sp3ctr4l

I’ve hated him since before Trump’s first election, correctly realizing he is a fradulent try hard con man megalomaniac, and have had to endure a decade of people mocking me ‘oh yeah like you are smarter than the richest man on earth yeah right fuck off’.

Yep. I am smarter than him. So were half the people hurling those insults at me, actually.

Elon is actually quite stupid at everything other than conning people.

Much like Trump.

Hehe sounds about right.

Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…

And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.

I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.

But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.

We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.

This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.

Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.

It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.

It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.

But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.

Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.

Exactly.

In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.

You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.

Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.

… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.

-.-

In the last minutes of the stream, Musk made a hardcore difficulty character he named Kekius Maximus, a 4chan-esque meme name he’s used as his display name on X. But Kekius Maximus was not long for the world. Musk died to one of the game’s tutorial bosses due to a bad connection, which subsequently concluded the stream, ending another sad, weird data point in the Elon Musk fake gamer saga.

The guy who claimed he was a top tier Quake player… who in actuality, was only scoring well in online matches, because he played on the T1 high speed, stupid expensive business line at his Zip2 business in the 90s… and performed terribly at LANs…

Well here he is 30 years later, now dying to a tutorial boss, partially due to the shitty connection of his own ISP.

Amazing.

Fucking called it.

This shit isn’t hard to predict, yet huge numbers of people treat you like a delusional conspiracy theorist when you say that a tech service provided by a company/org that converts into a public corp and plans to do an IPO… is now fully shifting into ‘make everything shitty and squeeze as much money out of it as possible’ mode.

This is basically completely unrelated to CoD… but…

Halo Infinite released some Juneteenth (a holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the US/ themed cosmetics a year or two back.

The color scheme for armor was named ‘Bonobo’ somewhere in the filename or metadata… which is a monkey.

Oops.

https://kotaku.com/halo-infinite-juneteenth-bonobo-freedom-emblem-nameplat-1849065291

… MegaCorps are not your friend, they’re just doing performative marketing.

Hours watched != Hours stored.

Any number of either is going to be huge for Twitch… but this is a no brainer, if a huge chunk of your costs don’t even generate a significant amount of views, muchless actual revenue… yeah it makes sense to stop making storing them.

You’ve probably got something that looks like the US income distrobution chart, probably evennmore extreme, for # of videos vs # view time, ie:

Replace the x axis with ‘videos by watchtime percentile’ and the y axis with ‘actual watchtime’.

So, you draw a horizontal line, everything that doesn’t get above about $150k on this chart is not being watched by enough people to be worth hosting (hosting realtime access to videos for tens of millions of people is very expensive).

Then, work backwards to figure out a cap for storage that applies to everyone, to be more fair than just outright de-listing videos by low recent view count, which will result in roughly the same amount of no longer provided storage, and allow 2 months for people to save off platform whatever they want, and choose how to trim down their hosted videos on their own.

The people complaining about this in the article are largely hysterical and delusional.

Perfect embodiment of ‘always online’ brain.

They genuinely believe Twitch is some kind of public good, some kind of default level of infrastructure like plumbing, that just works, forever, with no problems, because magic.

Hosting videos almost no one watches is a waste of money, and deleting them is among the least worst things Twitch can do to keep the lights on.

Twitch is a massive loss leader in a hyperprofit oriented conglomerate megacorp, in a shit-tier economy thats primed to become a burning-dumpster-of-shit-tier economy very soon.

Amazon is giving people months of warning.

But people are freaking out.

…

If you want to save some videos… go buy a 1 or 2 or 4 TB HDD, internal or external, and start saving shit to it. 4 TB HDDs look like they’re going for between roughly $80 to $150, or about 4 to 8 chipotle burritos delivered via personal chauffeur.

The vast majority of Twitch streams and thus highlights are in 1080p, 60fps, 6K bitrate.

Thats roughly 4.5 GB per hour, and thats rounding up.

These people complaining about ‘oh it’d be a full time job to save 5,000 of footage’…

Come on.

Thats 6 of those 4 TB HDDs, for 5000 hours.

https://github.com/ihabunek/twitch-dl

This has been around since 2018, and there are batch downloader clis that people have built off of it.

You wanna save 5000 hours of your shit?

Buy some HDDs, learn how to run some python.

…

The level of entitlement is … just comical, basically.

The alternatives Twitch would be looking at, instead of reducing cost by axing tons of videos almost no one watches, would be things like:

Making watching streaming in higher resolutions/frame rates a premium tier cost for viewers,

Dramatically amping up the presence of unskippable advertisements,

Dramatically altering the revenue splits from ad revenue and how much of a streamer subscribers payment actually goes to the streamer,

Or keeping that split the same but jacking up viewer subscription/bit costs.

Why would this be unexpected?

Proton already handed over the IP of a climate protester to authorities several years ago, while boasting that they had a no log policy.

https://therecord.media/protonmail-forced-to-collect-an-activists-ip-address-in-police-investigation

Every time, in the past few years, that I bring this up, everyone just acts like I’m setting an impossible standard and no alternative exists.

Proton has been shady for years.

Its one of the US’s three main social credit score companies, that determines your ability to rent or buy a home or car or get a job by selling your credit data to companies that perform background checks on you, background credit checks which you pay for.

Yeah.

OP suggests the ease of use for just using ProtonMail and ProtonVPN all bundled together.

Maybe don’t do that. Maybe use Proton VPN, but find a seperate and/or more secure email provider.

Tuta, Mailfence, StartMail are all comparably secure compared to ProtonMail.

Posteo is possibly more secure/safe from a legal subpoena in that they claim to not log IPs, and they claim they anonymize your account from your payment method… though I have not researched it enough to personally say yes they do this and it actually works to prevent the legal info request situation.

EDIT: Also, just to throw this in, another weird thing about IVPN is that they are actually legally based in Gibraltar, which puts it in a fairly weird legal situation where it does not appear to be totally clear how a legal request for data from them would actually be processed.

Proton VPN is no log…

But they have and will turn over your real IP address from your ProtonMail account if legally ordered to.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/6/22659861/protonmail-swiss-court-order-french-climate-activist-arrest-identification

https://proton.me/legal/transparency

You know, I think you are right.

I meant to say when the discussion forums were integrated and basically autogenerated for any game, when Steam went from ‘this is our game launcher’ to ‘soon we will sell every pc game that has ever and will ever exist.’

But when it comes to hiring people to moderate things?

Insanity.

Facebook does this by hiring tens, hundreds of thousands of moderators in economically undeveloped nations, managed by a few thousand based in the US or EU.

Its a horror show sweatshop of constant exposure to the most horrible content imaginable, which basically drives many employees to suicide or insanity.

There is no AI that can do this.

… Valve could maybe? probably? afford to hire hundreds of thousands of low cost moderators following Facebook’s model.

But I’m pretty sure that they would basically go, oh, we are now legally responsible for what is said on our platform?

Fuck it, nuke 99% of it from orbit, do a bit of redesign, hire a much smaller cadre of moderators, who will manage a vastly stripped down and more cumbersome and more restrictive ability to comment on or discuss things.

… What would be the downside to that?

12 year olds and morons with no impulse control now use discord instead of the steam forums?

People maybe go back to making their own game based community websites/forums?

… Who is going to stop using Steam because the discussion forums dissapear?

Because all the default comment posting and viewing settings for all the other ways you can leave a public message now flip to being restrictive and time delayed?

I really do stand by my other statement in this thread: You could erase everything that is not from a human, manually pinned discussion thread and nothing of value would be lost.

Bingo.

It’s been that way since its inception, astronauts with gun meme or whatever.

Steam discussion forums … kind of famously do not have or require any active, human moderation.

Basically, there’s a simple ‘foul word detector’, and that’s about it.

You could nuke everything that is not a manually pinned thread, and nothing of value would be lost.

Even though EAC and BattlEye have both supported linux for 3 years now, and the devs don’t actually have to do anything as Proton functionally ports the game from Windows to Linux automatically at no cost to them.

… They’re lying.

Maybe for a smaller game studio, I could actually believe they don’t know these things.

But massive AAA studios that have direct business ties to MSFT?

They’re lying.

They’re saying anything they can to slow down linux adoption, because MSFT wants to dominate as a PC gaming OS.

They used to just ignore, play dumb, feign ignorance or perhaps just actually be incompetent… now they’re just lying to our faces.

Sure Apex. Show us your stats for how many cheaters you caught who were running on Windows vs running on Linux, and show us how at least a smidgen of methodology you used to determine the bare metal OS of someone running on a VM.

Cheating software running on Linux is more challenging to detect than Windows-based kernel-level tools, and they require an increasingly higher level of attention from the Apex Legends team.

So, for starters, this is not a direct quote (of the interviewed Apex dev), so this is basically just the author’s opinion.

More to the point: Purchasable cheats that currently defeat AC on Apex are far, far more easy to find for Windows machines.

… and they defeat Kernel level AC on Windows all the time.

Also, Apex uses EAC which uh… supports linux, has for 3 years.

https://onlineservices.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck

EDIT 2: The article states Apex uses BattlEye, not EAC for AC… but all the info I can find on Apex says they use EAC? Maybe there was a recent change?

Either way, BattlEye supports linux/SteamDeck as well, also for 3 years now.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3104663180636096966

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-deck/proton-battleye-anti-cheat-support

I mean maybe there is some truth to cheat developers preferring to develop their cheats on linux…many programmers prefer to develop things on linux… but they develop them for Windows users.

Like… I obviously do not support cheating, so I won’t post the links… but a quick web search very, very easily reveals that all the cheats one can purchase… well they work on Win 10/11… no support for linux is indicated.

Granted I am no uberl33th4x0r, but I don’t see any Apex cheats which are easily acquirable which support linux.

…

EDIT: Oh right, it is probably also worth mentioning that after CrowdStrike Y2K’d half of the world’s enterprise Windows machines… through pushing a malformed update… that interfaces directly with the Windows kernel…

… MSFT is now re-evaluating giving kernel level access to 3rd parties, and is looking to create higher level APIs (above the Kernel) that are less likely to expose Windows to massive system stability errors from 3rd parties, and looks to want to at the very least have much more involvement with reviewing any 3rd party code that accesses the kernel:

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3483641/crowdstrike-backs-microsofts-demand-for-reducing-kernel-level-access.html

https://www.securityweek.com/microsofts-take-on-kernel-access-and-safe-deployment-practices-following-crowdstrike-incident/

Maybe these Kernel level AC proponents are a bit worried about their Kernel access on Windows being either much more stringently reviewed, or limited, and are making a fuss about it by scapegoating linux, you know, as a misdirect?

Just a thought.

EDIT 3:

A quote from the article I linked pertaining to BattlEye

BattlEye’s Steam Deck compatibility is great news, but its arrival on the handheld comes with small print. According to the anti-cheat solution’s clarification, developers will have to “opt-in”, suggesting that specific games could forgo compatibility. While it’s hard to think of a compelling reason why a company would want to do this, Valve’s PC competitors could, in theory, use the option to their advantage.

Pff, what an outlandish notion, that giant AAA studios (who all have massive business ties to MSFT) would exert pressure to limit linux marketshare/adoption, what a baseless and silly worry.

=P

Hey, the final stage of Spore is getting finished!

… Has this image just not been updated since like 2014, or has it just not needed to be updated?

‘Under’ would have worked and been shorter.