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Weekend SSD Adventures
Last weekend I was really getting the semi-annual itch to play Minecraft. When I loaded it up, I realized it would be a good idea to do a backup of my world, because I hadn’t done it in a while. I’ve poured a lot of hours into it with my partner and we would be devastated to lose it. So I wrote up a quick rsync command to send it over to my network storage (a strong term for an Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB hard disk attached). I/O error. Huh that’s weird. After some intense googling, I found out my SSD has reported 535 blocks unable to be reallocated. In other words, much of my SSD was becoming unreadable, and it was running out of good blocks to move my data to.
Reflecting on 2023
2023 was truly one of the years of all time. In this post, I will look back at some of the cool things I did in 2023 and set some goals to achieve in 2024.
Anti-cheat Software Sucks
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.
Re: The Art of Hyperlinking
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.”
Why Are We Still Using 88x31 Buttons?
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.
Cyberpunk 2077 Is Good, Actually
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.
Major Site Updates
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.
The Internet Is Crumbling
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.
I've Been Consumed by Honkai Star Rail
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.
Learning About Computers is Fun
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.