I just received an email from Google Play Developer today morning that they will not be activating the age verification APIs (they will throw an exception) because of the injunction, so there's nothing Apple specific about this.
> The fix was embarrassingly simple: once you fall back to screenshots, stay there until the user explicitly clicks to retry.
There is another recovery option:
- increase the JPEG framerate every couple seconds until the bandwidth consumption approaches the H264 stream bandwidth estimate
- keep track latency changes. If the client reports a stable latency range, and it is acceptable (<1s latency, <200ms variance?) and bandwidth use has reached 95% of H264 estimate, re-activate the stream
Given that text/code is what is being viewed, lower res and adaptive streaming (HLS) are not really viable solutions since they become unreadable at lower res.
If remote screen sharing is a core feature of the service, I think this is a reasonable next step for the product.
That said, IMO at a higher level if you know what you're streaming is human-readable text, it's better to send application data pipes to the stream rather than encoding screenspace videos. That does however require building bespoke decoders and client viewing if real time collaboration network clients don't already exist for the tools (but SSH and RTC code editors exist)
I just wanted to preview one of the games. It requires me to "Claim a wallet" or "Create a wallet". I don't want to do those things, I just want to preview a game to see how it looks/feels. There is no "What is a wallet?" help. You don't mention this concept in your post either, or have functional TOS/FAQ that might answer this.
The premise of this site seems to be that anything designed to make the game "addictive" is a dark pattern — this is contradictory to the concept of "dark pattern" in products in general, which I would define as "when an interface biases users towards action that is more in the interest of the business controlling the interface than the user's goals for using the software."
When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that. A "slightly dark" pattern would be combining core addictive gameplay junctures with microtransactions (retry/next level/upgrade) — but in this economy this just feels like a basic mobile game business model. A moderately darker pattern would be making the game increasingly frustrating while still addictive, unless you perform a microtxn (eg: increasing difficulty exponentially, and charging money for more lives/retries or forcing more ads).
A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
> When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that.
I disagree. Being addictive leads to it being hard to stop playing when you are done, and sometimes hard to avoid playing, which leads to playing even when you would like to be doing something else.
it's even worse than that. an adult meta questioning their addiction is much light than some kid being pulled into a grindy game that is often violent AND competitive; which by now scientific literature already knows it reduces pro-social behavior [0]
when i was 10, an old neighborhood showed me how the late game of Tibia was like and how that wouldn't ever change and how dumb i would be if i not paid the premium account, which would lead me there much faster and being obligatory if i wanted to make war/pvp. i politely refused invitations for playing WOW when i was in high-school with other friend i made and i'm greatful for that. i would never read so many books and watch so many films on that timeframe if i was grinding levels on the same area killing the same monsters, watching the same animation
Yes, not everything here is a dark pattern. The one that stood out to me was "Wait To Play"[0].
In the before times, there was a browser-only MMO called Urban Dead[1] which had a cap on the number of actions any player could take in a single 24-hour period. This was to avoid giving undue influence/advantage to players who could play more during the day and disadvantaging people who e.g. had to work during the day and could only play in the evenings. I played a lot of UD in its heyday and thought it worked really well.
That said,
>A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
There are lots of "true dark patterns" that are not deceptive UI elements. Loot boxes that require expensive keys comes to mind. Same with brutal grinds that can only be bypassed by pay-to-win booster items.
Yeah I used to enjoy those games. But I dont think thats necessarily what they are referring to here.
>Another common in-game timer is related to "harvesting" or "research". You may send your character off to harvest some resources, but you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time before this task is completed. This forces you to stop playing and wait for the timer to expire. Often there is a way to pay money or watch an advertisement to accelerate or skip the timer.
>Games that prevent you from playing them whenever you want are trying to get you to space out your playing throughout the day. This is a much better way for you to develop a habit of playing the game, and also a way to prevent players from reaching the end of a short game or getting burnt out on a repetitive game in a relatively short amount of time.
In a modern wait to play, you can bypass the restriction by spending money, or you are simply bounced back into ads multiple times during the day as you log in at every increment to press the next button.
These are still kind of bad, because it encourages a routine of playing every day. If I work 5 days a week and want to play only on weekends, I might get capped out when I do what to play. So it shifts the advantage to daily scheduled tasks instead of being able to play when I want to play.
> It still seems strange. A big part of GrapheneOS is to provide a safeguard from Googles data hoarding, yet it works primarily on Google phones.
That's the most confusing part. IMO GrapheneOS is not mainly about "provide a safeguard from Googles data hoarding", instead this is more like a side quest.
GrapheneOS is about creating a mobile OS that is more secure against advanced threats [0] than anything else, including stock Pixel OS and iOS.
[0] Currently my rule of thumb is, anyone who can find and write exploits for new memory corruption bugs for the wanted attack surface, or who can buy such capability, qualifies as advanced threat. Hence Cellebrite qualifies as a borderline "advanced threat".
That doesn't seem odd to me. Google's data hoarding is done in software, not hardware. Remove Google's add-on software and you have a more or less blank slate to work with. I don't see why we'd expect any different.
This is the answer. Google play services and related privileged components are the non-open source blob hoarding data, along with whatever backend services you use from Google. These components are part of the stock android image that comes on the device that's replaced entirely by GrapheneOS.
Naturally if you continue to use Google services then the data hoarding continues.
Considering last years development and quite open Google hostility?
No.
GoS have provided a lot of patches upstream, Some of which were even applied. Despite that they wouldn't get early access to A16 just because. Access EVERY vendor promising to preinstall privileged Google services has.
Allegedly Google security team was very happy about that idea, but got vetoed by management.
> This groundbreaking new initiative will make child care available to all New Mexicans, regardless of income, by removing income eligibility requirements from the state’s child care assistance program
What you are referring to is the progress they made prior to this news.
You should never expect to have rights to anyone's server API endpoints, esp outside of their TOS, which is basically what trying to build your own front-end independent of youtube.com is. However, with most browsers, you have all the rights to build extensions that hide divs and change styling and add new elements with data that's already loaded (as long as you're not calling API endpoints that aren't called by the site's source though, you run into the same problems again) which would accomplish everything you were trying to do.
> Thankfully, it's rare because people using ad blockers is apparently rare on the whole.
I wish this were the case. There's quite a number of websites that use Admiral's services to detect adblockers. Admiral got 19m dollars in funding last year, so I imagine the adblock threat is meaty enough.
People can have writing tics, i know i do — that said, this article does read very much like a scrape-n-translate + some "summarized insights" of Chinese forum threads. While that's fully within the scope of a human blogger, it is very much in the wheelhouse of a modern LLM.
More telling rather than any specific lines or phrases, to me, is that the tone gives off a strong "i don't have a single strong feeling about this topic, i'm just transcribing others' opinions and vaguely coming up with a C2A" vibe — no human who'd bother to write a personal-opinions blog would realistically channel that energy into an 850-word essay without LLMs doing all the drudgery.
IMO the hardest parts of learning a new language as an adult is
a) convincing yourself its worth the effort: almost every time an adult runs into a confusing element of a new language, they find themselves calculating how many people in the world speak this language, probability they don't speak english and likelihood of running into this person and circumstance, and it's easy to justify giving up and moving on
b) avoiding forcing it into the framework of your first language: if you have one distinctly favored language already, it's very hard not to try shove the new language you are learning into the former's mold, and this can be counterproductive in learning most languages that don't share an ancestor with your favored one.
a) is greatly mitigated by forcing yourself to be in said context by living in a place prioritizing that language. b) is greatly mitigated by already being bilingual+ with languages from distinct origins (eg: mandarin chinese and english) before learning a new one, so you can place the new language on a spectrum with the ones you already know instead of confined by the rules of just one.
longtime lurker first time account maker. i wouldnt say this was the first time i was tempted to express what felt to me as due acknowledgment nor was this the most compelling, but personal circumstances aligned with the what is apparently a "universal" (as far as human cognition is phenomenologically similar at least among a normal cluster) applicability of your observation on learning as we age, specifically the transactional social/market value of investing one's remaining lifetime. i especially loved the quasiglobal (euro.. swiss euro your emphasis) scope of the swiss school polyglot generator, definitely captured a sense of immensity in your narration (at least to me who understands how one language i dont know is a huge chunk of a known universe i am blind to) so ye anyway thanks, your post was a welcome dose of motivation to learn something complex yet relatively inane but ultimately disproportionately interesting tonight guiltfree not necessarily a new language but something i can brute clone in a childlike brain without the overhead of integrating it with the collective garbage ive recorded of my pov of the history of the universe so far. (i wish)
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