Not to detract from the article, but this has actually been a long time coming and known as a vector for decades.

E.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38419272

Ah that’s fair, I can see where you’re coming from on that. Those icons could 100% be generated with AI given the right prompting.

In my book, they look way more like stock assets to me due to how generic the symbols are, and the consistent styling. The “army guard” icon is kinda sus because of the stick “gun”, but that can be read as deliberate ambiguity to appease potential corporate customers who don’t want gun depictions in their vector stock images, and same deal with the generic “six point star”.

You’d also think they’d have chosen some sort of more detailed depiction of “isolation & surveillance” than a megaphone, or a lightning head for “fear & control”. If any of the accompanying text was included in the prompt to generate these images, the output would’ve been completely different.

I challenge you or anyone else who thinks this is AI to try to duplicate the image using any standard gen AI tooling. Please post what you get, I fucking dare you.

This is 100% crappy vector art thrown together into a crappy infographic by hand, and that thing on the bottom of the skeleton is called a pelvis.

Lampless.

I hope one day you see the light.

This isn’t storing the game in RAM; it’s caching it — which isn’t an effective strategy if you actually want fast load times and do any sort of substantial disk IO between system boot and game launch.

Not tryna get too analytical on a meme post, but tmpfs is the correct way to do this for anyone wanting to pull this sorta thing off seriously.

I expect Feynman’s answer, if he had a whiteboard and unlimited time, would’ve been to dive into Maxwell’s equations.

With that in mind, his answer makes complete sense. Good luck explaining coupled PDEs to people who aren’t mathy in a few sentences without visual aid. The analogy to the gravitational force isn’t on point; there’s a lot more to be said about how magnets tie to into E&M more broadly, compared to gravity.

Though you’re absolutely right that once you get deep enough into any topic in physics that the answer to “why?” inevitably becomes “it just be like that”.

On most distros, Flatpak has a separate auto-update process that runs independent of system upgrades. Disabling that “feature” should solve the problems you’re seeing.

I was hoping to play around with the dataset over the weekend to toy with some text-embedding techniques, but they’ve pulled the cord on the download links.

Anyone have a copy of the full archive they’re willing to share, or a magnet link?

It’s a useful way to dodge automated copyright flagging systems if you’re trying to churn out meme page content and crosspost it on many platforms.

One of my cats, despite being an extreme clinger, absolutely will not tolerate being picked up under any circumstance.

Lone exception? If there’s a bug she wants but can’t reach, she will meow until I come lift her up to catch it. One hand under her hind legs, one under her stomach - so she has both front paws free to pin the bug with. Fortunately, she’ll let me summon her too, so whenever there’s a moth or something hanging out on the ceiling, I yell “bug” and the cat comes running to catch it for me.

Right ol’ on-demand vacuum cleaner, that one.

There is a massive functional difference to anyone with two braincells to rub together.

The core devs can (and should) step in front of a bus (or tank) tomorrow; the core project will just fork, and LW and the other non-triad instances will do fine without them. I’ve had no issue on Lemmy blocking .ml client-side.

The only reminder of the triad’s existence is infiltrator trolls who make alts on other instances to post bad-faith arguments glazing the core devs.

You misunderstood the pinned post; it’s soliciting donations for core Lemmy development, not for the .world instance.

The core devs use donations to the project to fund their tankie .ml instance, which is why they’re getting pushback. There is zero comparable pushback among the community towards funding .world or other instances.

If you’d like to give away any free toasters with hackable embedded microcontrollers to prove your point here, I’m a willing recipient and will attempt setup of a searx instance.

deleted by creator

Yeah, I totally agree with that framing.

Overwatch definitely has its high-level cheaters, but the reason for that article is their ban wave model that Blizzard carried over from WoW: they often wait a few days/weeks before nuking an account. This approach means it’s possible for trolls to hack their way to high levels of the ranked ladder for a brief window, but those accounts are effectively canned in the long run. The upside is that cheaters have a much harder time figuring out why they’re getting flagged.

I quit playing after Blitzchung (2019), so OW2 may have a totally different scene going on due to switching from P2P -> F2P, but I only ran into a single aimbotter in the span of several hundred games. I still have friends who play though, and haven’t heard many complaints. A more recent reddit thread seems to agree too, e.g.:

Been playing for many years, and my roommate can agree with me. Probably the FPS game with the least amount of cheaters I’ve come across.

Blizzard did something right with the anti cheat.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/xwk02o/how_is_the_anti_cheat_in_this_game/ir6x5k7/

According to Riot’s own stats, the number of detected cheaters in ranked matches doubled after they rolled out their root-level AC for League (1/400 matches -> 1/200 matches):

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-removing-cheaters-from-lol/

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol-retrospective/

The article you cited does not support what you claim. League had a bot problem, not a cheating problem. The bots played against each other, and not against humans. This is because they were extraordinarily bad; they ran out of base and died, just to claim credit for having “played” games so the account could unlock new characters.

I spoke of Riot Games because I was comparing Leauge with their other game, Valorant.

Not the case in my experience. Nobody is backing out from server-side checks and nobody is spending a ton of money either developing or purchasing anticheat to appease “non-technical stakeholders”, such as they are.

Riot Games is a perfect case study where this exact thing happened, IMO.

League of Legends had millions of MAU and a near zero incidence of cheating, for a ~13-14 year span. They implemented root-level AC for their next game, Valorant, and they ran into aimbot problems within weeks. Root-level AC was rolled out for League a few years later, despite vocal objections from their developers, several of whom were vocally against the move on r/leagueoflinux.

Overwatch is another example of a super-popular game that manages to stay cheater-free using only heuristics and player reports. They’re doing dramatically better at stamping out cheaters than Valorant, CoD, and other comparable games that include root-level AC.

Are there any counterexamples where you’ve seen a game struggling with cheaters fix the issue with root-level AC? I can’t think of any, but maybe my gaming pool is just too narrow.

Rendering on client means you can still do all sorts of crap in terms of wallhacks, spoofing inputs and so on.

The solution for this that’s now in vogue is server-side occlusion checking. Basically, map what objects/characters that player has line-of-sight on server-side, and send the client only data for those which are visible.

Could you do effective autoaim with just a rendered frame fast enough? I bet somebody would try.

This exists - it’s usually done with a microcontroller that intercepts the monitor feed, scans nearby the player’s cursor or center-of-screen for probable targets, and softly fuzzes mouse movements towards that target.

Hell, in some cases the cheating isn’t even on software these days. CS had a big argument about some keyboard behaviors recently, as did fighting games about leverless sticks enabling certain shortcuts.

Yep, 100%. That’s why root-level AC is a bad option: cheaters are just switching over to these out-of-band techniques.

Companies prefer root-level AC because it gives non-technical stakeholders the impression that a game is “cheat-proof”, and therefore, that they don’t need to fund customer support to monitor and review reports of cheating. They’re not using root-level, client-side AC because it’s more effective than alternative options.

at least with running nothing but the renderer and the controller input client-side

Nearly all competitive multiplayer games run this way. The client is an untrusted rendering service, while the overall state of the game world is tracked server side.

I agree with your overall point.

However, as a professional codemonkey, I promise you that root-level AC is in fact less secure than server-side heuristic AC + user reporting, and tends to be user-hostile due to false-flagging of modified systems. Root-level AC can be bypassed rather easily these days with DMA and other out-of-band tooling.

As a case-study, League of Legends lacked any root-level AC for well over a decade, and was arguably the most popular game in the world at points. Cheaters were extraordinarily rare; the average player would typically encounter well under a dozen cheaters per thousand games.

Riot Games then released Valorant with full root-level AC, and had an aimbot explosion within a few months - mostly because they devalued player feedback & reporting in favor of their “robust” automated AC solution. Their overall anticheat strategy became less reliable on the whole, but they stuck to it because root-level AC is cheaper and easier to execute from the corporate-profit POV.