It feels weird to truly understand the terms of your loan nearly a decade after it started, and nearly three years after you started repaying it. Frankly, it feels bad to admit. But that is the case for many of us with the UK Plan 2 Student Loan. Of course, the onus was on us. We had the ability to read the Government websites and truly understand the terms, before making the decision.

Something feels wrong with Counter-Strike 2. But nobody knows quite what, if anything. My one wish for next season... for Counter Strike to improve their gameplay and their sub-tick if they want to stick to it NiKo, CS2 professional Game developers have a lot of tacit and explicit knowledge about their titles. They know the systems and the interactions between them, and what results they produce. But players of a game have a tacit feel about the game.

On October 4th 2025, kurtjmac completed his fourteen and a half year long journey to walk to the Far Lands in Minecraft. The first to take on daunting challenge, it was a great moment to watch. Kurtjmac is not the first to have reached it through walking in the Overworld, though. While there are hundreds of thousands of points on the Minecraft map Kurt reached first, throughout the years, people have taken on the mantle, and frankly blitzed it.

CYBERSHOKE is a large CS2 community server provider (see my previous post for a hint of their size). One of their gimmicks has been “optimising” the performance of the game, as the game has a lot to be desired on this front. They recently raised the point that CS2 does not engage in occlusion culling: not rendering objects and players outside of the viewable distance. The predecessor, CS:GO, did. This is bad for both performance and for combating cheating[^1].

For those who enjoy Counter-Strike community servers, the situation in Counter-Strike 2 is rather dire. An avalanche of spam has rendered the server browser unusable. The transition from Global Offensive killed multiple small communities. And large server providers have taken advantage of these problems to monopolise the market. Trying to find a server either involves capitulating to these big vendors, or trawling through a trench of spam. Scraping the server browser allows us to have some insight into the state of the market.

In a sweet irony, given I published a post about Evaluating kernel level anti-cheats as a consumer, some aspect of VALORANT, likely Vanguard, ended up soft bricking my internet whenever I tried to play the game. While this was a soft brick - only happened when playing the game, and it would fix itself after exiting the game - it was incredibly frustrating to run into. Here is what I learned and what eventually fixed it.

If you're interested in revisiting Minecraft from the Beta era, here are some notes. MultiMC is a third-party Minecraft launcher that allows you to have multiple separate instances of Minecraft versions, with a great interface to manage it. It isn't required, but I'd recommend using it. It is trivial to use play Minecraft 1.7.3 itself. The official launcher & MultiMC can be used to easily spin up an instance. My primary issue with playing older versions of Minecraft is the janky mouse input: it frequently skips & accelerates unnaturally, making it difficult to control.

Cursor, Claude Code & Cline all have different formats for writing reusable instructions for agents that are automatically embedded into requests. - Claude Code takes a file called with a variety of directory configurations. - Cursor used to be a file called , but is now a folder called , with the rules being individual "MDC"[^1] files. - Cline supports (or ). It seems to me that we should be standardising this, much like Model Context Protocol.

As a subscriber to The Verge & WIRED, it is rather annoying that the RSS feeds that both provide are littered with product recommendation listicles, designed to generate revenue through affiliate links. While they may be useful to some people, and generate an additional revenue stream, I am paying you. It is frustrating to still be advertised to, especially for something that promotes continual spending, something I'm cutting back on.