Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

In total, they found 29 undocumented commands, collectively characterized as a “backdoor,” that could be used for memory manipulation (read/write RAM and Flash), MAC address spoofing (device impersonation), and LMP/LLCP packet injection.

Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren’t meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.

I’d kind of like to know whether these can be used against an unpaired device or not. That’d seem to have a pretty dramatic impact on the scope of the vulnerability.

There’s an open-source CLI client to download GOG games, lgogdownloader. It’s packaged in Debian.

I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.

Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”

I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.

The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/4982vs5721vs4917/Radeon-RX-7600-XT-vs-GeForce-RTX-5080-vs-Radeon-RX-7800-XT

They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.

Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.

I mean, people do use the Web UI.

I was reading some articles the other day, and the impression I have is that that’s really not true for at least Trump.

The Trump route was more:

• Conservatives in the US felt that media had a liberal bias. Whether it did or didn’t doesn’t matter for this discussion — that was the perception.

• Fox News offers a viewpoint appealing to conservatives. It becomes essentially the only mainstream conservative media outlet. Liberal viewers watch a variety of news media, but Fox News dominates among conservatives.

• Fox News — already somewhat opinion-based from the start — starts to veer off into conspiracy land. Because so many conservatives watch Fox News, this has a major impact.

There’s some back and forth here. It’s not that Fox just pushed ideas that were out there, but that they’re willing to show material based on what people will watch, and they gained more viewers than they lost if they ran bonkers stuff.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html

There wasn’t really any major center-right mainstream news source other than Fox News, so if Fox shifts into conspiracy-land, so does the conservative public.

I dunno. Maybe the answer is something like a news source somewhere between CNN and Fox News. Something that a conservative audience is comfortable watching, but doesn’t fly off the handle to the degree that Fox has. It maybe can’t capture an audience that’s as large, but it only needs enough to be viable.

I mean, there are center-right media sources like the Wall Street Journal, but those are kinda not aimed at mass audiences.

Mbin is designed to support both reasonably on one account.

If you start making up your own law for international waters, it runs the risk that other countries make up their own for your vessels.

The EU could maybe impose its will on most countries in the world by simply threatening retaliation. But it’d be a big step, not one I’d take lightly.

Before reaching that point, I’d aim for a new treaty adjusting the rules.

She’s a House Representative. As long as the public in her district in, I believe, Georgia, keeps wanting her to be the one to speak for them, she’s gonna stay.

checks

Georgia’s 14th district.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia's_14th_congressional_district

Apparently there are lovey-dovey words coming out of Russia too, which has apparently pulled a rapid 180 and decided that the EU is the bad guy.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/europe/kremlin-trump-analysis-propaganda-ukraine-latam-intl/index.html

Across state-controlled Russian media, disparaging references to “the collective West” and “Anglo-Saxons” – thinly-veiled diplomatic code for US-led states – have been quietly dropped. Instead, it’s just what the Kremlin calls “the old world” of Europe, without its US partner, being singled out for criticism.

Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg delivers keynote address on “the current state of the war in Ukraine and how the war might end,” on Thursday, March 6.

Related article Trump’s Ukraine envoy says Kyiv brought the pause in US intelligence sharing ‘on themselves’

But “if we simplify it, everything now is decided by the great troika - Russia, China and US - that will form the new structure of the world. The European Union as a single political force no longer exists,” he adds.

In Russia, the heavily-controlled media reflects the mood of the Kremlin, as do the words of Russian officials now driving home US-European divisions while flip-flopping on Washington’s historical record.

“I do not want to be anti-European,” claimed Sergey Lavrov, the veteran Russian foreign minister. “However…. all the tragedies of the world originated in Europe or happened thanks to European policy. Colonization, wars, crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon, World War One, Adolf Hitler. If we look at history in retrospect, the Americans did not play any instigating or even inflammatory role,” he insisted in an interview posted on the official foreign ministry website.

Reserved for future use: krex & krox

Poor “kryx”.

Three-letter words that can be typed with one hand, since I have to type them frequently.

$ egrep "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb]{3}|[yuiophjkllnm]{3})$" /usr/share/dict/words

Another source familiar with Harris’ thinking told CBS News that she is “seriously considering” a run for governor. A gubernatorial bid would likely mean she would not run for president in 2028, which she is also considering.

On one hand, yes, she had an very abbreviated campaign period and yes, the big issue was the inflation, and there’s a limited amount that she could do about that.

On the other hand, she also had a well-funded campaign, and she had a shot and didn’t make it.

And she didn’t poll that strongly.

I would really rather have the Democrats find the strongest candidate they can in 2028. Harris didn’t run last time because she was the strongest option in the country, but because she was VP.

Most of said people aren’t looking at what’s going on with Medicaid, because the news is about annexing Canada and such.

Many countries, including Turkey, are prioritizing domestic supply and imposing export taxes.

I am not at all sure that we can import from Turkey.

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/import-export/import-guidance/sourcing-egg-products-and-shell-eggs-foreign-countries

Sourcing Egg Products and Shell Eggs From Foreign Countries

“Shell Eggs” is the term for whole, unbroken eggs in trade parlance.

Because of the expected shortage of egg products in the United States because of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in egg laying hens, companies that use egg products are asking about foreign sources of eggs and egg products.

To be eligible to export egg products to the United States, countries must have an egg products inspection system that is equivalent to FSIS’s inspection system. To determine whether a country maintains an equivalent inspection system, FSIS conducts a thorough document review of that country’s relevant laws, regulations, and other official publications, and one or more on-site audits of the country’s relevant inspection system. If FSIS tentatively concludes that the system is equivalent based on that review, FSIS proposes to list the country in the egg products inspection regulations as eligible to export egg products to the United States. FSIS then evaluates any comments received in response to the proposal and determines whether to develop the final rule. If, after evaluating comments and any other available data, FSIS concludes that the country’s system is equivalent, FSIS publishes a final rule listing the country in the regulations as eligible to export egg products to the U.S.

So, basically, there’s a long review process.

There are two countries authorized to export egg products to the United States: Canada and the Netherlands.

And the USDA needs to conduct the review.

So we are in a situation where Trump has managed to, in the matter of a few weeks, do his utmost to:

• Antagonize Canada.

• Antagonize the Netherlands.

• Lay off thousands of workers from the agency that has to conduct this extensive legal review to authorize any other countries, a bunch of whom were just judicially reinstated for the time being.

While Trump isn’t responsible for creating the pandemic that created the egg shortage, and that’s really the elephant in the room here, I can’t really imagine a worse possible way that he could be responding to it.

My understanding is that pressure on both Ukraine and Russia was basically part of the Trump administration’s plan.

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

In June 2024, Kellogg and Frederick H. Fleitz, who had also served on Trump’s National Security Council staff, presented Trump with a detailed peace plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.[30] The plan proposes a ceasefire on the current front lines, forcing both Russia and Ukraine into peace talks, and continued military aid to Ukraine if it agrees to a ceasefire and peace talks. If Russia did not also agree to a ceasefire and peace talks, the United States would increase arms supplies to Ukraine. Ukraine would not have to formally cede the occupied and annexed territories to Russia, but would postpone its plans for NATO membership for a longer period of time, and the territories currently under Russian occupation would remain under de facto Russian control. Kellogg and Fleitz said their main concern is that the war has devolved into attrition warfare that could wipe out an entire generation of young men in both countries.[31][32]

In November 2024, President-elect Trump selected Kellogg to be his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.[2]

Michael Kofman’s has been skeptical of Trump’s direction here, has said that he’s likely to have problems getting Russia to go along with anything that isn’t total capitulation for Ukraine, because the Kremlin thinks that it’s going to win this militarily. He’s also pointed out that Ukraine doesn’t have any incentive to go along with something that puts it in a weaker position, which basically anything that Russia would accept, as things stand, would. And the war only stops if both sides feel that they’re better off with it stopping.

The US has a finite amount of leverage here, unless it’s willing to do something like put troops in, which it isn’t willing to do.

EDIT: I also watched an analysis the other day from someone taking the position that Trump really views this in terms of scoring domestic political points — like, he’s the peacemaker president, and Biden is the incompetent war president, which is a theme that he’s been campaigning on. If one agrees with that, he also wants the war ended quickly, which places even more impractical constraints on Rubio and similar.

What kind of setup do you rock?

Single-monitor, non-ultrawide.

My take is that as long as your monitor is positioned sufficiently-closely to fill a sufficient chunk of your visual arc, you don’t need larger monitors set further back.

If you want to be able to have ready access to the stuff you want to see, it’s a software problem, not a hardware problem. Instead of having a ton of displays constantly showing stuff, where you’re only looking at a fraction of it, you want to make it easy to switch to the stuff you do want to see.

Like, I’ve seen people who have a monitor that they’re writing code on displaying something like Visual Studio. It’s got a tiny portal into code, and then the entire surrounding area is filled with widgets showing information about that code, lists of files, etc, that’s mostly being ignored, where the user is only using a tiny portion of the display’s space at once. I think that that’s a sign of mis-designed software:

The part where I can clearly read text is a comparatively-narrow cone in front of my eyes. Rather than turning my head and eyes for productivity stuff, I’d rather have software aimed at rapidly letting me put what I want to see into that cone, and if it’s multiple things, to switch among them.

Also, if you use a laptop at all on the go, you’ve got limited options as to a ton of monitor space, so you probably want a workflow that works with that unless you’re willing to alter your workflow on the go.

When would I consider an ultrawide or many-monitor setup? Well, there are some types of games where filling peripheral vision is useful. People have had many-monitor flight sim sets for a long time.

If I were really into a particular genre of game that did that, I might consider it.

Problem is, that competes with VR headsets, and in general, I think that VR headsets compete pretty favorably for that use case in 2025. Some flight and racing sim fans have physical hardware, and VR doesn’t permit for interaction with those controls:

But that’s really the only drawback, and I think that the people who build rigs like that are a very small niche: they’re spending hundreds or thousands of dollars and lots of configuration and setup time on controls for a single game.

And HMDs aren’t, in my opinion, really suitable as a general-purpose monitor replacement in 2025, so can’t just use VR headsets or whatever everywhere.

So my take is probably “single monitor positioned relatively-close to eyes”. My monitor is on one of those monitor mount arms, floats over my keyboard. If one wants to fill one’s peripheral vision for video games, probably use a VR headset for that.

oled monitor

I really like the contrast on these, was waiting a long time for these to come down in price. But one caveat which may-or-may not matter to you: OLED monitors in 2025 do not deal well with variable refresh rate (VRR, FreeSync, GSync, etc). When the refresh rate changes, it messes with the brightness momentarily. I am pretty sure that this is not a fundamental limitation, but as best as I can tell from reading, it’s not an issue that’s been eliminated by any monitor manufacturer. I’d guess that there are a limited number of OLED controllers out there, rather fewer than monitor manufacturers, so not that surprising that issues would be common across manufacturers)

We have created the conditions in which their safest course is to race to nuclear capability as fast as possible.

Having nuclear weapons isn’t a counter to a nuclear-armed country. Having second strike capability is. I don’t think that Iran is going to get second strike capability vis-a-vis the US anytime soon.

Well, in Zelenskyy’s defense, I don’t think that anything he’d have done differently would have likely substantively have altered the outcome.

So, to expand on that, at least in US law (and I’d assume elsewhere), if you let people use your trademark for other products and don’t legally challenge it, the trademark can become genericized, which means that you lose the exclusive right to use it.

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

I don’t know if that was the concern here, but generally, it’s true that there’s an obligation on trademark holders to actively defend their trademarks or lose them.

In the past, there have been some pretty unpleasant regressions.

My own home instance, lemmy.today, had some time where it was more-or-less unusable, because every release for a while had some new regression. The lemmy.world guys were a lot more conservative, just backported some critical fixes and waited for a while after each new release to wait and see if problems showed up. They didn’t crash into the regressions.

Granted, some of this could probably be picked up by better automated testing. But to some extent, I think that for at least big instances, it’s good to hold off, wait, and see if a new release has a bunch of issues.

Also, my understanding is that at least for some (all?) past updates, there’s no downgrade path. Once you upgrade, you’re committed.

Maybe you can back up the instances and restore them, but I suspect that that may break state across instances, since you’d get instances with conflicting views of what’s on an instance.