“Am I living in a simulation?”

If you’re banging Salma Hayek, the answer is yes. Duh.

StadiOn

This story about the implosion of Google’s in-house Stadia game-development company sounded like such a familiar clusterfuck that I found myself searching for Steve Perlman’s name.

SolarCluster

Former security company SolarWinds has blamed an intern for a leaked password associated with their massive fail, that turned out to be ‘solarwinds123’:

“a mistake that an intern made… They violated our password policies and they posted that password on an internal, on their own private Github account”

If an intern was in a position to set a password that was used by anything more sensitive than the third-floor laser printer, and you had nothing in place to enforce your ‘policy’ or detect lapses, and the thing that password gave access to was somehow Internet-accessible, your entire business model was a complete fraud.

I can think of plenty of stupid-password stories, including the time the new Core Services Group full of Senior System Administrators changed the root password on all the infrastructure servers to be the bullshit temporary password we’d been giving to every new employee for years (“iltwas” = “I Love To Work At Synopsys”), but that was so long ago that everyone on the Internet had a public IP address and Netscape still thought they had a viable business model.

Pokemon Shogun

Nintendo is promising a real open-world Pokégame, for next year. This year will just be another remake, this time of Diamond/Pearl. Both of these surprised me, because I’ve been assuming they’d just keep adding DLC to Sword/Shield; a lot less development work and a license to print money.

“I invented a thing!”

He seems to have survived the Internet’s immediate response that VW’s been selling that exact same thing for years.

What’s in a name, enscript edition?

I’ve been poking at re-implementing enscript from scratch, because the GNU clone of this ancient Adobe tool is cruftier than a cruftwyrm in a cruftstorm, tarted up with all kinds of useless crap that interferes with the core functionality of printing a damn text file.

There is no equivalent software available for any platform at this time. You can get some kind of printout from text editors, but black text on white paper in a fixed-width font is just too primitive to attract the attention of modern skittletext-loving dark-moded 20-year-olds with perfect eyesight and an addiction to running everything inside an Electron app.

I’ve got a long list of necessary and forbidden features, and a tentative implementation plan (Python3 + free version of Reportlab), but what I really need to focus on is bike-shedding the name.

Goal: clearly suggest the fundamental purpose of cleanly converting TXT to PDF in any modern fixed-width Unicode font, optionally including the implementation language as a discriminator. Continuity with the long history of the tools in Adobe’s TranScript package would be a plus, but I think that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a single name that includes any of text, txt, pdf, lp, script, tran, en, etc, that isn’t either already in use by another likely-abandoned open-source package, registered to a terrorist group, or simply horrible. Assorted uses of “2” and “to” don’t improve the situation in any way. Honestly, the least-horrible options I’ve come up with so far are “pdftty” and “qenscript”. One can’t be pronounced these days without being canceled, and the other sounds like the companion app to barbiescript.

[the long-abandoned source code for the original Adobe TranScript package is visible online, by the way, but Project Athena’s ancient Trac server requires an MIT login to actually download anything; I might still have a copy somewhere from ~1992, if the files on that tape ever made it to a zip drive that made it a USB disk that made it to a NAS that made it to another NAS. Actually, I know I still have it, but I’d have to find something that can read original NeXT single-sided optical disc cartridges, and then hope they’re still functional.]

So after all that…

…it turns out that the version of “Sex (I’m A)” that Alexa will play by default is not the original version from the album Pleasure Victim. It’s a re-recording with offputting synths, Terri Nunn emphasizing her lines oddly, and some other guy taking the male role and being mixed too prominently. The simulated moaning has also been redone, really badly.

A bit of digging suggests that this is the version from the album Metro: Greatest Hits, which continues the usually-disappointing trend of Alexa choosing the most recent version of a song rather than the one I actually want to hear. Often this is a terrible live version by the wrong band, and adding “the album version of” will help, but if I have to write extremely specific incantations to safely summon a song, I might as well switch to demonology.

(for instance, I learned to add “the song” after the time I said “play chitty chitty bang bang”, and the TV turned on and started playing the movie)

Unrelated, Why isn’t this cat happier?

---

Comments via Isso

Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.

Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.

---