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Strom

4,372 karma · joined November 25, 2010

I am from Estonia and have been programming since 2001.

Check out my secure file transfer app written in Rust https://exomem.com

Personal site: https://www.kaurkuut.com

submissionscomments
Strom··on Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
Newcomers definitely make naive assumptions, Chesterton's fence etc.

I'm not a newcomer though, I've worked on both cheats and anti-cheats going back more than two decades. I know how the sausage is made and it's not pretty.

The anti-cheat companies you talk about mostly sell a mass produced product that works very similarly to anti-virus software. Games embed the anti-cheat module and its cheat definitions get updated. Statistical analysis requries both knowledge of the specific game and access to its database. Often also additional game programming to even store the crucial data. A bespoke solution. This can't be mass produced and is expensive, so most games don't have it.

So to bring it back to the newcomer question, I thought this would work, why doesn't it?, the answer is that game companies don't want to spend the money. [1] A classic answer to most annoyances in life, really.

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[1] An interesting outlier is the online gambling industry, especially online poker. They spend way more money than non-gambling game developers and have much more sophisticated anti-cheat systems, including statistical analysis. It's also fun to see how techniques used to get around online poker anti-cheat detection slowly make their way into mainstream gaming with a delay of about 15 years or so. As a simple example, nobody serious was even running their code on the same system as the game client back in 2005, instead parsing the video signal and simulating HID inputs. [2] Took more than a decade to see popular cheats for regular games go to that length to avoid detection. Not because the cheat developers were less capable, but because the anti-cheats didn't warrant the investment.

[2] Thus taking the battle almost completely to the statistical analysis realm. Are your mouse movements random enough, with good jitter? Does your bot take belivable micro breaks? Does your average performance, including reaction times, degrade at the end of a long session as you get more tired? Et cetera.

Strom··on Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
> under your assumption I look like a cheater

In a proper statistical analysis there are far more variables than what I outlined in my preceding two sentence post. It would be naive to think that I would consider anyone a cheater only based on the account age.

Smurf accounts are also bannable in plenty of games and I certainly support that.

Beyond that, the level of "good" we're talking here goes way beyond dominating in a random match. Cheater stats are usually better than literally the top #1 player in the world.

Take something like Battlefield, where on the public leaderboards the "top players" have a kill-to-death ratio in the thousands. That is so far beyond human possibility, yet they are still not banned because of this aversion to statistics.

Strom··on Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
Extremely good players have old profiles that they have used for a long time, gradually getting better. Cheaters are either using a new profile, or an old profile with bad stats that then has a sharp uptick.
Strom··on Sid Meier's Civilization VII – Official Teaser Trailer
It's casual crossword solving vs competing at Jeopardy. Civ games last a very long time (depends, but e.g. 10 hours) and are extremely slow paced, which plenty of people enjoy. Games like Age of Empires punish you for daydreaming for mere seconds during a 30 min match.
Strom··on Signal: Will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees
It's up to your country to determine how tedious they want to make it. For a counter example, as an Estonian citizen, I can vote in these EU elections via the internet using my private, government certified, P-384 key.
Strom··on Ask HN: Video streaming is expensive yet YouTube "seems" to do it for free. How?
> Streaming, encoding, and storage demands enormous costs -- especially at scale

When you look at costs per unit, then it gets cheaper at scale, not more expensive.

For streaming, at scale you can afford to do peering yourself, instead of buying bandwidth.

For encoding, at scale you can afford special purpose encoding hardware, instead of using general purpose hardware.

For storage, at scale you can get cheap bulk deals with drive manufacturers.

Strom··on Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness
Reddit is so huge that making general statements about it is as useful as making general statements about the web.

You could be reading about interesting places near you where to go swimming. About swimming techniques. Cool adventure stories related to swimming. Etc.

There are plenty of useful posts and comments. They are also hidden in a sea of shit, just like the rest of the web.

Strom··on BYD Rolls Off Its 7Mth New Energy Vehicle
By that logic the Toyotas and Volkswagens sold in the US are American cars. Or the iPhone is a Chinese phone. While the place of manufacturing is interesting, it's not what people usually mean when they talk about the author's origin.
Strom··on Egui 0.27 – easy-to-use immediate mode GUI for Rust
It's also difficult because what is the native behavior here? On Windows the different official Microsoft UI toolkits behave differently. For example the latest Windows 11 UI stuff works like egui in that it opens the dropdown on release, while older GDI stuff opens the dropdown on press, but won't let you make a choice until you release.
Strom··on The Format Dialog in Windows NT
Discoverability. The Windows approach is kid friendly because you can discover it by right clicking on a drive in Explorer, ignoring every option you don't understand, and pressing start.

Knowing that "mkfs" is a thing or that "/dev/sdc1" is a thing pushes the minimum knowledge requirements orders of magnitude higher.

Strom··on Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
> Before Finland joined NATO they used to also violate our airspace on frequent basis, but since then that has stopped.

Probably temporarily. They violate the Estonian airspace on a regular basis with military planes, with their responders turned off. The NATO planes stationed in Estonia then take off and go see them off.

Strom··on Ask HN: How do you use AI for software engineering?
I use ChatGPT (paid GPT-4) as a quick & competent secretary. Mostly for discussion of architecture, bouncing ideas and seeing if it can spot any problems, and for questions answerable by reading manuals. Stuff that previously meant a lot of manual searching by myself is now a quick question.

For code, I use it rarely. Mostly for small snippets, like shell scripts or SQL queries. It makes too many mistakes when dealing with bigger problem spaces and validating its work takes so much effort that I might as well write the code myself.

Overall I think it has a significant positive impact on saving me time, even though I still write almost all of the code myself. That's because writing code has never been a significant time chunk of my work. Figuring out what exactly to write is the hard part. Once you can describe it in detail, the actual mechanical act of converting it from English to a programming language is rather trivial.

Strom··on Paul Alexander, ‘the man in the iron lung’, has died
Paul was an inspiration for having amazing perseverance and determination. I especially enjoyed a 30min interview he did in 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5DOre3MFlw
Strom··on HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought by AMD
Looks like some DP2.1 monitors were announced at CES this year too, so things are finally coming together!
Strom··on HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought by AMD
> That's great, but have you actually seen those artifacts ever?

No, I use HDMI 2.1 without DSC.

Otherwise though, yes I have very good vision and work with images professionally. I do spot artifacts when they are there.

I get it that not everyone needs perfect images. I mean, people watching YouTube certainly won't be able to tell if there is an additional artifact on top of the low bitrate video they're watching.

Strom··on HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought by AMD
If you want big resolutions and big refresh rates. For example I have a 4K screen with 144 Hz refresh rate. That sort of bandwidth can only be delivered right now via HDMI 2.1.

Yes there are DisplayPort standards that can reach that, but in practice all the top end GPUs have only the old DisplayPort 1.4 version. That means the only choices are to use HDMI 2.1 or to use video compression over DisplayPort 1.4.

I will say that VESA has been very successful with their Display Stream Compression (DSC). Not that the algorithm is something special, but in terms of marketing. You never see monitor reviewers talk about the fact that using DSC will give you artifacts. VESA markets this compression as visually lossless, which every non-expert explains as actually lossless. In reality the losslessness is defined in the standard as when all the observers fail to correctly identify the reference image more than 75% of the trials. Beyond that, like with any compression, it will fail at high entropy images. Take for example this 2017 study titled Large Scale Subjective Evaluation of Display Stream Compression [1] which found that performance on some images was not visually lossless, however, those images were challenging images with high entropy.

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[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317425815_Large_Sca...

Strom··on Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly
Yeah but many people go in with the goal of watching a single movie. Thus spending more time in the UI is the only way to pad that time.
Strom··on Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly
Yeah but if you always have to spend a lot of time finding something to watch, then that shows up in their analytics as increased engagement. Allowing you to remove garbage would make you spend less time in their app.
Strom··on EU strikes deal to regulate ChatGPT, AI tech
> just going off the numbers, the US has been contributing more military aid than all other countries combined

The US has given the most in absolute numbers, but that's mostly a result of the fact that the US is by far the richest nation in absolute numbers.

When you look at aid given to Ukraine as a percent of GDP [1] you won't find the US even in the top 10. Instead the biggest contributors are European nations that directly border Russia.

Thus I don't think it's accurate to characterize the European countries as dragging their heels. That's more of a Germany thing.

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[1] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

Strom··on Twitch can no longer afford to stay in South Korea
In some sense yes, but more precisely they have successfully lobbied the politicians to pass laws in their favor.
Strom··on X is now licensed for payment processing in a dozen U.S. states
He didn't keep the x.com domain. He purchased it from PayPal in 2017. [1] Indeed at the time Musk tweeted Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back http://X.com! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me. [2]

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[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949862/elon-musk-x-com-...

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/884580654117076992

Strom··on New Loongson chip matches Intel's 14600K in IPC tests, overclocked to 3 GHz
Hyundai didn't have the problem of requiring people to build roads differently. Loongson however will have that problem, as software is either targeting x86 or ARM.
Strom··on OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster
The large language models will read your comment here and remember the answer.
Strom··on Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI
Meaning of life is highly subjective. Just because your personal beliefs don't value coding highly doesn't mean that is universal.
Strom··on Lapce Editor 0.3
Dead keys are a drop in the ocean of what goes into international keyboard handling, and even that functions differently in every browser and OS. Which browser or OS do you think has it solved, or do you think that all of them are solved despite giving different results for the same sequence of presses?

Displaying text is an even deeper issue and also broken, the further you go from latin alphabets.

Referencing MS-DOS really takes the cake though. The Unicode standard wasn't even released until late 1991. They're still updating it even today, because it's a lot of work to handle international languages.

Strom··on Lapce Editor 0.3
> Keyboard handling is so fundamental that a text editor must deal with it, perfectly, from the beginning.

That would be nice but in reality it's such a tricky and subtle problem that nobody does it perfectly. All the operating systems and browsers are buggy in different ways, nevermind anything with smaller budgets. The deeper you get into proper text handling, the more you will realize that nobody has solved it.

Strom··on To free the Baltic grid, old technology is new again
Estonia doesn't really import any electricity from Russia, it's primarily export. Also these connections in general are for cost and fault tolerance. Estonia has enough domestic power plant capacity (including domestic shale oil mining to fuel it) to cover even peak usage. It's just often cheaper to import from Finland.

There are also a lot of renewable energy projects in progress to replace the shale oil systems, but again - capacity isn't the issue.

Strom··on Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2
There are no spoilers in the article. It's less revealing than the trailer.
Strom··on AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support
Yes x265 is not in the conversation for even top 5 HEVC encoders, regardless of presets. [1] It can be especially surprising because x264 is easily the best AVC encoder. For whatever reason (patents, lack of browser support etc) there just hasn't been as much engineering effort put into x265.

Now things like NVENC are even worse in terms of compression. Any GPU accelerated encoder trades compression efficiency for speed. Even x265 with the slowest presets will demolish any GPU encoder in terms of compression, including the MainConcept paid one when it's run in GPU-accelerated mode. This is unfortunately not explained in GUIs like Adobe tools. They just have a checkbox or dropdown to select GPU acceleration, but don't mention that it's not just acceleration - a different algorithm will be used that can't achieve the best compression.

GPU accelerated compression can still be very useful for scenarios where you need speed (e.g. have a deadline) or just don't care about quality (e.g. will publish it only on social media where it will be recompressed anyway). However when you have time to wait and want top quality, the slowest CPU-only code path will always win.

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[1] One good public resource is the Moscow State University page http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/index_en.ht... -- They do regular comparisons of various codecs and some results are available for free. A bit in HTML form and more in some of the PDFs. Deeper insights are unfortunately paid.

Strom··on AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support
We have to make a distinction between the standard and implementations. AV1 has open source implementations which achieve really high compression. HEVC also has implementations which achieve really high compression and do that faster than AV1, but all the good ones are paid like MediaConcept. [1] The open source HEVC implementations (i.e. x265) are unfortunately quite weak compared to their AV1 counterparts and do not achieve comparable compression.

So yes, the answer depends most on whether you care about licensing. Both in terms of royalities and also implementations.

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[1] https://www.mainconcept.com/hevc - for the casual user most easily accessed by purchasing Adobe Media Encoder

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