onceuponaban's recent activity
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Comment on PlayStation Network is still down after fourteen hours and no one knows why in ~games
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban Did someone say argue? Jokes aside, Linux Mint is absolutely a great choice and is my default recommendation to anyone interested in Linux but unfamiliar with it. It's based on the most popular...Did someone say argue?
Jokes aside, Linux Mint is absolutely a great choice and is my default recommendation to anyone interested in Linux but unfamiliar with it. It's based on the most popular distribution, Ubuntu, while avoiding the dubious decisions its parent company saddled it with while still ultimately being a very sensible base with a lot of help resources in case issues do arise. The distribution generally aims for "sane defaults" that the average user would reasonably expect without needing to specifically ask for it (while I wholeheartedly support Debian's commitment to truly free software, when you end up with a critical component of the computer not working because a very common piece of hardware doesn't have available drivers without going out of your way to look for a non-free one, something the layman wouldn't even be aware is a concern, it ends up being an obstacle to user adoption, although that's something they did eventually accept required a sensible compromise). Finally, the desktop environment developed alongside the distribution itself superficially resembles Windows' UI which is helpful to get new users acclimated. All of this combines into a very polished package that is user friendly and Just Works™, exactly what the average user wants out of their OS.
I instead treat my computer more as a hobby which led me into the Arch Linux rabbit hole but I've since settled to using CachyOS which leverages the AUR (which I like a lot as it enables having very niche software having packages available in a way other distributions might not) while still providing sane defaults I don't need to tinker with endlessly
not that this stops me from doing so anyway. Also, they default to KDE, and I like KDE. This is obviously not a common usecase, so recommending Linux Mint in general is still the best bet IMO. -
Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games
onceuponaban Adding my two cents on the subject, while FTL: Faster Than Light already relies on RNG for most of its gameplay as a roguelite is wont to do, there is actually a mod generator for randomized...Adding my two cents on the subject, while FTL: Faster Than Light already relies on RNG for most of its gameplay as a roguelite is wont to do, there is actually a mod generator for randomized starting ship layouts (with guardrails in place to make sure they're all, or at least almost all, actually playable). Originally made by the Russian community but translated to English, it is available here. It supports the base game and optionally some of the more well known mods to pull equipment to generate ship layouts with, (and if using Hyperspace you get to choose how many more ships are added instead of replacing the base game's 28, up to an additional 5 sets of 30 each) though while that nominally includes the Multiverse mod I don't think it actually properly supports it anymore due to the mod having significantly changed since. The other supported mods have long since stopped development, with any still active becoming separate mods as they adopted Hyperspace's features, so they're probably safe to combine with the randomizer.
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Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games
onceuponaban I was aware of an active Mario Kart Wii modding scene existing, but I had no idea there was one for Mario Kart 64... which actually brings to mind another game I sank a ton of hours in that I'd...I was aware of an active Mario Kart Wii modding scene existing, but I had no idea there was one for Mario Kart 64... which actually brings to mind another game I sank a ton of hours in that I'd deem appropriate for this thread: Sonic Robo Blast 2. This is a total conversion mod of Doom Legacy of all things, warping it into a full-fledged fanmade 3D Sonic platformer, a take on what a game following Sonic 3D Blast's art direction in a more straightforwardly 3D environment might have looked like.
...Except I lied, that's not the one that actually came to mind. While I find the concept interesting, I'm not all that into platformers. The one that did is Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, a mod of SRB2 that further morphs it into an online kart racer following similar layout principles to Mario Kart 64 (3D environments covered in 2D sprites, including the karts themselves) but keeping the 2D Sonic era aesthetics of SRB2, becoming a game with an identity of its own in the process. And, taking advantage of its legacy as technically still a Doom mod, the modding ecosystem made it extremely customizable, which the community took advantage of to a ridiculous extent. Something like Master Chief, an Among Us crewmate, a couple Touhou characters, an office chair, a Russian T-54 painted in gold, Monika from Doki Doki Literature club, a 1:1 port of Mario as he appears in MK64, Kirby and a Vic Viper racing on a Hyrule themed track or the Cathedral from The Binding of Isaac while everyone keeps pressing a horn set to various Internet memes would be a fairly mundane sight on an SRB2Kart online server, giving it a reputation as a "M.U.G.E.N Kart" of sorts. Something that the developers actually didn't like all that much as their intention was more to make an unambiguously Sonic fangame.
They eventually got their wish through a long awaited update becoming more of a separate release in the form of Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, breaking away from both SRB2 and SRB2Kart's established identity (which is probably for the best, as to be honest it is so radically different in terms of gameplay that a lot of the SRB2Kart userbase, myself included, didn't enjoy it in the way they enjoyed SRB2Kart, resulting in an effective split of the community between those who stayed on SRB2Kart 1.6 and those who followed the devs with DRRR).
While I personally don't enjoy what I saw as an overly complicated set of game mechanics tacked on what was already working just fine in SRB2Kart and a further increase of the already frenetic pace colliding into a chaotic and unfun mess, my understanding is that taking the time to fully master those mechanics results in very exciting and rewarding gameplay, and another thing it has going for it is proper singleplayer content making it more of a full game than "just" the client for an online-first kart racer like SRB2Kart is (where the only singleplayer gameplay available is time trial). While SRBKart is easy to learn, hard to master, DRRR is hard to learn, harder to master, and while I'm not part of it there's definitely an audience for this game. Which, if you've been keeping track, is technically a mod of a mod of another mod. And while the more cohesive identity of DRRR gives fewer leeway to the kind of chaos the community turned SRB2Kart into, it still leverages its Doom heritage and has its own set of community addons to mod the game some more.
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Comment on Should I self-host my blog? in ~tech
onceuponaban While I agree the feeling of the Internet being a more dangerous place is unmistakably there, I think it's important to realize the state of cybersecurity of years past was already awful if not...While I agree the feeling of the Internet being a more dangerous place is unmistakably there, I think it's important to realize the state of cybersecurity of years past was already awful if not even worse (remember the time when getting your computer instantly infected upon connecting to the Internet with no user input was a very real risk if you weren't careful in ensuring you had an operational anti-virus and a reasonably up to date OS before connecting to the Internet? Windows XP is remembered fondly now but its era was when this risk was at its worst). I think it's more accurate to say that we're more aware of the risks now than the past being actually safer, and with the physical and digital aspects of our lives intersecting more than they used to, the stakes should you fall prey to malware or some other form of cyberattack are also higher.
For what it's worth, there's Yunohost which offers an easier step into self hosting while establishing some baseline security that is probably good enough for the motivated layman (for example, fail2ban is provided and set up for you, and rule 0 of cybersecurity, keep your system up to date, is made easier by yunohost's web interface). I'm using it myself, and while I have some gripes with it and will probably switch to a fully custom self hosted setup when I move away from a raspberry pi and to a more powerful mini PC as my server, it's definitely serviceable as a way to discover what you can achieve with self hosting while giving you a greater awareness of how to set things up correctly and safely when/if you decide to roll your own setup later on.
That being said, your computer's safety is absolutely a legitimate concern and it makes sense to delegate the actual hosting to a third party just for the sake of shielding yourself should the worst happen. Exposing myself through self hosting is a risk I personally accept as I value control of my hardware more, but that is not necessarily sensible for everyone.
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Comment on Global Capslock key in ~comp
onceuponaban I may or may not have learned to type "wrong" and instinctively use Capslock instead of Shift when typing capital letters...I may or may not have learned to type "wrong" and instinctively use Capslock instead of Shift when typing capital letters...
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Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentThe funnier part is that on a technical level, the Linux installation procedure is actually simpler than on Windows despite Hyperspace's development originally only taking Windows into account....The funnier part is that on a technical level, the Linux installation procedure is actually simpler than on Windows despite Hyperspace's development originally only taking Windows into account. Hyperspace needed debug symbols in the game's executable to figure out how to hook it to the game properly, and on Windows the latest version to include these debug symbols is 1.6.9 (compared to the current 1.6.14 version), requiring to downgrade the latest version by patching it (as directly distributing the downgraded executable would technically be piracy...), whereas on Linux it was discovered while investigating whether a Linux port was possible that the latest version of the binary as of writing, 1.6.13 (don't ask why the latest Linux binary has a lower version number than on Windows, I have no idea, especially since the features that 1.6.14 is supposed to add on Windows from 1.6.13 are also present on the Linux version), does include these debug symbols meaning it can be loaded directly without needing any patching. And since not much ultimately changed between 1.6.9 and 1.6.13(14?), the issue of quirks unique to either version causing bugs in one OS but not the other is fairly minor (though I know from experience that there are cases of it happening and in particular with Lua stuff)
Before that, the way to make Hyperspace work on Linux was to bruteforce it by using Wine and following the same instructions as Windows, which is also how the MacOS version handles it (though managing Wine is automated so that it can be made into a convenient installable package... Well, relatively speaking, at least)
Fun fact: I technically contributed to that particular project by "creating" the app's logo (actually just cut and pasted existing artwork made for the original Hyperspace in a square aspect ratio)Meanwhile, the author of the application that allows you to manage mods, Slipstream, had the foresight to make it in Java, automatically making it cross-platform, so once Hyperspace itself was Linux compatible the whole mod ecosystem worked just as well on Linux as on Windows without the mod authors having to worry about cross-platform compatibility (as that is solely Hyperspace's concern).
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Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games
onceuponaban No worries about the degree of impact on gameplay, I made this thread with everything from total conversion to zero impact on actual gameplay in mind, so long as you consider it worthy of being...No worries about the degree of impact on gameplay, I made this thread with everything from total conversion to zero impact on actual gameplay in mind, so long as you consider it worthy of being discussed.
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Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )LinkI'll start by throwing FTL: Faster Than Light into the ring, a seemingly unassuming roguelite by Subset Games (basically two friends with the help of some contractors) from 2012 that eventually...I'll start by throwing FTL: Faster Than Light into the ring, a seemingly unassuming roguelite by Subset Games (basically two friends with the help of some contractors) from 2012 that eventually became one of the pillars of the genre.
Optional context: FTL modding lore
Mechanically, it is actually a very simple game; the gameplay loop boils down to choosing dialogue options, managing your ship through menus, and technically real time fights though given the unlimited pause ability and reliance on predictable timers in every aspect of the combat system, it is more similar to turn-based combat in spirit. Add to that the graphics being low resolution pixel art (the game as a whole runs in 720p) from a 2D top-down view and you get a video game that looks like it should be moddable with minimal effort. And as it turns out, it was, as the game's resources could be straightforwardly extracted and repacked back into the game, revealing that pretty much everything was stored as plaintext, xml, png and ogg files. And so a modding scene was born (with the blessing of Subset Games, as they dedicated a section of the game's official forum to modding and added a page on the main website to showcase some of them).
Just adding and changing resources could already get you pretty far. The game gave the player up to 28 individual ship layouts to start a run with, which mods made customizable, the event system could be used to make up your own with just as much diversity as the base game, the UI itself could be reskinned, and interesting weapon and other equipment combinations could be figured out by playing with the same parameters used to provide the base game's weapons and coming up with sprites for them. One of the most well known mods of this type was Captain's Edition, a major overhaul mod that ostensibly stayed within the spirit of the base game while also throwing in pretty much everything and the kitchen sink resulting in a massive amount of added content to the base game. While impressive when it was released, the merciless passage of time and some frankly poor design decisions eventually caught up with it and while the mod's historical significance cannot be understated I personally wouldn't recommend it today. Because the modding scene didn't stop there. (and for that matter, neither did Captain's Edition's author, as he went on to make Hyperspace Dogfights, an excellent fast paced side-scrolling roguelite shooter)
Changing the assets was all well and good, but the game engine was pretty inflexible, so the next step was to rip it open and see how it could be manhandled to make the game do things it was never meant to do. And so was born FTL Hyperspace, the backend mod to what would become the second era of FTL modding. Its capabilities grew over time, and new features are still being worked on including a complete overhaul of the infamously brittle save system and mindblowing advancements such as colored text in events (don't laugh, that was surprisingly very difficult to figure out! It was considered 5 years ago and only now has it been made possible). As for things it can already do? More ship hangar slots, new crew types, various bugs that didn't matter to the vanilla game but was a PITA for modders fixed, custom unlocks and achievements, some other things that I'm not getting into to avoid doubling this post's character count, oh and the ability to integrate Lua scripts in mods. For a game where mods until then could only toy with an already defined xml structure to influence the game, that one was a massive breakthrough. And with this, comes the mod I want to talk about that I sunk hundreds of hours in after probably just as many in the base game, and while not developed by the same team did drive much of Hyperspace's own development as the "flagship" mod to show off its features.
By now, Subset Games consider, and have done so for several years, that their game is complete, and doesn't warrant any more updates. While there are some known bugs left, some of them are convenient exploits for the player in an otherwise brutally unforgiving game that are deliberately not being patched out and the rest are minor enough to be more interesting quirks of the engine than actual problems, and besides the lack of updates is actually a good thing for modders at this point. They have absolutely no incentive to delve into whatever spaghetti code they cooked more than a decade ago just to fix minor bugs while also pissing off their remaining dedicated playerbase in the process when they could, you know, work on a new game. They're also not interested in making a sequel to the game, as the pretty sparse but well thought out worldbuilding holds up on its own. The game they released after FTL, Into The Breach, did have some easter eggs referencing the previous game but is otherwise a separate work. You probably see where this is going: naturally, the best candidate for a mod to a game that will (probably) never see an official sequel is... a fan made one.
Introducing FTL: Multiverse, a rebirth of another ambitious major overhaul mod that didn't pan out named Project: Coalition (the remnant of the project can be found over in this thread) which leveraged the FTL Hyperspace backend developed alongside it to eventually culminate in an amount of content that utterly dwarfs any FTL mod before it in scope. Or the base game itself, for that matter. Picking where the base game left off (and extrapolating a whole lot of fanmade lore in the process), the game positions itself as the aftermath of a won run in the base game, where the player's Federation ship managed to defeat the Rebel Flagship... only for a fleeing rebel leadership and the Federation both stumbling upon multiversal drive technology, kicking off the civil war once again but this time across the entire multiverse. Each run is no longer just an artifact of the roguelite gameplay loop. Each of them represents an attempt from a Renegade, a Federation agent sent into a specific universe to defeat the local Rebellion as its interdimensional counterpart works in turn to topple the local Federation. Each win is another universe back into the Federation fold, and each loss is one that falls to the Rebellion.
With this massive increase in narrative scope comes a suitable increase in content. Multiple alternate endings, tons of new races, factions, weapon and equipment types, new game mechanics and events to experience, and of course, new player ships to unlock over the course of the game. The base game gave you 28 layouts to start with when all of them are unlocked, Multiverse bumps that number up to almost 300 (and that number is far from final). I cannot describe in any reasonable amount of words the sheer breadth of content that this mod offers on top of an already absurdly replayable game. I would highly recommend this mod to anyone who liked FTL and would like more of the same, because FTL: Multiverse delivers exactly that.
But wait, there's more! FTL: Multiverse might be the biggest Hyperspace mod, but there are other notable entries like Insurrection+, which I'd consider to be the spiritual successor to Captain's Edition, updated to the FTL modding scene's modern standards while avoiding the pitfalls of its predecessor (in fact, the original Insurrection mod from the same author which this is the direct successor of also came as a variant that aimed to rebalance Captain's Edition itself), and Arsenal+, another take on a major overhaul pseudo-modpack from the Russian community available over on VK, but as it turns out, Multiverse gathered a sufficiently large community to itself end up with its own collection of addons, available on this forum that serves as a catalogue for them. So, if Multiverse itself isn't enough for you, there is even more content available to expand it further (and some of those addons got notable enough themselves to get their own-subaddons or start providing cross-compatible content with each other)
Honorable mention to the Type D/E/F mod which is an oddity for being a mod that isn't built upon Hyperspace despite being made years after its arrival, providing a new set of 28 ships to play with replacing the original ones.
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What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past?
Meta aside We have a recurring thread to talk about video games people play here, but what about video game *mods*? This is also a trial run to gauge interest to see if this thread might make...
Meta aside
We have a recurring thread to talk about video games people play here, but what about video game *mods*? This is also a trial run to gauge interest to see if this thread might make sense as another recurring thread. I suspect the subject would be more niche, so if it *does* it would probably make more sense as a monthly rather than weekly recurring thread? Something to think about.This thread is aimed toward discussing video game mods, whether that be major overhauls, more tame additions to what is otherwise still pretty much the base game, simple QoL stuff, tech demos showing off black magic the game's engine only begrudgingly accepts to let happen, mods you're making yourself, modpacks, or anything else that is related.
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Comment on Global Capslock key in ~comp
onceuponaban It looks like the situation reverses occasionally. I looked at the capslock state for a while and at times it gets a lot more chaotic, toggling on and off very quickly, but right now it looks like...It looks like the situation reverses occasionally. I looked at the capslock state for a while and at times it gets a lot more chaotic, toggling on and off very quickly, but right now it looks like if anything there is a bot keeping it off as much as possible (or there were never any bots and we're just looking at the quirks of an imperfect client.
Though if automation is involved, I guess the next step is people leveraging it to communicate somehow. Global Capslock-enabled Morse code, anyone?
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban Neovim is my text editor of choice as well, though with the caveat that I'm specifically using the AstroNvim distribution (with my longer term plan being to set up a fully custom configuration)Neovim is my text editor of choice as well, though with the caveat that I'm specifically using the AstroNvim distribution (with my longer term plan being to set up a fully custom configuration)
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban Not actually an Emacs user (not because I don't like it but more because I'm afraid of it taking over my OS, then my life, then my very soul) but my understanding is that going with Doom Emacs (or...Not actually an Emacs user (not because I don't like it but more because I'm afraid of it taking over my OS, then my life, then my very soul) but my understanding is that going with Doom Emacs (or similar distribution) is itself not a bad option for onboarding. There's nothing preventing you from starting out with it, tinkering with it later on and either decide you want to keep using it or "going back" to vanilla Emacs so you can start
and never stopbuilding your own setup using what you liked from Doom Emacs and/or adjusting what you didn't like. At least, the same logic applies with nvim (which I do use) regarding astronvim/nvchad/whatever else. -
Comment on Using ChatGPT consumes a 500 ml bottle of water; so what? in ~tech
onceuponaban (edited )LinkThis article also highlights how quickly analogies can simplify the point you're trying to make down to uselessness. "Asking ChatGPT 50 questions consumes the equivalent of 500ml of water"...This article also highlights how quickly analogies can simplify the point you're trying to make down to uselessness. "Asking ChatGPT 50 questions consumes the equivalent of 500ml of water" displaces the context so much that the comparison stops making sense. If someone was at a press conference, they'd definitely have drank at least half a liter of water by the 50th question. And, for all the shortcomings the human brain might have as a computing unit, everyone agrees it's pretty damn energy efficient compared to actual silicon based computers. How is that supposed to give you a proper idea of the amount of energy consumed by LLMs? I believe there are massive issues regarding the impact of the energy consumption caused by this GenAI arms race (especially when companies start floating around the idea of getting their hands on nuclear power plants for the sole purpose of powering their server farms) but as the article rightly points out, this kind of analogy hinders more than helps in conveying this concern.
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban After checking on a computer where VS Code was installed, apparently yes it does... which raises the question of why is CTRL+SHIFT+P the shortcut it shows for the palette in the menu over the much...After checking on a computer where VS Code was installed, apparently yes it does... which raises the question of why is CTRL+SHIFT+P the shortcut it shows for the palette in the menu over the much simpler F1?
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Comment on As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders in ~tech
onceuponaban At the risk of beating a dead horse, what instantly came to my mind instead was 1984's telescreen. You know, the device that everyone has but you're not allowed to turn off, and acts as both a...I swear the entire concept was someone reading Fahrenheit 451 and coming away with "I want that."
At the risk of beating a dead horse, what instantly came to my mind instead was 1984's telescreen. You know, the device that everyone has but you're not allowed to turn off, and acts as both a television set (which since this is 1984, means broadcasting propaganda) and a surveillance camera.
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentFor what it's worth, it looks like the debugger implementation in VS Code follows a standard which is also supported by other IDE/text editors, including Nova itself according to its documentation...For what it's worth, it looks like the debugger implementation in VS Code follows a standard which is also supported by other IDE/text editors, including Nova itself according to its documentation since version 9, although it seems more limited regarding which debuggers are supported. Other programs that support it include Eclipse, Emacs (because of course it does), Helix, and Neovim (through this plugin if you want to try it out) as well as being a WIP for Zed.
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban Ah, I mixed the two up and assumed the framework and what you're teaching were related. Point is, something tells me it would be a bad idea to spring nvim on students that presumably aren't...Ah, I mixed the two up and assumed the framework and what you're teaching were related. Point is, something tells me it would be a bad idea to spring nvim on students that presumably aren't already familiar with it.
Out of curiosity, what approach do you use for debugging that requires more than stepping through breakpoints?
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban They've been pretty quick on the uptake whenever breaking changes happen in the Youtube API. The latest example was some integrity checks which were being progressively rolled out over the last...They've been pretty quick on the uptake whenever breaking changes happen in the Youtube API. The latest example was some integrity checks which were being progressively rolled out over the last couple of weeks. By the time it affected me (which resulted in any attempt to watch a video yielding a 403 error), the update that fixed it had already been out for days, and the only reason I didn't update before that was because I had disabled the integrated update notifications, since my package manager is supposed to handle it... and forgot to update my system for an entire week.
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
onceuponaban I think the biggest thing that undermines the point of the palette is the fact it's bound to CTRL + SHIFT + P by default which is needlessly complicated for a feature which is supposed to make...I think the biggest thing that undermines the point of the palette is the fact it's bound to
CTRL + SHIFT + P
by default which is needlessly complicated for a feature which is supposed to make other features easier to access. If anything I'd intuitively expect that to be a printing related shortcut.That is one thing that (n)vim does right: you want to type a command? Switch to normal mode if you're not already in it (which is going to be the Escape key) and press
:
. That's it, you can type your command. And since saving a file is one of those commands, you will pretty much immediately learn and remember it for anything that is too niche to warrant a hotkey of its own and too specific for a vim motion.That being said, in your situation I suspect that even if a debugging plugin for your framework happens to exist for it, subjecting your students to nvim out of the blue wouldn't go well :) (and Azatoth help you if someone is on Windows)
If anything, I'd put my money on merely something critical breaking at the wrong time and the last person who was familiar with that part of the infrastructure and knew how to fix it is no longer on the payroll (or on vacation/is ill/strictly enforces not being reachable by the company outside of work hours/random bureaucratic red tape is preventing them from intervening). If this was an attack, I think those responsible would have come forward by now.