Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called "Half Life 2". Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

I feel this needs to be repeated 🍪

The annoyance of cookie banners
doesn't come from the regulations, but from the malicious compliance of the corporations who want to exploit your personal data.

No data-harvesting cookies = No banner.
Simple.

My websites have no cookie banners,
because they don't use any non-essential cookies and don't track visitors.

Yours shouldn't either.

#Privacy #Cookies #PrivacyLaw

In a depressing tale as old as time, we're seeing the sole dev who made the #Pokemon ROM hack called Pokémon Lazarus (who goes by 'Nemo') stepping back from the public

They shared their 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 work free, and the vocal minority crawled out of the sewers and spewed hatred

Homophobia (because there is one scene with pride flags), bigotry, even disgust at Nemo deigned creating audio tracks from the ground up

You can read my thoughts on it here:

https://gardinerbryant.com/pokemon-lazarus-when-a-fan-game-becomes-a-conversation/

Unsure Calculator: calculate with numbers you're not sure about

Pretty neat!

https://filiph.github.io/unsure/

#LibreQoS is an example that you can develop a world changing startup from the borderland. We are thankful to KTSM 9 NEWS for highlighting our work on fixing #latency, #bufferbloat & #jitter for Internet Service Providers and their customers around the world:

https://www.ktsm.com/news/el-pasoans-operating-software-startup-designed-to-improve-internet-connectivity/

We would like to dedicate this to our beloved colleague #DaveTaht (1965 - 2025) that was instrumental in the global effort on fixing these issues for the #ISPs & their customer everywhere!

#OpenSource #FLOSS

One of the best pieces I've read in awhile. Emily Bressler in @mcsweeneys.net writes "I Work for an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person":

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person

The current Pope in 1982. He's even from Chicago: obviously a Blues Brother.

As someone elsenet remarked, "He looks like he spent the 80s hunting undead gangsters and complaining about the wind."

After six momentous passes in a small aircraft, skydiver Gabriel C. Brown completed his mission. He and his photographer friend Andrew McCarthy created this stunning image that shows the adventurous subject falling in front of the sun.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/andrew-mccarthy-skydiver-sun-image/

#photography #nature

"If you're not on board with AI you're going to get left behind"

Boost if you'd like to be left behind and would consider paying extra for a life without this bullshit.

Mozilla announces more AI in Firefox, still failing to understand that at this point their market share is made of tech savvy people who do not want that.

Mozilla, please. Stop chasing the fads. Get your own values.

People use Firefox to get access to an open web, use a sturdy browser, and not to be tracked. Build in that direction and that direction only.

Nobody from your current user base will recommend Firefox with AI to their friends.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/

#firefox #ai #privacy

Pepper & Carrot, Episode 39: "The Tavern" is finally out!

This 11-page webcomic is a standalone episode that you can read in five minutes. It's about courage and an experiment with sound in the comic medium. Translations are already available. We've got English, Français, Deutsch, Español, 中文, Nynorsk, and Toki Pona, thanks to some great contributors. And a big thank you to my 1106 supporters for giving me the time to create this one.

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/webcomic/ep39_The-Tavern.html

#webcomic #krita #peppercarrot

free software without progressive politics is just free labor

End of Japanese community at Mozilla due to the introduction of AI-based translation.

The community members have expressed disappointment and frustration that their long term volunteer efforts and local knowledge were being replaced by machine translation, which they felt did not match the quality of human provided support.

This is why Mozilla sucks so much, they are going crazy like rest of the industry.

Source
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446

Added screenshot in case Mozilla decided to remove it

# DHH and Omarchy: Midlife crisis – Rust in Peace

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-midlife-crisis/

"But until I see a male writer asked that question, I am going to respectfully decline to answer it.”

Source:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/07/lauren-groff-on-florida-as-a-state-of-mind/

Back from vacation, I caught up on discussions about the kernel and had nice chats with my @igalia colleagues.

At the end of the day, I published a blog post about my Kworkflow talk at Kernel Recipes 2025 with speaker notes and live demo script. So that, you can check what I presented in more details.

https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2025/11/03/kworkflow-talk-at-kernel-recipes-2025

This blog post also reminded me how fun the #KR2025 days were.

""[…] In this article, we will do a deep dive into […] showing off #eBPF’s ability to poke deep within the #Linux #kernel internals to answer questions about the state of the running kernel.

The subject of our investigation is #netfilter, […] Which of the rules in my firewall ruleset caused the drop of a particular packet?

The goal of this article is to demonstrate how to answer this question. We can use this same approach to answer a myriad of questions about the kernel and to hook into pretty much any arbitrary point inside the kernel.""

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/11/03/using-ebpf-attribute-packet-drops-netfilter-rules (written by @toke)

#LinuxKernel

I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.

It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.

It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.

Running a package update on my Arch system and it ends with:

(666/666) upgrading xdp-tools

Spooky indeed 👻 😱

My submission to the Competition Bureau of Canada about the new and current Android restrictions, https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/en

Google has announced that it will stop permitting me from writing my own apps for Android unless I both register with them and seek their approval on an app-by-app basis.

I purchased Android because it was sold as "open source", rather than Apple's monopolistic "closed garden".

I have numerous non-Google apps, including the "Tailscale" network security program, and another to tell me when the next TTC bus will arrive. I've also written a toy Sudoku app for friends.

Google promises to keep me from down-loading these, and already makes it surpassing difficult by requiring a workaround, one which which is sarcastically called "side-loading", using a wired connection to my development machine.

Google has already banned programs to warn Americans about "ICE" raids at the request of the US government, and should not have the ability to do the same to Canadians at the US's behest.

It is, in my opinion, unacceptable for Google to impose these barriers on Canadian Citizens. For any other device, I can install a program I like by pressing a button on a web page. And I and other Canadians can write their own programs, and put them on a web page.

(see also https://keepandroidopen.org/)