Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.

Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders’ themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!

https://www.eurogamer.net/arc-raiders-review

That’s a funny thing to say. The communication channel between the browser and whatever external password store can be made as restricted as you like… keepassxc and its browser api let you restrict which credentials are offered to the browser, and can let you manually OK each request, for example. It doesn’t need unrestricted read access.

The bitwarden browser plugins are a bit more dubious though, because they communicate with a remote password store with more limited controls, and their enthusiasm for trying to store passkeys and totp hashes is definitely worth avoiding.

There’s an interesting mastodon thead from back in July where someone was unhappy with the state of bitwarden and looked at a bunch of alternatives:

https://transfem.social/notes/aa2w3yuz3tfz0hdp

This also seems to have been around when keepassxc started using coding assistants, so it isn’t quite clear to me why the issue has suddenly surfaced now.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/12207

Not permanently, by the looks of it.

Some fediverse links from non-mastodon sites can’t be loaded directly, it seems… if I stick the url into my mastodon client’s search field it’ll take me to the actual post, because it’ll do the request via the fedipub api. Anyway, I appreciate that’s a pretty poor UX for most people, so I’ll try and check my links more carefully in future!

I saw the post linked yesterday, fwiw. I’m annoyed I didn’t spot that it was missing a timestamp, as that’s usually a sign of suspicious tweets.

Oh yeah, it’s not the particular kind of good news we’d all like, but it is still entertaining.

Also, it is worth noting that this isn’t the normal way people get served. It’s a right hassle compared to just visiting someone at home or at the office or whatever. This sort of action is taken when the person being subpoenaed was actively evading it, but is also an egotistical idiot who is incapable of keeping a low profile.

Sam Altman got subpoena’d live on stage.

https://bsky.app/profile/walkingtaako.bsky.social/post/3m52utxcmls26

It sounds a little like “natural language is an awful way to unambiguously specify systems… but what if there was a special computer language that you could use to create computer programs in? 🤯” combined with a something that sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choreographic_programming which already exists, but I guess represents a new frontier for vibe coding distributed systems, which are famously amenable to yolo development.

It’s everyone’s favourite alternate browser developer back again, lamenting how mean some tech folk are and how cruelly they threaten and oppress certain groups of people.

Which groups? Oh, you know the ones 😉

Source: https://goblin.band/notes/aeui8zv7rw80c08v

Kinda, but nothing I’m entirely happy with. We use bitwarden at work, at my suggestion, but I don’t like the tools as much as I do keepassxc, and even though you can self-host the network service that stores the data, you still have to host something whereas keepassxc is standalone and you can sync the password vault over some file sharing service, or carry it on a usb stick, etc. there have been a couple of incidents whereby user license data wasn’t processed correctly and people got locked out of bitwarden vaults, which is pretty serious even if it was only temporary. That can’t happen with easily-backed-up-and-restored local databases.

They’ve also had some “license controversies” which should also give you pause for thought if you were interested in a free and open system: https://www.techradar.com/pro/bitwarden-clarifies-open-source-commitment-amid-user-concerns

The original keepass project is still alive, and maybe I’ll have a look at that. The current maintainer is a bit odd, and the project has had some historical security issues, but I suspect that all password managers (at least on windows) will have the exact same problems. It is unlikely to have the same range of features, but it is written in a memory safe language (C#) rather than in C++, which keepassxc uses (and I’ve never been entirely happy with).

In short, everything is awful, and I will probably stick with xc for my own purposes for now, as there isn’t quite a replacement for me yet. I’d buy a mooltipass (https://www.mymooltipass.com/) except I’d want a backup, and that means an outlay of a good £300 which is a bit painful. And they’re often out of stock 😕

KeepassXC (my password manager of choice) are “experimenting” with ai code assistants 🫩

https://www.reddit.com/r/KeePass/comments/1lnvw6q/comment/n0jg8ae/

I’m a KeePassXC maintainer. The Copilot PRs are a test drive to speed up the development process. For now, it’s just a playground and most of the PRs are simple fixes for existing issues with very limited reach. None of the PRs are merged without being reviewed, tested, and, if necessary, amended by a human developer. This is how it is now and how it will continue to be should we choose to go on with this. We prefer to be transparent about the use of AI, so we chose to go the PR route. We could have also done it locally and nobody would ever know. That’s probably how most projects work these days. We might publish a blog article soon with some more details.

The trace of petulance in the response… “we could have done it secretly, that’s how most projects do it” is not the kind of attitude I’m happy to see attached to a security critical piece of software.

Apparently someone has managed to wrangle a bunch of preprogrammed biases out of grok. There’s nothing unexpected here, and the source isn’t great, but might be worth a look.

https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/10/31/grok-admits-its-constructed-to-protect-israel/

Seems like fairly generic us right-wing thought, glazed with the requirement to hype elon.

Not so much “enjoy” as “remember at all, unlike most of the other games I’ve played in the last 10 years or so”, but I take your point.

KDE showing how it should be done:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

Question:

I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

Response:

We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

1. The owner is a nazi
2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

I got more “the thing” vibes, tbh.

That’s depressing… I really liked the music direction of halo. It really stood out to me in a way that other games never manage. I can still hum the halo theme and a bunch of its score, but I’d be hard pressed to do that with any other game… I know the elder scrolls theme, I guess, but can’t remember much else about their sound design.

Yeah, skintight palmtop hologram cortana certainly ticked some boxes there, but in-universe it was all a bit “everyone is beautiful, no-one is horny”, with a side order of “all assistants should be female and sexy”, to my mind at least.

And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:

“We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob

https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979

It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT

It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.

I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as “the flood”, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.

Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that they’re cool with all this.

https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood

I can imagine a world where AI becomes extremely good at flipping burgers or driving cars well before it learns how to write software or […] protein folding or playing board games

That’s because despite Moravec’s paradox being noted down in the 80s (y’know, the last ai winter) there’s still a certain kind of asshole who thinks that flipping burgers is an easy task performed by stupid people but playing go is somehow the height of human intellect, despite 40+ years of evidence to the contrary.