Counterpoint:

Humans in a civilized (meaning urbanized) society… are domesticated, are basically in captivity, from the comparative framework of wild animals.

CounterCounterpoint:

Using studies on captive wolves as a fundamental basis for how human societies do or should work…

… Is maybe really stupid compared to, I don’t know, using Sociology as a basis to understand human societies.

Sociology being the field that focuses on the social dynamics of uh, humans, which are markedly different from wolves, and other distinct, largely non sapient animals.

Its uh, kinda in our name, homo sapiens sapiens.

Agreed, complete fucking travesty.

As best I can tell, they also more or less also orchestrated the complete regulatory capture of the FAA, to rubber stamp and normalize their high bureaucracy, low actual safety and reliability paradigms.

Oh right, they also uh, totally don’t assassinate whistleblowers.

Totally don’t do that, nope, not at all, never.

If i fits, i shits.

Sorry, I haven’t been alive at any point where the beancounters at finance were not the ones running pretty much all well known American manufacturing companies/brands, for anything, cars, aircraft, tools…

Maybe possibly firearms is an exception.

Maybe.

Yeah, 30+ years is kind of a long time.

We were great at making stuff… and then all the mergers and acquisitions happened roughly under Reagan, and things just got more bad from there, NAFTA under Clinton, massive financialization, stock buybacks, private equity firms, CDOs, etc etc.

So yeah, we are no longer great at making stuff.

…

I grew up with a super rightwing dad explaining the ins and outs of what you’re describing happening to Boeing, where he worked most of his life.

He voted against literally everyone and everything that would have pushed back against the bean counters, and of course now more lately he’s voted for the idiots version of an ‘domestic industrial development policy’, ie, deport all our farm labor and slap import tariffs on literally everything, despite him knowing full well there are 0 complex mfg supply chains with a physical footprint on American soil that do not rely on imports.

People like him are why we were good at making stuff, why we no longer are.

30 years is more than enough time for a population to essentially unlearn a skill, at a societal level.

Despite me being American and thus never being able to afford anything imported, or made with imported parts…

I agree, the few US Saab car owners I knew more or less described their cars as reliable, so long as you keep up with basic maintenance… and then GM bought their car division, and basically all downhill from there, we (USAsians) absolutely fucking suck at making cars, by basically every possible metric.

I wonder if SAAB shares are up…

Ah, ok, thanks for providing the source, I genuinely appreciate that.

So, now, I’ll break my public safety rule, to prove a point.

So yep, again, Kernel level AC, routinely defeated, all the time, with such regularity that it is a viable business model.

Almost like Kernel AC doesn’t do what people seem to think it does, it isn’t a panacea, and the tradeoff is that you lose all your computer security… for nothing, really.

Found that in actually 15 seconds btw.

So, again, Kernel level AC can be, and routinely is defeated, all the time.

This is easy to verify with a simple websearch and maybe 30 minutes of time, I don’t want to directly link to where you can purchase working cheats/hacks/methods that can defeat Kernel AC, because I do not want such things to proliferate.

But you appear to be claiming the competetive scene for CS has introduced a Kernel level AC.

I cannot find this, this does not appear to be true, but I could be wrong, could you please source this claim?

I cannot find a competetive CS community or league or tournament that has… somehow rolled their own custom version of CS, overlayed with some other AC, on top of VAC.

Frankly, I don’t see how this would be possible without somehow forking CS, and then either stripping out or modifying VAC… as … two AC systems working at the same time are nearly 100% guaranteed to fight each other, and class the actions of the other AC… as cheats and hacks.

Its essentially analagous to how, 15 to 20 years ago, if you had McAfee and Norton and whatever other realtime, always active, system level anti virus software running, simultaneously… they would fight eachother, treat the other AV system as a virus, as malware.

…

All I can find is CS communities discussing the problem broadly, mixed with a lot of speculation that a recent VAC overhaul now does include Kernel AC… despite there being no actual evidence for this, beyond the collective bias and fallacious logic that if an AC becomes more effective, the only possible explanation is that it must be because of Kernel access.

What Valve actually did, was hook up AI to greatly enhance its serverside cheat detection capabilities and accuracy… one of the rare actually good use cases of AI as it relates to cybersec.

It seems to have improved their, again, server side heuristic detection abilities… without needing Kernel level access.

…

So yeah, please source your claim.

Unlike my easily verifiable ‘claim’ that I do not wsnt to cite for cybersec reasons, your claim should not have that problem at all.

Not sure how you could read this and come away with the idea that I do believe that…

I am talking about the subset of gamers that go on internet forums and discord servers and make false, unsupported claims as to the effectiveness or necessity or Kernel AC over other forms of AC, tell people this just is how it is now, get with the program, eat the bugs, play the spyware game, its fine, everyone is doing it.

Yep.

I would argue those people are extremely silly, but apparently some people just literally do not value privacy, data security, at all.

I guess we’ll see how well that works out with fascists running the show now, surely they’ll only go after the bad immigrants gamers!

Are you maybe a woman who had to stop using their period tracker app?

A trans person who had the audacity to exist, while being trans?

… Do you play video games on the same PC you do everything else on?

To the first chunk:

I mean yeah, thats why I said longest lived, not ‘most popular’.

But I am glad you agree that… VAC is reasonable, and works pretty darn well.

But this leads into Part 2…

Why does VAC work pretty darn well?

Beyond the technicals of the methods of AC…

Because if you fuckup bad enough, your entire Steam Library can be deleted.

Steam is a platform.

Every single other major company that is trying to force Kernel AC on the PC market is acting as if they do, or should just also be the de facto platform, as they are on consoles.

Yep, cheat on Xbox or PS and your account can get banned there too… but a PC is more than a gaming console, has a lot more private stuff on it than one, typically.

Valve are PC natives so they never pushed for Kernel AC.

They just allow, and now warn you about Kernel AC from other mega publishers on their platform, and these other game publishers.

Their whole thing is that they want you to use their platform instead of Steam. They’ve pretty much all done it at this point, at least tried… Ubisoft, Rockstar, MSFT/GFWL, ActBlizz (now technically MSFT but w/e), etc etc etc

And they want to force Kernel AC down your throat on your PC as well as consoles… because it gives them more data, which they can use themselves, and sell to data brokers.

… Anyway, the funniest part?

EAC and BattleEye have offered full support to game devs to get their AC working on linux via Proton… for 3 to 4 years now.

It comes with their licensing agreements.

But management almost never cares to tell development to actually use this support thst they are already paying for!

… Because they get lots of money from MSFT, and MSFT hates Linux.

Also, if you go on areweanticheatyet … you can see that almost every single AC system of any kind, in the last 10 years… has at least one game that showcases it working on Linux.

This means that it is provably, entirely possible to get nearly all AC systems working on Linux, as some game dev team has done this.

Its just that most game dev teams, under most management… are not directed to.

There is no real technical reason why AC cannot be made to work in a satisfactory way on Linux.

At best, it is dev/management laziness/nonprioritization, at worst, it is publishers not wanting to upset MSFT, or still pursuing their idea of what should be normalized in terms of a gaming distribution platform, and the backend business side of profiting from dataharvesting.

Yeah I mean its not like Valve has been using a combination of server side and client side game file only validation to do AC for Counter Strike for 20 years or anything.

Yep yep yep, the whole industry uses Kernel AC, other than the devs of the longest running competetive FPS franchise ever, yep yep yep!

I offer:

0.2% more effective detection of cheaters (theoretical)

You offer:

Full and total access to every single file on your computer, all of its hardware, and all connected devices, via kernel level access.

Do you accept?

Yep.

Things were better when private servers had actual mods and admins, they acted more like pubs where you could go see the regulars, actually form a community.

I am still baffled that anyone thinks that Kernel AC is any kind of effective at stopping hacks, people have been literally making a living off of defeating it, and selling those hacks / methods for almost a decade now…

But nope, still got hordes of idiot gamers who think they work, think they’re necessary, think they can’t be spoofed.

Yep, lets go check on the DXY again…

Yep, going down, again.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy

Down from about 110.2 at about the inauguration, to about 98.3 right now.

Or, Trump has devalued the USD against the other currencies it actually trades against, by about 10.3% in just over 6 months.

Minor nitpick:

It’s just onus, no h. English is inconsistent.

Herb, lol.

…

But anyway… so, this has yet to go to court.

If Valve just… does their own intepretation, unbans some games, Visa and MC can just say welp you violated the partner rules, no more payments for you.

Now, Valve has to do a prolonged legal battle to prove wrongful termination of contract … while also having their money printing machine offline.

And also, all that would do is possibly award them compensatory damages.

A court cannot compel a business transaction (an ongoing partnership) or partnership anywhere near as much as it can compel people, corporations have more rights than people.

If it could, well then we have turned the economy on its head, now judges run businesses, not CEOs.

…

Maybe there is some kind of wrongful termination / non renewal of contract clause, but:

1 - I doubt it

2 - Well you’d be having lawyers argue the validity of that anyway.

Valve and MC + Visa both currently do not want to take this to an actual lawsuit because it would be extremely costly in financial / reputational terms for each of them.

Visa and MC and Valve would all massively lose financially if their agreements fell apart, Visa and MC and Valve as well could also suffer massive reputational damage depending on how exactly the public narrative forms around the lawsuit… and lawyers are quite expensive.

Nobody actually wants to pull the trigger, because its akin to a MAD scenario with nukes.

…

That is why we are getting this weird tap unfolding basically PR war, where both sides are angling snd making essentislly veiled threats… but not actually seeming to do much beyond posturing.

This kind of shit happens all the time between corporations, its usually just that it stays internal to the involved companies, you read about it two decades later in an autobiography named ‘My life as a corporate big shot’ or whatever.

And it is the legal system that determines whether or not a contract has or has not been breached.

Just like it is also the legal system that determines whether or not a company is a harfmul monopoly.

Your opinion is one I agree with, but that isn’t how things work, there has to be an official arbiter that agrees with or disagrees with that, and those arbiters are called courts, which are full of lawyers making arguments, and the best lawyers tend to cost the most money.

…

Also… what, is Valve going to sue Visa and MC for… Visa and MC choosing not to do business with them?

There is no legal mechanism that forces Visa and MC to do business with Valve, that punishes Visa and MC should they choose not to.

This is like suing a person at a farmer’s market for not buying an apple.

Or, that is roughly what Visa and MC’s lawyers would argue.

Yes, they’re all computer programs, no, they’re not all as spectacularly energy, water and money intensive, as reliant on mass plagiarism as LLMs.

AI is a much, much more varied field of research than just LLMs… or, well, rather, it was, untill the entire industry decided to go all in on what 5 years ago was just one of many, many, radically different approaches, such that people now basically just think AI and LLM are the same thing.

I hear you, but I wouldn’t go that far.

You think Steam is a money printing machine?

MC and Visa are payment processors.

Literally every credit or debit transaction that involves them?

Oh yeah, they shave a penny or two or sometimes more off of that transaction, the business and actual banks involved usually eat it, not too long ago it would be much more common for retailers to pass some of it to the consumer as well.

Its the Office Space scam, but actually legit, at a muuuch grander scale.

Thats a fucking money printing machine, they unironically have at least 10,000x more money to throw at lawyers than Valve does.