Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess

Re: Impossible?

Some types of idiocy are, however, self-limiting, see also: Darwin awards.

Re: Impossible?

You could only do that if you also banned encryption, because a VPN handshake over a TLS-encrypted channel looks exactly the same as any other traffic.

Yes, you could ban encryption, but that would mean that HTTPS no longer works, which means that all internet banking, and online commerce suddenly becomes insecure, nobody uses it, and the economy collapses. Not such a smart move, and almost certainly a fatal one, once the baying mob catches up with you.

Of course, you can do such things, but only an absolute idiot would, it would be like trying to work out why a gun isn't firing by looking down the barrel and fiddling with the trigger.

Re: vote reform

...or Russian bot accounts, take your pick

You got any figures to back that up? You know, other than that woman who got arrested for inciting people to burn down a building with people in it?

Why do people suddenly think "freedom of speech" means freedom from consequences?

Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update

Re: Hopeless error message

...or it was, but, despite having the exact same symptoms, and detailed description, this instance was actually something completely different, and was 11 years ago. It's just Microsoft have managed to repeat their fuck-ups, because their QA team consists of a room full of drunk gibbons, all issuing their instructions through Copilot.

Re: It makes me realise...

Microsoft might be responsible for some of the nastiest, unusable software out there, but at least they never inflicted iTunes on us.

Re: Hopeless error message

But they do give you more information, an error code in the form of a seemingly random string of hexadecimal digits, which if you google it links to a "knowledge base" article from 2013 that relates to something almost, but not quite entirely unrelated. If you're lucky, you'll also find support posts on a Microsoft forum where someone describes the exact same issue as you, with the response to send all sorts of diagnostic information to a Microsoft support person, but no details of how the problem was ever resolved (if indeed it was).

Any actual data you care about should always be stored in more than one place, even if that is two separate physical drives within the same machine. It's trivially easy to set up a scheduled job under windows to do this for you using robocopy.

What was an actual ball-ache was the situation I was in, where Windows was running from a M.2. SSD, but the boot partition was on an older hard disk, which had the previous Windows installation on it (which I had previously wanted to keep as a dual boot while migrating from one version of Windows to another). I eventually figured out how to repartition the SSD to add a UEFI partition and use the tools under Windows to make that the active boot partition, and at the same time, remove the option to boot from the older Windows installation, so I could re-use the space. Microsoft don't make these tools easy to use, and I'm sure there are any number of ways you can render your computer unbootable if you don't do it right.

This brings back memories of a previous Windows patch that didn't work due to EFI partition sizes being too small, maybe a year ago, and the hair-raising business of having to re-partition the hard drive with my boot partition on my home PC, with the partition in question for some reason being in the middle of the drive (thanks Windows). It's at times like this you hope and pray that you understand what you're doing properly, and don't accidentally screw up and delete that partition that has all your stuff on it.

At least this gave me the impetus to actually look into how to move the UEFI boot partition to another, newer M.2 SSD, allowing me to finally replace the ageing spinning rust that my PC had been relying on to boot for some years. Windows certainly doesn't make that easy, either.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

Re: Steer clear of these types of Remuxes if you value your security

Whilst it's true that MS stuff is often woefully insecure and designed to suit their needs, not the customer's, don't make the mistake of thinking that an alternative is secure just because it isn't made by MS.

All software is prone to having flaws, because it is designed and written by humans* who don't have the ability to see the future; best practice changes, in all aspects of software design, including security, and the thing that is deemed to be the best and most secure way of doing something today may well have a critical flaw that is discovered tomorrow.

This is why we don't rely on SSL3 and TLS1.0 as the encryption layer in HTTPS any more, for example, and why we have relatively recently published SHA-3 standards for hashing algorithms. It's not only Microsoft who have to patch their software to accommodate such security updates.

This isn't to say that a lot of stuff designed by Microsoft isn't seemingly deliberately awful, but have you ever seen iTunes, for instance? (Granted that is also proprietary and open source). Microsoft are hardly alone in the awful software stakes, and a lot of terrible stuff is FOSS, and that's terrible in terms of design, lack of support, and gaping security holes in exactly the same way as Microsoft's proprietary crap.

*Yes, okay, some is now written by "AI", but you can just go ahead and assume that this will be riddled with worse flaws.

This browser add-in doesn't just hide ads, it tells you to OBEY

Re: Ads

Apart from targeted ads (which are usually woefully badly targeted, if my attempts to block trackers are working), my top issues with adverts are:

1) Running scripts; a static image is one thing, but the moment you allow a third party to inject scripts onto your website, you are opening the door to being a malware vector

2) Pop-overs/pop-unders, other sneaky tactics that intrude onto my PC

3) Unskippable adverts that you have to sit through to see whether the two-paragraph article you were trying to read actually had any salient information in it

4) Audio. Just no.

5) Those mobile ads that, if you press the screen anywhere except on the one-pixel wide "close" button, take you to the app store and try to install some shitware mobile game. You know the ones.

Regarding the last of these, since I use a pi-hole at home, I tend to forget exactly how bad these are in many mobile apps, until I'm away from home and subjected to the full force of the drivel-hose that is mobile advertising.

NHS England confirms: Palantir staff can access patient data

It's actually even worse than just regurgitating the training data, of course. Because the data is used to build a heuristic model, the "AI" may or may not regurgitate it wholesale, and might indeed hallucinate or omit vital parts of it whilst claiming not to have. The moment someone decides to rely on data obtained in this way, costly, and possibly life-threatening mistakes are going to be made, for instance, if it insists that a patient doesn't have an allergy to a common medication, when they in fact do, or that a dangerous treatment is safe.

"No humans have access to the data" = "it's been fed wholesale into AI for training" = "the AI can be persuaded to regurgitate its training data for all to see, since the 'I' doesn't stand in any way for 'intelligence'"

The rumour mill suggests Streeting himself may not be too far behind, after his 18-minute meeting with Starmer this morning, in a blatant act of positioning himself for a leadership challenge. IMHO, the only thing that Starmer currently has going for him is that he's not Streeting, it would be the Labour government equivalent of replacing Boris Johnson with Liz Truss.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Re: Outages

I can recall a similar call some years back to $telco to request some replacement hardware after a nearby lightning strike (the induced ground current in the coax line had neatly blown up just the TV box, and not the router, both attached to the same cable via a splitter, I'm guessing that was the low-impedance route).

"No, there aren't any lights on on it, it has been struck by lightning. There was a flash and a loud bang outside, and it stopped working, now it rattles if I pick it up and shake it."

Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch

Re: Radiation hazards are often overblown.

Uranium-238 decays via alpha emission, and then beta emission into Uranium-234 which has a half-life of over a quarter of a million years. Radon is quite a way down the decay-chain, after some other long-lived isotopes. Given that gaseous diffusion operates on timescales that are orders of magnitude smaller than this, the risk of any of it accumulating in your house is zero. Similarly, ²³⁵U decays via ²³¹Protactinium which has a half-life of 33,000 years, before further decaying; the isotope of radon it produces in its decay chain has a half-life of 11 days. If you had a lump of ²³⁵U sitting around (which itself would be a bad idea for many reasons), the odds are that at any one time, there would be precisely zero atoms of radon in the room with it.

As for the risk of heavy-metal poisoning, the solubility of uranium oxide in water (or other polar solvents) is incredibly low, and given the low concentration required to impart colour to uranium glass, and the fact that it is vitrified within a glass matrix, the glasses that I drink wine from are completely safe, especially in contrast to the toxicity of the ethanol in them. Statistically speaking, I have probably never ingested a single atom of uranium from them.

Re: Radiation hazards are often overblown.

Uranium glass was mass-produced cheaply in the early part of the 20th century, and is quite collectible, not because it is rare, but because it's a pretty colour, it glows under UV, and the majority was made in the Art Deco style, which is quite attractive. I have several pieces sat around me in various places at the moment, none of which read noticeably above background on a radiation counter. Where I live, background is 0.07 μSv/h, and one of my collection once briefly registered at 0.5 μSv/h with the detector held against it, which was just as likely to have been a cosmic particle. You'd get more exposure from eating a Brazil nut. The only reason I'm not surrounded by more of it is the self-imposed rule that I should only buy more if I can find a definite use for it beyond just looking pretty.

The people making this stuff in the 1920s might have been exposed to a minor radiation risk when handling the uranium salts which went into the glass (in very small amounts), although even then, they would have been predominantly ²³⁸U, not ²³⁵U. Nobody was ever putting enriched uranium into glassware. Making the stuff on a commercial scale only really came to an end because of WW2, and not because of the weapons potential of uranium, but because industrial output, especially in Central Europe, where much of it came from, got switched from making ornamental glassware to more deadly products. After the war, access to uranium ore became more controlled, for obvious reasons, and nobody was going around knocking on the doors of secret buildings asking for their used depleted uranium so they could make some pretty green glass.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: re: "Freshly made MoviPrep?"

Capsaicin is marginally more soluble in alcohol than it is in water; the problem is that beer (even the 5% fizzy piss frequently sold in curry houses) is still 95% water; proof of capsaicin's solubility in ethanol can be found in the existence of chilli vodka. It's probably also proof that there is no God if you feel the urge to drink it.

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

Milk or yoghurt also does the trick.

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

Or, less harsh on the skin, wash your hands with cooking oil, followed by washing-up-liquid, followed by soap and water. Capsaicin is fat-soluble, the oil dissolves it, the washing-up-liquid solubilises the oil, the soap and water removes it.

Better than putting bleach on your skin, which is arguably worse for it than chilli.

Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again

To be fair, so can Facebook, the problem is that it's perfectly easy to track and monitor you through a browser, and it takes a fair amount of skill and knowledge to actually sandbox it properly. Given that most people use Chrome, they've already lost that battle.

I don't know about you, but I have friends and family spread far-and-wide across at least five continents. Meeting some of them in person is a once-in-a-couple-of-decades thing, given that travelling around the world is generally quite prohibitively expensive. Those who live on the other side of this country I'm likely to only see in person a couple of times a year. I'm still interested in what they are up to.

I'm assuming the tap-the-phone thing is a once-only requirement to actually add someone to your friends list, not something you'd require on each interaction, otherwise you'd just be having a good old-fashioned in-person face-to-face conversation.

The main problem this is going to have isn't the requirement to tap, it's gaining enough traction to get a critical mass of users; the same reason Bluesky hasn't replaced Twitter yet.

Re: Fatal flaw

I'm not sure if that makes me a big-dammed-hero or an evil griefer - guess it depends on your point of view.

You'd probably have to check your spreadsheet.

Re: A couple problems with this

And how is he planning on keeping this going if it catches fire and there are 100 million users a year from now? You gotta get revenue somehow, unless you are independently wealthy, which I assume a "Philadelphia area programmer" is likely not.

From the article:

Carson has made a career out of starting solo SaaS operations, like domain name backordering site Park.io, as well as playing the domain name market, and his acquisition of Friendster happened because of his connection to that industry.

Sounds like he is doing alright for himself.

Re: So...

I think the point here might be that the guy who bought it already has revenue, so this could lose money and he'd shrug it off.

Too many people seem to think that the end-goal of life is to accumulate as much money as possible and cling onto it; this results only in a stagnating unbalanced economy with oligarchs at the top and everyone else in poverty. It shouldn't actually be anathema to spend some of your earnings on something that isn't a money-spinner. The alternative is for very few individuals to end up with all the money, and then suddenly that money no longer has any value, and other resources take over as the currency used to build the guillotines. Examples of this playing out are copious throughout history; we're supposed to have a regulated economy to prevent this sort of thing.

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

The bit that cements how pointless doing this is, is where he has to wrap the photocells in foil to prevent them from generating a voltage from the ambient light that would otherwise far outweigh that from the phosphor around the tritium, even at night. Sure, there might be niche applications for this in environments of complete darkness, but this is akin to me trying to get some sort of power from my collection of uranium glass, which barely reads above background on a radiation detector.

Really, all this demonstrates is that a photocell converts photons to electricity even at very low levels, which is hardly surprising given how they work (an incoming photon knocks an electron from one energy level to a higher one). 1887 called with news about the photoelectric effect.

The only technology that died more times than VR is AI, and that seems to have worked out

Re: "none of us can have a "VR room" in their house"

Star Trek also has force-fields, tractor beams, and transporters that can instantaneously dematerialise and rematerialise a person across space. Lots of things are possible if you ignore the established laws of physics, and go with magic instead.

Let's not talk about how there is also some universal sense of "up" in space, and spaceships always meet in the same plane of orientation, eh?

Re: Since when have these been part of the metaverse?

Everyone forgets about 3D TVs, don't they? I can still remember the clueless rich kids boasting about theirs 15 years ago. They're probably the same rich kids who have a cupboard full of various VR headsets covered in a layer of dust and who are now self-employed "running" companies that produce low-quality vibe-coded apps written by "AI" and which are filled with security holes and flaws that will furnish them with nice little court cases to defend in five years time. If anything, at least, then the "AI" boom will assist in separating rich fools from their money, and teach them something about the consequences from which their comfortable lives have sheltered them, up until now.

Counterpoint:

VR has failed, despite billions being pumped into it, and it being shoe-horned into everything, because the use-cases aren't there, the problems it has are insurmountable (motion sickness, disorientation), and nobody really liked it

"AI" will fail too, despite billions being pumped into it, and it being shoe-horned into everything, because the use-cases are only there as long as "the first one's free", the problems it has are insurmountable (hallucination, verifiability, non-deterministic behaviour), and everyone who isn't trying to get rich off over-selling it hates it.

VR does have its niche use-cases, and these will continue, but it's not everywhere and in everything like its prophets predicted. "AI" is the same; it has its use for data analysis, and approximate models, but it isn't the thing that everyone seems to be claiming it is; intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Re: HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

I can virtually guarantee you that the Linux driver isn't some horrible piece of HP bloatware, but is a standard Postscript driver, and your distro has been smart enough to work this out for itself.

It's a while since I've had to set up a printer on Linux, but I seem to recall it being relatively painless, is Linux still using CUPS?

Re: Windows circles of hell

Zoom was always shitty, it just happened to be in the right place at the right time during the pandemic to get the adoption it needed to be the de-facto tool. If Skype hadn't been vacuumed up by Microsoft, that would probably be the standard video-calling app now instead.

Re: HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

Whilst Windows is horrific, you've found the company that's more horrific. That's right, HP.

Don't install any of their bloatware drivers, if you want to print, just use a basic postscript driver, by adding it manually. Microsoft aren't actually at fault in this instance.

It's a bit fiddly to add a printer manually, and you might need to figure out its IP address or network name, but it can be done.

Security updates for unwanted features

There would be far fewer updates if they made all the new "features" of Windows opt-in rather than forcing them onto you by default, then we'd only need the security updates and bug fixes for these if we actually wanted them.

Copilot shoe-horned into everything, I'm looking at you.

Nvidia slaps forehead: I know what quantum is missing – it's AI!

Source of truth

What's the source of truth here? The potentially error-ridden result the quantum computer spits out, or the potentially hallucinated result the "AI" spits out?

Glibness aside, surely to detect an error, you need to know what the correct result is already, which makes calculating it via a QC a tad redundant, no?

If there's a step to verify the correctness of an output that takes much less computing power to calculate (for example factoring the product of two large prime numbers* is slow, but checking that multiplying the results together gives you that original product is fast), why do we need "AI" to do that verification, and without seeing its working can we trust that evaluation anyway? If it can't count how many "r"s there are in "strawberry", then I'd question its usefulness here.

*O, hi there Peter.

Anthropic goes nude, exposes Claude Code source by accident

Re: So a door is open, you are therefore allowed to steal code?

...to stretch this analogy, if you then made a copy of those keys available to someone else, you would clearly be in the wrong, so the person who discovered this was wise to not host a copy of the source themselves. However, if you go out without closing or locking your front door, don't be surprised if everyone knows what's in your hallway.

I'd suggest that the human error in publishing the location of the source code via build pipeline is human error; the fact that the source code could be accessed from the internet is a security breach.

While we're on this subject, when are Microsoft going to fix their gaping security hole in GitHub, where releases automatically include a tarball of your entire source tree in releases? This means that, effectively, you can't make releases on a repository public whilst maintaining the privacy of the source, which is kind of a big thing if you happen to be working for a commercial entity. INstead, you have to then take your release artifacts and put them somewhere else, without including the source.

Re: So a door is open, you are therefore allowed to steal code?

If someone somehow accidentally posts their house keys through your letterbox when they're in the process of posting flyers for the local pizza place, have you stolen them?

Even if they knocked on your door and asked for them back, and you returned them, they'd still be wise to change their locks, there's no crime in making a copy of a key you legitimately have in your possession.

Re: Wait...what?

The magic of "AI" is that you can write hundreds of thousands of lines of code much, much faster, and accrue a decade's worth of technical debt in mere seconds!

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Re: Trust issues

"Sorry you only have the basic free tier of Copilot with GitHub™, which will automatically restrict your code by adding bugs and inefficiencies. Upgrade to the standard tier for only $99.99 p/m which removes this restriction..."

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

Re: "and possibly vehicle tax"

Assuming you're in the UK, I hope you don't ever try to drive using it then, because it expired, and you are therefore uninsured, as well as committing an offence...

Re: "if any other party gets into power."

I'd argue that the coalition government was anything but broadly successful, especially the extremely fiscally right-wing "austerity" measures that are still affecting us today (basically the reason why everyone's council tax goes up by 5% every year, and councils are still going bankrupt). It's extreme neoliberal short-term economics, based upon selling the family silver now to shore up the house. To be fair, it was Thatcher and Reagan who started all of that nonsense, but Cameron and Clegg, and especially Gideon "George" Osbourne have to take the blame for the economic misery of the 2010s.

Re: "if any other party gets into power."

To be fair to Corbin [sic], the remain campaign was basically run by the government at the time, so by engaging with the official campaign, which was run appallingly badly, he would essentially have been crossing the benches. The bigger questions about the whole fiasco still stand; why was Cameron allowed to pass a bill that explicitly stated that it was an advisory referendum, and then bind the government to the result by stating that the government would implement whatever result, before skipping town the moment it went the other way? Why were people told we woudln't be leaving the common market or customs union if we did leave the EU, but then this became a mantra that we must leave these? Why where whole cohorts of people (those most likely to vote remain, such as those who had been living and working in EU countries for over, IIRC, 5 years) excluded from the referendum (because it was advisory so didn't need to include them), why did the Cambridge Analytica scandal not invalidate the whole thing, necessitating a re-run, and, finally, whatever happened to the investigation into Russian interference, and funding of pro-leave groups, which almost certainly was a big factor, given how Putin likes to do absolutely anything he can to destabilise the EU? Where did Arron Banks get all that money from, eh, and why did so many of the pro-leave people have links to Russia, several having lived and worked there? Oh, and I forgot about the illegal funding and over-spending in the various leave groups, too.

After all that, we can talk about how Jeremy Corbyn was a bit shit, and how he didn't reflect the attitudes of the vast majority of his own party members, who were overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU. He's far from the main one to blame here, though.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: Agreed

A great example of this is to give ChatGPT a date of birth and ask it how old a person born on that date is. Unless they have fixed it (by duct-taping on yet another hacky fix), it will get it wrong, based on the date of its training data.

The problem with "LLM graphics tools" aka image generators, is that they are "trained" on real work that real people have worked hard on, and then churn out permutations and variations of that work, essentially copying it, without giving any credit to the original artists, or paying any royalties for use of copyrighted work.

So, what they actually are, is a computer program designed to take money out of the pockets of struggling artists, and put it into the pockets of CEOs. As such, they can fuck right off, and as far as I am concerned, they need regulating properly, so that such theft is recognised as such.

Re: bring it on

I think the answer here is that sycophancy appeals to certain "personality types" (I use the term advisedly, because things like Myers-Briggs are complete bollocks). Narcissistic people love to be praised, especially when the praise is undeserved. Unfortunately, narcissists also tend to be power-seekers, so what we're getting here is a feedback loop that encourages the worst kind of people to just carry on with whatever they feel like doing with no checks and balances. Putting people like that in charge of things has predictably bad results, you only need to look at current world politics to see the consequences of not reigning in narcissistic sociopaths.

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: Up to a point, Lord Copper

No, it doesn't. It does preclude the suggestion that they formed first on Earth, and then spread into the rest of the solar system from there. Just getting something up to escape velocity takes a lot of energy, and the process of doing it by smashing lumps of rock into space would be far from 100% efficient, thereby cooking whatever you're trying to fling into space. And by "cooking", I do, of course, mean absolutely incinerating, and subjecting to the sort of G-forces that flatten any sort of nascent life, if it wasn't already on fire.

If you believe in some sort of mysterious hand of a creator, then you already believe that this creator must have magical powers that don't have to obey the same laws of physics as everything else. The belief in any sort of "magic" powers that transcend natural forces and physical rules implies that those rules simply don't apply; since by definition magic doesn't follow rules, the belief in any magic implies everything must be subject to magic. This in turn implies that all human knowledge, experience, and wisdom is false. You might like to believe you live in a magical universe where everything is possible if you just wish it hard enough, but this isn't borne out by any evidence; ergo creationism is bollocks; sorry to break it to you.

Re: Up to a point, Lord Copper

Things like isotopic composition demonstrate prove pretty comprehensive evidence that most space rocks formed in space, at the same time as the Earth and didn't originate here; not to mention the physics involved in launching something into space and then decelerating it into a stable orbit, especially since most of the material in the solar system isn't on an orbit that coincides with Earth's.

Short answer: no.

Re: So...

Yeah, I did start writing a follow-up, and then decided that I might have been going into too much depth.

Technically, a lot of the lighter elements could have been produced pre-supernova in stars reaching the end of their lives, as they switch from fusing hydrogen to sequentially heavier elements, at higher energies, and contract at each stage, blowing off their outer layers. Nothing heavier than iron can be created by stellar nucleosynthesis, due to the energetics of fusion (iron is the peak nucleon energy), and iron (and elements up to that) can be produced by fusion in a star before it explodes (I believe the path is the fusion of silicon). As you say, heavier elements are more likely produced in mergers of stellar remnants, and "exploding stars" is a massive oversimplification (point of order: a white dwarf is the remnant left after a supernova, and doesn't explode itself; a type 1a supernova involves accretion onto a white dwarf, but that's a special case). Stellar remnants, especially neutron stars and black holes, also tend to have very strong magnetic fields, due to conservation of momentum when they contract, and these result in jets of material being accelerated to relativistic speeds. I'm not familiar with the exact physics involved here, but those slamming into clouds of material certainly sound like the sort of thing that would create conditions for exotic physics.

I have to concede that I don't know a lot about the specific physics involved in nucleosynthesis during supernovae, so I'll take you word that these don't generate heavier elements than zinc; that does sound plausible. I guess the difficulty in knowing the exact processes comes from the fact that we can't exactly easily observe them as they happen, or conduct experiments, so a lot comes down to theoretical models, which themselves are often simplifications (spherical cow in a vacuum kind of things) and model things that are on the edge of known physics.

This is why new astrophysical discoveries are often fascinating (at least to me), as they are one of the few things that are at the boundary of known science, and we almost always learn something new from them. I'm just waiting to see if Betelgeuse goes up in my lifetime, if nothing else because it will be pretty.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 promises to bring you out the other side of the uncanny valley

Re: Wrong use of AI

Well, then, you've projected a whole load of stuff onto me.

Personally, I prefer anything that's NPC related to be story-driven, not procedural. Adding "AI" to the same procedurally-generated objective that previously had three different dialogue options, but now has 3 million, but with added slop, isn't improvement. The best games out there have well written storylines, or innovative gameplay, and AI just doesn't do that.

I'm sure it doesn't need saying, but games that consist entirely of "quests" that involve going over there, killing those enemies and bringing back that item, aren't made any less tedious by interspersing it with cut-scenes you can't skip even though you've seen them before, or NPC dialogue that adds nothing new.

Re: Wrong use of AI

NPCs trying to push far-right conspiracy theories like "white South-African genocide" on me? No, ta.

Perhaps, rather than additional cut-scenes and NPC dialogue to skip, AAA titles could focus on gameplay instead?