To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.

Oh, this is the first time you’ve left either hexbear or ml then.

The AdBlockalypse.

You really made an account just to post this singular comment?

Firstly, yeah… RDRO is utterly plauged with all sorts of cheaters using trainers and all kinds of cheats is full of crap, at least for PC.

The standard strategy you basically have to employ is that whenever you see something nonsense like that happen is you have to jump to another instance/lobby. Depending on your luck, you may have to do this every 15 to 60 minutes aaaand some cheats allow the cheater to follow you to your new lobby.

Secondly…

A few years back I was in RDRO and was attacked by a cheater.

I had a broke ass level 15ish character with the just a few of the least expensive guns.

They had infinite ammo. Teleport hopping. Spawned 10 additional NPCs versions of themselves, then of my character, then zombies, then legendary animals (basically fucking monsters).

All the while they’re scrambling their name in the scoreboard every minute and create spoofs to make it harder to actually do a report or have the grievance system actually work correctly.

I killed them all. I died over and over again, but I kept killing them. Whittled down the fake names and spoofs and kept doing the grievance thing until it was actually landing on one consistent name.

Then the cheater began spawning gigantic props like boats attached to their character, which rotated and hit with physics force when they rotated, which they could shoot out of but I could not shoot into.

But uh, I managed to juke my way through cracks in the collision mesh, then shoot him.

He got tired of this at some point… and just turned himself invisible.

But, by this point I’d been killed enough times that I’d managed to get him showing up on my radar.

I’d by then long since run out of ammo… and began stalking him, via radar, with just a knife and lasso, sometimes the running tackle with the lasso that leads into a hogtie, other times actually managing to sneak up behind him, executing an invisible foe.

After an hour and a half of this, he started slipping up, and I could see him attempting to flee me, teleport half a klik away and just stand there for 30 seconds, then move a bit, then pause again, presumably fiddling around in his menus.

I killed him a few more times in this state, and he quit, he left.

… I would have just jumped to another instance if he had not killed my horse.

Do not fuck with a man’s horse lol.

… anyway, yeah. hung up my hat after that. fucking nonsense.

According to Mutahar:

1. The Anti Cheat has already been bypassed by a free cheat menu on Windows.

2. He’s fairly sure he has figured out some kind of way to temporarily bypass (as in, it’ll probably get caught in a few weeks) the linux block by some kind of custom virtualization method (requiring only one GPU) that he says he may explain in detail at some point.

In general, he’s done with playing GTO.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSagozpKPs&pp=ygUSbXV0YWhhciBndGEgb25saW5l

But yeah, obligatory reminder for BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat games that refuse to allow linux play:

All these game devs have to do is flip a switch, click a few options in their developer portals, to allow BattleEye or EAC to work on linux, through Proton.

And its been that way for 3 years, since 2021.

There is literally no reason for games that use these services to not work on linux, the devs just don’t fucking care.

Yep, I’m only 35 and remember when almost all drivers generally only used hibeams in situations of serious low visibility due to fog or snow or rain, or a totally unlit road at night out in the middle of no where, and where it was common courtesy to turn your hibeams off when someone is coming toward you on the other side of the road, turn em back on when they pass.

Seems like basically no one does this at all any more, barring some longhaul truckers.

Its just super brights all the time.

If you have an astigmatism, just get fucked, crash and die I guess.

Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…

… because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.

They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.

In case people forgot:

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/active-listening-marketers-smartphones-ad-targeting-cox-media-group-1235841007/

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

They (basically any large online retailer or advertiser) are, in fact, listening to everything you say near your phone, near your alexa, your echo, your smart device.

Linking heard words and phrases with your known shopping activity + a gigantic dataset + statistical analysis = they can predict all kinds of things about you, with shockingly high accuracy, and thus aim products at you.

You know how archaeologists and detectives can make a decent profile of a person or group’s daily lifestyle by analyzing your garbage?

Welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia version of that.

Please, please, sue the World Bank Mr. Musk. I am so sure that will go well, and totally won’t result in anything bad for all of your massively debt financed businesses.

And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.

There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.

Make it a Starship exploding with dogecoins flying out of it.

I am still hopeful the Twitter HQ will become a homeless shelter one way or another: Looks like Musky boy just hasn’t been paying rent, so, fingers crossed.

I am remembering a lot of AAA games in the past two years that have launched and basically been unplayable for a day to two weeks due to some kind of combination of not enough servers, garbage netcode, or other game breaking bugs.

Elon just went to a different clown college.

A mandatory class at both AAA game dev flavored clown college and blood diamond mines flavored clown college seems to be the art of talking up a whole lot of cool innovative features and then going hugely over budget and development time and then cutting most of those features for a late delivery date.

(And no, I don’t care if the devs are good at their jobs but management fucked them! is the defense for AAA games. Sure, maybe that’s correct on an internal level. Doesn’t really matter for a consumable product. Would be nice if the idiot asshats got laughed out of the industry instead of new car collections, golden parachutes, but thats a whole 'nother discussion)

Its probably fairly straightforward:

Their new format and infrastructure for video hosting was not properly tested, and they did not expect the amount of bandwidth needed to support viewership demand.

Basically, same thing as a modern AAA live service game launch.

It probably isn’t a DDOS. Its probably just… a distributed amount of viewers requesting more bandwidth than they expected/knew how to serve.

Not if they disagree with a business strategy on profit potential, moral/ethical ramifications, debt management, buying out another business, doing a stock split or stock buyback, where to source a needed material or service from, whether or not to massively raise executive compensation, environmental concerns, or if they’re going to get fucked by a hostile takeover, or being acquired by a private equity firm, maybe they do want to outsource some part of this business or spin off a part, maybe they don’t…

You say that as if its just always immediately obvious to everyone what the correct path is, and that the primary focus of that path should be to maximize profit, which in and of itself is a bad assumption on its face and is also a matter of contention: do you want to keep doing bandaid solutions to ensure short term profitability, or do you want to cut back on profitability for a year to shore up your market position or develop a new branch of the business, or engage in a capital intensive plan that will likely guarantee profit in the long term?

Businesses are a bit more complicated than ‘the richest guys always agree and always know how to make the mostest money and they would never ever have conflicting opinions or interests with me!’

Is there anything else you can do with your stock, other than sell it to someone else?

This is where it starts to get complicated.

You can promise to sell you stock by a certain date in the future to someone, at a price the two of you agree upon now.

If the actual price of the stock goes below the previously agreed price, by that deadline, well then you probably gained money.

If the actual price of the stock goes above the previously agreed price by the previously agreed date, you probably lost money.

This gets even more complicated when you take out a loan to buy a stock, and then do the above.

Theres a whole lot more. Check out investopedia.

I always thought that crypto is such a scam especially because in the end, it has no value in itself, and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. If noone wants to buy it, well, you are fucked. Does it mean that stocks are exactly the same concept?

Its the same in that both crypto and stocks can crater to zero if there are no buyers.

It is different in that crypto, as you say, is completely digital and nontangible, whereas most businesses on a stock exchange have at least a basis for their stock valuation in real world assets, products, services, revenue flows, profit margins and such.

Basically, what is more likely to go completely tits up?

A random NFT scheme?

A brand new start up IPO?

A long established industry giant?

Probably the 1st then 2nd then 3rd.

Or is the price set by some different mechanism than crypto is - pure demand from people willing to buy?

Ultimately they are both markets, which have prices ultimately determined by what people feel is a fair price.

Both involve projecting possible rise or fall in the value of the asset (stock vs crypto coin), but in the case of crypto, there is usually 0 actual underlying fundamentals, there is no business model beyond ‘if we all invest in this it will be worth more money’, which works until the price goes high enough that usually the person or group that invented the crypto sells all of their crypto. This causes panic and everyone else sells off for much less.

Functionally, that means a whole bunch of people lost money, and the originators made a whole bunch of money.

A pump and dump scheme, its usually extremely illegal.

Crypto bros kept acting like the laws governing finance did not apply to them.

Turns out, the laws do apply to them, and even as bullshit as the stock market is for the average joe, basically the entire crypto sphere collapsed in 6 months after it turned out that they were basically all cooking their accounting books and doing all kinds of fraud.

While the stock market is largely bullshit in many ways, it is at least regulated to prevent many different kinds of financial fraud, while the crypto sphere is almost entirely comprised of con artists and their suckers.

Sure, one share is one vote, but uh that means that whoever has the most shares wins the vote. IE: one or two very wealthy individuals or groups votes count for as much as potentially millions of other people.

The average working class joe investor basically never has the power to really influence anything.

There are also tons and tons of different kinds of shares and different kinds of voting power, and often there are setups that basically mandate some particular entity always has a significantly large portion of shares.

Basically, its not democratic at all, unless you subscribe to the ‘some pigs are more equal than other pigs’ kind of democracy.

EDIT: A metaphor one can use is killstreaks in COD vs TF2s randomized damage.

In the long run, given a set of purely equally skilled players, CODs kill streak mechanic will functionally randomly choose certain players and elevate their score higher and higher. A positive feedback loop. You end up with a very uneven distribution of scores because mild success is rewarded with wild success.

Whereas in the same situation with TF2, the semi randomized damage across players of equal skill basically would result in a much more even scattering of overall player scores.

Capitalism rewards you more the more money you have, and the more money you have, the easier it is to make even more money, which leads to the haves and the have nots.

In a Co-Op business model, by contrast, its often one person, one vote. There are barely any of these in the US though… we love our entrenched wealth divide between those bastard wealthy asshats and all of us temporarily embarrassed millionaires who will get rich one day.