People often don't recognize that they are in an adversarial situation, where taking a step that looks like it solves the problem does much less than you expect because other people will later counter your work.
People often don't recognize that they are in an adversarial situation, where taking a step that looks like it solves the problem does much less than you expect because other people will later counter your work.
If your qualifying definition of "solution" is "magic bullet" then there are no solutions. Every solution is a component in the perpetual fight.
1. Collaborative situations: your solution works better and better, because people notice and work with you. Ex: designing an icon or coining a word for a new concept; over time more and more people recognize it, use it, etc.
2. Indifferent situations: your solution continues working about the same, because it's not about interaction with others who adapt. Ex: enabling compression on HTML serving, inventing joist hangars, new cancer surgery technique. Most inventions and engineering is in this category.
3. Decay situations: your solution slowly stops working as well, because the world moves on. Ex: payroll software needs to be updated as payroll regulations change.
4. Adversarial situations: your solution quickly stops working well, because others are directly trying to counter your work. Ex: investing strategies, antibiotics, ad fraud, ad fraud detection.
When you're evaluating a solution based on how it seems like it would work in the current world, thinking about how collaborative-vs-adversarial the situation is helps you predict what the full rollout of your solution would look like.
I realise this probably comes of a little snarky but I've tried following your comments in good faith and it just seems like a very abstract hammer looking for a nail without really reading/listening to the quite literal/simple/not-very-abstract discussion being had here.
Then, in our subthread it seemed to me like you were saying that it being adversarial doesn't matter, and wins are always ephemeral ("every solution is a component in the perpetual fight"). I responded by explaining how this varies by situation, with some where wins compound (cooperative) but that the adversarial nature of ad fraud shortens the lifetime of wins dramatically compared to other domains.
-cuts their profits in half or more because they have to pay for the proxies(or if they own them they can't sell them since they need them)
-it prevents most low skilled people from doing it
-it prevents them from doing on it on an infinite scale, AWS have more than a 100 millions IPs, it's rare to see a grey market proxy provider with more than a few millions clean IPs, and it usually cost like 40 cents per IP, where it can be FREE on AWS
You add basic protection against headless browsers, behavioral analysis etc...And now 99% of the people who can fool you are already making 6 figures in legitimate jobs and won't risk 10 years of jail to earn just a bit more money.