I’m looking for other complex open world games that throw you into the deep end without any explanation, and are completely unforgiving when you make mistakes.

UnReal World? It’s never really grabbed me when I’ve tried it, personally, but it might be up your alley.

Kenshi has a pretty difficult start, though it gets easier later in the game. I don’t think that it’s as complex.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is quite complex and has a very steep learning curve, with a lot of hidden stats and the like and limited documentation.

It’s actually probably a pretty potent lever from the Trump administration. My guess is that Anthropic might be able to sue and win. But…that will take time. They have an IPO coming up, and the last thing they want is going to be this hanging over it.

It’s an argument in favor of having more checks on the Executive, I’d say.

He just licenses his name to these things. He doesn’t manufacture all these “Trump” products.

I use Emacs plus LaTeX to author stuff.

If I gotta read Office documents, then LibreOffice.

A federal judge in Mississippi has punished all four lawyers on opposing sides in a civil trial and canceled the proceedings after some of them, relying on artificial intelligence, cited fake legal cases in court filings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/us/ai-lawyers-sanctioned-mississippi.html

In an order filed on Monday, Sharion Aycock, a senior U.S. District Court judge, wrote that the four lawyers had violated Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure when they certified that the information in their filings was factual.

I think one concerning thing is that this is the easiest thing to check. I mean, at some point, I assume that someone is going to rig something up to LexisNexis to actually validate the existence of cited cases, because that’s pretty simple and mechanical. Heck, even those lawyers, even if they don’t have any tech people at their fingertips, could have had a paralegal check citations or something. It really shouldn’t be that fundamentally hard for a lawyer to avoid getting in trouble for this specific issue, even if they generated the text with an LLM.

My bigger concern is that if lawyers are willing to put stuff like this out, they’re presumably also willing to put out information that hasn’t been checked where the errors are subtler and it’s harder to find erroneous material. In the case of citing nonexistent cases, it’s really easy to say “the lawyer clearly didn’t even look at this”, because it’s hard to make that kind of error if you have read over it. This is, once highlighted, flagrant and obvious. But…there’s potential for subtler errors, where it’s harder to tell whether the lawyer did at least try to review the material and just made a basic error, and thus it’s harder to impose punishments for it.

2. Lamplighter

Lamplighters were responsible for lighting and extinguishing gas street lamps in towns and cities before electric lighting became standard. They typically carried ladders and torches to perform their duties. The job was crucial for maintaining public safety during the evenings. However, with the introduction of electric streetlights, the need for manual lamp maintenance disappeared, leading to the decline of this occupation. Lamplighters are now part of history, representing a bygone era of urban infrastructure.

The lamplighters themselves were machine operators that replaced earlier professions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy

A link-boy (or link boy or linkboy) was a boy who carried a flaming torch to light the way for pedestrians at night. Linkboys were common in London in the days before the introduction of gas lighting in the early to mid 19th century.

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

A washerwoman or laundress was a person, usually a woman, employed to wash laundry by hand, before the widespread use of washing machines and commercial laundries. The profession existed in many cultures, spanning from antiquity to the early modern period. While the profession has historically been gendered, often associated with women, in some contexts, men also performed laundry labor. It was typically low-paid, physically arduous, and associated with lower social status.

The occupation began to decline with the rise of commercial laundries. The spread of domestic washing machines and self-service laundries further reduced the need for the independent washerwomen profession. By the late twentieth century, the profession had largely disappeared in industrialized countries.

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

A hostler (/ˈhɒslər/ or /ˈɒslər/) or ostler /ˈɒslər/ was traditionally a groom or stableman who was employed in a stable to take care of horses, usually at an inn, in the era of transportation by horse or horse-drawn carriage.[1]

7. Ice Cutter

Ice cutters were essential in the days before modern refrigeration. These workers harvested large blocks of ice from frozen lakes and rivers during the winter, storing them in ice houses for use throughout the year.

Related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceman_(occupation)

An iceman is someone who sells or delivers ice from a wagon, cart, or motor-truck. While the advent of modern refrigeration and freezers have made the profession increasingly uncommon, in previous eras of human history, the iceman transported and sold ice harvested in frozen regions to customers in warmer climates intended for cellars and iceboxes, to help preserve food and cool down beverages and homes.

Iceman and ice-wagon in Crowley, Louisiana, 1938

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

A filling station attendant or gas station attendant (also known as a gas jockey in the US and Canada[1][2]) is a worker at a full-service filling station who performs services other than accepting payment. Tasks usually include pumping fuel, cleaning windshields, and checking vehicle oil levels. Prior to the introduction of self-starting vehicle engines, attendants would also start vehicle engines by manually turning the crankshaft with a hand crank.

In the United States, gas jockeys were often tipped for their services,[3] but this is now rare as full-service stations are uncommon except in New Jersey, 16 “urban” counties in Oregon, 4 cities in Massachusetts, and the town of Huntington, New York, where there are laws or restrictions against letting customers pump their own gasoline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Worldwide#History

In 1925, the world’s first fully automatic elevator, Collective Control, was introduced. In 1931, the company installed the world’s first double-deck elevator at 70 Pine Street in New York City.[11][12]

End of an era.

I mean, the real sin here is from the Bluetooth SIG. If you make a radio protocol that broadcasts a unique identifier, it’s going to be abused sooner or later.

Google and Apple already know where Bluetooth devices have traveled if an iOS or Android phone using Location Services has come near them at any point.

Other people, like these ALPR guys, can probably harvest a little more data from users of Bluetooth devices, but they aren’t going to be the most meaningful harvester, as they have far fewer collection points.

Magewell Pro Capture card

I’ve been kind of shifting towards use of USB devices over internal cards.

All of the USB devices that I have still can be connected to computers. Ditto for DE-9 serial ports, though I might need a USB adapter.

But I’ve seen ISA->PCI/AGP->PCIe obsolete a lot of old hardware that I’ve had sitting around, and that’s just on the PC. That includes my video capture hardware.

I would guess that when there’s a problem, there are a lot of people working concurrently, all of who have access to the data.

I would guess that someone who is responsible for monitoring systems on the ground and isn’t at risk of losing oxygen and blacking out and isn’t having to get into a spacesuit is probably the principal person involved with assessing the condition of the station in an emergency.

I’d also expect that the person who makes the big calls is on the ground.

searches

It sounds like there is a person aboard the ISS who has ISS command, but normally, it’s a person on the ground who makes most of the calls:

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

This is a chronological list of commanders of the International Space Station. A pre-decided inhabitant of the ISS assumes command upon departure of the previous commander, at the end of an expedition, in a small hand-over ceremony. Their responsibility is defined by the ISS Code of Conduct, which states that the ISS commander has some authority over the operations of the ISS, but should ultimately defer most decisions to the Flight Director.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_controller#Flight_director

Flight director

Leads the flight control team. Flight has overall operational responsibility for missions and payload operations and for all decisions regarding safe, expedient flight. This person monitors the other flight controllers, remaining in constant verbal communication with them via intercom channels called “loops”.

Apparently the (older) Russian modules had been leaking air. The leakage rate was manageable, but the cause of concern was that the total rate of leakage abruptly doubled. Might be that they were worried that there might be some kind of progressive failure occurring.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

I hope I ran the vkgears test correctly?

Yeah, that’s fine.

Both of those should be using hardware rendering, at least based on my understanding of the text. You have the name of your video card where “llvmpipe” would show up, right above “64bit”, which is what happens on my system when using hardware rendering.

But…for some reason, you’re consuming a ton of CPU time when rendering using OpenGL, despite doing hardware rendering. That’s not what happens on my system. I don’t know what would cause that.

One would want it fixed either way. For Steam, one can force Proton to use OpenGL rather than Vulkan as a Direct3D backend by setting the environment variable PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1, which will cause many Windows apps to use OpenGL…but your problem is the opposite. Vulkan looks fine.

thinks

The only thing that comes to mind would be that there’s an Nvidia mechanism on systems where you have multiple GPUs — this can happen when you have an integrated on-CPU GPU and a discrete GPU on a laptop, say – to render on one and then copy to the other. I don’t know what text would show up as the renderer in that case, and I don’t have Nvidia hardware, much less Nvidia hardware plus an integrated GPU to test. I don’t think that that’s probably what’s going on here, but I don’t know what mangohud reports in that case. I would think that mangohud would be smart enough to actually display the renderer being used, but…maybe it’s not. But if you want to try it, you could give this a shot. I’m taking a stab in the dark rather than really analyzing it:

$ __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud glxgears.x86_64-linux-gnu

If the CPU usage when you run the above command goes from ~20% (as is currently the case for glxgears in your above screenshot) to ~4% (as is currently the case for vkgears), that might be what’s going on. If it is, then I’d try running your game with the __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia environment variables set. I wouldn’t bet much money on it working, but I guess it’s not hard to try.

EDIT: If anyone else with an NVidia card wants to run the MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud glxgears.x86_64-linux-gnu command and report whether their system uses a ton of CPU time on all cores, that’d be a useful data point; I can’t, as I don’t have the hardware. I guess it’s possible that that the CPU usage could be normal — this is going through xwayland, and maybe something there causes that. I don’t want to flag it as something abnormal on OP’s system if it’s not. But it’s not the way my AMD system acts.

If you live in a big, brightly lit city and you feel like allergy season just never ends, you might be right: New research shows that light pollution prompts plants to shed pollen longer, increases the growth of notoriously allergenic ragweed and makes our bodies more prone to allergic reactions, from runny noses to asthma.

But on the flip side, there are also going to be fewer trees in a city. That is, one might have more pollen in a city with a lot of nighttime lighting than one would relative to a less-lit city, but I doubt that one has more pollen in a city than outside cities.

I noticed today that the CPU usage jumps to ~98% as soon as I start WoW. Even just in the main menu. I had previously started CS as a test to see how it behaves there. In CS, the CPU load stays around 25% even when playing against bots (so not just in the main menu) and with significantly higher graphics settings. So it seems there might be some kind of problem with the CPU?!

It’s probably not anything physically wrong with the CPU. It just means that the WoW binary is trying to do something in a loop and not getting anywhere (at least not quickly). It’s consistent with falling back to software rendering, which is what I guessed the problem might be, but other things could also cause that.

For Counterstrike, assuming that that’s what you mean by “CS”, I’d guess that the game’s engine probably uses about four threads, and it looks like you have 16 cores.

If you haven’t done the vkgears/glxgears stuff that I mentioned above to make sure that you can render using hardware acceleration using Vulkan and OpenGL, I’d do that. Given that you’ve said that you also get slow rendering performance with some other games, I’d be suspicious that that’s your problem, since that’s the behavior I’d expect to show up if you were falling back to software rendering — very slow rendering performance.

pokes around

It sounds like World of Warcraft switched to a 64-bit binary some time back, so probably no need to check that hardware rendering works for 32-bit binaries — just 64-bit, both Vulkan and OpenGL.

If you’ve already done the vkgears and glxgears stuff that I mentioned above and those work using hardware rendering without issues, then the underlying Linux 3D rendering stuff should be okay. That means that whatever’s at issue is probably in Proton or World of Warcraft. If you’re wanting to troubleshoot further, I’d probably try launching Steam from a virtual terminal (like, probably Konsole in your case) and then launching WoW and seeing if WoW prints anything there.

If nothing comes up there and you just get a black screen…well, let’s see. All of the important state should be on the WoW servers, so you could try uninstalling it and reinstalling WoW and see if that resolves whatever’s the issue. Take some time to download the game, but it’s not human time, so…shrugs it’d probably be the next thing I’d try.

But I wouldn’t recommend doing any of that until I’d done the vkgears/glxgears test I mentioned and confirmed that you’re rendering using your 3D hardware.

There are three major DRAM chip manufacturers: Micron, in the US, and Samsung and SK Hynix, both in South Korea.

Micron has two new fabs coming online in Boise, Idaho. The earliest one is scheduled to start operation in the first half of 2027 (they recently announced that they’d moved that timeline up from the second half of 2027) though it’ll take time to ramp up; it will not be doing output at full capacity immediately when it first starts up.

https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id

They announced late last year that they were going to do a second Boise one as well for more capacity.

They also have New York fabs that they’re doing:

https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny

For the South Korean manufacturers:

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-03-12/business/industry/Samsung-and-SK-are-expanding-fast-but-why-is-memory-still-in-short-supply/2540153

Samsung

This year, Samsung is prioritizing the conversion of its lines to memory chips at its Pyeongtaek campus in Gyeonggi and the acceleration of new facility construction at the site.

At the P4 plant, the company is upgrading dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) production to its latest 1c process, which will be used for high bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced DRAM chips. Samsung aims to secure 1c capacity of more than 200,000 wafers per month by the end of the year through line conversion and additional equipment installation.

Construction of P5, which had previously been delayed during the semiconductor downturn, resumed this year with a timeline accelerated by roughly six months compared to earlier plans. The chipmaker is bringing in tens of thousands of new workers to construct the megafab, capable of producing HBM, DRAM, NAND flash and potentially foundry chips. Construction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027, with equipment installation beginning shortly afterward and mass production targeted for the latter part of 2028.

Construction of the last Pyeongtaek facility, P6, is currently expected to start in the third quarter of 2028.

SK Hynix

SK hynix is currently concentrating short-term investment on expanding capacity at its M15X fab in Cheongju, North Chungcheong, while also upgrading older lines.

The company is adding 1b DRAM capacity at M15X, while accelerating 1c node conversions at its M14 and M16 fabs for production of HBM and server DRAM. After hitting a capacity of 10,000 wafers per month last year, it is expected to expand capacity by up to 70,000 wafers per month this year.

For a new greenfield project, SK hynix is advancing construction at the Yongin semiconductor cluster in Gyeonggi, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing projects globally. The cluster will ultimately host six Samsung fabs from Samsung and four SK hynix facilities, and the latter is moving ahead first.

Construction of the first fab, Y1, is expected to be completed in February of next year, earlier than previously planned. Equipment installation is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2027.

Y1 will be built in six cleanroom “phases,” a unit used in fab construction for the capacity expansion stage. Each phase adds more floor space and related equipment for wafer capacity expansion. The first three phases are expected to begin operation within the same year, providing a capacity of 150,000 wafers per month, with the remaining phases adding another 150,000 wafers per month once fully operational.

The second fab in the cluster, Y2, is expected to begin construction around the third quarter of 2028.

So, two points.

First, new memory fabs start coming online in 2027, and there are more being constructed that will be coming online in subsequent years.

But, second…I think that some perspective is in order. Set new production aside. Let’s imagine a world where that didn’t happen. In fact, let’s imagine that not a single additional memory chip was going to be produced. Video games were around when I played games on an Atari 2600, to pick an early video game console. I had fun with it. It didn’t have the latest, real-time rendered photorealistic graphics. But…the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of memory. Not gigabytes, not megabytes, not kilobytes. Bytes.

There are people building microcontrollers right now that have onboard memory, and those aren’t impacted by this. It’s just the high-density dedicated memory chips that go on DIMMs that are seeing all that demand.

According to Wikipedia, there were 30 million Atari 2600s made. The CPU I currently have in my desktop has a little over 145MB of onboard cache. Twenty-six of those CPUs, looking just at their onboard cache, no external memory from Micron/Samsung/SK Hynix, have more memory than all of the 30 million Atari 2600s ever manufactured, combined.

Like, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy using all this memory that we have had available in recent years. But…video games are here to stay and would be even if no dedicated memory chips were around.

As you can imagine, this is enormous pricing pressure for enthusiasts trying to build gaming PCs or upgrade their rigs in 2026.

Waiting until 2028 for anything involving RAM would be a good idea, if possible. You’re likely to get more for your money.

If you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket and are determined to spend on gaming computer hardware in 2026/2027, it might be a good idea to consider things like game controllers, displays, or something like that, since those don’t have prices driven by memory price.