Comment by FieryMechanic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FieryMechanic | Hacker News Reader

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> In that case I believe it's fair to disregard all other epistemological processes and blame BSODs on the game out of principle

I am sorry but that is asinine and unscientific. You should blame BSODs on what is causing them. I don't like kernel anti-cheat but I will blame the actual cause of the issues, not assign blame on things which I don't approve of.

I am a long time Linux user and many of the people complaining about BSODs on Windows had a broken the OS in one way or another. Some were running weird stuff like 3rd party shell extensions that modify core DLLs, or they had installed every POS shovelware/shareware crap. That isn't Microsoft's fault if you start running an unsupported configuration of the OS.

Similarly. The YouTubers that were most vocal about HellDivers problems did basically no proper investigation other than saying "look it crashed", when it was quite clearly their broken hardware that was the issue. As previously stated their CPU had a burn mark on one of the pins, some AM5 had faults that caused this IIRC. So everything indicated hardware failure being the cause of the BSOD. They still blamed the game, probably because it got them more watch time.

During the same time period when people were complaining about BSODs, I didn't experience one. I was running the same build of the game as them and playing on the same difficulty and sometimes recording it via OBS (just like they were). What I didn't have was a AM5 motherboard, I have and older AM4 motherboard which doesn't have these problems.

> that is asinine and unscientific

Well, yes. I did say something to that effect. Blaming BSODs on invasive anti-cheat out of principle is a political position, not a scientific one.

> During the same time period when people were complaining about BSODs, I didn't experience one. I was running the same build of the game as them and playing on the same difficulty and sometimes recording it via OBS (just like they were). What I didn't have was a AM5 motherboard, I have and older AM4 motherboard which doesn't have these problems.

I understand what you're saying here, but anyone who does a substantial amount of systems programming could tell you that hardware-dependent behavior is evidence for a hardware problem, but does not necessarily rule out a software bug that only manifests on certain hardware. For example, newer hardware could expose a data race because one path is much faster. Alternatively, a subroutine implemented with new instructions could be incorrect.

Regardless, I don't doubt that this issue with Helldivers 2 was caused by (or at least surfaced by) certain hardware, but that does not change that given such an issue, I would presume the culprit is kernel anticheat until presented strong evidence to the contrary.

> Well, yes. I did say something to that effect. Blaming BSODs on invasive anti-cheat out of principle is a political position, not a scientific one.

When there are actual valid concerns about the anti-cheat, these will be ignored because of people that assigned blame to it when unwarranted. This is why making statements based on your ideology can be problematic.

> I understand what you're saying here, but anyone who does a substantial amount of systems programming could tell you that hardware-dependent behavior is evidence for a hardware problem, but does not necessarily rule out a software bug that only manifests on certain hardware. For example, newer hardware could expose a data race because one path is much faster. Alternatively, a subroutine implemented with new instructions could be incorrect.

People were claiming it was causing hardware damage which is extremely unlikely since both Intel, AMD and most hardware manufacturers have mechanisms which prevent this. This isn't some sort of opaque race condition.

> RI would presume the culprit is kernel anti-cheat until presented strong evidence to the contrary.

You should know that if you making assumptions without evidence that will often lead you astray.

I don't like kernel anti-cheat and would prefer for it not to exist, but making stupid statements based on ideology instead of evidence just makes you look silly.

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