bottled samples into sample tubes in trays so that the machine can process them, and usually adding a barcode to each sample tube. The sample tubes need to be kept immaculate as well - some of the things that we test water for, like pesticides, are only present in miniscule concentrations. Might not actually save a great deal of time, and you need to buy and maintain a very expensive automated sampler.

When I used to work in the water industry, we were usually able to get PhD-qualified research chemists to do all this mind-numbing laboratory work. There’s a bit of a surplus of qualified chemists compared to the number of chemist jobs available, so you got absurdly over-qualified people applying for these roles.

I’d suggest that we do not. How about we split the difference, and drop them off halfway between Belfast and Stranraer, say?

Ah, but if they destroy it inside Russia, then they can wait for the Russians to repair it and then destroy it again. This thing is an essential prop for the Russian economy, they really can’t afford to be without it. Might as well turn it into a money sink for them.