This article buries the lede so much that many readers probably miss it completely: the important takeaway here, which is clearer in The Register’s version of the story, is that ChatGPT cannot actually play chess:

“Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were."

To actually use an LLM as a chess engine without the kind of manual intervention that this person did, you would need to combine it with some other software to automate continuing to ask it for a different next move every time it suggests an invalid one. And, if you did that, it would still mostly lose, even to much older chess engines than Atari’s Video Chess.

edit: i see now that numerous people have done this; you can find many websites where you can “play chess against chatgpt” (which actually means: with chatgpt and also some other mechanism to enforce the rules). and if you know how to play chess you should easily win :)

this is a tweet from 2020: https://xcancel.com/CianMW/status/1267890378276876288

but, the organization which operates that hotline is still active: https://girightshotline.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_Rights_Network

The English translation of ‘stukkie wukkie’ would surely be the train is ‘stuck’?

Google translates “stukkie wukkie” as “piece of shit” or “wonky”, depending on other nearby words, and “stukkie” as “broken”. but neither of these words is in a dutch dictionary afaict. And google doesn’t translate anything i tried to those words.

I’m not a Dane though so could be wrong.

Dutch is the language (and demonym) of the Netherlands.

Dane is the demonym for people from Denmark, where they speak the Danish language.

this is obviously a joke but it contains more dutch than people unfamiliar with the language might guess.

here is google’s translation of a verbatim transcription of the image:

oopsie woopsie! the train is a piece of shit!

we are working really hard to make this maybe you can fwietsen better owo

Maybe a Dutch speaker will comment here and tell us how many of the words in the image are actual Dutch words? I suspect google is probably providing plausible translations for some that aren’t really.

yep https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Global_Village_Coffeehouse

see also https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Memphis_Lite

a bit of context:

• I Still Know What You Visited Last Summer

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selectors/Privacy_and_the_visited_selector

• https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/07/chrome_135_history_sniffing/

it’s among the many OSes you can run in an emulator in your web browser at https://copy.sh/v86/

The network never went down.

You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢

When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.

https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.

Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/

As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service ur1.ca which is also now long-dead.

imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.

🪦

The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢

you linked to a slop video

Why memorize a different command? I assume sudoedit just looks up the system’s EDITOR environment variable and uses that. Is there any other benefit?

I don’t use it, but, sudoedit is a little more complicated than that.

When invoked as sudoedit, the -e option (described below), is implied.

       -e, --edit
               Edit one or more files instead of running a command.   In  lieu
               of  a  path name, the string "sudoedit" is used when consulting
               the security policy.  If the user is authorized by the  policy,
               the following steps are taken:

               1.   Temporary  copies  are made of the files to be edited with
                    the owner set to the invoking user.

               2.   The editor specified by the policy is run to edit the tem‐
                    porary files.  The sudoers policy  uses  the  SUDO_EDITOR,
                    VISUAL  and  EDITOR environment variables (in that order).
                    If none of SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL  or  EDITOR  are  set,  the
                    first  program  listed  in the editor sudoers(5) option is
                    used.

               3.   If they have been modified, the temporary files are copied
                    back to their original location and the temporary versions
                    are removed.

               To help prevent the editing of unauthorized files, the  follow‐
               ing  restrictions are enforced unless explicitly allowed by the
               security policy:

                •  Symbolic links  may  not  be  edited  (version  1.8.15  and
                   higher).

                •  Symbolic links along the path to be edited are not followed
                   when  the parent directory is writable by the invoking user
                   unless that user is root (version 1.8.16 and higher).

                •  Files located in a directory that is writable by the invok‐
                   ing user may not be edited unless that user is  root  (ver‐
                   sion 1.8.16 and higher).

               Users are never allowed to edit device special files.

               If  the specified file does not exist, it will be created.  Un‐
               like most commands run by sudo, the editor is run with the  in‐
               voking  user's  environment  unmodified.  If the temporary file
               becomes empty after editing, the user will be  prompted  before
               it is installed.  If, for some reason, sudo is unable to update
               a file with its edited version, the user will receive a warning
               and the edited copy will remain in a temporary file.

tldr: it makes a copy of the file-to-be-edited in a temp directory, owned by you, and then runs your $EDITOR as your normal user (so, with your normal editor config)

note that sudo also includes a similar command which is specifically for editing /etc/sudoers, called visudo 🤪

Russian propaganda

ah yes it’s that notoriously pro-russia website hrw.org 😂

Can a country “choose” the ambassador of another country? That’s counterintuitive to me

Countries choose their own ambassador to another country. The nominee this article is about is from the US.

Separately however, countries can choose to accept or reject the ambassadors other countries send to them. It’s very uncommon to reject them, but actually South Africa’s ambassador to the US was expelled earlier this month. I wouldn’t be surprised if South Africa doesn’t accept Bozell.

if that is the case I choose upper-left of the political compass for you (:

i’m curious, where do you place yourself on that compass? if you’ve got 20 minutes I highly recommend this video about it.

I’m pretty sure you’re replying to a joke.

I assumed it was a joke, but (correct me if i’ve misunderstood) I understood it as a joke rooted in the misconception that the US bombing of Yemen was a thing that happened 12 days ago rather than something that has continued every day since then.

If there is some way that this joke works in light of the fact that this article is from yesterday, I failed to grasp it.

We know. There was a group chat.

Did you? This story is about the 17 air strikes that happened yesterday. The attacks described in the group chat were the ones that happened 12 days ago.

The US has continued to bomb Yemen every day since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2025_United_States_attacks_in_Yemen

Because Netanyahu doesn’t want to testify at his corruption trial

Yes, that was one reason…

and because the United States has not stopped giving them weapons to carry out this war, regardless of what they did and or who the US president was

and that is another.

But, this article buries the lede about what was probably the most compelling reason for Benjamin Netanyahu in making his decision to murder hundreds of people yesterday and today:

Netanyahu has a deadline: his government must pass a national budget in two weeks, or face the prospect of his government collapsing, triggering new elections.

Returning to war paved the way for Netanyahu to bring his far-right ally Itamar Ben Gvir back inside the coalition and beef up his governing majority. Ben Gvir had quit because of the January ceasefire with Hamas, and returned Tuesday with the resumption of the war.

[…]

The strikes could last at least another two weeks until Israel passes its national budget, giving Netanyahu a stronger position in power and more flexibility to resume a ceasefire, analysts say.