Huh, weird. The only thing I can think of is to check /etc/security/limits.d to see if there’s another conf file in there setting it to 4096.

Are you sure you really need 1048576 open files? It seems like a lot. But you’ll probably want to set “soft” as well as “hard” limits. Then you need to log in again for the change to take effect.

I wonder how Cloudflare estimates the increased rate of false positives they’re getting after they made their bot detector even more oversensitive in recent weeks. It no longer likes my default javascript-enabled browser profile and I don’t always bother to load another one when I get cloudflared, so >50% of visits from me are “bots”.

I got as far as “hey, wait a minute, that can’t be a perfect square…” before the gunfight started.

I have some doubts about the Russian minister’s understanding of the tenets of Satanism.

Imagine how malevolent the next generation of AI will be, when it’s trained on today’s Internet text.

When The Witcher 3 came out I had the money and bought it shortly after release at a local shop, because my net connection then was way too slow to download anything measured in gigabytes.

I think it was a set of 3 CDs. I took them home, started installing, and then found out that 3 CDs was nowhere near enough and it wanted to download somewhere in the 10s of gigabytes before I could play. It took about three days.

a firestorm on X ensued … it mostly came from users who seem to be on the far left of the political spectrum.

The far left of x dot com, huh. I’m sure they’re gratified to know that their opinions matter to someone.

Congrats to GameStop on being described as “struggling” when I would’ve expected “defunct” by now.

Them going “retro” makes sense to me. I happened to be near one of their locations the other day and remembered that the last time I went in there it was to ask if they still had a bin full of second-hand PS3 discs somewhere. All I got was a succinct “no.”

Browsing around nethack.org I found this link if anyone’s in need of an introduction to nethack: https://web.archive.org/web/20210212161326/http://www.linuxvoice.com/nethack/

The comments are full of people sharing their yasd stories.

Early 90s the pirate BBS scene was still going strong. You could dial in and tie up your phone line for days at a time. My guess is it was about as common then as it is today, relative to the size of the game industry.

Strange how Denuvo being cracked doesn’t change how I feel about it at all.

1. Links to news stories from…
2. …credible sources, with…
3. …their original headlines, that…
4. …would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Given what passes for “news” some of the time I suppose you might find some better-conceived piece about poo-flinging in e.g. The Guardian, but personally I think rule 2 is where we run into real problems here.

There’s some small chance that this is not machine-generated slop, but it’s still not Not The Onion material.

“The cloud” is just somebody else’s computer.

If disk space is a problem, why don’t more instances delete old stuff? 99% of what’s posted doesn’t need to be archived forever.

Okay great, but steam engines from the mid 19th century could probably outrun humans too.

If they make the fediverse illegal, then it will be illegal. There’s not much that can be done about it. Obviously we cannot do “age verification.”

It would look really bad, politically, so they probably won’t go that far right now — they’ll just slowly push things in that direction until it seems feasible.

I think the window for having that debate was some time around 1992.

Encouraging more teen pregnancies seems like it might cause problems for the education system, but that’s okay; Fox News loves the uneducated.

Personally I suspect that the best cure for a low fertility rate is a good 60 to 100 years of declining population size. It’s worth a try anyway.