We could have a better discussion around this if we recognize that failing to stop 100% of something isn't a prerequisite to rigorously evaluating the tradeoffs.
Doesn't actually stop all cheat developers. If even one person develops and sells a cheat that the kernel-level anticheat doesn't catch, then it stops 0% of cheaters from buying and using the cheat.
It's much harder to sell a cheat that requires the user to significantly alter their computers boot process. Anti-cheat just exists to inconvenience cheaters enough so that the cheats lose their value.
It makes the cheats more valuable on the black market. I'm fairly sure the only people cheating in the major competitive games with anticheat are whales and extremely unethical pro players.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it's one-sided. Essentially you are saying "Just trust me bro" on behalf of a self-evaluating company.
I'd argue the potential for abuse is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have, and doesn't have much bearing on the effectiveness of anticheat, but I understand that's not the point you are trying to make.
Sorry, my writing should have been clearer, I put one too many negatives in. :-)
I didn't claim we should trust the company. Whether we can trust the anticheat maker is certainly part of the rigorous evaluation of the tradeoffs I mentioned. My point was that saying "it doesn't stop cheaters" is both incorrect and stifling to a more productive conversation, because it implies anticheat has no value and is therefore worth no risk.
As for me, if Gabe said "now you can opt your Steam Deck in to a trusted kernel we ship with anticheat and play PUBG," I'd probably do it. But that's because I, for better or worse, tend to trust Gabe. If Tencent were shipping it, I'd probably feel differently.
Compare: "I still get spam, therefore all these anti-spam measures are worthless"
It is absolutely the case that there would be more cheating if we turned off the only partially effective systems. We know this because they are regularly stopping and banning people!
People are going to to be upset when it happens but it is absolutely inevitable at some point Steam ships a Steam Deck with hardware based attestation of the OS being a signed version of SteamOS, feeding back to a Steam API, that can be used as the basis of an anti-cheat solution.
That describes what I've seen. When I first compared 2020 and 2024 in as apples-to-apples a way as I could, it seemed like 2024's frame rate was about a third lower than 2020's. This was on a 7900 XTX with 24 gigs of VRAM.
Yep, this really bums me out. Wanted to try plenty of Minecraft mods but never wanted to go to the trouble to set up a secure environment, so I never did either.
As an only-tangentially-related aside, the difficulty of making mods for Windows games work on Proton also bums me out.
I wish some kind of cross-platform, sandboxed modding ecosystem existed solving enough problems that most modders would prefer to use it. I'm not sure that's even possible, though.
I guess with polarizing topics it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right? And there's some fuzzy line that you want the thread to stay on one side of.
I will freely admit my view may be too dismissive and that I should change my ways, but these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze. In other words, that ratio I mentioned seems out of whack. Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead, not enough people vouch for 'em (I'm sometimes guilty of that), and the amount of invective and judgment they're met with just seems to depend on how fast they got downvoted or flagged to oblivion.
I realize I'm shouting into the wind, and you have no obligation to change any of this for me. But I really do not see how this sort of thing is good for the site long-term. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a certain set that needs to scream about something every month or they start vandalizing less controversial threads and it's net positive to let them have their moment. Maybe I'll go write something that auto-hides threads for me when there's been a certain proportion of flagging and downvoting.
Anyway, you've got a tough job and do it with grace. No reply necessary, but thanks for all you do.
> these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze
I agree. The trouble is that not discussing it at all is not a solution either.
> it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right?
I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is.
> Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead
I don't think there's a "thread mainstream" here. I think the community is deeply divided.
If you (or anyone) see good-faith comments getting mistreated in this way, we'd appreciate links so we can take a look. Sometimes we restore those comments, other times we find that the comment broke the site guidelines and thus should stay flagged. But we always look, and usually also have enough time to reply.
> I realize I'm shouting into the wind
Not at all! We're interested. We just don't necessarily have good answers.
> So, sending it to page 4 quick-like has too many downsides? I am not an expert in community management, I'm interested to understand why.
We're not experts either. It's not as if there's any foundation for this job other than just doing it, badly.
I'll try to explain how I personally think about this. One thing is clear: the core value of HN is intellectual curiosity so that's what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). I'd refine that one bit further by saying it's broad intellectual curiosity. There's also narrow intellectual curiosity, which has its place but isn't what we're trying for here. (And there are other forms of curiosity, e.g. social curiosity, which motivates things like celebrity news and gossip. Those also have their place but are less relevant here.)
What's the difference between broad and narrow intellectual curiosity? If you think of curiosity as desire and willingness to take in new information, then I'd say "broad" means wanting to take in new information about anything—whatever's going on in reality, the world, etc., because it's there; and "narrow" means wanting new information, but only about a restricted subset of things. That means there's an excluded set of topics—things about which one could take in new information, but for whatever reason, doesn't want to. Maybe it's too painful, for example.
What I'm saying is that the current topic is one of a few topics which are painful (and the pain shows up as anger in the comments), but which broad intellectual curiosity simply cannot exclude. If we exclude it, then we fail to optimize for what we're optimizing for. In that sense, not discussing it amounts to failing.
But discussing it also amounts to failing, because it's not realistically very possible for this community to discuss it while remaining within the site guidelines. It's too painful, too activating, and crosses too many of the red lines that past generations have left pulsating in all our bodies. That is why I said "I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is".
We can try to mitigate that through moderation ("please don't cross into personal attack", "please don't post flamebait", etc.), but those lines are particularly feeble in this case. There's little scope for those to land as neutral with commenters and readers. It too easily feels like we're adding to the conflict when we post that way.
Therefore this is a case where we can only fail, and all we can do is follow what Beckett said and fail better. Failing better is still failing and still feels like failing—there's no way out of that. I'm just pretty sure that the alternative in this case would be worse overall, even if it felt easier in the short term. It's always easier to go narrow in the short term. But we're in this for the long haul.
Thank you for your thoughtful response, that helps me understand more where the site leadership is coming from.
BTW the comment I linked above[0] has been flagged and is dead again, after I thought it had been restored. Did it violate site guidelines? Or did somebody come back in and flag it again?
> > these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze
> I agree. The trouble is that not discussing it at all is not a solution either.
Not discussing it at all is certainly a solution. There are plenty of other fora where these issues can be discussed (Reddit and Twitter, off the top of my head). HN does not have to also take up that mantle.
> > Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead
> I don't think there's a "thread mainstream" here. I think the community is deeply divided.
It's quite obvious that there's a thread mainstream. One perspective absolutely dominates the top level posts and replies. Top level posts with a different point of view have been flag killed very thoroughly. I would make a contrarian post (the type that HN normally loves) to try share my knowledge of the situation (which I bet is significantly deeper than 99% of the commenters here) but it's not worth it when I expect it to get instantly flag killed.
> If you (or anyone) see good-faith comments getting mistreated in this way, we'd appreciate links so we can take a look. Sometimes we restore those comments, other times we find that the comment broke the site guidelines and thus should stay flagged. But we always look, and usually also have enough time to reply.
But the discussion will have moved on by then. There are simply not enough moderator resources to moderate a discussion on this topic. That's not your fault, that's just the way it is, but it does lead to HN becoming a worse place.
It's hard for me to feel like these political flagfests make the rest of the site any better, while the rest of the site is what I find value in. If I want to witness mobs possessing massive standard deviations in knowledge and experience with the subject matter flamewarring each other, there are already a whole lot of places on the Internet I can go for that. It's the tech-and-genuine-curiosity-not-yelling part of HN that's the value prop for me here, and FWIW, for a sample size of one, threads like this do little to improve on that.
Of course I can hide this story and move on. But it's hard for me to believe that all the stress hormones flowing in the people reading and participating don't have some kind of negative knock-on effects on other, more peaceful threads.
Can you tell me why NamePolicy=keep doesn't do the trick?
Looking myself for options to keep a Debian bare metal server I admin from going deaf and mute the next time I upgrade it... It still uses an /etc/network/interfaces file that configures a bridge for VMs to use, and the bridge_ports parameter requires an interface name which, when I upgraded to Bookworm, changed.
At this rate maybe I'll write a script that runs on boot and fixes up that file with whatever interface it finds, then restarts the network.
A long time ago I did some IT work for a real estate agent in the US that dealt in international properties. I was stoked on a listing he had up for a beautiful French chateau for $40k. He told me to forget it. “It’ll need completely new electrical, all new plumbing. And that might not sound so bad, but just wait till you actually try to get the work done by locals on time and on budget. It won’t happen.”
As Lyman Stone wrote in 2020, “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
Agreed! I stuck with Firefox for a long time, but within the last year moved to Brave because too many sites were breaking. To your list I'd add "adblock," though, because it seems like extension standards are converging on a point where that's more effectively scaffolded inside the browser.
The program didn't get far enough to determine definitively if it was worthwhile for fighter applications -- the aircraft wasn't designed for that level of maneuverability. It was about learning what they could do at the limit of what was known then about composites, unconventional aerodynamics, and flight control law development.
Part of the genius in this project was they proved you could actually produce a wing out of composites effectively tailored to resist upward (or downward) wing deflection with a counteracting downward (or upward) twist on the leading edge, so despite aggressive maneuvering the wing would not find itself in a self-reinforcing loop of increasing load that would lead to structural failure.
Therefore, the wings wouldn't twist and buckle.
The math said it was possible, but history is littered with clever composite designs that can't actually be manufactured to the required tolerances, or that change shape after coming out of the mold, or that can't be pulled out of a mold without breaking the part or the mold or both.
doesn't actually stop all cheaters.
We could have a better discussion around this if we recognize that failing to stop 100% of something isn't a prerequisite to rigorously evaluating the tradeoffs.