Awesome stuff. Envious, here (NL) its impossible to get a prescription.
For an alternative approach for comparison: My wife and I eat low carb and fast every other day for a year now. Around the 2nd month mark we got the exactly same outcome: food became a chore. We sometimes dont eat for 2-3 days when travelling or busy. I dont remember feeling hungry in about a year. We do sports - I sure have less peak power, but can sustain moderate efforts for longer (I use a power meter and Hr strap - my vo2max dropped). I feel significantly sharper mentally and managed to learn a new language (Dutch, from zero to B2) in a year - while working a cto job. Not eating easily gives 3hr extra a day, incl. what I get from waking up early.
Saves us a ton on groceries and eating out. The only thing we do watch out is carbs - I can eat a kebab or two tacos but dont eat any sweets, eat bread or drink beer/soda. Weight stabilized at my high school level. Not sure if I can recommend it as it is a bit tricky to practice, especially while having a job that requires routine socializing, but - it does work. The only really difficult thing is to start and endure the first two weeks or so.
No, I eat a lot less in general and a whole lot of veggies.
I followed the same routine 4 years ago, then I stopped and when I started eating carbs my vo2max recovered overnight. I think one cant have it all - either you run on stored energy which caps the power to weight ratio - or on readily available glucose and glycogen. Its fine, I am not an athlete, I do sports to feel good. I dont see an impact on raw strength - just on anaerobic performance.
Anaerobic - i feel more or less normal while under aerobic load, and i can sustain significantly less anaerobic load - i used to be able to maintain 1600W for about 30 seconds (equivalent to a sprint to a finish line at pro-cyclist level). I can barely touch 1000W while on fast/low carb diet. I did a few experiments, and after carb loading I get an immediate increase in anaerobic perf.
The only times i was really happy at work was when I was working with giants, people way smarter than me.
And then I made a turn to easy corporate jobs where progress was effortles by comparison and colleagues very eager to lay praise. This led to years of unhappiness and intellectual stagnation. (And money, but that hardly compensates, and I think a smart engineer can make money without having to work a dull corporate job).
Also, high praise in corporate environment often means no career progression past certain points. They already have their management buddies, and they need efficient engineers in the lower ranks.
Besides, robotics its where its at. Just ask where nVidia is investing. Or look at the demographics. Or anti-immigration politics in western countries. It will be robots all over the place within a few years.
Part of their sales drive. We are absolutely assaulted by their sales reps trying to sell agentforce. They wine and dine non-technical executives and push the "ai agents will do everything" story. He is just reinforcing this narrative. Nothing to see here.
The plan is also to force existing customers to re-negotiate their existing long term contracts (many made on favourable terms a few years ago) to include the agentforce and data cloud stuff.
The window of opportunity for this is now: people seem to believe the 'agents' are something really quite new and different, and we haven't yet reached the peak of the hype curve. (Whereas in the boring, backwards enterprise companies salesforce is very active in we are past the peak hype for LLMs/RAGs and its hard to sell that).
A bit ironic he says he will hire 2k+ sales staff though, considering part of their pitch for agentforce is it will handle any customer interactions, sales included.
nice, strategic reduction in workforce growth that accomplishes a similar outcome to a layoff: controlling headcount to optimize margins and account for market conditions, disguised as sales and marketing. A++
Most existing front-end frameworks are already low-code by any standards, I'd say.
Most backend, integrations, automations require some degree of business logic, which requires algorithmic thinking, and this in turns requires engineers - there aren't many people who 'think algorithmically' and can't code. Engineers, in turn, hate low code frameworks, as they are useless on the CV and annoying to work with for reasons mentioned by others here. Proprietary s*ht tech that always, inevitably, leads to custom code.
And, it's expensive. We had mulesoft, outsystems, boomi and replaced it all with general purpose stuff shaving approx. 9M/yr in license costs. We have lost no velocity, and the great thing about the alternative (in our case: simply standardizing the toolset and going with GCP 'serverless' stack) is that its super easy to find devs who will willingly work on that. That hasn't been our experience with the low code frameworks.
But why bother with image recognition? And pay a heavy latency penalty which makes it difficult to implement PID-style controls on player's aim? Its a game of milliseconds and opencv is comparably slow, as is the I/O involved.
Far easier to do a MiTM on the network traffic and recreate state in another process.
Still easier to clone memory pages used by the target app, or use hardware that allows dma.
And fundamentally, the anti-cheat software is fighting a loosing game because of some quirks of x86:
- hardware breakpoints on memory latch to logical, not physical addresses
- one can map the same area of physical memory to different logical addresses thus allowing arbitrary memory reads
- simulating inputs through the PnP stack can be made indetectible with polymorphic code doing the injections
- detecting the aimbot's core code can be prevented via at least two methods: triggering (and capturing) page faults on memory hosting the bot or, again, with polymorphic code generation
One could create a fully open source cheat engine relying on memory reads and input injection via the pnp stavk and it would be undetectable deterministically (with heuristics, sure).
Games - unless streamed - need to know a bit more about the world they display than the player is allowed to see. Some engines I analysed (years ago) tried to limit propagating data to the local client to only a portion of the map and close proximity (the more recent battlefield games, if memory serves), while lots still have all enemy coordinates at all times in memory, some even with debug symbols to help the poor aimbot community reverse memory structures that more easily.
Its hopeless. The only winning move is not to play :-)
I suppose the memory being mapped twice could be detected by anti-cheat though. You can then also make more mitigations to prevent detection of the mapping (e.g. hooking the syscall to check the active mappings), but it’s always a cat and mouse game.
You are right on the first point, but I don't think you are right on the syscall part - a kernel level module can just read the PT directly without resorting to a syscall, no? You get access to CR3, and besides kernel-level PTs have a fixed logical (and if memory serves, physical - though maybe just on windows) address.
When in the non-PAE mode, I think one can still practically trigger page faults on attempted reads on the PDEs mapped by a kernel-level aimbot, force flushing of TLBs when anti-cheat tries to read the PT, and effectively conceal the cloning (although if the anti-cheat is doing this often enough, the performance impact might be too much?).
When in PAE mode, I do not know of a practical way to do it, but I haven't been researching such exploits for a few years now.
I think at this point, the most practical way to implement an open-source, undetectable aimbot proof-of-concept would be to perform static reversing of the game engine to get the network protocol, peform a MITM to listen in and recreate state on a separate process or machine, do a PnP input injection via a real or fake mouse/keyboard.
Reversing the code (as opposed to memory structures) is very hard these days, though, and not because of anti-cheat software, but because of the high-end anti-piracy runtimes and layers upon layers of abstractions which are annoying to analyze in assembly. (But sure, not impossible, and I am sure people are doing this considering the crazy amounts people are willing to pay for private aimbots).
For a system programming geek its all very interesting and intellectually stimulating, but boy does it ruin the fun of multiplayer gaming :-( I think the best way to protect against cheaters would be to run streaming-only servers where all the processing happens server-side.
Yup, no respect for the people who published the article. It was one paragraph of content impossibly diluted. TLDR: some idiots allowed USB sicks to be plugged into the supposedly air-gapped system. Hilarity ensued.
Those things come with a cost. Erode self esteem and reinforce the idea that failure is a very real option, since "its easy to get back on the horse later".
My piano teacher tells me that every single mistake takes two successes to undo, and I think this is the same with habit forming. Keep failing and you are not going to get better at getting back on the horse, you will get better at quitting and accepting defeat.
> Erode self esteem and reinforce the idea that failure is a very real option
I feel differently about failure. I think failure failure is always, constantly, an option. But that doesn't mean it should erode my self esteem.
I don't want to negate your piano teacher's advice, because I think there's an element of truth in there, and I'm not sure what your goals are. But as a fellow (hobby) pianist who gave it away for 5 years from burnout, I now prefer to follow Stephen King's advice:
There’s also the problem where avoiding failure leads to more conservative goals. If you look at failure as a thing to avoid, you won’t try as hard as songs when you’re learning piano. You might get good, but you’ll never reach your potential.
Reaching your potential may not be compatible with experiencing joy through. In my experience I’ve been happier and better at doing things I like doing.
Always wanted to learn playing guitar, interact socially or starting a business but boy those makes me so bored.
I'd assume this thing peaks at 350W (or whatever) but idles at around 40w tops?