Seems like a total fluff piece for China, released exclusively in China, with a glowing interview in CCP mouthpiece Global Times being pretty much the only book review I can find. And what’s more, it’s getting blurb endorsements from Ctrip co-founder James Liang.

Has this book been reviewed elsewhere? And what’s happened to Kevin Kelly here?

This is a photo of how I see my post on programming. Dev instance.

This is how I see my post from my alt account on Reddthat.

I'm interested how y'all check/monitor your reverse proxy logs. I run an nginx vm that has ports 80 and 443 forwarded that exposes some of my services to the internet on different domains. I use nginx exporter for Prometheus, but I would like a better monitoring to see what connects to my services (like my Lemmy instance).

If I would be under pressure by LLM scrapers for example, I would only notice via application and hardware metrics, but I would have to figure out what's going on.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Will Rock is basically Serious Sam.

That’s the first comparison anyone makes. And they’re not wrong. It plays almost exactly like Croteam’s arena shooter—fast, chaotic, and ridiculous. But calling it a copy misses something important. Because Will Rock isn’t just a clone. It’s a four-month miracle, a budget game from a brand-new studio, and a strange, beautiful mess stuffed with quirks that make it unforgettable. That is, if you were lucky enough to stumble into it.

Saber Interactive was brand new in 2003. Will Rock was their very first game. They built it in just over four months. Four months to create an entire FPS from scratch on a brand-new engine. An engine that didn’t even have a name yet—it would later become Saber3D. At the time, Will Rock was basically a tech demo wearing an Ancient Greece skin.

The game came out in June 2003 under Ubisoft. But the marketing wasn’t exactly explosive. The most famous thing about it wasn’t a trailer. It was the soundtrack. Specifically: Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock.” It’s definitely in the trailer. It’s apparently in the main menu. YouTube uploads show it.

And yet… after replaying the game, I never heard it once. That’s not a song you just miss. So maybe it’s a ghost track. Maybe it’s a Mandela Effect. Either way, it’s the most famous song that may or may not actually be in the game.

Distribution was weird, too. Ubisoft sold it in stores. But it also came bundled with Gigabyte PC-CDROM drives. A lot of players didn’t buy it—they just found it on their new hardware. That’s how many people first played Will Rock: by accident. Which might explain why it feels like a half-remembered fever dream now.

The story is early-2000s action nonsense. Willford Rockwell, archaeologist, gets possessed by Prometheus. Prometheus gives him powers. He goes to war with Zeus to save his girlfriend. That’s it. But the Greek mythology setting works. Where Serious Sam had Egypt and aliens, Will Rock has Minotaurs, Harpies, Centaurs, Cyclops, skeleton warriors, and massive Atlas statues that rip themselves free from pedestals and come for you.

And this is where the boom begins.

Minotaurs don’t just die—they split into more Minotaurs when you kill them. Atlas statues don’t just stand there—they crash forward like a granite linebacker. Harpies dive-bomb screaming. Rat-bombs explode. Enemies accidentally damage each other in the chaos. The screen becomes a mess of smoke, blood, and flying marble.

The weapons make it louder. You’ve got the standard pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and minigun. But then it gets weird. The shotgun looks like a lever-action rifle and uses rifle ammo. The Medusa Gun turns enemies to stone so you can smash them into gravel. The Acid Gun inflates enemies until they burst with a wet rubber squeal. The Atomic Gun fires a miniature nuke. And the shovel—the humble melee weapon—is absurdly effective, especially against archers. Every weapon feels tuned for chaos.

Then there are the Titan powers. You collect gold to buy them at altars. Immortality makes sense. Titan Damage makes sense. Titan Motion? It slows down time—and slows you down too. It’s basically useless. A broken power-up in a game already running at maximum speed. But that’s Will Rock. Half the fun is in its glorious mistakes.

The level design swings wildly. Sometimes you’re in wide-open killboxes built for maximum slaughter. Sometimes you’re in cramped switch-hunts that feel like filler. You’ll bounce on trampolines, fire yourself from catapults, sneak through a Trojan horse, pull endless levers. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s busywork. But it’s never quiet.

Reviews at the time were mixed. Metacritic score: 63. GameSpot called it a “mindless knockoff.” IGN called it “hard.” Other critics called it too easy because enemies dropped in three hits and health pickups were everywhere. Even the difficulty became a quirk—easy for some, brutal for others.

For most players, Will Rock disappeared quickly. It was overshadowed by Serious Sam and never got a sequel. But for the people who remember it? It’s the quirks that stand out. The regenerating Minotaurs. The statues that wake up. The useless Titan Motion. The shotgun that’s somehow a rifle. The shovel that’s better than half the guns. The ghost of Twisted Sister haunting the main menu.

For everyone else, Will Rock is just another budget shooter from 2003. But for those who stumbled into it—maybe from a Gigabyte CD-ROM—it’s something stranger. A flawed, loud, chaotic snapshot of early-2000s FPS excess. A game that didn’t just copy Serious Sam. It kept the boom going.

Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.”

This has been a problem for years: Substack has a Nazi problem - The Atlantic

Substack won’t commit to removing Nazi content - TechCrunch

I don’t think this can be ignored anymore. If you’re on Substack, please consider one of its many fine alternatives. Wired wrote about a few last year.

Plus, it’s quite easy to move a newsletter these days.

Saisi par une association et après avoir interrogé la CJUE, le Conseil d’État juge aujourd’hui que SNCF Connect ne peut pas imposer à ses clients de communiquer leur civilité. Ce traitement de données n’est pas conforme au RGPD qui impose que seules les données personnelles strictement nécessaires soient recueillies. En effet, le recueil de la civilité n’est pas indispensable pour la vente des billets ou le contrôle d’identité durant le voyage. Et la fourniture de services spécifiques en fonction du sexe ne justifie pas que la civilité soit demandée systématiquement.

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33715135

"That’s why Ukie strongly supports the use of robust classification systems like PEGI across all platforms, including those hosting adult or experimental content," the statement reads. "We believe payment providers and platforms alike should have confidence in trusted age rating systems and the enforcement mechanisms behind them."

Police in the south-western German state of Baden-Württemberg are to be allowed to use the analysis software from US firm Palantir, which is controversial among data protection advocates.

The regional ruling coalition has resolved its dispute over the software and paved the way for a corresponding amendment to the law, government sources told dpa on Tuesday, confirming earlier reports by regional public broadcaster SWR.

The police in Baden-Württemberg had signed a five-year contract with US company Palantir to use the analysis software Gotham, but the legal basis for this had been lacking until now, prompting criticism from the Greens. An amendment to the police law is necessary to permit the software's use.

The software was specifically developed for security agencies and is used by intelligence services, the military and police.

With Gotham, millions of data points from various sources can be analysed and linked.

The German states of Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia also rely on the software, but they have adapted their police laws accordingly.

Fuuuuck stop letting Palantir get away with this shit! And for fucks sake stop changing your laws to allow for their software.

You're paying them money! Make them adapt to you, and if they hit you with "it just doesn't work that way. This is how we have to do it," (which btw, is what they tell everybody) then give your contract and your money to somebody else!!

You know how people watched Hitler taking control and could preemptively see his plan was definitely to just keep going until he had taken all of Europe? This is the modern day strategy, except it's going to be the whole world instead of Europe and Peter Thiel is Hitler.

Does anyone know how to test a Wayland session with a Kubuntu 24.04 live USB? I'm testing it out now, but I see that it's using an X11 session. I'd like to test how the laptop would work under Wayland instead, before installing Kubuntu or Ubuntu for good.

Some web search lead to this post, which gives quite involved instructions but it's from 2020. Hopefully it's more straightforward now?

Cheers!

Without Installing another OS like Proxmox, does anyone know any tooling that will easily deploy VMs on my local computer and deploy software stacks on them?

I only have my desktop for hosting, but I also want to continue using it as my personal desktop.

I'd like to host game servers, cloud storage software, websites for clients. And have a portal for me (and potentially them) to be able to provision).

Edit: I'm just finding out about Apache Cloudstack which might do what I'm looking for.