This week, Riot Games announced they are bringing their Vanguard anti-cheat software to League of Legends🔗. Previously introduced with the release of Valorant, Vanguard is a pretty typical kernel-level anti-cheat software, which is to say, a security nightmare. It runs at the highest level of permissions possible on your system.
A lot of people seem concerned that, because Riot is owned by Tencent, Vanguard serves as a backdoor for the Chinese government. Honestly that seems ridiculous. Not that it necessarily can’t be used for nefarious purposes by the Chinese government, but Chinese spying has a much lower possible material impact on U.S. players than American spying. In the video🔗, Riot said that Vanguard “does not collect or process any personal information differently from our current Anti-Cheat software,” which I guess is something, but that can change at any moment. The bigger concern, in my view, is if Riot suffers from a security breach (again) and hackers are able to deploy malicious code through Vanguard. Truthfully, I’m not totally sure how feasible it is for that to happen, but it is certainly possible, which is worrying enough.
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I recently read fLaMEd’s post discussing the shortcomings of linking techniques frequently used on the smallweb, such as link pages, webrings, button walls, etc. Many websites on the smallweb employ these techniques in order to connect to other stops in the smallweb space. I don’t think they are inherently bad, of course, but the context matters a lot. I want to know why the webmaster has chosen to put these links on their website, even if the explanation is as brief as “these people are my friends and their websites are cool.”
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Web 1.0 revival is pretty popular these days in the smallweb circles, but one aspect of it should have remained in the grave: the 88x31 button.
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The last time I played Cyberpunk 2077 was shortly after release in late 2020 on the PS4 version, which was a rough experience🔗, to say the least. I had been excited for the game since the announcement almost ten years ago now, so the disappointment was quite painful. As a result, I left the game alone for the past 2.5 years, even though I heard the patches fixed a lot of issues. I just couldn’t convince myself to try again.
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I did a complete overhaul of the layout of my site. When I launched my website a year and a half ago, I designed it while under the influence of web 1.0 nostalgia. With this redesign, my goal is to better use the amount of screen space PCs have these days, while also making it easier for the content to be responsive on mobile.
The links page has been revamped as well. As much as I enjoyed hiding the link descriptions until hovered, it makes for a poor experience both on mobile and for screen readers. Recent discussion about web accessibility of the smallweb in the 32-Bit cafe🔗 Discord server prompted me to rethink how I wanted to present the content of my website, especially on a page as important as my outgoing links page.
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It is an interesting time to be online. Twitter went from bad to worse. Reddit kneecapped itself. It seems now that the period of free money is over, tech companies are finding out that operating at a loss to amass users and putting off any sort of monetization plan as long as possible isn’t as great a business model as was once thought. So far it appears to only work in a monopolistic scenario, like with Google and perhaps Meta. Everyone else hasn’t really hit that critical mass. The only thing of value these companies have is the data they host, which is now being siphoned for free by AI products, then repackaged and regurgitated to the consumer. To defend against this, both Reddit and Twitter have removed free access to their API and are charging exorbitant prices to restore access. The result is shittier platforms for the user, who create the entirety of the platform’s value in the first place.
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Normally gacha games aren’t my thing, but I downloaded Honkai Star Rail on a whim and now it’s consumed so much of my time. I know basically nothing about the lore, but regardless I’m really enjoying the story and characters. The combat system is really fun and I like getting to try different characters. It’s so weird because I’ve tried to get into more “traditional” turn-based RPGs to no success but this game just scratches an itch in my brain.
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Recently, I was working on a toy Linux shell to learn about the fork and exec system calls, and I got curious about how the popular shells like bash implement shell scripting languages, which led me down a rabbithole of lexers, parsers, and formal language definitions. It led me to Robert Nystrom’s Crafting Interpreters🔗, a book that guides you through writing an interpreter for a toy language called Lox. Nystrom’s code is in Java, but I wanted to do it in C, which has been a bit of a headache. I’m really rusty in C compared to my college days, but improving my C skills and learning about programming languages has been quite an enjoyable experience, regardless. It’s neat to see real applications for some of the topics covered in automata class.
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For the past year, this website has been generated using some Go code I wrote, which was fun while it lasted, but it got to the point where every time I wanted to add something I would have to hand-code the new feature, which resulted in my website never getting updated. So moving forward, I’ve gone back to using Hugo as a static site generator. It’s been a great experience so far, converting my old stylesheets into a Hugo theme has been quite easy. My custom-built site generator is a project I’d like to revisit in the future, but for now ease of use takes priority.
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Specifically, I got a ThinkPad T450s from 2015 for about $40. It didn’t come with storage, a power adapter, or the external battery, which cost me about an extra $100 to order. The internal battery is there but I can’t really test it until my power adapter comes in (I forgot to order it at the same time as the laptop whoops). There are also some keycaps missing. I can’t test if the switches are good yet but hopefully it turns out to be an easy fix. When I removed the back panel, I found that the plastic towards the front that the screws go into was broken, as if someone had just ripped the thing open with the screws still in there. One screw’s plastic is completely gone, but the other two are there, loosely hanging around, which is annoying, but some super glue should fix that right up. Assuming the laptop works once all my parts come in, I can’t be too mad over a $140 laptop.
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