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> in the name of entertainment.

Does the purpose change how the act should be interpreted?

> A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given

Burners give so many fucks that we willingly do a thing historically reserved for punishment in the military (de-mooping)

> in a manner where it can never be recovered from.

Environmental sustainability is an actual goal not just greenwashing. I encourage you too look into Playa Resto https://journal.burningman.org/2022/10/black-rock-city/leavi... and note that the term volunteer is used meaning these people don't get paid.


Theme camp based on an area famous for getting hit with hurricanes and other natural disasters here.

During the rains we were one of the few places still open and where you could party, eat, and grab a solid drink. Being on Esplanade also meant we were a shelter for people to wait out the weather.

Loads of great moments by doing that.


This is how camps known as "Plug n Plays" work. Charge exorbitant camp dues, provide everything for your campers, and let them lead the most privileged lifestyle out there.

Many camps did this, and were actually turning a profit at Burning Man by taking advantage of the community of volunteers.

A few years ago the Burning Man organization put a stop to this by decreasing or eliminating camps considered to be Luxury or Plug N Play. Not just because they were antithetical to the event, but because they became famous for a slew of problems.

White Ocean is one of the more famous camps in this domain. A luxury camp that charged exorbitant fees for extremely wealthy individuals to come and party without any responsibility. They had loads of sexual assaults, dosing incidents, and campers generally being shitty people. The leads also refused to pay the hired help. This led to a now-infamous vandalism incident.

White Ocean basically has a permanent ban on attending now.

You cannot incentivize people out there with money. You have to take something away that they actually care about.


This would lead to less compliance.

There are lots of people out there who would happily pay fines or not get deposits back if they didn't have to do the less glamorous parts of the event. You have to take something away that they actually care about.

If a camp does a really bad job at moop cleanup, Burning Man organization talks to leads to understand what happened. Frequently what they will take away is the camp's placement in the event, or sometimes even the ability to attend the event as that camp at all.

For reference: I am one of the leads for a fairly large and famous Burning Man camp. We camp on Esplanade most years. We do exactly what you proposed: We have deposits, and the more people put into the camp before, during, and after the event, determines if we offer them a refund and an invitation to camp with us next year. One of the factors is if you help us during setup and strike.

An invitation to camp with us guarantees them a ticket at one of the cheaper tiers. We have plenty of campers that come in, pay the dues, do nothing for the camp, are generally useless during the event, and bail out leaving a huge mess.

Conversely, we have a very small (10-20%) team of highly dedicated individuals who stay past the event and pick every piece of string, fuzz, fluff, lag bolt, rebar, and debris out of the dust and take it out. These people get nearly their entire camp dues back. If they attend next year, the social capital that they've built doing so compounds into them becoming increasingly popular and famous on Playa.

If there's one thing that Burning Man has taught me, it is that very few people are motivated by financial incentive. If you really want to motivate someone, figure out what they genuinely desire. It's rarely money.


Your claim is backed by psychology research. The most well known study is the "Israeli Nursery" one where a fine was introduced based on how late you were to pick up your kid.

Parents started treating "x shekel fine for y minutes late" as "buy an extra y minutes for only x shekels!".


I don't think it would work here.

Some camp leaders spend famously x m$+ just to bring their art to the playa. They wouldn't care about some fine.

Similarly the fine would make it impossible for others to stay after.

This is one event that somehow resisted economic behavior IMO


I wonder how well that replicates between different cultures with different attitudes about money.

Would it though? It seems like it could work, even if people opt to "not comply" aka pay the fine.

Charge $1,000 fee per acre (eyeballing it, that seems reasonable). There are people who will clean an acre to be spotless for $500: not bad for a day of honest, actually contributing to the environment, outdoor work!

If I'm missing something and it actually costs more than I know, raise it to $2,000. If heavy trash needs to be removed also, charge that too, by weight.

And if you don't pay, you're banned.

It's worth a try if you ask me.


It wouldn't really work because BM is a highly dynamic system with multiple variables that resists simple solutions.

  - The site conditions and trends of the day changes amount of moop per year
  - Some people dump their trash on other people's campsites
  - Wind carries moop onto campsites that already cleaned
  - Complaints about "unfair" deposit revocation would cause strife in the community
  - 10k attendees make <$50k/yr but must pay full price; doubling the price is a huge burden, even if temporary
  - Everybody already cleans as much as they're willing to clean
  - Rich people will all moop if they think they can pay to be exempted.
    They don't mind being banned because the event doesn't matter to them, it's just a party
  - There aren't many people who can/will stay for weeks after the burn, even if you paid them
  - The risk of increased moop increases risk that the event becomes banned
So basically it would result in more moop, would make people angry, would make it harder for poor people to attend, and would risk the status of the burn. Current system is working, no need to introduce additional downsides.

Depends on the outcome you want. I'd easily pay $$ to not have to do shit at BM but I'd not really like what that would do to the event.

Probably the closest example is if you ever read freakonomics introducing a late fee for parents picking up their child late from daycare increase late pickups.

https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/what-makes-people-do-what-t...


Like many other financially-backed initiatives, it's been investigated. Implementation is extremely hard, and would lead to an enormous shift in the very-established culture of volunteering.

> Would it though?

Rather than immediately shoot down your idea, let's talk about logistically implementing this:

1. Cleaning/non-compliance is already fined, if it's not cleaned properly or in a timely manner. This is serious waste like blackwater spills ($500+).

2. This would impact the the self-reliance, decommodification, and leave no trace principles. Burners don't need to be expected to clean up after themselves, they can pay someone else to do it. Yes, lots of wealthy burners would do this.

3. We'd need to set up a system of accountability. Sure, we can create a new department within the org, The Waste Accountability Department. Who do we charge for the bike graveyards (https://imgur.com/a/PolJDcI)? These are bikes that get abandoned in large clusters at the end of the event. Do they get assigned to whichever camp space they end up near? Do we start to add in plenty of surveillance (human or tech-based) to see which burner left their bike? Do we add in facial or other recognition to make sure we fine the right person? 3a. Currently bike graveyards are handled by nonprofits and volunteer orgs that take those bikes, fix them, and donate them to kids in Nevada. If we continue that program, do we pay them for taking the bikes? Do we need to appraise bikes based on their value, or do some other system of cost to repair vs value? Do we just sell blocks of "1000 lbs of bike"?

4. A core element of burning man, as mentioned in 2. is "Decommodification". This would commodify cleanup, and there are loads of first and second year burners who would absolutely pay someone $500/$1000 to clean their plot. Accountability here gets hard, as the people who are willing to pay are also the people who are unlikely to verify the quality of work. There are loads of people who would prey on burners in a rush to get out, pocket the $500, and walk off. Accountability and prosecution here, again, gets hard. The decommodification principle prevents this.

5. Who would issue the fine? Burning Man is a non-profit, the fine would require legal enforcement, collections or some other method to threaten people into paying. It would also require accounting for where that money goes and how it is used. Bureau of Land Management? They already do issue fines for blackwater spills and other serious environmental hazards (see 1).

6. Currently cleanup is handled by the Department of Public Works and Playa Resto. Both are volunteer-driven. Once we start paying people to clean up, why aren't we paying the people who deploy the porto-potties, make the streets, maintain the vehicles, and operate the core infrastructure? DPW spends 3-6 months before the event preparing the site for the event.

As I hope this demonstrates, it's not as simple as just having a group of people you can pay to clean up. There's a lot of logistical challenges, not to mention a pretty big shift in the culture.

I vote we stick with making people clean up after themselves, independent of their ability to pay.


Uni professor here.

My colleagues that teach hard skills courses (like data structures and algorithms) either love AI and incorporate it into their teaching at every moment possible, or despise it in the same way graphing calculators were by high school math teachers when they were introduced nearly 30 years ago.

I teach soft skills classes to engineering students, and I'm unconcerned with students using AI. I write my problems in a way such that, if the student truly understands the assignment, prompting the AI to solve the problem and iterating on it takes a similar amount of time to doing the work themselves. AI is not very good at writing introspectively about the student. In other words, AI isn't going to be helpful when the homework question is "A fellow student comes to you asking for suggestions on how to maximize their chances at landing an internship. What advice do you give them that's immediately actionable?"

Try it, plug that into ChatGPT or your favorite LLM. It parrots the same generic tips everyone tells you, with very little on "how" do perform the action in an effective way. Read it, copy it into your advice document, get a poor grade. Try telling other students to take this advice. Note how they don't because the advice isn't actually actionable enough for them to take action.

LLMs are also not very good at the follow-up question "In a previous assignment you gave specific and actionable advice to a peer on the job search. Which of these suggestions were so good you are now doing them?" A number of students write a "Mental Gymnastics" essay, claiming they are following all their suggestions (because they think that's what the professor wants to hear) while the evidence they provide demonstrates they are not. A student asking an LLM to write the essay for them consistently produces a digital 'pat on the back'; a mental gymnastics essay that ultimately makes the student realize how unwilling they are to solve the #1 problem in their college career.

I've done away with exams wherever possible. I stick to project-heavy courses. What I've found to be far more concerning than AI use is the increasing loss of social skills and ability to cooperate within the younger generations. The number of students who would prefer to fail a class instead of talk to literally any human being is astounding.

The number of students who refuse to build soft skills, and believe that tech is truly a meritocracy where the only thing that matters is 'lines of code', there's no politics, and they won't work call or crunch or give code reviews, is also astounding.


This is the content I come to orange site for.


Your ad hominem attacks aside, The point the author is trying to make is that Microsoft is actively using dark patterns in an operating system to get them to buy things.

If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!"

PowerShell and most CLIs are terrifying to non-technical people. Literally Here Be Dragons. The layperson might be skeptical of a YouTuber telling them to run a dodgy script, but in the age of "delete system32" people sure as hell aren't going to run a command as admin that a user on a random forum recommends they run.

Stuff like this is why I have moved all of my systems except my gaming PC to Linux.

Edit: no seriously look at this notification https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f5907... Grandma absolutely does not understand what that means, She just knows she doesn't want to lose photos of her grandchildren.


RE "....If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!"....."

The implication here is, OneDrive is backup . It is NOT. Moe Microsoft dodgyness ....


Recovering game dev here

The publisher for this game was Activision. They absolutely had deadlines, lots of (1987) money invested in this, outsourced to a third party company in Hungary, had the outsource team fail, moved development platforms a few times, wrote a programming language and a game engine, and then became the best selling C64 game.

Very much development hell.


When Windows 11 was force-installed on my main game development desktop, I was skeptical, but kept using it. I was annoyed at having to turn off all the tracking and noise (like news articles)

When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.

Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.

My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)


On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.

On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.

after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out


Simucube uses the hid-pidff driver which is built into the kernel. For setting up the base using the SC2 software there is a guide available[0]. I’m not an SC owner myself but there are a few people on the SimRacingOnLinux[1] discord who seem to have everything working nicely.

0: https://granitedevices.com/wiki/Using_Simucube_wheel_base_in...

1: https://simracingonlinux.com


You can install programs under Steam that are not distributed through Steam.

You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.


Seriously the only thing stopping me from putting linux on my wife's laptop is the fact that she uses a cricut, which has software that doesn't work well on linux.

Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.


Sadly, the original Assetto Corsa is also borked on Linux (AC Evo and AC Rally, on the other hand, run great).


AC works fine just requires a little extra setup, either use this script[0] or use the latest GE-Proton (with a fresh prefix), I recently updated protonfixes to fix a CM/CSP issue. The latter is better as newer Proton has some definite performance improvements.

0: https://github.com/sihawido/assettocorsa-linux-setup


That’s excellent, thanks for the heads up! By chance, RPS covered the Mulholland Drive mod recently and I’m keen to try it on Bazzite.

I would definitely prefer to go the GE-Proton route. To clarify, what do you mean by “fresh”? Just the most recent release or something more specific?


Fresh should mean creating a new prefix. For example, Proton-GE enabled wow64 in Wine by default, but it requires recreating the prefix to use it. Should be easy enough with Protontricks or even Winetricks.


Yes very much this. It is possible to modify an existing prefix but there are quite a few things to do, it's easier to back up savegames and game config files and then create it anew.


Thank you very much to both of you. Got it running flawlessly with CM on Steam Deck OLED at 90fps using GE-Proton10.34 and LSFG-VK for frame-gen. This one goes straight to the top (alongside DR2.0 and AC Rally) as favourite gaming on the go.


Nice, glad to hear it.


In my (admittedly limited) experience, it does run, even with quite comparable performance, but getting a wheel to interact with the game has been a bit challenging. But this could be resolved with a custom driver for my specific hardware. Using the community standard mod manager seems to resolve the UI jank by completely bypassing it.


What is your specific wheel hardware? It should simply be a case of binding the wheel axis in Content Manager’s controller options.

Hop on either matrix or discord listed at https://simracingonlinux.com and one of us will be happy to help you work through the issue.


yeah, I've heard this too.. and I'd rather my rig just works rather than try and stuff around making it work under linux + I know iracing is cooked anyway, and I've spent enough money on the rig to just want it to work, and not get stuffed over by some anti-cheat, maybe soon

picture of my rig https://www.arcturus.com.au/rig.jpg


That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.

Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.

Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.

But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?

And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.


I had the same experience! Not looking back at all.


They already crossed your line with 11, and you're still using it despite Win10 or Ubuntu also being an option. Are you really going to switch when 12 comes out, or is something holding you back?


I will warn you, Ubuntu is basically dead now.

Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.

Please switch to Linux, but find a distro that actually wants you as a user.


> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.

Citation very much needed for this claim.


As somebody who has been around linux almost for as long as it exists, i must say that is a very strong statement.

In real life: systemd IS useful, Wayland is becoming (has become?) the default, ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro family.


In my experience, Snap is frustrating to use, buggy and is opinionated in ways I don't like.

It's also a weird choice for servers running Ubuntu. I recall some CLI utilities being moved to Snap and you can't install them with apt anymore.


Ubuntu on servers has always been "a choice", Debian is definitely the preferable of the two. Even on desktops, I'd sooner suggest Debian or Mint than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a dead distro coasting on a reputation 15(+) years out of date.

(And it used to be that Ubuntu was still a defensible choice for maximizing the chance of getting help online, but LLMs have effectively neutralized this advantage.)


Mint still uses Xorg, so it's outdated. I tried it recently, it wasn't working with my iGPU+dGPU (nothing exotic, just a regular PC), and all the other distros already went to Wayland so nobody was talking about this online. I feel bad for anyone who gets convinced to switch from Windows to Mint, being told it's the easy one. The fix was to just install Ubuntu.

Maybe Xorg is inherently better than Wayland, but that doesn't matter, the ship has sailed and the community evidently doesn't have time to properly support both.


I genuinely don't think Xorg is a deal breaker for newbs and I would characterize dual-GPU as at least slightly exotic, maybe because I've never owned such a computer, but that's a fair enough point. Personally I think the polish of Cinnamon makes it the best recommendation for somebody new, and I know a whole lot of people start with that and have a sufficiently good experience that they stick with linux (while maybe moving on to other distros.)


It's not exactly dual GPU, just the Intel CPU has integrated graphics as usual. I'm not surprised if you don't have that, but it has to be the most common desktop setup, and quite common on high-end laptops. Was giving black screen after wake. Probably a solution exists somewhere, but even if I found it, the fact that this was broken out of the box and didn't have a clear fix was already reason enough not to trust it.

The GUI layout of Cinnamon vs KDE vs w/e seems like the main thing people argue about, but it doesn't matter compared to this. Anyone who even knows what an OS is enough to go install Linux will figure out how to use whatever GUI you give them, provided it works. The bar needs to be at making sure stuff isn't straight up broken.


To be honest I haven't owned a dGPU in almost 20 years, but I've been lead to understand that most users with them use them all the time and ignore their iGPU, unless they're laptop users, in which case they might have to use Nvidia's proprietary drivers from what I understand; the installation of which is something Mint makes straight forward for novices, or so I've been lead to understand. Maybe I'm wrong about some of that.

I definitely agree that KDE vs Cinnamon probably doesn't matter. But I'm afraid I don't think particularly highly of any KDE-first distro; it's great from, for example, OpenSUSE, but that's not a distro I'd recommend to new users for other reasons.

The problem I've got with Ubuntu is they keep doing weird shit like submitting desktop searches to Amazon or putting ads in the motd. They're an erratic organization and I think it's a mistake to send new users in their direction. Mint may not be perfect, but I think it's broadly inoffensive and mild, a good distro to leave a good first impression on a new user fumbling through the process themself.


So Debian is a no because it ships with KDE?

Imo Ubuntu deserved to lose its users when they switched to Unity, not because Unity sucks (it does) but because it's unacceptable for a newbie-focused OS to rug-pull its entire GUI like that for any reason. But it's still #1, so realistically the leader is going be either Ubuntu or something corp-supported like SteamOS.


> So Debian is a no because it ships with KDE?

I don't think this is a problem at all. I tend to install Debian from the command line (Arch-style), but from what I remember GNOME is the default DE. DEs are largely a matter of opinion, but I find GNOME to be more polished overall. I do use a few extensions however to recreate a desktop-centric UX (Dock, boot to desktop and a few other tweaks).


Debian is a soft no, because despite being an excellent distro, it defaults to GNOME or the user has to deliberately choose something else, which is a problem for giving distro recommendations to noobs because whe you start tacking on stuff like "and make sure you enable the..." their eyes start to glaze over and you risk them thinking the whole affair sounds more complicated than it really is.

I mean I really do love Debian, if not OpenSUSE I would be using Debian now, but it's not a great distro to suggest for absolute novices.


He's not wrong though, the amount of Snap stuff you have to remove in a fresh install is starting to get a bit annoying (I usually remove at least the Snap versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and replace them with binaries from Mozilla - they will still self-update).


You don't have to remove them though, it works fine.


You are right, the snap versions mostly work fine. It's just that there are a lot of annoyances due to the nature of Snap packages (slowness, increased disk space requirements, problematic integration with the rest of the system...), but it definitely is possible to live with them.


My Gentoo system is fully systemd and Wayland based from the start. Might sound like heresy to some users, but it was my decision from the start as I liked how they worked, that they are the future, and that you don’t have to wrangle shell scripts for building an OS. I had used systemd a lot via many Ubuntu servers before, so that helps.


> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base

When was that? I don't disagree that it appears to be the case (especially with replacing coreutils/sudo/etc and the... varied approach to .deb vs snaps) but I'm not aware of them saying it explicitly in those terms?


Is your name a reference to the Blizzard game? If so, I worked on that :)

You're not wrong, but tbh I'd move upstream to Debian. I use Termux on my phone (Z Fold) with Debian and XFCE, and have been extremely pleased with the performance. Combined with a folding keyboard and some AirNeo's, it's become a fantastic micro-development system that fits in a hand bag.

Not that I don't like Arch, it has a very few (subtle!) things that Ubuntu has solved recently, like eGPU hotplugging


Nope, my nick predates Blizzard Entertainment, Co. I chose it as my nick on IRC in early 1991, and have used it everywhere ever since.


If that means that package versions for commonly used tools are less than a decade old in the future that's probably a good thing though ;)


Sorry but this comment is part of the reason anyone should rightfully be scared to switch to Linux. Not only do you have to pick one of 999 distros, but every choice is wrong according to someone. Which one do you recommend, and is it the kind that will throw random issues or be called evil?


Debian, if you need a rock-stable system; Fedora for cutting edge.


These are good choices, also consider Arch if you want the most agency over what goes into your system. That being said, you can also build a very minimal system with Debian from the command line with the arch-install-scripts. It's just that Debian stable will freeze relatively old packages for the sake of avoiding breaking updates, such as changes in configuration files that require manual intervention. On a gaming rig however, you will typically want to avoid Debian as you want the latest drivers, latest Proton/Wine, etc. as the performance uplift can be substantial and compatibility keeps improving.


For the most agency over my system I prefer Qubes OS. I use Debian and Fedora inside VMs. Their mnimized versions are available from the Qubes repositories.


Yeah those are fine choices, but someone is going to say why they're actually horrible, just like Ubuntu which is also fine


I have had an excellent experience with KDE on Fedora. Has been stable despite being on the forefront of updates, familiar UI approach for Windows refugees while still offering plenty of customisation options for those who seek it.


If you have any unusual set-up going on personally I'd recommend a rolling release distro like manjaro (arch) or fedora, so you get latest drivers and whatnot fast. Modern releases of these distros come bundled with the same desktop environment options as Ubuntu and good, easy to use package install and update GUIs. IMO it's more noob friendly than Ubuntu because your stuff is more likely to work without weird workarounds.


I strongly suggest any other distro that is Ubuntu. Canonical is a Microsoft wannabe


Fighting off snaps would be reason enough to abandon them but Canonical has control of the snap store in a way that is antithesis to open source as they're trying to run a walled garden play. This is the exact type of crap that lit a fire under my ass to get off Windows in the first place.


I’ve heard there are issues with anticheat. Have you had any issues?


Anti-cheat systems that rely on rootkit-style undermining of your OS will indeed not work on Linux.


There's a good tracker here:

https://areweanticheatyet.com


It's hit-or-miss, with recent live service and esport titles being the iffiest. The older multiplayer titles, casual shooters and natively ported games are more consistently supported and form a sizable library of working online games.


i thought it would bother me, but honestly, tehre are just too many good games that dont require eac.

i would imagine eac on linux will have to be addressed once steam machines drop, but for now i look at it like, if a game requires eac, at this point the game studio is just too lazy or cheap [0] to be linux compatible so we just play something else. far too many great games.

[0] its even more silly considering eac doesnt seem to stop cheaters at all. every single popular game that requires eac is still absolutely overflowing with more than obvious cheaters.


Easy anti cheat works on linux, if the game developers permit it.


It's not the same as EasyAntiCheat and doesn't support the same features. It's like saying Excel works on iPad, but you can't even use VBA on that.

Or a game example: I have Minecraft (Bedrock) on my phone so therefore I should be able to do the same things as Minecraft (Java) on Windows. The problem is they're the same names for different software with similar, but not the same, functionality.


So you're saying that easy anti cheat on linux is different from on windows? I am aware it is not as effective as detecting cheating on linux, but does this affect gameplay itself? Or do game developers not want reduced efficacy of detecting cheaters, and so they don't support linux at all?


I don't play those games myself but the word is that the EAC on linux lacks the same kernel hooks that are available on Windows. I personally consider that a plus but if you're a developer obsessed with strong anti-cheat you probably do not.


Linux kernel provides ways to observe from user space. The problem is that there’s nothing to stop someone running a kernel which neuters anticheat tools ability to observe using that functionality. As far as I’m aware the only way to mitigate that is via measured boot attestation and having signed kernel etc.


Ah, I was under the mistaken impression EAC operated in userspace.


It does on Linux. That's the problem for developers. Unless you're talking about Windows.


It's not that it can't be traced, the author is stating it won't be traced because high-ranking government officials are selling those secrets.

This is actually not new in this administration. Last year the president posted on social media telling people to buy stocks a few hours before he announced tariffs (https://apnews.com/article/trump-truth-social-djt-tesla-musk...).

The bigger problem isn't whether or not it can be traced, or if it should be traced. It can and it should. The central issue at stake here is the sale of government secrets to private and (presently) anonymous groups for profit. The author is stating that since we don't know who the trader of that commodity is, and because that commodity's price is tightly coupled to actions related to the war, that trader could be helping enemies of the U.S. Without the knowledge of who the person is, or how they knew to make such a huge market movement, a claim of treason can be argued.

The biggest problem is the intelligence community is heavily rooted in trust. Movements like these signal there's an intelligence leak to the general public, or more appropriately, someone with $580 million lying around. An intelligence leak reduces trust; allies are less likely to share information if it's leaked. Conversely, trust is returned when the leaks are found and plugged, and measures put in place to prevent those leaks in the future. The author is stating that these leaks are unlikely to be plugged, which will reduce trust in American intelligence. After all, as the president said, "Let's say I was gonna do it or let's say I wasn't gonna do it, why would I tell you?" (https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c4gqjyk0vx3t)

Except he is telling someone, and that someone is making a lot of money.


> It's not that it can't be traced, the author is stating it won't be traced because high-ranking government officials are selling those secrets.

"US SEC's ex-enforcement chief clashed with bosses over Trump cases before leaving, sources say":

* https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-secs-ex-enforcem...

"SEC enforcement director quits":

* https://www.cfodive.com/news/sec-enforcement-director-abrupt...

The head of the SEC didn't want the SEC's investigation division to investigate (certain things).


I should have been clearer, why can't this be publicly traced?


1. Brokerages, banking, and the financial sector in the U.S. is tightly regulated. Personal financial information is very private, and financial data breaches are treated seriously (See: Equifax). You shouldn't be able to publicly trace it. It won't be disclosed unless the owner of the account consents (like a credit check), or a subpoena is issued. If the trader isn't suspected of a crime, there's no reason for others to know who placed those contracts.

2. Crypto is a unique and new player in banking and securities. Specifically, the ledger is open to all and very transparent. In order to know which wallet owns what and how much, you need to be able to look at the ledger to confirm. This design is intended to prevent fraudulent transactions. Banks and brokerages don't keep an open ledger, they keep an extremely private and heavily secured database.

3. People are heavily disincentivized to disclose this information. See: Epstein, and the people and companies that did financial business with him. Openly telling the public you sold stock to someone who trafficked underage girls isn't good for your reputation.

4. Futures in this case are similar to stocks. It's literally a market: You put in a bid to buy or sell something, someone else accepts, and both parties agree to a contract. Digital trading systems match buyers to sellers, and does so on behalf of both parties. If you trade using Fidelity and place a bid for 1,000 units of Corn at $500/unit, you might end up buying from Chase. Even if the transaction is in-person, the trader may be acting on behalf of someone else. In the case of the $580 million deal, it was spread over 6,200 contracts.

5. The STOCK Act of 2012 was supposed to prevent this, at least for members of Congress. The PELOSI Act that's currently introduced for voting is supposed to further prevent this.

6. To my original point: the problem isn't that these trades occurred. The problem isn't even that it's almost certainly insider trading. The problem is that government secrets are being leaked. The authors argument is that it almost certainly won't be investigated and any attempt at investigation will be blocked, because the level of corruption in the current administration is such that the sale of state secrets for others to profit off of is permissible. In fact, they can brazenly do it in the open while still ensuring that their privacy will be kept because of #1.


Thank you for the detailed answer!

Very interesting. I wonder how much good a publicly transparent trading system would do. And what downsides there are, of course.


Unfortunately it’s mostly wrong. And the reason it’s not public is much simpler. These markets are both standard contracts on CME matching engines.

The CME uses a system where orders (and fills) are entered via a direct TCP/IP connection between the trading system and the exchange. There is no opportunity for any system besides the trading systems (computers, switches, etc) on each side to see the order.

The CME then distributes the market data to a variety of paths in the form of price updates to an order book. That is the price and quantity of buy and sell orders at each price point. While these data feeds aren’t public, the cme gets paid for the data, it is widely disseminated, but it’s had the trading system identification removed. This whole story comes from people with market data contracts observing these feeds.

There are other exchanges that provide more information about who is entering orders but infrequent but large participants don’t like this because it allows the market makers an information advantage against them. And large block participants tend to correlate with real economic activity (oil producers and consumers for instance).

If a market maker knows an order is for one of these participants they can presume the size is going to be bigger and thus charge more for liquidity (in the form of of widening the price on their bid/ask spread offerings). Half the job of a modern HFT is predicting this sort of thing.

So the cme keeps it this way so one set of their market will keep using them. It’s part of the balancing act a two sided exchange has to navigate.


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