Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

Xah Talk Show 2026-02-06 Ep758 JavaScript. Array Sort, Peter Norvig, is Python Acceptable Lisp - Xah Emacs Blog

2026-02-07T02:49:13.000Z

2026-02-06

Xah Talk Show 2026-02-06 Ep758 JavaScript. Array Sort, Peter Norvig, is Python Acceptable Lisp

An in-kernel machine-learning library - LWN.net

2026-02-06T23:01:08.000Z

For those wanting more machine learning in the kernel, Viacheslav Dubeyko has posted a new in-kernel library for that purpose.

What is the goal of using ML models in Linux kernel? The main goal is to employ ML models for elaboration of a logic of particular Linux kernel subsystem based on processing data or/and an efficient subsystem configuration based on internal state of subsystem. As a result, it needs: (1) collect data for training, (2) execute ML model training phase, (3) test trained ML model, (4) use ML model for executing the inference phase. The ML model inference can be used for recommendation of Linux kernel subsystem configuration or/and for injecting a synthesized subsystem logic into kernel space (for example, eBPF logic).

It is rigorously undocumented and there are no real users, so it's not entirely clear what the purpose is, but there are undoubtedly interesting things that could be done with it.

Inverness - Take on Rules

2026-02-06T20:11:24.000Z

When I Invited All of You Over to Watch the “The Big Game,” I Assumed You Knew I Was Talking about Human Chess - McSweeney’s

2026-02-06T18:00:00.000Z

I don’t know why you’re all so upset. I’m sorry if there’s some “other event” that you were all more excited about that’s apparently also happening at the exact same time as this party, on the second Sunday in February at 6:30 p.m. But if you were confused by my invitation, that’s on you. I said that I was throwing a party to watch “the big game,” and I think any reasonable person would have understood that I was talking about watching a game of human chess.

That’s right, human chess: thirty-two actors in elaborate, historically authentic costumes as the chess pieces, and two chess grandmasters controlling the action, all of which plays out on the giant chessboard I built in my backyard. Yes, if there’s something other than human chess that people call “the big game,” I’m simply not familiar with it.

Fine, I’ll address your questions and complaints one by one:

First of all, I don’t see any issue with my choice of words. Human chess is quite literally a big game. Not only that, I can’t think of ANY game that is bigger than human chess. Were you expecting to show up and watch a human-scale version of Chutes and Ladders or maybe Hungry Hungry Hippos played with real hippos? Don’t be ridiculous, you would never want to have to deal with hippos—believe me, it’s enough trouble wrangling the real horses ridden by the human chess knights. No, there’s no game that comes even close to being as big as human chess; therefore, human chess is THE big game.

Please stop asking if we can turn on a TV. I can’t imagine what TV show or live event you’d want to watch when you could be watching the big game. And anyway, because of the cost of building the giant chessboard, feeding and stabling the horses, and paying the chess-piece actors (who are all in SAG and are not working for scale), I can’t afford a television.

There WILL be a halftime show. Admittedly, it’s almost never clear when the halfway point of human chess is, but we usually just decide to have halftime at around the four-hour mark (we like to let the grandmasters take their time). Entertainment will be a lute player and a falconer.

It’s true, in the lead-up to this party, I have been talking a lot about how excited I am for the big game’s ads. The “ads” are the advisors who make sure the actors playing the chess pieces speak in period-accurate ways, stay in character, and don’t spook the horses. The ads ARE very funny, and I DO often quote their jokes (which are about human chess) at the office water cooler the day after the big game.

NFL is an abbreviation that stands for “Nice, Fun, Large.” After all, human chess is all three of those things.

Many of you seem to be particularly hung up on the fact that I repeatedly talked to you about whether or not tailor Swift would be attending the big game this year. My tailor, Stephen Swift, comes over to watch the big game whenever I organize one, but he was feeling a little under the weather this year and wasn’t sure he could make it. I don’t know who this singer is that you’re all talking about, but tailor Swift calls his clients “Swifties” and he is engaged to a player who’s played in the big game the past two years—that handsome pawn over there on d4. Stephen also sewed all the costumes worn by the human chess pieces.

Chips and Dip are the two falcons who will be performing with the falconer at the halftime show. The falconer comes from Upstate New York, which is why his act is called “Buffalo Wings.” You better believe we got Chips and Dip and Buffalo Wings for the big game!

When I said we’d be “cracking open some cold ones,” I was, of course, referring to what happens when one of the knights gets removed from the board. Knights’ armor stiffens in the chilly February weather, and to be taken off, it has to be “cracked open” with a special tool made for removing knights’ armor in games of human chess. If you didn’t understand that, then why did you all insist on high-fiving me every time I referenced “cracking open some cold ones”? If you want a beverage, I’m more than happy to pour you a flagon of mead.

Finally, you can all stop shouting at me that today is a Super Sunday. I agree! ANY day of the week is a super day when you get to watch the big game (which, again, is obviously human chess).

Fine, leave if you want, but you’re all still invited back next month for my Oscar watch party. I promise, it’s exactly what it sounds like.

If you're struggling to play tactics sim Menace, it could be because your antivirus is randomly deleting files - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-06T17:36:40.000Z

This week saw the early access launch of turn-based tactics game Menace, created by the piss-swigging misanthropes behind Battle Brothers. Julian has been having a wonderful time playing it and learning about the importance of spare ammo and adequate reconnaissance. It could have been worse, Julian. Your antivirus software could have deleted some of the game’s files. This being one of the currently known issues listed in the patch notes for the game’s first proper update.

Square Enix announce Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse, sequel to one of 2023's best horror mystery games - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-06T16:55:42.000Z

Square Enix have announced Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, a summery sequel to horror mystery visual novel Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. The original game earned itself a double thumbs-up from former RPS reviews editor Rachel Watts, shortly before she vanished while gathering blood-stained stones one moonlit night. (I am just joshing with you – Rachel is alive and well over at Thinky Games. Remember, there's no such thing as ghosts and there definitely isn't one hovering behind you right now.)

The Mermaid’s Curse should be good, then. It trades the first game’s gloomy streets for the coast of Japan, where young pearl diver Yuza Minakuchi discovers another version of himself at the bottom of the ocean. I routinely discover other versions of myself at the bottom of a bottle of Tuppersmith's Old Peculiar, but nobody's making any dang visual novels about me. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

Six stable kernels for Friday - LWN.net

2026-02-06T16:45:01.000Z

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.18.9, 6.12.69, 6.6.123, 6.1.162, 5.15.199, and 5.10.249 stable kernels. As always, each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Ardour 9.0 released - LWN.net

2026-02-06T16:24:54.000Z

The Ardour digital-audio-workstation (DAW) project has announced the release of version 9.0.

This is a major release for the project, seeing several substantive new features that users have asked for over a long period of time. Region FX, clip recording, a touch-sensitive GUI, pianoroll windows, clip editing and more, not to mention dozens of bug fixes, new MIDI binding maps, improved GUI performance on macOS (for most) ...
We expect to get feedback on some of the major new features in this release, and plan to take that into account as we improve and refine them and the rest of Ardour going forward. We have no doubt that there will be both delight and disappointment with certain things - rather than assume that we don't know what we're doing, please leave us feedback on the forums so that Ardour gets better over time. Those of you new to our clip launching implementation might care to read up on the differences with Ableton Live.
In the coming weeks, we'll begin to sketch out what we have planned next for Ardour, in addition to responding to the feedback we get on this 9.0 release.

[$] Kernel control-flow-integrity support comes to GCC - LWN.net

2026-02-06T16:23:30.000Z

Control-flow integrity (CFI) is a set of techniques that make it more difficult for attackers to hijack indirect jumps to exploit a system. The Linux kernel has supported forward-edge CFI (which protects indirect function calls) since 2020, with the most recent implementation of the feature introduced in 2022. That version avoids the overhead introduced by the earlier approach by using a compiler flag (-fsanitize=kcfi) that is present in Clang but not in GCC. Now, Kees Cook has a patch set adding that support to GCC that looks likely to land in GCC 17.

Razer BlackShark V3 gaming headset review - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-06T16:13:20.000Z

Like the Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL keyboard – except as astute readers will notice, this is a headset – the BlackShark V3 Pro is something I’ve welcomed into my everyday PC kit for months, yet apparently needed the invention of a new review format in order for me to talk about it. Whoops. Still, the length of that happy headwearing should tell you something: I like it, a lot.

If you think open worlds are too big, play Shrinko / if you think open worlds are too small, play Shrinko - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-06T16:02:57.000Z

The open world dislikers bundle through the door of Dr Shrinko’s office like mardy harlequins, fuming and shrieking in their oversized licensed gear. One is wearing GTA 6 brand trousers so long they reach to her eyes. Another sports an Elden Ring hat that extends to his ankles. “Doctor, doctor!” they wail. “The open world games are too big. They consume all of our free time. Why, it takes Yasuke 40-100 hours to get from one end of Assassin’s Creed Shadows to the other!”

Dr Shrinko leans back in his chair with a pleasant smile. “Solution is simple,” he trills. “Make Yasuke 40-100 times larger.”

Mewgenics developers reckon going for a full launch over early access is "a weird thing now" - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-06T15:49:43.000Z

Mewgenics, the cat breeding roguelike battler from Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, finally saunters out of its litter box with a cheeky smirk next week. It's been a long time coming, but the developers have opted to make players wait for a full release, rather than going the early access route plenty of games opt for nowadays - the likes of Hades 2 and Wreckfest 2 spring to mind. As a result, McMillen and Glaiel see the way they've gone as no longer being the norm, and have shed more light on their reasons for not picking early access.

Beaver city-builder Timberborn confirmed for launch on March 5 - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-06T15:16:38.000Z

Easily one of the best city-builders around, Timberborn is set to leave Early Access on March 5th with a big update to the game.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Org Capture From Anywhere - Irreal

2026-02-06T15:06:30.000Z

Just a quickie today. Jack Baty has a short post on how he enables Org capture from anywhere on his system. He does pretty much what I do except that I use yequake instead of his custom script.

Yequake probably handles the edge cases but either way you simply evoke Emacs and ask it to run a bit of custom Elisp. If you aren’t doing something like this, you should take a look at Baty’s post or Alphapappa’s yequake. No matter where you are, you can bring up your capture menu and bring notes or a browser link into Emacs. I use it many times a day, especially for capturing items that I might want to write about in Irreal.

This is just another example of how Emacs can ease your workflow. You simply pop up an Emacs frame, capture you note, and deal with it later. It’s about as easy a way of capturing a quick note without breaking you out of the flow as you can get. If Emacs is at the center of your workflow, you should definitely check out Baty’s post or Alphapappa’s yequake.

Butcher by day, people hunter by night - ZOMBUTCHER sounds like a fun but gruesome sim - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-06T14:55:26.000Z

As a butcher you serve people meat, but what if the meat is also people? You can't help it in ZOMBUTCHER, since you're a Zombie.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Safe In Our World has a big Charity Bundle up on Fanatical with some great picks - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-06T14:39:09.000Z

Safe In Our World is a Mental Health charity that does some great work, and now you can support their mission while grabbing 22 games from Fanatical.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Security updates for Friday - LWN.net

2026-02-06T14:18:04.000Z

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, kernel, python3, and python3.12-wheel), Debian (alsa-lib, chromium, openjdk-25, phpunit, tomcat10, tomcat11, and tomcat9), Fedora (openqa, pgadmin4, phpunit10, phpunit11, phpunit12, phpunit8, phpunit9, and yarnpkg), Mageia (python-django), SUSE (alloy, cups, dpdk, expat, glib2, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-1_8_0-openj9, java-25-openjdk, kernel, libpainter0, libsoup, libxml2, openssl-3, python-filelock, python-wheel, python312-Django6, thunderbird, traefik2, udisks2, wireshark, and xen), and Ubuntu (glib2.0, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, python3.14, python3.13, python3.12, python3.11, python3.10, python3.9, python3.8, python3.7, python3.6, python3.5, python3.4, and tracker-miners).

Mewgenics review - a roguelite where sacrificial arse maggots and frightful defecation are the keys to success - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-06T14:00:00.000Z

I can't get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I see his beady peepers deep in my subconscious. It’s the loss.

I sent Fish Sticks to the pits of hell to face the armies of Satan. Even though he had a nasty case of gastritis. Even though he slurped green goo that made his eyeballs bulge from his face. And he would’ve made it home, too, if it weren’t for a particularly pissed-off frog. The amphibian dragged him kicking and screaming into the path of the vacuuming jaws of a floating demon. The bastard gobbled him up. Him and his ability to pluck maggots from his allies' rectums and swallow their souls. As he vanished into the demon's belly, so too did my chances of passing his rectal soul-sucking powers to a new generation of adventuring cats.

JSAUX announce a charging-friendly Steam Deck travel case - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-06T13:24:49.000Z

Accessory maker JSAUX just revealed their new "Double-Decker Travel Supply Case" for the Steam Deck LCD & OLED that's charging-friendly.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

“You gotta let some of the chaos in”: Diablo 2's art lead explains what he doesn’t like about Diablo 4 - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-06T13:04:14.000Z

Last week, Moon Beast Productions officially revealed Darkhaven, a new action-RPG in the spirit of Diablo II, but with a changing, destructible, procedurally generated world that both echoes Minecraft and takes inspiration from the Diablo modding scene. Moon Beast are made up of ARPG royalty – their senior staff include original Diablo senior designer, art director and writer Erich Schaefer, Diablo 2 art lead Philip Shenk and Diablo 2 programmer Peter Hu.

As you’d expect, the Darkhaven devs have many Thoughts about Diablo today, at once leveraging their credits for marketing (they're about to launch a Kickstarter) and resisting the idea that they are making an unofficial Diablo sequel. I don't get the sense that any of them outright despise Diablo IV - summarised by Alice Bell as "2023's prettiest RSI machine" - but Shenk in particular argues that the game has squandered “the magic” of previous games by focussing on smooth progression and balancing and in general, “overly engineering the experience” in order to keep people glued to the game’s live service.