I own a steamdeck, and have been playing BlackOps III (with no anticheat)
It's a total mess. Even with a handful of players actively playing, I almost always find a cheater. I get that anticheats are not "convenient" but to say that we should get rid of them, it's a bit naive.
Yep, cheating is absolutely rampant in any game where the anticheat is ineffective or nonexistent to the point that it’s barely worth playing games like that in online mode.
It’s very frustrating, because I don’t like the idea of rootkit-like anticheat either, but if reports and moderation were the only way to keep cheating at bay, the companies building the games in question would need to keep a team employed full-time to exclusively investigate reports and dole out bans. Even then, this team probably wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough to deal with them all in a timely manner, leaving the problem still somewhat unfixed.
Perhaps the only real solution is for competitive games go current-gen-console-only, where end to end control is a given and invasive anticheat is kept separate from our computers.
Back when I played TF2 circa 2010 I helped friends run our own servers and we would just manually ban the cheaters. If they came back me or someone else would ban them again until they got pissy and moved on to greener pastures.
A great technique we used in my servers, it that involves having repeated servers, and a server culture where some trusted players are mods, as otherwise the cheaters vote to ban enough non cheaters to turn the game into a jungle. TF2 itself turned into a cheating horror as Valve servers were added, and the typical player just clicked on quick game, basically destroying the server culture, as you would almost never get new users.
Ah. Now I remember why I stopped playing. Valve funneled everyone away into their own servers and our private server died. After that the play experience, as you say, slowly turned into a horrorshow. Forgot about that bit. Oof.
I understand that medium is not absolutely necessary and ideally we would have an open source tool that is easy to deploy. In the meanwhile, I use medium quite a bit.
When we use medium, we tell our audience we don't care if they get bombarded with bad UX, like subscription popups. And we tell our accessibility activist audience that we don't want them to read us at all.
I immediately nope out of medium articles. I black list medium on my search engines. And I criticize medium authors on HN instead of reading their articles. This is all with the hope of bringing back more accessible old school blogs.
If I wrote a blog in 2024, I would use a free GitHub Pages site, and use a markdown based blog generator. This distributes my message for free, without attacking my audience's attention with sign up screens.
Yeah. Medium did help to consolidate searching for blogs, but it also vastly increased the extremely low effort, and encourages bringing hot garbage takes to the spotlight.
I have yet to find a technical writer on medium that isn’t basically musing about what they learned that day in boot camp, or just regurgitating some stupidity they just read about how “FP is totally actually extremely performant if you just squint really really hard while lying about numbers!”
The bar for “good” on medium is already so insanely low that I question their move here.
I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me.
Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Regardless, I could not stop thinking how having physical media would avoid these drops.
Unless you have a Sony Smart TV. I bought one a few years ago and the ethernet port is a 100 Mb. To stream from Sony's own movie service, they tell you to use WiFi:
> 7: The Pure Stream™ feature requires an Internet speed of at least 43 Mbps. To enjoy at the highest speed of 80 Mbps, you need an Internet speed of 115 Mbps or faster. Ethernet (wired LAN) connections are limited to 100 Mbps due to the TV's product specifications. Therefore, to enjoy 80 Mbps with Pure Stream™ functionality, you need to connect to a Wi-Fi router that supports IEEE 802.11 ac/n (wireless LAN).
Why I would want to connect a malvertisement tracker siphoning partyhouse to my network and subsequently the internet is beyond me, but whatever floats thy boat.
Because almost 100% of the time that is the only way that you can get legitimate 4K ultra high definition high dynamic range content over streaming services. They won't give it to you over your web browser on your PC. Doesn't matter what operating system you run. It's got to be a set top box or a smart TV.
Depending on who you ask, requirements per 4K UHD stream are about 25-30Mb/s. This is not a number that any kind of modern wifi should have difficulty keeping up with. I have absolutely no problems with 4K UHD streaming over wifi; mixture of Wifi 6 and 6E throughout. In fact, Wifi 6E is usually faster than wired GigE.
I routinely cap out at ~10MB/s over 5GHz Wifi 6 (wireless AX). This obviously depends on your hardware and environment, but needless to say I always just connect good old copper if I need speed.
Also: Do not trust those "<four digits> mbps over wifi!" claims on marketing, they're all worthless horseshit. The numbers are derived from ideal conditions you would never find in the real world.
I agree that those "AX9000" marketing numbers are fake.
>This obviously depends on your hardware and environment
This is the key point. If you have:
A high link rate client.
A high link rate access point.
Line of sight between the two, same room.
A low utilization and interference channel.
No one else heavily using your Wi-Fi.
Non-bad drivers for Wi-Fi.
Then TCP throughput of about 1/2 to 2/3 link rate is possible. 1200 Mbps link rate yields 600-700 Mbps speed tests. Some applications have small TCP windows so their throughput drops on 5 ms latency wireless versus <1 ms wired.
Yes if you plug you always get 920 Mbps throughput.
I mean, I literally see 1.2Gb/s over Wifi 6E from my MacBook Air M3 to my NAS, which is more than I get over wired GigE. So that's not marketing, that's (very-micro) real-world benchmarking.
I do live in a house on a 1.5 acre parcel, so I'm not getting much congestion on the Wifi bands. Even so, I would regularly get 400Mb/s on Wifi 6 in our condo in NY where you could see 30 or more networks.
I do nightly backups of my critical machines to a central server, some are connected wirelessly. The server is obviously hard wired.
Whereas the wired ones upload their backups at full gigabit speed (~100MB/s including overhead), the wireless ones only ever upload at ~10MB/s. I might see it go up to ~30MB/s if I'm lucky, but we're talking pigs flying over blue moons.
The wireless machines range from "one wall away" to "other side of the bloody house", but they're all the same. Even if I get one one sitting right next to the router it won't do more than ~10MB/s. I'm also located in the middle of nowhere in terms of EMI, so the air is clear.
Wireless is bullshit. If you need speed, just run copper and save yourself the grief. You only use wireless when the convenience of not running copper and/or being mobile trumps the lack of speed and reliability.
Eh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches.
I find it roughly equal as things go.
The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer.
That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a long while.
The full solution would be to just let people cache the entire video and watch directly from disk, but I believe that’s intolerable to the IP folks.
I remember when YouTube switched from it's original method of streaming to DASH. The old method was to basically pick a file and buffer up to N time in advance (I think it was based on the media length).
But the original DASH implementation was very aggressive about keeping a minimal buffer size and downgrading quality at the slightest hiccup. I was also on a not particularly great internet connection at the time, so I used to pause 720p at the start and let it buffer enough for uninterrupted playback, but YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. There were add-ons to force dash off to mitigate the problem but iirc YouTube was starting to make higher qualities dash exclusive.
Clearly someone at YouTube was optimising to reduce time-to-play and buffering but in a typical metrics driven approach, excluded the possibility that for some videos these were less bad problems than 360p videos. At that time I was watching a lot of let's plays and programming tutorials and most of the people were uploading content recorded and intended for 720p or 1080p, so unreadable text because of quality downgrades was a big problem for me at that time.
Nowadays I just brute force it by having comically excessive amounts of internet (2gbps ftth) so YouTube randomly deciding garbage quality is much rarer, but it still happens sometimes.
I'm so happy someone has explained this, because it's a problem that has bothered me for years and I always assumed it was an issue on my end. It's incredibly annoying when you can't make out what's happening in a video, set a higher bitrate then pause to wait for it to download, and it just freezes a couple seconds past the current point, which ends up making the whole video unwatchable.
I don't know what kind of internet these Google engineers are working with, but for people on shared wifi, or in dense urban areas where there is a lot of interference, or tethering to a 4G phone, or sitting on a train, or a mountain, or using a VPN, or living in a country where the government messes with the traffic, it just isn't realistic to expect users to have a fat pipe that never drops out.
>YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p.
If you're using the web player and manually set the quality, it should never downgrade the quality during playback. If your connection is too slow it'll just pause while it tries to buffer
Is this still true in the age of the smart TV? I’ve never looked but always presumed they had essentially the guts of a crappy Android phone with the radio transceivers replaced.
They get apps and updates now so I would’ve assumed some semi-reliable persistent storage. This really doesn’t even need to be persistent; resetting on reboot would be perfectly fine.
I’ve no doubt they would struggle to cache “real” 4K, but at the bitrate most of this 4K stuff is sent at, 1 GB of cache should be at least 5 minutes. Netflix recommends at least 15 Mbps for 4K streaming. Even doubled to 30Mbps, that’s ~4MB/s, or about 256 seconds of content cached per GB.
same, before he really spinned off into his antics, I was really considering buying a tesla. I ended up leasing a lexus instead. Next car will be full EV, but will never get a Tesla, and it is 100% because of this man's actions.
Teslas don't experience the network effect like a social network does, especially since they've opened up NACS/Supercharger to other car manufacturers.
I don't have a Facebook, Twitter or TikTok. And LinkedIn exists as nothing more than a glorified resume for me.
What is your point? I couldn't care less what other people do, only where my standards/beliefs lie. I can't/won't ever support Tesla due to Musk. If he didn't benefit from my purchase, I almost definitely would have done so.
Sure but I personally know 3 people in Sweden who got rid of their Teslas and won't ever purchase one again, that is from a very small anecdote but if it has happened within my very low sample size I'd guess that others are sharing a similar sentiment.
Two of those are older folks, not even that connected with tech in general (or much of the internet vitriol), if Musk's bad press is reaching them it seems to me a quite generalised issue.
The bad press is particularly bad in Sweden and was all over the main media, with Musk refusing to sign collective agreements with Tesla employees there, leading to strikes [e.g 1,2].
Eh only one of those examples includes the CEO literally retweeting nazi-adjacent stuff so it's a bit easier for me to hold tight on Tesla. Even my wife who is not a big tech follower will never consider a Tesla now.
I've voted R in almost every election up until 2016. Things have changed quite a bit the last 8 years.
Edit to add: I also interviewed to work at Tesla back a few years ago (before all the Twitter stuff). I thought Elon seemed pretty hard-driving but otherwise had no strong opinion. Only declined to move forward because the work/life balance seemed poor.
The conservative Sohrab Ahmari recently wrote a piece in which even he found Musk to be too conservative for his tastes. One of his complaints:
>A popular white-nationalist account with the handle “IAmYesYouAreNo” posts a meme declaring, “You are witnessing the biggest act of cuckoldry in human history. An entire civilisation willingly giving away its land and women.” Musk quotes the post, adding in his own words, “Accurate” (he has since deleted the response).
What's the mitigating context here? Can you adequately explain it for me?
Love the humblebrag. This "investing" method works until once day it doesn't. Don't get me wrong, HN is wrong a lot of times. Those two specific examples are about companies that are monopolies for all intents and purposes. Google and Meta pretty much control their primary markets. Tesla does *not* control their primary market. In fact it looks like their competitors are closing in on them very fast. No one was closing in on Google Search or Instagram/Whatsapp. The numbers never indicated that at any point in time. For tesla on the other hand...
Sentence Emotional Polarity has been solved since the mid-2000s. It was even an award winning paper at the ACL in the 2010 [0]
> believes some of these to be offensive
Offensiveness implies emotionally charged. It's not hard to tell if a sentence is offensive (ie. Emotionally charged) or inoffensive.
Heck. Copilot has literally just made a racist trope of African American "thug" just by me asking "A boss very angry in the mountains, maybe holding an airsoft". It automatically made an image of a yelling black man holding an AR15 [1]. This absolutely should have been terminated, which is what OpenAI and Meta's generator did.
I like Sam Altman's quote on this. "I think the world is gonna find out that if you can have 10 times as much code at the same price, you can just use even more. So write even more code."
I agree that it will have an impact, but I'm wary to predict something specific, whether negative or positive.
This. Current tech of AI is comparable to github and npm where when they got introduced (but less dramatic in terms of productivity improvement actually), what do you think happened when we got millions of open source libraries to do our job much more effectively? The number of developers did not shrink as a result, instead it skyrocketed!
I guess my point is I am not predicting anything. This has already been happening in the past year. Smaller companies are seeing a crunch; have we not continued to see layoffs at the big tech companies? The name of the game is reducing costs and headcount at the moment. There are certainly outliers, like OpenAI, that have massive demand but for the vast majority of companies this is not true.
The best that can be done, where possible, is to edit each comment down to whitespace, save that, and then delete it. But yeah, probably still not technically good enough.
I archive (in multiple places, including locally) all of the threads that I add as sources to my personal knowledge base. I'm sorry, but shared knowledge and wisdom I can refer to in the future is more important than your "protest voice" against a centralized platform.
I recommend that if you want to delete something, then delete your account only. Your username won't be visible, but the content still will be.
this seems very short sighted. mid/senior level engineers will not have the knowledge that they need to make the educated decision between 3-4 alternatives that chatgpt might spit out. There's also no liability for any decisions made if you can just blame chatgpt.
Also good managers inspire. Inspire growth, productivity, learning. Good luck with chatgpt
It's a total mess. Even with a handful of players actively playing, I almost always find a cheater. I get that anticheats are not "convenient" but to say that we should get rid of them, it's a bit naive.