At least it adds noise to the system. It’s better than the people who are happily training the AI.

The article talks about how Republicans are alienating virtually every woman in the country. So, to appear electable, they’re having their wives and kids do the ads, so that out-of-touch women will see a woman in the ad and decide that the candidate is a good guy.

But that, and the whole focus on “traditional family values” and everything boxes them into a certain image, that you’re not a real American man if you’re not married with kids by the time you’re in your 30s or something. So, even if he had a picture with his fiance and dog, it would prove he’s not a “traditional family values” republican. So, better to pose with a friend’s wife and kids than prove that he’s not “normal”.

What’s ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That’s why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.

AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says “tell me which images contain a motorcycle”. It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.

Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it’s my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.

And, even if you do lobby the government full time, what if you’re a lobbyist who works on behalf of environmental groups. If the Sierra Club wants to alert politicians about a secret clause snuck into a new bill regulating coal mines, they can hire you to talk to the right people. If a town like Flint, Michigan is having trouble with contamination of their water supply, they can hire you to find the right people to talk to.

Maybe in an ideal world every politician would have enough time and enough staff to fully investigate things on their own. But, in the real world, we’re probably always going to need people to talk to the decision makers and advocate on our behalf.

What we really should have is good oversight and tight rules to ensure it’s just talking and not doing favors, giving money, etc.

What about a lobbyist who works for say the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Or a nurses union. Or who works for the Sierra Club, or some organization trying to protect the environment?

“Lobbying” is just talking to a politician on behalf of a person or group. If the Hollywood studios all hire lobbyists to talk to representatives about why copyright terms should be longer and DRM should be mandatory, doesn’t it make sense that there should be people telling the other side?

I get that too often lobbyists overstep ethical boundaries. Often, they either effectively bribe politicians, or they write up laws allowing the politician to just rubber-stamp them. But, you could shore up and/or enforce laws restricting that kind of thing, while still allowing a representative of a group to meet with a politician and explain their point of view.

Mmmmmmm baking engineer…

You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.

So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.

I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.

It’s amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced “war mode” and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.

What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.

Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren’t enough victims to pick on.

I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn’t want to grief others would have been relatively easy.

That’s one thing I’ve always admired about Eve Online. It’s an MMO that’s almost entirely player driven. Various sectors of space change hands between different factions of players. That results in the sorts of things you’re talking about. Unfortunately Eve has extremely boring space battles (for players, for watchers it can be fun), and a toxic community.

But, I’ve always wanted an RPG where the world evolved. To me, the key thing to make that realistic would be NPCs that didn’t respawn. Like, if you killed a certain golden dragon named Gurnadom, that dragon was dead, gone, nobody else could kill it. There would be no Gurnadom killing guides because there was only ever one Gurnadom and only one group of players ever killed that dragon. There might be tips on killing golden dragons, but each dragon was unique so it wasn’t a matter of watching videos and understanding the patterns. Each fight against a golden dragon could only happen at most once, and every fight was unique.

And, in any game involving war, there should be permanent destruction of things: fortresses that were attacked would take damage over time and eventually be turned into rubble. A side that’s winning a war should be expanding its territory. As a result, where a player can safely go should depend on the progress of the war, which is something not programmed into the game, but player driven.

I’m just so tired of the WoW style of MMO where the player is “The Champion” who has saved the world multiple times… along with the hundreds of other nearby players who are all the one-and-only champion who also killed a certain raid boss over and over every week for a month.

Some of my favourite games use procedurally generated maps. But, those maps are not hand-sculpted the way MMO dungeons are. And, while you could certainly use generative AI to come up with generic babble from NPCs, that’s not the same as designing entire quests. It may be that eventually a generative AI system will be able to do everything a human could have done: hand-crafted maps, full quest chain dialogue, etc. I just think we’re nowhere near that point yet.

For example, a quest chain almost always has a goal behind it. You’re revealing a certain aspect of the story to the player bit by bit as they complete parts of the quest. But, to do that you need at least a very basic theory of mind. You need to understand what the player knows before the quest chain starts, what each bit of the quest chain will add to their knowledge, and then what they’ll understand at the end of the quest chain. That “theory of mind” stuff is the thing that generative systems just can’t do right now because they’re just fancy auto-complete.

As for auto-generated dungeons, WoW tried that with Torghast in the Shadowlands expansion, and it was not well received. Granted, part of the problem was that Torghast was a depressing, death-themed “dungeon”. But, a bigger issue was that there was no intention behind the design of the levels. It was just a randomized set of corridors that fit together in a random way. Good dungeon designs require intention. You want to reveal something to the player as they go through the dungeon. Ideally you want to know that you’re working your way towards a boss. WoW’s black temple raid is a good example of this. You start in the sewers, you work your way out into a courtyard, you enter another building, clear out the ground floor and open a door that unlocks access to a set of staircases that works its way to the top of the building. You beat the Illidari council which allows you to access a door that opens to the roof of the building where you face the final boss Illidan. I don’t think generative AI is anywhere near being able to come up with a concept like that, let alone design the maps and art for the whole thing.

The sad thing is, I think those days are 100% over. With data mining, wikis, etc. I think there will never be a game that’s played mostly in-game with in-game tools, with people chatting in-game about how to do overcome various challenges the game throws at you. The world has just moved on. I never played something as hardcore as Ashron’s Call in the early days, but I do miss the early days of WoW when so much more of the fun was player-driven, and there was so much more interaction with other players.

I think that’s one reason why D&D is seeing an increase in popularity. It’s a game where you can optimize things to some extent, but because it’s human-driven, a DM can mitigate that somewhat. It’s also inherently social, and it’s impossible to data-mine, and difficult to min-max because each campaign is different and many DMs have slight variations on the set rules.

I don’t think Blizzard understands how to make a social game, and I’m beginning to realize they never did. The game used to be more social, but it seems like that was by accident instead of by design.

Like, you used to have to use the chat channels to find a group for a dungeon run. That forced you to chat. When they added dungeon finder, you didn’t need to chat anymore, making it less social. When they made cross-realm things happen, zones felt less lonely which was good for being social, but then it meant that you no longer ran into all the same names over and over, so you stopped knowing people. That was really bad for social things because it meant that people who behaved badly didn’t get a bad reputation and people who behaved well didn’t get a good reputation.

This is a great feature given the current state of the game. But, I wonder if it will have the unintended side effect of making the community even more toxic.

So really, all modern browsers are either forks of KHTML / KJS or are based on the Mozilla codebase. But, at least right now, there are 3 separate engineering teams working on 3 independent codebases. Which hopefully will mitigate some of the issues you get when one company completely controls a software “ecosystem”.

Strange, because they say it’s a “custom version” of Firefox. That normally means it’s a custom build, not a true fork.

Mozilla was doomed from the start.

Netscape Inc. wanted to sell browsers eventually, which makes sense. It’s product which requires a massive amount of engineering effort. But, when Microsoft started tying IE to Windows and giving it away free, there was no way that Netscape could actually make any sales. The bigger reason their business was crushed was that Microsoft was also giving away their web server (IIS) away for free, while Netscape was charging for theirs.

Some kids today are too young to know that Microsoft was sued by the US government over this and lost the case (along with what was very likely Microsoft falsifying evidence). But, then Bush Jr. took office and the government basically took a case they had won and effectively threw out the win.

When it was clear that Netscape was going to fail as a business they open-sourced the browser either as an act of charity or spite. The problem is that it’s still a massive and expensive project to build a web browser. That’s especially true in a world where standards keep evolving and the browser has to keep having new features added.

Since making a browser was so expensive, they needed financial support, and eventually that came from Google. At first Google just wanted Firefox to exist as a hedge so that Microsoft wouldn’t dominate the browser market. But, once Google came out with Chrome it was both a way to keep directing traffic to Google search, and a way to pretend they don’t have a monopoly on browsers.

But, if 90% of the funding of your project comes from Google, there are some obvious lines you can’t cross. So, Mozilla has to keep doing this dance where they make a browser that competes with Chrome, but one that doesn’t cross certain lines that would make Google mad and result in them shutting off the funding.

Google would shut off the funding to Firefox in a heartbeat if they took ad blocking and privacy too seriously. But, Google doesn’t care too much if Mozilla messes around with AI or ads.

Doesn’t Safari use a different codebase? It’s not available on non-Apple platforms, but it’s good to know that there are still engineers working on a different codebase.

Is it a true fork, or is it a project that follows the Firefox tree and builds a customized browser from it?

The difference being, if it’s a true fork, they have to do all their own browser engineering starting at the time it was forked off. That sounds like a monumental effort.

I looked at their jobs list and counted 35 jobs. Of that I count 9 that are AI-related and 4 that are ads-related. The list also includes a few generic jobs like “Chief of Staff”, “Client Analytics Manager”, “Staff Test Engineer” or “Fixed-Term Social Media Trainee”.

Basically at least 1/3 of the jobs they’re advertising that have a specific team mentioned are AI or ads jobs.

You can’t do this with any company. The correct number of ads people working at Firefox is 0.

So, have some fun with the other players at the expense of the player who refused to do even some basic work for the benefit of everybody else. It doesn’t have to be massively cruel, just give them a nudge so that next time they do put in the required effort.

Sure, but given that the player did avoid doing the work, the DM can take the opportunity to punish them for it.