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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Same kind of people who lie all the time to look good to others. Some people want to be awesome but know they suck, or even more pathetic don’t suck but can’t stand not being the best, and cheating is their pathway to getting the social results of being awesome without needing to develop the skills.

    The way I’ve seen it for ages now, being a loser isn’t just about losing games, it’s how you handle losing games and how much you internalize that. I see it as short for “sore loser”. Cheaters are losers in that sense.

    Though it makes the idea of them still losing despite cheating even more hilarious, which is why I love the idea of games that detect cheaters but stick them in cheating queues instead of just banning them.


  • There’s another whole category that also doesn’t care about what the game is running on the kernel: seperate device cheats. They act as a man in the middle for the input and output signals, and can auto shoot when you’ll hit or adjust your aim if you’re close but not quite there. Or just play for you entirely if it’s that good at processing the output.

    And blocking that isn’t likely possible without killing streaming for the game or convincing all users to get input devices with encrypted connections or they can’t play your game.

    I’d respond to the original comment that anyone who doesn’t have server side cheat detection isn’t serious about stopping cheaters. In any case, I just removed that game from my wishlist. Not that I needed another survival builder game anyways, though they do tend to catch my eye.





  • I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.

    Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.

    Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.


  • Except that wouldn’t make a difference as far as the children data protection bit is concerned. It goes WAY beyond porn and governs the handling of any data that can be tied back to a child, including IP address, online aliases, and email addresses.

    And it’s not even just about selling it, but processing it and storing it at all. There’s technical necessity exemptions, like routers aren’t subject due to handling the IP address for routing, but stuff like logging the submitting IP address with an image to be able to handle abusive submitters would count. While it is a legitimate use, part of the UK law is requiring consent for doing anything with the data of someone under 13, and the current legal situation is “well, most sites probably break the law but you can trust us that we won’t go after you if you give it your best shot”.

    I’m surprised more sites aren’t pulling out of the UK with a law that seems designed for selective enforcement to get rid of sites the government deems “bad” while letting the ones it deems “good” or “harmless” serve as examples that they are trying to be reasonable with the law that basically makes websites illegal because 12 year olds can use browsers and might go there without parental consent.

    Also handing the ones that do check age even more information, but it’s OK because once you become an adult to do whatever with that information.



  • At one point I developed a habit of converting any recursive algorithm I was writing into a loop instead, since I knew function calls have overhead and all recursion really does is lets you use the calling stack and flow control as an invisible data structure.

    Then I got a question about parsing brackets properly during an interview and wrote a loop-based parser to solve it and the guy had to fish for a bit before I remembered recursion and realized that’s the answer he was looking for. My mind just wouldn’t consider using a whole calling stack when an integer would do the trick faster.







  • If it makes you feel any better, you would have turned 30 today regardless of what you have done in the past (unless you don’t make it to 30 (unless quantum immortality is real)).

    Happy birthday! And if you aren’t happy with your efforts so far in life, better to tackle that looking forward than regret it looking back, though be kind to the yourself of today so you don’t regret spending your life preparing for the future instead of enjoying the moment.






  • I used to do “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, etc”

    But then found it was better to so l switch it to “one-thousand one, one-thousand two, etc” because then the count matches the time closer. In the first, when you say the count, you are actually one second earlier. Eg, “two” marks the end of the first second and the start of the second one. But saying the number after (one-thousand, steamboat, mississippi, or whatever) means you can just say the number you last said for an accurate second count.