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valgaze

Re:Jailbreaking the Switch 2 on Thursday October 22, 2026 @12:53PM (#50197980)
Perfection:

  The JetKVMs allow Codex to send controller inputs to the  Switches over USB and receive video output over HDMI. We also need a way to press the power button—when the Switch 2 crashes, it needs a button press to restart.

  That’s what the Bluetooth light switch flicker from Amazon is for. When the lever comes down, it presses the power button. Once the power button is fully pressed, the rest of the lever’s torque lifts the mechanism.
Google's ADK (agent development kit) uses LiteLLM extensively: https://adk.dev/agents/models/litellm/

Their docs list LiteLLM's vulnerability from March... https://i.imgur.com/TPVrVyW.png

Years ago Experian hit me with a sneaky fee for some credit-monitoring service I’d apparently been auto-enrolled in after checking my score. It was a substantial amount of money at the time. When I complained & asked for a refund for this auto-enroll service, Experian immediately offered me a discounted rate.

I filed a complaint with the CFPB. I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but Experian backed down and refunded every penny.

I’m not an expert in financial regulation but that was the first time in a while where I felt like a federal agency was actually protecting ordinary people rather than hassling them.

Over past couple years the CFPB’s leadership seems packed with hyperpartisan apparatchiks intent on dismantling the very agency they’re in theory going to run.

This debanking matter may well fall within the CFPB’s purview. But the agency today seeing today bears little resemblance to the muscular consumer watchdog it was created to be.

Acting Director Mark Paoletta strikes me as precisely the kind of Washington operator lawyer you’d want nowhere near an agency whose entire purpose is to protect consumers from powerful financial institutions.

Re:Beauty in DVD Menus on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:42AM (#50006395)
Wow you're right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cQHZUKCo9A

Insanely impressive

Re:Beauty in DVD Menus on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:41AM (#50006374)
- "secret" menus

- randomized menu backgrounds/environments

Sounds super annoying sorry it sucks but who exactly are they defrauding in your view? And what numbers are they gaming?
Re:Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @12:09PM (#49714698)
> German journalist Angelique Geray posed as a fan of Vladimir Putin on social media while investigating how covert Russian agents operate in Germany.

> Geray spent several months creating a fictional online persona. Using the alias Katya, she presented herself as a pro-Russian influencer, trying to build a following organically and establish contacts on social media.

> “Katya” posted videos of herself posing in a striped Russian sailor shirt, professing her admiration for Putin, and walking around the Bundestag with a Russian flag. Before long, agents contacted her and offered her unspecified assignments and sent her payment in Bitcoin.

> Geray and other RTL journalists were able to observe the recruitment process firsthand. New agents were initially given simple tasks — taking a photo, picking up a package, or obtaining a SIM card. They were later drawn into more serious operations, though these “disposable agents” knew only their own roles and did not understand the overall plan.

> Jović invited “Katya” to meet. During their meeting, he spoke about his pro-Russian activities and hinted at the involvement of Russian intelligence agencies. Asked directly whether intelligence agencies in Moscow were directing his social media activity, he said, “Nobody knows. Well, I don’t know — in theory. In practice, I do know.” Later, when Geray approached him under her real name as a reporter, he denied taking part in a pro-Russian campaign.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/14/an-undercover-german...

Re:How much of F-Droid is LLM generated? on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @07:05AM (#49710641)
FDroid can be very strange…

””” F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. ”””

Re:Steam Frame starts at $1059 on Monday September 14, 2026 @06:45PM (#49705287)
I've been astounded by how many older games are suddenly getting surprisingly good VR ports/mods (I suspect AI-assisted tooling is playing a role in some of this) There's a youtuber Beardo Benjo who has been documenting a bunch of them where some are tethered to a PC while others have been ported to run natively on the Quest.

A few of the more interesting ones, newest to oldest:

Left 4 Dead VR [9/14/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-blXLU_oy8

DOOM [9/11/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkxVI2KEKrk

Call of Duty Zombies VR [9/2/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9VjFpInLiU

Dead Island 2 VR [8/28/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=notfg5bjUdM

The Simpsons: Hit & Run VR [8/26/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQJZKjkRzyI

GTA: Vice City VR [8/18/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH5k5Un8_HE

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time VR [8/6/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzhbhrotI1Q

Cyberpunk 2077 VR [8/4/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXho2LdD1qo

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild VR [5/17/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Mpqk2X3ww

Pokémon VR [9/1/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlEl1IVU8PA

Ready or Not UEVR Mod [9/8/2025]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnGfQBQJP8Y

Astounding that swimming and collisions and all that stuff seems to function!

Commenter explains how it works:

  I can see not enough people know how this addon works. Allow me to explain.

  It is a mod, but it was only possible with a plugin, it can be (with a bit of  tweaking) used for other games and already has been, for example rocket league, sonic generations, blender and minecraft. the way it works is that mario 64 is  running in the background so that the mario physics and gameplay functions work, but the actual character is invisible but the hitbox is still there, so that mario actually can be hit for example. with the plugin mario can pretty easily be put into any game, though some fixes might be needed at some times, for example in sonic generations for the rails to work, mario has to be disabled and sonic's control is taken over again so that "mario" can grind on rails.

  TD;LR: Basicilly this addon use libsm64 which contains original SM64 assets and ported into GMod. So yeah, it's not a recreation and that's also explain why you need a Mario 64 ROM (in z64 file format) to get this addon working.
Re:CarPlay Is Additive on Thursday July 02, 2026 @09:29PM (#48769578)
Author says "I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay."

From July 2022: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/apple-carplay-could-be-a-tro...

  Apple engineering manager Emily Schubert said 98% of new cars in the U.S. come 
  with CarPlay installed. She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would 
  only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.

  “It’s a must-have feature when shopping for a new vehicle,” Schubert said 
  during a presentation of the new features.
+1 on sawstop

Re: LLMs using these nuclear weapons it could certainly be a corpus/training-data issue

Russian nuclear doctrine is "escalate to de-escalate" where they use or credibly threaten—limited nuclear escalation to force the other side to back down (kind of like breaking a bottle in a bar fight and look like a wild man to calm things down) with nuclear weapons, https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/escalate-deescalate-p...

Fwiw, Gen. John Hyten the former commander of US Strategic Command (nuclear deterrence) says that “escalate to de-escalate” misrepresents Russian doctrine:

https://www.stratcom.mil/Media/Speeches/Article/1264664/2017...

  Yesterday’s panel discussed the implications of our responses to adversaries seeking to limit nuclear use. We discussed Russia’s destabilizing doctrine, which some call “escalate to de-escalate.”

  I really hate that description. I’ve looked at Russian doctrine and Russian writings. It isn’t “escalate to de-escalate”; it’s “escalate to win.” Everybody needs to understand that.
So maybe whatever is heavily represented or most authoritative could lead to these systems making those kinds of decisions
Re:VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare on Thursday June 04, 2026 @11:15AM (#48399929)
"Vue.js: JavaScript MVVM made simple (vuejs.org)" February 3, 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169288

Evidently Evan You was an Art History + Studio Art and major and at Parsons School he had to pick up javascript to quickly show his work. During a stint at Creativelab5 at Google, he was so inspired to improve on AngularJS experience that he came up with Vue and the rest is history.

I have no idea what this Cloudflare acquisition will ultimately mean but I know I am so very grateful for the beautiful frameworks/tooling Evan and his team have cranked out over the years.

Re:Railway Blocked by Google Cloud on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:32PM (#48202785)
May 2024 UniSuper incident: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...

A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

8 May 2024

UniSuper and Google Cloud understand the disruption to services experienced by members has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We extend our sincere apologies to all members.

While supporting UniSuper to bring its systems back online, Google Cloud has been conducting a root cause analysis.

Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events, where an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.

This is described as an isolated, “one-of-a-kind occurrence” that has never before occurred with any Google Cloud client globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the sequence of events and taken measures to ensure it does not happen again.

Why did the outage last so long?

UniSuper had duplication across two geographies as protection against outages and data loss. However, the deletion of the Private Cloud subscription triggered deletion across both geographies.

Restoring the Private Cloud required significant coordination and effort between UniSuper and Google Cloud, including recovery of hundreds of virtual machines, databases, and applications.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/453701

“Use of Nuclear Explosions for Excavation of Sea-Level Canal Across the Negev Desert”

Re:A faster heart for F-Droid. Our new server is here on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @03:27PM (#46437579)
Hmm:

“F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access.”

Those are probably part of this ad campaign: https://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/kristi-noem-announces...

Those idle tv moments are probably bought as an ad slot

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