At least it adds noise to the system. It’s better than the people who are happily training the AI.

What’s ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That’s why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.

AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says “tell me which images contain a motorcycle”. It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.

Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it’s my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.

Mmmmmmm baking engineer…

You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.

So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.

I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.

It’s amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced “war mode” and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.

What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.

Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren’t enough victims to pick on.

I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn’t want to grief others would have been relatively easy.

A bunch of paper tossed into a corner could get wet, mouldy, get munched on by rats, etc. But, I know what you mean. Spinning plates full of magnetized bits with a connector technology that only lasts a decade at most is hardly going to be reliable, even if stored under ideal conditions.

To me, this is just another story of the music industry’s technical incompetence.

Even in the 1990s, everyone would have known that hard drives were not a long-term archival storage solution. This is like crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it in the corner, then being upset decades later when your “archival solution” had issues.

Yeah, I was going to say that we know that Ea-nasir’s copper was shitty.

Obviously not everything from 1750 BC survived, but we do know that certain mediums are more likely to stand the test of time than others. Something physical with the writing carved in? That will probably last. Something with pigment on vellum, that won’t be quite as good, but you can store a lot more information per kg. Something involving bits? That won’t last even a quarter century. Something involving bits stored using magnetism and retrieved using mechanical motion? Good luck keeping that for even a decade.

But, the thing we’ve shown will 100% stand the test of time is keeping the information flowing, though at the cost of some degradation. In the past, this was one generation telling stories to the next. When that happens, not only does the information get passed on, the language used is subtly updated in time with the evolution of the language. You don’t need to learn Akkadian cuneiform to read it, it’s available in whatever the modern language is. Similarly, if digital files keep getting passed around, it doesn’t matter if the original came on a floppy disk, and floppy disk readers are now gone. The file exists, stored in whatever medium is current. But, you get degradation with this process too. Music might be turned into mp3s with some data getting lost. Photos might be resized, cropped, recompressed, etc.

If I wanted something to be preserved exactly as-is for centuries, I’d carve it into a non-precious metal (so nobody melted it down). If I wanted something to be easily accessible for centuries, I’d try to share it as widely as possible to keep it “in motion” and in a format that was constantly up to date.

Thank you for proving that the left lives in a bubble just like the right.

gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton’s favor

I don’t think people realize how close that means the race was. 50/50 is like a coin flip. 35% is like rolling a six-sided die and getting either a 1 or a 2. It’s not the most likely outcome, but it’s not a surprising result either.

Your well come.

I miss Allie’s blog alot.

Noone should of aloud this code to go out the door. Atleast alot of other people people probably complained aswell, so your apart of a bigger group, incase you were worried.

COBOL

If you’re going to forbid any 2-letter initialism because it might have naughty connotations, you’re not going to be left with many options.

Yeah, Display Port is old, but I’ve never seen that P and D symbol before, or at least never noticed it. And, even if it existed before Display Port over USB, you’d think that that potential confusion was a good opportunity to come up with a new logo for something that would be put next to a USB port.

It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

I think the goal was always that you’d only ever need one type of port and one type of cable and that that port and cable could do anything. Unfortunately, because there are so many revisions and so many features are optional, you’ve now got a situation where the port is the right shape, the cable fits into the port, but you can’t get the thing to work without reading the fine print, or without decoding obscure logos.

I just love that in a world with Power Delivery (PD) they decided that the best way to indicate Display Port (DP) was to have an ambiguous symbol involving a P and a D.

Ah, I would say that is worse than piracy, since you deprive them of the ground for a time.

Maybe, in my mind I was picturing a situation where someone had lots of property and didn’t realize that anything had happened. I see your point though, that in theory you’re depriving them of the use of it whereas with copyright infringement there isn’t even a second where they can’t enjoy their own property. They only potentially lose out on a sale.

Sneaking into a concert that isn’t full is probably a better analogy. You get the experience of the concert without paying for it, and the venue owner maybe loses out on a sale without knowing it.

Also, “piracy” or “copyright infringement” isn’t theft in any sense.

A key element of theft is that you deprive the rightful owner of something. You now have it and they no longer do. What makes it wrong is that the person who should have it no longer does. It’s not that you have it. That’s why the punishment for “mischief” where someone completely destroys something belonging to someone else is similar to the punishment for the theft of that same object.

Copyright infringement is breaking the rule that the state imposed giving someone the exclusive right to control the copying of something. You’re not depriving anyone of anything tangible when you infringe a copyright. They still have the original, they still have any copies they made, any copies they gave out or sold are still where they were. The only thing you’re doing is violating the rule that gave them exclusive control. If you’re depriving someone of anything, it’s depriving them of the opportunity they might have had to make money from selling a copy.

If anything, copyright infringement is more similar to trespassing than to theft. Just like copyright infringement, trespassing involves not allowing someone to control who accesses their property. If you sneak onto someone’s campground property and have a bonfire party, the person loses the opportunity to rent out the campground for the bonfire, and any money they might have received for doing that. But, if you sneak in and sneak out and leave no trace, you could argue that nobody is harmed.

I haven’t gotten into the Beta, so I haven’t played it, but I’m curious, is the game designed so you can’t do anything without walking, or is it so that you can creep along at a snail’s pace without walking but to actually make real progress you have to walk?

It seems to me like you could use the psychology of a Pay To Win / Microtransactions game to motivate people but by using walking instead of money.