tehmics

Servers often don't send player data that is outside of the immediate area of the player, but they have to for enemies that are nearby. If they walk around the corner and your client didn't know about it, then you'll be waiting for your ping time to even render the enemy. I.e. they walk around the corner and already shot you, then you see them suddenly appear a full players width away from the corner, and you die. Aka peekers advantage amplified.

Same deal with footstep sounds, bullet tracers, a player's shadow, etc. Your client needs to know where all this is coming from and it can't do that if it doesn't know the enemy exists and where. And that is a buffer zone for hackers to derive wall hacks from.

So basically, the overwhelming majority of servers do do all those things, since the late 90's. Hacks tend to work within those bounds. The most common, impactful and hard to detect cheats are based on providing perfect mechanical inputs. Aka aim hacks. Nothing about limiting info from the server can prevent that unless you also want the legitimate player to be unable to see their enemies.

It's great for parsing through the enshittified journalism. You know the classic recipe blog trope? If you ask chatgpt for a recipe, it just gives you one. Whether it's good or not is a different story, but chatgpt is leagues better at getting to the info you want than search has been for the last decade.

I think you're giving Tony way too much credit. This is exactly the type of shit he says on his show, it just has a much different impact at a political rally

I love Leo and Patrick. I think Leo is still doing The New ScreenSavers and Patrick is off doing an AV podcast last I checked. I miss their shows on rev3 too

I'll definitely throw a can of tuna on a box of Mac to get some protein in there. It somehow feels slightly classier than the cut up hotdogs of my childhood

Ok this one is cursed. You win

Smash em up and it's not much different than Doritos or something. Not my go to but I've done it in a pinch

Instant mashed potatoes with American cheese melted in, and a variety of seasonings, butter, toppings etc. It's a great, cheap way to make a bowl out of random leftovers, protein or whatever. But I wouldn't dare serve it to someone.

'quickadilla' I'll slap a tortilla on a cold pan, turn on the heat and build it right in the pan while it heats up with shredded cheese and left over meat. Takes 5 minutes and it's at least as good as Taco Bell, and actually warm and melted.

More of a meal I'd actually be willing to share, but not brag about because it's sort of a bastardization of cultures. But I'll often make a curry using Japanese curry blocks, and season chicken in a vaguely Indian style, then put it over rice. Really simple and delicious. I'm kind of proud of it but I wouldn't even know how to explain it to someone, much less actually serve it.

Spread gun is even better if you manage to offset the spread. It can only have x bullets active at once, so if you stack the bullets it will turn into the highest DPS machine gun in the game

Yeah I had the GOTY edition with shivering isles etc, but if it came with the horse armor I have no memory of it. I certainly didn't buy it with horse armor in mind. I'd like to know if that was included in the figures.

We know pretty damn well that people buy cosmetics though, especially in the current gaming landscape. So he's right, and we all lost something important here

Okay that's fine, but when websites are effectively writing

if user_agent_string != [chromium]
     break;

It doesn't really matter how good compatibility is. I've had websites go from nothing but a "Firefox is not supported, please use Chrome" splash screen to working just fine with Firefox by simply spoofing the user agent to Chrome. Maybe some feature was broken, but I was able to do what I needed. More often than not they just aren't testing it and don't want to support other browsers.

The more insidious side of this is that websites will require and attempt to enforce Chrome as adblocking gets increasingly impossible on them, because it aligns with their interests. It's so important for the future of the web that we resist this change, but I think it's too late.

The world wide web is quickly turning into the dark alley of the internet that nobody is willing to walk down.

Yeah this is a hard one to navigate and it's the only thing I've ever found that challenges my philosophy on the freedom of information.

The archive itself isn't causing the abuse, but CSAM is a record of abuse and we restrict the distribution not because distribution or possession of it is inherently abusive, but because the creation of it was, and we don't want to support an incentive structure for the creation of more abuse.

i.e. we don't want more pedos abusing more kids with the intention of archival/distribution. So the archive itself isn't the abuse, but the incentive to archive could be.

There's also a lot of questions with CSAM in general that come up about the ethics of it in that I think we aren't ready to think about. It's a hard topic all around and nobody wants to seriously address it beyond virtue signalling about how bad it is.

I could potentially see a scenario where the archival could be beneficial to society similar to the FBI hash libraries Apple uses to scan iCloud for CSAM. If we throw genAI at this stuff to learn about it, we may be able to identify locations, abusers and victims to track them down and save people. But it would necessitate the existence of the data to train on.

I could also see potential for using CSAM itself for psychotherapy. Imagine a sci-fi future where pedos are effectively cured by using AI trained on CSAM to expose them to increasingly mature imagery, allowing their attraction to mature with it. We won't really know if something like that is possible if we delete everything. It seems awfully short sighted to me to delete data no matter how perverse, because it could have legitimate positive applications that we haven't conceived of yet. So to that end, I do hope some 3 letter agencies maintain their restricted archives of data for future applications that could benefit humanity.

All said, I absolutely agree that the potential of creating incentives for abusers to abuse is a major issue with immutable archival, and it's definitely something that we need to figure out, before such an archive actually exists. So thank you for the thought experiment.