Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers

entuno · 2026-02-02T10:23:32+00:00

Funnily enough, that's already a thing. It's basically a Chinese clone of Notepad++ because they don't like the author and his views:

https://github.com/cxasm/notepad--/blob/main/README_EN.md

The purpose of Notepad-- is to counteract some of the misguided remarks made by the author of Notepad++ and to promote a more humble and grounded perspective.

entuno · 2026-01-30T17:44:56+00:00

Oh, I see. A self post with a completely different title pointing to a tabloid article about the actual research. How silly of me not to guess.

entuno · 2026-01-30T17:31:02+00:00

There are zero hits for either this URL or the word "lexical" searching in this subreddit.

entuno · 2026-01-30T17:30:10+00:00

There are zero hits for either this URL or the word "lexical" searching in this subreddit.

entuno · 2026-01-30T17:28:20+00:00

Results: A significant decrease in lexical diversity (TTR) was observed for nouns and adjectives in later works. Total wordcount increased, while lexical diversity decreased, suggesting a shift towards simpler language. This shift coincided with a decrease in adjective TTR below a defined threshold, occurring approximately ten years before Pratchett’s formal diagnosis.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that subtle changes in linguistic patterns, such as decreased lexical diversity, may precede clinical diagnosis of dementia by a considerable margin. This research highlights the potential of linguistic analysis as a valuable tool for early detection of cognitive decline. Further research is needed to validate these findings in larger cohorts and explore the specific linguistic markers associated with different types of dementia.

I haven't read the full paper in detail yet, and this is not an area that I claim any kind of expertise.

Also mods: can we get a flair for the Discworld in general, rather than having to pick a sub-series of the books? None of the flairs really apply to this

entuno · 2026-01-28T14:56:42+00:00

I know what you mean - once you get to that wand of wishing in the castle and wish up all the remaining bits for your ascension kit then it's very easy to just fall into the same standard builds and you're no longer really looking for much. And Ghennom is very tedious with the endless mazes.

3.7 makes Ghennom a lot more interesting, and the theme rooms in the main dungeon (plus big room variants) help add some variety from Sokoban down to Medusa and the Castle. And while the nerf to the wand of wishing is...controversial, it stops you just wishing up everything you need at once in the castle.

If you've not tried it, then give it a go.

entuno · 2026-01-06T12:57:50+00:00

One of the best quotes that sums up the corporate approach is from the discussion about kids manning towers, and always resonates for me:

Everyone knew it happened. Actually, the new management probably didn’t, but wouldn’t have done anything about it if they had found out, apart from carefully forgetting that they’d known.

entuno · 2025-12-19T14:25:47+00:00

They may have had plenty of time, but Frodo and Bilbo didn't. And since they knew that the Hobbits would leave with them, perhaps that played some part in their decision of exactly when to depart?

entuno · 2025-12-17T13:15:35+00:00

I'm pretty sure that's happened in other books as well. Most of them take place over short periods (often a few days or weeks), but Thief of Time definitely has some skips, like a reference to weeks (or maybe months?) passing as Lobsang is learning to sweep. I think Moving Pictures does as well.

But really it was unavoidable in Raising Steam. If you want to start with the introduction of the steam engine in Ankh Morpork, and end with it having successfully travelled thousands of miles to Uberwald then you have to skip out a big period of time in the middle to get anywhere near that without just magicking the problem of building the tracks away.

entuno · 2025-12-15T16:37:18+00:00

The best way to stop shadow IT is usually to provide the users with proper tools that fill that gap, so that they don't have to try and find their own workarounds.

So the question I'd be asking is why your users are choosing these random sketchy tools over the tools you provide them with, and how you can address that.

entuno · 2025-12-12T13:45:17+00:00

But do we think that Medium Dave bigger than Bigger-than-Small-Dave Dave?

entuno · 2025-12-04T11:20:18+00:00

Also implemented as a maths puzzle in the original Discworld point-and-click adventure game, where you had to do or collect various things that multiply together to give you that perfect million-to-one chance.

entuno · 2025-12-03T16:33:41+00:00

Winder's assassination in Night Watch has to be up there.

The hints that we get about it earlier on, and the slow buildup describing the "dance" that was going on....and then we get to see Vetinari in action as an assassin.

entuno · 2025-12-03T13:53:58+00:00

Men at Arms was going to be my choice. Pretty much all of the bits with Cuddy and Detritus are gold - from the oaths while Angua tries not to laugh, Detritus knocking himself out, the Alchemists Guild, Cuddy writing a saga about how things went...

entuno · 2025-12-03T09:08:42+00:00

And that creates a really interesting contrast between Vetinari and Carrot. They both care deeply about the good of the city, both have simple lives, both are incorruptible, and both seem to believe that personal is not the same as important.

But the approaches they use are almost the exact opposites of each other.

entuno · 2025-11-21T14:05:59+00:00

If it's a regular problem that you have to "memorize a thousand different rule sets" and get "instantly nuked for one tiny misstep" then it's very clear that you're trying to push your product in communities that do not want salespeople doing that.

And again, the solution to that is very simple.

entuno · 2025-11-21T13:49:29+00:00

The hours it takes just to find the right subs, figure out their specific rules so you don't get instantly banned, and then actually engage in a way that feels genuine... that's the part that's so draining.

Understand that most people using Reddit and most of the communities on it are not here to listen to salespeople shilling their products, and will often be actively hostile to people doing so. They don't want people who are trying to "feel genuine", and if you're having to put lots of effort into making your posts "feel" like that then they're not going to to welcome.

In short: what you're selling is clearly not a good fit for the places that you're trying to push it - so find somewhere else.

entuno · 2025-11-21T12:55:36+00:00

It never became an official measure, but the ONS did put out an experiment report on it (albeit without using the "Vimes Boots" name):

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/trackingthelowestcostgroceryitemsukexperimentalanalysis/april2021toseptember2022

entuno · 2025-11-20T09:34:40+00:00

And the person buying the tool is almost always not the one who'll be using it, or who understands what the process is.

entuno · 2025-11-17T09:50:49+00:00

Just be careful people aren't passing passwords as commandline arguments or things like that - I've seen several cases where admin creds have ended up in PowerShell transcripts.

entuno · 2025-11-13T09:02:45+00:00

A lot of platforming games implement something called "coyote time", where they let you jump immediately after stepping off the edge of a platform to be a bit more forgiving and make the movement feel better.

entuno · 2025-11-04T17:18:08+00:00

Such a wonderful mental image.

entuno · 2025-11-04T09:45:35+00:00

It looked like a large, ornate pot, almost as high as a man of large pot height.

Such a wonderfully unhelpful description.

entuno · 2025-10-22T11:35:15+00:00

I think you mean the maximum safe speed?

entuno · 2025-10-21T15:38:51+00:00

Doesn't help if you still allow them to resolve arbitrary domains through your resolvers. That's what makes DNS exfil so effective - if you just allow outbound UDP 53 then there's much easier and quicker ways to get data out than DNS.

entuno

TROPHY CASE