Doing all of this is completely unnecessary. First design your game so that the server never trusts the client. Don't give it more information than the human player could themselves see and never rely on any calculations from the client. That's still insufficient though, so it's necessary for the server to collect and analyze the data it receives from the client. Anything that frequently operates outside of the thresholds of human ability is cheating. Cheat programs are still programs and operate algorithmically and can be identifiable in that way.

There's also the matter of what to do with the cheaters. You can ban them out right, but that's just information to the people selling the cheats. They can do A/B testing to detect the detection methods. I think that a better solution is to quarantine them so they only ever play other cheaters. Anyone falsely labeled will lose horribly in this environment and will be washed out of it. Everyone else will only be inconveniencing people as awful as they themselves are. None of it requires users to install or run invasive code on their own machines.

It's actually bad at this sort of thing. You can ask an LLM to write a 5 paragraph essay about the Gettysburg Address and to give you the program code to perform a word count and it will give you responses that are experts would agree are correct or otherwise good. However the same AI that delivered each if asked to count the number of words in the five paragraph essay it generated will be wrong. The current AIs posses that kind of advanced technology giving the appearance of magic, but it's just a very clever trick. There's very clearly something missing and even if we can't define what that is, once you understand what to look for it becomes apparent that the tools are limited in much the same way an Eliza bot is despite how it once managed to convince many people that it was human despite being a few hundred lines of code.

You don't test something by walking down the golden path where everything works out perfectly. Instead you consider ways to break it and show that it doesn't work. If you want to convince me something is intelligent it had better damned we'll be able to take two pieces of knowledge it has and make logical connections between them. If you're not testing well or hard enough you're only pulling the wool over your own eyes.

Over what time period? If I told you that if you give me $100 now, I'll give you $300 in 10 years, that's a fairly good deal if you think I have a good chance of delivering on that or enough other income sources to squeeze if that investment goes sideways. It's the same idea here only in the billions of dollars as opposed to the hundreds.

Microsoft investors either put up with this same shit the last several dozen times the company stuck a lot of money into some dubious but potentially profitable proposition or they sold their shares to someone else who would. Some of it pans out and a lot of it doesn't. The tech industry is the sort of place where one winner more than covers dozens of losers.

All of these companies get filtered through a further layer of a market that treats them in the same way that they treat AI. Microsoft, Oracle, and any other company you can buy shares of are just an investment that may or may not pay off. Staring directly into it will drive you mad, but somehow it works better on average than anything else we've come up with. It's not just companies that believe that AI will pay off, but larger humanity as well, at least to a certain degree best measured by willingness to invest in the companies investing in AI.

If you think all of that is utterly wrong and stupid then you should start shorting the stocks of the companies investing in AI. If you're right, you'll make money from doing so. If you're wrong you'll lose money. Whether you care about making money or not, this is a useful exercise for you to reflect upon how much you really believe your own position. As a wise man once said, "Put your money where your mouth is."

There are a few possibilities that stick out to me. One is that lead is more available and is being uptaken to replace something else that isn't available in the necessary quantities. The human body is good at making some substitutions when some molecules aren't available, so it would not surprise me if other organisms did the same. For example, if humans restrict carbohydrates in their diet, the brain will switch to using ketones in place of glucose. Plants could be using lead in place of something else in a similar fashion.

Another is that it's just random noise. It's an interesting observation that should be studied in greater detail but if it wasn't a hypothesis they tested for then it's not something that was properly controlled for. If you've ever done a controlled study before you've no doubt found some interesting results that you weren't even looking for. Sometimes you've inadvertently stumbled onto something more interesting than what you were looking for in the first place and other times it's coincidence and not reproducible.

Until someone takes the time to investigate and study it, no one may know why we got this result.

It's beautiful to see a whole new generation realizing that Microsoft Works is an oxymoron.

They've been in control of government about as much as Republicans over the last 20 years. If they were going to do anything shouldn't those evil companies already have been ripped to shreds? The evil companies contribute to Democrats and Republicans alike, employ their friends and relatives, and take other steps to ensure that neither party will make any serious efforts to root them out. The truly insidious ones even get legislation passed that gives the appearance of reining them in while actually achieving the opposite.

No political party has much incentive to deliver you results, because at that point they have nothing to promise you or anyone else. For whatever reason the promise of action is valued by the electorate as much or slightly more than any actual accomplishment. The best you can do for yourself is to avoid doing business with evil companies. While not everyone will be as personally responsible as you, it's still your personal resort choose who you do business with.

I'm surprised Europe has t figured out a way to regulate the flood of cheap Chinese crap out of existence. While they have tariffs of their own in some cases they usually just find other ways to enact protectionism to keep foreign competitors out of local industries.

The unfortunate truth is that most people value cheap crap in the now more than more expensive quality products that will last much longer. Unless and until you or anyone else can change human nature the cheap crap will flow, whether from China or whichever country eventually replaces them.

AI can spit out a lot of boilerplate type code (some of it close enough to correct) that it can replace the sort of code monkeys that were slapping together bits of code sourced from across the internet all day and hoping it would work before seeing if adding another snippet from elsewhere might solve their problem. The LLMs just do this more efficiently.

A skilled developer could use an AI to generate most of this and fix the mistakes well enough that they're more productive than the aforementioned doorknob licker. Better developers would figure out a way to write an abstraction layer to simplify that process even more, but often times that's a lot of work and requires someone who really know what the hell they're doing and for most companies another half dozen monkeys are just as good in their estimates.

Anyone who's ever had a boss or customer that doesn't really know what they want to begin with no longer cares if an AI craps out some slop that might break in a few edge cases when the requirements will change a week from now and all of that code will get ripped out and replaced with the next sacrificial offering. If what you're doing is really just rapid development / prototyping why not use an AI to speed up the process of eliminating all other alternatives before settling on something that will last for more than a few months?

They are. The trouble is that something really shitty pushed hard by a dominant player can destroy something much much better. Enshittification in action :(

Other than the IEEE, the ACM is the largest publisher for anything tech related, and is probably larger than IEEE for things strictly related to CS and numerous other sub-fields. If they're irrelevant than everyone else is even more irrelevant.

Hopefully others follow suit with this. The majority of the research published in these journals or conferences is funded by our tax dollars. All of that content already belongs to us and the idea that access to it requires a multi-hundred dollar subscription is ludicrous.

I think that is will only be a net positive. Open source software works well by allowing more eyeballs to spot and fix problems. The same principles apply to science as well and giving more people access to the results will improve the quality of the field as a whole when problems can be identified by a larger group of people.

That's a different unrelated problem. This is a separate issue that plants that receive more CO2 are less nutrient dense. It makes sense if you consider that CO2 is basically food for plants and that they grow more when exposed to it. However if the other molecular components that make up nutrients in those plants don't increase, then it's unsurprising that the nutrition density goes down. Of course that also means that the problem isn't too difficult to fix if the crops can be fertilized with the various compounds or precursors that are used by the plant to form those nutrients.

I look forwards to the posts where because Apple is not an absolute monopoly they are somehow immune to any accusations of anti-trust.

No one would ever sign up to such insane terms if Apple wasn't in such a powerful position that they could dictate such terms. In other words, their position and size in the market is such that they can enforce things that no one would be able to do without that kind of size, regardless of product quality.

Them demanding this is 100% confirmation that anti trust action is entirely warranted.

Women seem to be perfectly able to be elected Governor.

Well not al the country is ragingly sexist.

America will absolutely vote for a female president.

There is no evidence this is true.

empty-headed,

Are you telling me that someone with a functioning, full head would ramble the following in a speech about crime?

But you want to have, when they come, the leaders come to our country to sign documents that the war is over or whatever, or for other reasons, they come for trade and you want them to come through so beautifully, you ride down those roads, everything should be perfect. You shouldn't have medians falling down into the roadway, median, the metal things that are always⦠Somebody had a great lobbyist because I've never seen them look good. I've been looking at those things with the little rut, they're always broken bad, but here they're really bad. We're going to either put new or fix it and it's not expensive, it's not really expensive or we're going to fix our roads a little bit. We're going to clean up our sidewalks.

So it seems like empty headedness is only important of you're a female candidate.

NPC

Ah yes, NPCs have famously bad AI like when they coded it wrong and got the US president to salute an enemy general. Oh right NPCness only matters if you're female, got it.

whose politics are whatever is popular this week.

Ah remember when that candidate railed against Mamdani as a " a 100% Communist Lunatic", then threatened arrest and insinuated he'd have his citizenship stripped? But then immediately flipped into a complete love-in when Mamdani won referring to him as a "really great mayor"? Oh no wait that was Trump, so apparently wild flip-flopping on politics only matters if you're a female presidential candidate.

As soon as one runs who isn't a completely unlikable opportunist,

Are you telling me Trump is likeable and not an opportunist? Turns out being one only matters if you're female.

It isn't sexism that has kept women from the White House

Absolutely it is. 100%.

BuT hEr EmAiLs!!111one. Lock her up!!! Remember that? Where's the rage against Trump for not imprisoning Hegseth? Oh yeah, turns out no one actually cared about the emails. So why did they claim to?

IOW you're a massive hypocrite. Literally everything you accuse Clinton and Harris of, Trump has done 100x worse.

Turns out dementia only mattered for Biden. When the choice was between Trump with dementia and Harris who had the gall to be female and not white, a "funny laugh" is way more important than dementia.

It's almost like the MAGAts were making up excuses for voting for Trump (even they know they need excuses funnily enough).

E.g. Microwaves have become more common

I've been winging it myself. I've not really found anywhere that makes more than surprisingly basic use of a microwave, so I've been experimenting on my own.