a lil bee 🐝

I think the distributed nature of Mastodon keeps government control from being an issue. It would be kind of cool as a space for citizens to ask for assistance or air grievances while giving the politicians an officially owned space for things like announcements.

Ah, good call, I forgot the context. Does this apply if he escalates to supreme court and they grant certiorari?

That wouldn’t be necessary. Presidents have the power to pardon and nothing says it cannot be used on the self.

In the eyes of most Americans, goats are livestock and dogs are pets. The dog getting the attention is not surprising at all.

Define “BLM”, “protests”, and “success” because any combination of different variables produces a different result. Additionally, even then, there is a lot of nuance to being successful when it comes to political movements.

The protests undoubtedly brought more attention to policing and racial issues in general. They obviously didn’t solve either problem. Some states passed progressive policing laws, some regressed out of spite or in reacting to the other states.

Then you also have the category of “well, it might have made an impact on this but we’ll never know”. For instance, does Biden win in 2020 without the Black Lives Matter protests? No idea, and nobody truly does or even can. That would be an enormous impact on many things, some of which may not even have been goals of the protests.

Or, maybe it was never quite so bad as we all believed? There is no doubt that the internet and social media impacted all of our lives and routines drastically, but I think some of the impacts of social media are exaggerated by layfolk just reacting to how they feel about it. There are tons of great studies showing its impact to the mental state of children and we have to work on that, but I don’t think it has entirely uprooted the childhood experience. Just my two cents.

Lol I guess it wouldn’t bother me much. I’m a SocDem, which makes me fail the purity tests pretty quickly. I just want a movement with a leftist heart and a pragmatic head, so we can actually win rights instead of performing while the Titanic sinks.

Why is it that everytime someone on the left does something stupid online, it’s automatically propaganda? Why can’t it just be the case that there are a lot of politically and generally uneducated people that are part of the movement, which is consistent with every populist movement for all time? This has to be reckoned with and mitigated if the left ever wants to actually hold power and do something with it.

I just want to say that this was a fantastic thread, and thank you for posting. There are some great suggestions in here.

Wow, those are some serious Licensed Insurance Agent skills

And yet, they will dance around looking for anything else to say. It’s so bizarre!

If you’re building a military, de-individualization makes sense and builds cohesion. If you’re building a society or a relationship, de-individualization is gross and abusive when used with intent.

Yeah I’d be less worried about internal pressures (which should be minimal at a halfway decently run org) and more about the externals. I don’t think you would actually end up dealing with anything, but I’d know those reliant huge corps are pissed.

Man, your on-call situation sounds rad! I was salaried and just traded off on-call shifts with my team members, no extra time off. Luckily though, our systems were pretty quiet so it hardly ever amounted to much.

That’s fair. Yall, I was really not trying to be shitty. It was just shorthand I used, thinking of their HQs. No ill intent intended and I apologize for any harm it caused.

I’ve been an SRE for a few large corps, so I’ve definitely played this game. I’m with you that it was likely just the FB identity or ad provider causing most of these issues. So glad I’m out of that role now and back to DevOps, where I’m no longer on call.

The country where all of those services are maintained and hosted in… Just colloquial shorthand, not trying to be exclusionary.

Looking at the downmeter shot someone posted above, it’s half the SREs in the country. Not sure what the root cause will be, but damn that’s a lot of money down the tubes. I would not want to be the person who cost Meta and Google their precious thirty 9’s of availability lol.

I’m a DevOps engineer by trade, and do a lot of work with network security. “Never trust anything on the other side of a connection” is fine and all as a rule of thumb, but real solutions have more nuance than that. What is “trust”? Should I just never connect to anything? Obviously we have to, so we’re already assuming some level of “trust”. There are always degrees of trust, and a peer to peer game server is a higher degree than browsing a site hosted by a server, is what I think the developer meant.

Now, I agree with you, this shouldn’t be some full substitute for proper network security or whatever, but I don’t think they’ve given any indication that’s the case. I can also speak from experience that certain choices in tooling are thrust upon dev teams at times, for cost or “political” reasons. It’s also fully possible it’s just a bad call from a techie who worked on a prior project with it or something.

Hey, I’m not arguing that mtx are a good thing for consumers or anything like that, and I’m with you that they’ve had an adverse effect on progression systems. I just see the logic in their reasoning for having anticheat. Anything client side could be subverted by those same cheats, and it still wouldn’t address the second issue of the impact on the shared galactic conflict feature. All that said, this was a poor choice of implementation and I don’t think it will pay off for them. I don’t think you’d be seeing the same backlash if it was something like EAC. Maybe from the techy crowd on Lemmy, but not from the average consumer.

The developer lays out their reasons:

HELLDIVERS 2 is a co-op/PvE game, why do we even need Anti-Cheat?

That’s a great question, and there’s two related but separate points to it:

First, we want everyone to have a great time playing HELLDIVERS 2, with friends, ex-friends or randoms. What we’ve seen in some of our and others’ games is that rampant cheating tends to have a very negative effect on players openness to playing, especially with randoms.

There’s an anecdote from HELLDIVERS 1 I’d like to share:

When we released HELLDIVERS 1 on PC there was effectively no anti-cheat implemented. Additionally HELLDIVERS 1 uses a peer-to-peer networking model, and that means, from a security perspective, each game client will blindly trust each other.

Shortly after release we noticed there was a cheat going around which granted 9999 research samples. Unfortunately any non-cheaters in the same mission would also be granted 9999 research samples. These non-cheating players now had their entire progression ruined through no fault of their own.

We were able to deal with a lot of these early issues without using a third party solution, but it took a lot of work, and most of it was done reactively.

Incidentally HELLDIVERS 2 also uses a peer-to-peer networking model, but this time around we’re trying to be more proactive and make sure everyone can play the intended experience.

Second is the Galactic War. There’s this huge metagame going in the cloud which all players (and game clients) participate in. Even though we have other countermeasures in place, a cracked game client could make it easier to disrupt the Galactic War, which would sour everyone’s experience

I think those are reasonable explanations for anti cheat having a place in their game. I’ve been hit with that example scenario before in other games and it just ruins the fun entirely for a lot of progression-driven players, like me.

What I haven’t seen a good answer for is the reason for this AC solution specifically. It seems like they could have gone for something much more popular and compatible than what they did. If it was for cost reasons, I think that’s a short sighted decision. Regardless, it has me thinking twice about a game I was fairly certain about trying, so that’s disappointing.