I watched several groups of “tech nerds” get rejected from night clubs in the Bay Area after the huggingface open source meetup.
It doesn’t matter how much money you give to them, society think they’re still ugly, four eyes, nerds who deserve to be shoved in lockers. Remember that the only reason high functioning autists weren’t murdered by the nazis was dr.Hans Asperger intervening to convince the German high command that they can build rockets.
Look to how the internet uses “sperg” as a pejorative similar to intel. Forcing a neurotypical to listen to your “*tism” rant makes them literally want to murder you. Resentment against tech workers with money is off the charts in trump voting America. Ungrateful to say the least…
> What’s stopping tech nerds from putting effort into their appearance like everyone else to get into a club?
For those who put the effort, nothing will stop them, and they will be more than welcome. The idea is to filter out the smug ones who think they are higher human beings who don’t need to conform to the norms of such places like everyone else, and putting any effort toward such “intellectually plebian” entertainment is beyond them. So everything is kinda working as intended.
The long range “precision” attacks by Russia often just end up randomly killing civilians.
Eg: missile strikes on Kyiv blowing up a children’s hospital, or the September strikes on Lviv blowing up a random apartment building and wiping out almost an entire family.
You can easily go “what are the chances” even when shahads are flying over your head and the sky is lit up with tracer fire from mobile air defense units after some exposure.
The downstream effects in other countries are pretty annoying.
Because of US restrictions on pseudo, bizarrely other countries have followed suit - it’s next to impossible to find a decongestant with pseudo here in Ireland, they will sell you the useless phenylephrine shit instead, and the packaging is almost indistinguishable unless you spend a while looking and arguing with a pharmacist who is convinced phenylephrine works just as good.
I remember a fair few moved after the last go around (2016) to Berlin and the ones I met found German bureaucracy incredibly stifling in terms of business, which was a major fumble of the ball.
Same with Brits moving post Brexit vote, finding the German environment difficult to do business in.
Really, Europe needs to be able to capitalise on whatever amount of talent flight from the US happens, instead of … whatever the fuck they are doing currently.
There's no concept of "server" or "Change lobby" on Apex or other Battle royales.
You just queue up for a game, which lasts ~20 minutes. As you are in a 3 player team if you disconnect from the game you get a temp ban penalty, since that also degrades other players experience. So there's no disconnecting freely once a game has started.
Now imagine you're playing for 10-15 minutes just to die without really having any chance. That gets frustrating, really quickly, since winning is close to the only "reward" you get from playing the game.
It's not like a classic COD or Battlefield game, where you can feely leave or join any game/server. Once you're in you're somewhat committed, and you have no control over where or with whom you're playing against.
Games with ranked systems will always be cheated. If you play competitively and attain a sufficiently high rank, you will encounter cheaters inevitably. If cheating hits a certain threshold (or even the perception of cheating), the system collapses because people won't compete in a system they perceive as unfair. It isn't a matter of just changing servers when there are consequences for winning/losing. Even worse, many competitive games offer specific, tangible rewards such as items/skins/etc. for winning, which heavily incentivizes cheaters even further. I have definitely stopped playing games completely because of cheating issues - one dumb one particularly for me are m/kb players on playstation FPS games, which is trivial to stop and detect, but they won't do it. I'd vastly prefer something invasive on my playstation to prevent that experience than the alternative, which is to just not play.
until very recently TF2's servers were infested by bots which kill you in one shot across the map. changing the server wouldn't help because they were on every server. this quite literally made the game unplayable for years.
I might be old or something, but I really don’t give a fuck if someone’s cheating in a video game.
It was basically the norm when I was growing up, there was always someone using wall hacks or whatever, it was just kinda funny and never ruined the fun.
You are just old. Hacks absolutely ruin the game even for casual players, especially in the newly popular Battle Royale games where you might not run into the hacker until the very last part of the match. It feels bad to invest 20 minutes into a match, be feeling good about the finale showdown, only for them to aimbot you from nowhere - you never stood a chance.
The issue you're missing is the scale of the cheating.
When it is some small percentage of games you might shrug, hope you don't run into the cheater again, and move on to the next game where nobody is cheating. A few matches of your day get ruined but you still get to enjoy >95% of them so it's overall still a good experience. It has a very small impact on your enjoyment but you can move on and still enjoy most of your time.
It becomes a problem when there are so many cheaters that you encounter one in nearly every single game you play. Making it nearly impossible to play or win because the aim botting, wall hacking, infinite ammo, one-hit-kill, teleporting, invincible hacker is mowing down you and your entire team and the round ends in a few minutes. Except now it is 5 out of every 6 games you play and you hardly get to enjoy playing.
Additionally, back in the day you could leave matches without really getting punished for it. If you encountered an obvious hacker you could just leave and rejoin a new game. Now you get punished for leaving matches and might have to sit out a 15-60 minute timer if you leave too many games. Mix that with some high percentage of cheaters and you might be sitting in lobby waiting to play the game more than you're actually playing the game.
Let's say you enjoy playing Chess. How long would you enjoy playing against Alpha Zero - especially when expecting to play against someone your own ELO? At what ratio of playing against people cheating with Alpha Zero would you stop bothering to try and play Chess? I could tolerate it occasionally but if every single person I was playing against was just using Alpha Zero I'd stop trying to play Chess at all. It's no fun to lose every single time because the other person is always cheating.
Substitute any other pass-time for video games and I think most folks feel differently.
A pick-up game of basketball
A weekend mountain bike race
A corn-hole tournament at your local bar.
Someone cheating in any of these contexts would typically be upsetting. No one likes a cheater.
Video games are different because you can't call them out on it in real-time. You don't usually have any way to prove it. You also can't really escape it because there might be another cheater in the next lobby. In person, you have a lot more power or control over the situation (typically).
There are plenty of games you can play where cheating is allowed.
I think a majority of people who play competitive online games enjoy fair competition, and it really isn’t fun to play against cheaters.
I played NBA2k on PC for a few years, and unlike on consoles, cheaters were rampant. Half the games would be against players who were like 12 feet tall and could make every shot from anywhere on the court. It was zero fun, and I stopped playing.
I think “just let people cheat” is not a viable option.
It really depends on the level of cheats. Someone using wall hacks has a huge advantage, depending on the game, but it doesn't take that much more skill to outplay them. But when you get to a point where the cheats aren't just a tool anymore but do most of the work, the skills required to still win get so astronomically high that you will lose every time unless you are a top 0.1% player. Which isn't really fun anymore. And many cheats nowadays are exactly that: practically unbeatable. Not a challenge, not hard but doable with enough work, just unbeatable
Getting a win is the intermittent reward players get from these battle royale games against 20 or so other teams, when a hacker ruins that it's pretty annoying.
I think it depends on the kind of game. I played Team Fortress Classic back in the day and if someone was cheating it didn’t have a big impact. During the pandemic I got into FPSes again and played COD Warzone. In a game like that you have a multi minute build up to actually engaging another player, to go through all that then get beamed by someone with an aimbot is very frustrating.
This makes sense if you're playing games for fun with people you know, like on the old community servers, but nowadays games like CS are played competitively for money and clout, and usually with complete strangers. Fun isn't part of the equation anymore, or at least comes as a side-effect.
not only that.. we're not far from the point where it becomes undetectable because a camera fed AI instance on one computer is manipulating the inputs on gaming machine
I kinda feel the same way.. I imagine games not having community servers and focusing heavily on rank/seasons etc makes it feel a lot more serious? Idk I used to find community on dedicated servers, it was part of the game, with in game text/voice chat, now the community exists entirely outside of it in discords etc.
Tbf, the only thing I miss with my M2 MacBook is the ability to run x86_64 VM’s with decent performance locally.
I’ve tried a bunch of ways to do this - and frankly the translation overhead is absolute pants currently.
Not a showstopper though, for the 20-30% of complete pain in the ass cases where I can’t easily offload the job onto a VPS or a NUC or something, I just have a ThinkPad.
