Lots of ideas in here that fail to properly identify and address the root cause, which is disappointing given how many of us are programmers.
Trace the problem back. Where does it start?
Why is PE investing in homes? Because they can make money. Why does buying a home make money? Because the value appreciates. Why does the value appreciate on an asset that literally deteriorates over time? Because of restricted supply. Why is there a supply shortage?
The root cause of this issue is supply. Zoning, mostly, is to blame. There are down stream issues, like the capacity of the construction industry, but that is an effect of the current environment not a root cause in and of itself — if there is money to be made, construction will grow as fast as it can.
Fix supply, and you fix the issue. This is a uniquely (English) western world problem. Go look at western countries that speak English vs. non-English housing starts. It’s just a cultural failure. You can blame corporations all you want but at the end of the day most people in the anglosphere expect a return on the largest purchase of their lives, even if it comes at the cost of materially worsening the lives of those around them.
Usually a root-cause analysis asks for five why's so your analysis seems a bit short.
One should ask why it is that housing / land is more profitable than those investments in which banks and private equity previously invested. And then when you follow that line of reasoning (too much capital and credit -- thanks quantitative easing! -- poor performance on bonds due to low interest rates and restrictions on the quality of investment vehicles) and you'll see that the root cause is probably more financial rather than _just_ too little housing.
Debts need to be cleared, losses need to be accepted, and leverage unwound. Building more housing just gives banks and private equity more stuff to buy.
That there may be "too much capital and credit" is a red herring because investors won't pour money into assets that aren't lucrative. The main reason housing has been so lucrative is because there's more demand than supply, so building more housing what needs to happen!
You're absolutely right of course. Even a child could look at the present situation and determine that the solution is to simply build more housing, but for some reason many grown adults cannot accept such a simple solution and insist that what's actually needed is more government regulation or something.
What you’ll find is that a subset of players define a behaviour and now you have to prove that that behaviour is cheating. For most behaviours that could be cheating, it will overlap with skilled players.
Examples would be pre-aiming corners and >99th percentile reaction time.
It’s estimated that cod warzone has 45 million players - a 0.1% false positive rate at that player count is 45000 people. That’s a _lot_. It needs to be orders of magnitude less than that.
Anti-cheat is a necessity for an enjoyable game experience. If you are a casual who doesn’t care about game integrity, you probably aren’t the target audience.
I don’t want any cheaters in my games. I don’t care if a rootkit is required. Riot has a kernel level anti-cheat and it’s _really_ good. It’s so good in fact that it deters most cheaters from even trying. This is the dream for anyone who wants fair games.
I agree with you, but I think the best solution is just to let people run the game without anti-cheat, but they can only play with other people who also opt-out of anti cheat (or choose to allow themselves to be matched with people who opt-out).
Then people can choose to either accept they have to install a rootkit anti-cheat, or want to risk facing cheaters in return for not having to install the anti-cheat.
I wouldn't be able to enjoy life with the knowledge there's a rootkit installed on my machine, developed by the same people that make video games, and hate all levels of accountability, riddled with vulnerabilities that could grant an attacker the same ridiculous level of permissions.
> If you are a casual who doesn’t care about game integrity, you probably aren’t the target audience.
Friendly reminder. 90% of games are not competitive multiplayer and don't need any anti cheat to be enjoyable.
My main entertainment is video games and books (no TV) in equal proportions so I'm far from "casual". I play zero competitive multiplayer due to the "communities" being invariably toxic.
Last time I played something like that it was Starcraft 2 when it was new. Enjoyed being called a stupid noob when I won.
Yeah. I've found a nearly 1:1 correlation between "Does it try hard to be 'competitive' or an 'e-sport'?" and "Is a huge section of the playerbase just godawful toxic assholes?".
As the years ground on, I've learned to avoid games billing themselves as an "e-sport" or indicating that they are extremely focused on the "competitive" scene, unless there's something very compelling to offset the asshole players that will inevitably be pulled in.
Yea! There was a pretty popular /r/gamedev post talking about how like 95% of the linux bugs existed in windows also. Just that linux users are trained to report and provide quality logs/evidence.
But it did not happen, when you used a book and never executed any command you did not understand.
(But my own newbdays of linux troubleshooting? Copy paste any command on the internet loosely related to my problem, which I believe was/is the common way of how common people still do it. And AI in "Turbo mode" seems to mostly automated that workflow)
Once you internalize that flat-Earther-ism isn’t about the Earth being flat you realize that rational arguments are pointless.
To expand on that, it’s about community and finding people who share your interests. The movie Behind The Curve explores this idea and it’s quite revealing.
And the ego boost of it all - being one of the special few who sees "the truth" that others are too brainwashed/dumb/whatever to see. Makes one feel quite important.
Those are the simple cows to be milked, but numerous 'gurus' in these communities are very well aware of the bullshit they propagate to the weak and gullible, but its just such an easy noncritical prey. You can always just go deeper in paranoia.
Makes me think that mr trump switched from being democrat to republican and pushed for magaesque folks who often love him to the death due to very similar principle - just spit out some populist crap that stirs core emotions - the worse the better, make them feel victim, find easy target to blame which can't defend themselves well (immigrants), add some conspiracy (of which he is actually part of as wall street billionaire).
Extreme left wouldn't swallow easily that ridiculous mix from nepotic billionaire who managed to bankrupt casinos and avoided military duty (on top of some proper hebephilia with his close friend mr E and who knows what else).
But what do I know, just an outside observer, but nobody around the world has umbrella thick enough that this crap doesn't eventually fall on them too.
I think Trump's just been running a simple popularity-seeking loop for a while. Do a thing; if his people like it, do it more; otherwise do it less.
I've heard that even Hitler was like this: that he didn't start out hating Jews, but repeatedly reacted to the fact that he got louder cheers whenever he blamed things on Jews. But I don't know how to verify if this is true.
What could be expected to be the "shared interests" of a community of people organized around supposedly believing something that they aren't actually about believing?
It's since being replaced by similar isms like climate change hoax-ism. Very similar way of arguing, dealing with contradicting evidence and seeing a conspiracy whenever a large body of scientists has a consensus.
Unfortunately, the climate change deniers in all their forms have made it much further by having support in politics and having a real impact on people's lives. In contrast to flat earthers.
Just the mere fact that my post here could be interpreted as political (which it really isn't) is evidence of this.
It's more about discrediting conspiracy theories to shift the Overton window so the real ones with the flavor of 'the government is spying on you' also seems crazy to most people.
I see a lot of people in here saying no. Just don’t use it if you don’t want it. It’s really that simple. This is a very simple feature request for HN.
Biggest hurdle for me to do this is just multiplayer games. I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.
Contrary to most Linux advocates I’m a big believer in giving studios the tools they need to defeat cheaters and I don’t care much about system integrity if it means fairer games.
The anti-cheat creators other than Valve aren't bothered to invest into making a Linux kernel anti-cheat, and most Linux users would be unwilling to allow one to be installed either.
The only sure-fire way to defeat cheats is with something like Counter Strike's overwatch system: have humans vet replays. Cheats are a ludicrous business, there is simply far too much incentive to defeat software-based systems.
It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.
Well, the beauty of Linux is that anyone can go implement whatever features they want. But, I’m very happy that folks aren’t very interested in supporting this kernel level DRM stuff.
> I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.
It probably would have to be an isolated environment to run in. Something like the Secure VM efforts adopted for desktops, perhaps with a small trusted hypervisor instead of CPU vendor extensions. Anything else I can think of starts to restrain what software you can run on your machine, or becomes highly invasive in ways similar to Anti-Cheats on Windows, both of which would be rejected by the general Linux community. (Through, it's not like anyone was asking Microsoft either before implementing anti-cheat and trampling on system integrity, at least until Microsoft started requiring signed drivers)
However, given that a generic blackbox implementation enables DRM and binary encryption there will probably still be opposition. It gets particularly nasty if it's given access to something like a full TPM to unlock application data in the same way a TPM can unlock an encrypted drive for your OS. That would make it the penultimate closed source application, which is really anti-ethical to a number of communities. (open source, modding, game/app preservation...)
Even on Windows they are losing despite the invasive anticheats.
I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.
The server should stop sending positions of undetected enemies - this requires rethinking game engines due to the predictions they perform.
The server should log every single action by every single player (full replays) in perpetuity, train models on it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.
Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.
It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.
> I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.
The speed of light makes this _marginally_ problematic to do. It is possible that a unit might move out of the fog of war, or out of cover, during the latency to the client (or between server ticks). You'd effectively have pop-in during some scenarios - but it would be minor and the net benefit would probably make it worth it.
I recall one of the MOBAs adding this during its lifecycle, HoN I think?
Their settled solution is still not perfect, hence still the need for client-side anti-cheat. The final video clip is definitely done to look effective than it actually is. Those positions are transmitted based on space, not time, and in a real game you'd be moving slower.
Mobas generally have a lower tickrate and simpler vision setups
Looks like they put in some effort. You will get better results by having this type of anticheat baked into the engine from the very beginning and requiring a GPU on the server.
What I had in mind is having a primitive physics simulation with point clouds (+ velocity smearing) for entities and geometries for surfaces. You will be able to to do many more checks this way.
Who exactly is "Linux"? What entity, specifically, would work on kernel anti-cheat? The only realistic company who would care about this is Valve. So really you should say Valve, not Linux.
That's the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop: outside of Red Hat and Canonical (neither of whose business has anything to do with gaming), there is basically no well-funded company that cares about it at all. Linux already works great for the use cases that matter to the people who develop Linux, who mostly are not trying to compete with Microsoft or Apple.
Those are generally not the same anticheats with the same levels of functionality. As an analogy it's like saying Excel supports iPad. Or a gaming example that used to be way more common: Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 is supported on Game Boy Advance.
It's a game and it is Tony Hawk, but it's not really comparable as Tony Hawk on PS1.
they have the tools they need to defeat cheaters, they just choose to go about it in very invasive and lazy ways because people still buy their product.
then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.
It’s not that hard to find examples. Chinese incursions in the south China sea and the development of artificial islands to project power and control over the region. Their plans for Taiwan. The annexation of Tibet. Xinjiang ethnic cleansing. Erosion of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong SAR. And yes the entire Belt and Road initiative which is basically loan sharking.
No. That list shows coercive or authoritarian behavior, not classical imperialism.
Imperialism means establishing colonies or directly ruling foreign territories for economic extraction. China today doesn’t occupy or govern other sovereign states. The South China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan are all disputes within--except Taiwan + the South China Sea--undisputed national boundaries.[1] Belt and Road loans, while allegedly predatory, are contractual and do not create colonial rule. So it’s perhaps aggressive nationalism and coercive influence, but not imperialism.
1. Yes, looking way back, the occupying Qing dynasty established said boundaries through quite a lot of imperialism about a century before the US got busy manifesting its destiny.*
Tibet was a self governing entity until Chinese invasion. Though China would disagree. Tibet's leaders are still in exile and one of the key issues of China with India.
If the argument is that Tibet was not a country, then the same applies to Taiwan. Taiwan is not internationally recognized as a country, except for a few nations.
Autonomy is not sovereignty. Tibet wasn’t “invaded” like a foreign country, it had been de facto autonomous after the chaotic Qing collapse, but no one recognized it as sovereign. If I were to guess at China's narrative, the PLA’s 1950 entry is probably seen as a reconsolidation of territory long claimed by China, not new imperial conquest. And Taiwan’s status only survived because US intervention froze the Chinese civil war’s outcome, not because it was ever outside China’s historical frame. Again, indeed, Qing imperialist actions 300 years ago led to the current map, and you might see me as pedantic here but calling China (or modern US/Japan/Britain for that matter) imperialist might feel satisfying, but analytically it dampens the real and harmful empire-building sense of the term used in history.
I think one issue is when do we start drawing the line that an autonomous entity is recognized as a sovereign country. Do we start with the UN? Because before nation states formed, it was a bit ambiguous. British empire's colonies were not a formally recognized countries in the modern sense. But we do agree that British were imperialistic.
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