Hello!

I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series.

Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland as a Jungle Cruise skipper!

As a hobby, I have an N-Scale (1:160) model train layout.

  • 2 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Counter-counterpoint: I’ve been using it since 2019. I think you’re exaggerating.

    • It aggressively tries to center itself, always. If you’re in a lane and it merges with a second lane, the car will swerve sharply to the right as it attempts to go back to the middle of the lane.

    • It doesn’t allow space for cars to merge until the cars are already merging. It doesn’t work with traffic; it does its own thing and is discourteous to other drivers. It doesn’t read turn signals; it only reacts to drivers getting over.

    • If a motorcycle is lane-splitting, it doesn’t move out of the way for the motorcycle. In fact, it assumes anything between lanes isn’t an issue. If something is partially blocking a lane but the system doesn’t recognize it as fully “your lane”, the default is to ignore it. The number of times I’ve had to disengage to dodge a wide load or a camper straddling two lanes is crazy.

    • With the removal of radar, phantom braking has become far, far worse. Any kind of weather condition causes issues. Even if you drive at sunset, the sun can dazzle the cameras and they don’t detect things that they should be able to - or worse, they detect problems which aren’t there.

    • It doesn’t understand road hazards. It will happily hit a pothole at 70 MPH. It will ignore road flares and traffic cones. When the lanes aren’t clearly marked (because the paint has worn away or because of construction), it can have dramatic behavior.

    • It waits so long to brake, and when it brakes it brakes hard. It accelerates just as suddenly, leading to a very jerky ride that makes my passengers carsick.

    The only time I trust FSD is when it’s stop-and-go traffic. Beyond that I have to pay so much attention to the thing that I might as well just drive myself. The “worst thing it can do” isn’t just detour; it’s “smash into the thing that it thought wasn’t an issue”.


  • To be fair, you don’t get to be an expert at something by just reading about it. You become an expert by immersing yourself in it and knowing all the nuanced details of what you specialize in.

    For example, I’m a AAA gamedev programmer. My specialty is the Unreal Engine. I know tons of little quirks about the engine that many of my coworkers don’t - but that’s because I’ve been using the engine for over a decade at this point.

    I don’t devote every waking moment to learning about Unreal - I used to spend a lot of free time researching it before I got hired, but now I leave gaming stuff at work to avoid burnout.

    You don’t need to like hyperfixate on something to become good at it. You just need to work on it for long enough - and if it’s literally your job, you’ll spend 40+ hours/week engrossed in it, for years.




  • The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that’s where Google got the idea from.

    Basically, this is the way it works:

    • You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS, e.g. working alongside/relying on the TPM stuff from the BIOS). This is the “attester”. Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can’t patch the binary).

    • A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a “good” attestation and reuse it elsewhere. The ways attesters can respond may vary so you can’t just extract the encryption key and sign your own stuff - it wouldn’t work when you get a different request.

    • The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - “this browser, this OS, not a VM, not Wine, is not running this program, no ad blocker, subject to these rate limits,” etc.

    • If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can’t patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.)

    • The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key.

    • The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data.

    They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many (“low entropy”). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that “Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.”)

    That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn’t want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they’re pushing “low-entropy” under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.


  • People don’t want to sell their personal data for currency.

    People need currency. There is only a finite amount of currency in the world. Power structures are formed because some people have currency and other people need currency.

    People are forced to do things like sell their bodies, sell their organs, and - yes - sell their biometric data. Because they need currency to survive. You don’t see billionaires lining up for this.

    It’s exploitation of those who are most desperate. You can argue that there’s the systemic problem - that there shouldn’t be billionaires alongside people who are starving and need to sell their bodies - but that isn’t being solved anytime soon.

    But exploiting this systemic problem, using it as leverage to convince millions of poor folks to sell their biometric data… that’s immoral. It’s immoral to take advantage of desperation just to line your own pockets.

    Why do you think you’re hearing about this from some of the poorest countries in the world?






  • I believe it would also extend to anything that can be confused with the white and blue logo in the context is social media.

    I can’t take the Android droid logo, make him blue, give him a squiggly antenna, and then try to make him the logo of my new phone company.

    While Meta doesn’t own the letter X, if the government says “People might get confused between these two marks” that’s a valid reason to reject the trademark or prevent the company from calling itself that. See https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search/likelihood-confusion:

    Likelihood of confusion exists between trademarks when the marks are so similar and the goods and/or services for which they are used are so related that consumers would mistakenly believe they come from the same source. Each application is decided on its own facts, and no strict mechanical test exists for determining likelihood of confusion.

    So basically it would come down to a judge deciding if the marks are too similar to each other or not.

    To determine whether a likelihood of confusion exists, the marks are first examined for their similarities and differences. Note that in order to find a likelihood of confusion, the marks do not have to be identical. When marks sound alike when spoken, are visually similar, and/or create the same general commercial impression in the consuming public’s mind, the marks may be considered confusingly similar. Similarity in sound, appearance, and/or meaning may be sufficient to support a finding of likelihood of confusion, depending on the relatedness of the goods and/or services.

    So I could use something similar to the Android logo to sell fishing supplies, since the likelihood of confusion is small - Android doesn’t make fishing supplies. We only have an issue if I start selling phones or if Android starts selling fishing supplies.