Sami

Yeah, like the other person also mentioned Counter Strike has had a major cheating problem for two decades and it’s still pretty bad today. Valorant is a very similar type of game: twitch shooter that needs fine motor skills and reaction time where one player can dominate an entire match. Valorant has a more intrusive anti-cheat and a lower ratio of cheaters but both game still have cheaters and cheats. People will pay large monthly fees for access to premium, not-yet-detected cheats to compete in competitive circuits.

What’s distinct about twitch shooters is that the core gameplay is very simple (just click on everyone’s head) but it can take thousands of hours to become really competitive at them. People who are not at the same level as their opponent may think they are cheating if they outskill them enough which leads to a feedback loop where new players feel like they need to cheat to be on equal footing because the other person HAS to be doing it too.

Players with a lot of hours can usually tell if someone is cheating with relatively high accuracy (except at very high skill levels where the cheaters are also incredibly good at the game) but newer players tend to consistently call cheats on players that are just better at the game. Competitive drive, lack of trust in other players playing fair and high skill ceilings all create the demand for cheats which in turn creates lucrative opportunities for cheat developers.

Ruining other people’s fun is also another popular reason like you said but I would say most cheaters justify it to themselves in some way.

A podcast that covered the topic said that the plan was more expensive per student that what the state’s existing housing designs cost to build. Also, his donation only covered like 20% of costs.

He also tried to design a windowless mega-dorm as a weird social experiment of sorts. All around great guy

In his October 25 resignation letter to UCSB Campus Architect Julie Hendricks, Dennis McFadden ― a well-respected Southern California architect with 15 years on the committee ― goes scorched earth on the radical new building concept, which calls for an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.

The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly. Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate.

https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-protest-over-ucsb-mega-dorm/

Thankfully it did not get approved.

we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication

I don’t think you’re making the point you think you’re making

My 2012 laptop runs windows 10 perfectly fine and has the latest security updates. We’re way past the point of using hardware limitations as an excuse for companies to drop support early.

I don’t see why a school should have to replace their basic computers with an equally basic computer after 3 years unless it’s broken beyond repair. I don’t think the OS itself is doing much more than what an enterprise copy of windows does for security.

It’s absolutely, 100% intentionally misleading. They even recognize that internally and are currently being sued for just that.

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the agency accused Amazon of using deceptive designs, known as “dark patterns,” to deceive consumers into enrolling in Prime, which provides subscribers with perks such as faster shipping for an fee of $139 annually, or $14.99 a month.

The FTC said Amazon made it difficult for customers to purchase an item without also subscribing to Prime. In some cases, consumers were presented with a button to complete their transactions — which didn’t clearly state it would also enroll them in Prime.

Getting out of a subscription was often too complicated, and Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would have made canceling easier, the complaint said.

Internally, Amazon called the process “Iliad,” a reference to the ancient Greek poem about lengthy siege of Troy during the Trojan war.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/06/21/amazon-prime-without-consent/

Sure, but I don’t think it has to be a subscription nag. They’re free to monetize as they wish but I don’t have to use it either when non-subscription alternatives exist.

I set this up and like the UI but it does that stuff where it says things like “Hey you have duplicates do you want to remove them? Oops sorry you gotta pay for that” and “Hey we noticed you’re using a adblocker”. Everything has to be a subscription service these days.