Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I definitely think the future of some things is streaming. Despite the failing of stadia, et. al., competitive multiplayer gaming is still #1 on my list of things to stream. This is the one place I would be entirely happy to participate in draconian DRM, assuming it is packaged in a reasonable manner (aka not a hacky kernel driver).

A fair multiplayer game is much more valuable to me than some notion of control over the underlying software/hardware ecosystem. I am happy to surrender control in favor of correctness/fairness in some contexts - i.e. those that allow you to impact the ability of others to enjoy their experience.

Now, if you are sitting by yourself watching movies or reading e-books or the news, I agree - this stuff is not much more than senseless oppression and antagonization.

View on HN

Streaming is certainly taking over radiologist viewing stations. It fits very well with a lot of annoying things that the pandemic/remote work put a heavy focus on. It also fits with healthcare IT's enterprisification of everything where everyone is made to be a slave to their tools.

HN is completely moronic about cheating in multiplayer. I seriously can't believe that people here think it's ok. Absolutely disgusting that you're getting downvoted.

I am honestly not sure that is the reason for the downvote but I don't really give a shit. HN is a weird place.

In past attempts to discuss this, the conversation was typically driven into "if it can't be perfect, why even try" kinds of rhetoric. The primary criticism being that you can still use some sort of vision AI/robot to cheat to some degree. My counterargument is that there exist systems beyond deterministic DRM approaches that can be blended in to make it effectively perfect for all practical purposes. Statistical analysis (aka you might be cheating) combined with dynamic active canaries (i.e. fake, 2-frame targets you bait the bot into aiming at) can solve the problem really well. You could put statistical bounds around the likelihood of fair play that look like IBM mainframe uptime figures.

The only other reasons I'd expect downvotes: Extreme principled ideologies (aka no DRM ever no matter what I don't care). Or, those who are actually cheating at video games and can't imagine a world where they'd be forced to bust their ass to get ahead at something.

Not all of us live in cities with fiber connexions. This is a very first-world, urban take. That's just another idea to exclude rural kids, and I shouldn't downvote for this, but I sometimes am tired of how much we are treated as second class citizens. I'm now in a big city (70kcapita) but I still have most family and friends in much smaller country villages and they already feel they are ignored. Once again HN prove them right.

Also I did set up VNCs (w/o clipboards) for datasec when I worked at a PAAS. Low refresh rates and low res (it was basically spyder/Hadoop web page, and terminal commands to import data), it was unusable when I worked from my parents house or when I visited friends in deep Brittany.

Have you ever heard of this thing called starlink? Are we going to pretend like gbps-class connectivity is not going to saturate every last square inch of this planet before the decade is out?

Streaming is not going to solve cheating[1] in the general case. I think the only scalable solution to cheating is community moderation, like in the dedicated server era.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942320

Reply on news.ycombinator.com