In basic terms, your computer has to say something like I clicked here, to send it to the server and orchestrate with the other clients. On the flip side the server sends stuff back that your client can show you were the other clients are. All this raw data can be used by a cheater however they want. If we minimise the data available to you or a cheater to be the levellest, that would be the client only sends mouse and keyboard inputs, and all the client gets back from the server is pre-rendered frames. Think game streaming, from a cheating perspective is the problem solved? No, they just make a program to read screen and move the mouse when it sees an enemy faster than any human can, or more realistically to avoid that detection, just act slightly better than the cheaters opponent. As other comments have mentioned, game streaming for everyone would be expensive for the server. And if your clever you’ll realise that even BIOS level detection won’t stop a separate computer with a webcam doing keyboard mouse emulation, hence the comments about the developers wanting control. AI deepfakes can attest that even gameplay moderation will get more difficult as the input emulation gets more human like.

So the only hope is to do enough of all these things so that cheaters deem it not worth the effort/not profitable enough.

I wonder if your sentiment is common, because being a non American, it appears as a vocal counterbalance to the occasional intangible headlines. This would ironically explain the imbalance from my perspective

I’d be interested to know where you draw the line of code ownership. Arguably FOSS is the place where projects are most likely to become a Ship of Theseus.

From my perspective AI slop is pretty unusable as it comes out, but can be an approximate starting point. It seems generous to call an LLM a coauthor, I’d be more likely to have a long list of Stack Overflow commenters as coauthors first.

For the reasons you are stating the snapshot is actually a boon. More than I’d like to admit I’ve had to write something that has been done so many times before with some slight structural differences. And of course there isn’t a library flexible enough nor enough time to write that library. Instead of just busywork mindlessly writing something that should just exist already. You can just slop it out quickly then spend the time it would have taken to write that, to refine it into something maintainable with all the new changes that are actually interesting and useful improvements. I see it as raising the bar of starting point.

That said, I just license my own stuff as MIT because I want to raise the bar for everyone, though I know it’s likely the AI companies haven’t respected the wishes of those who don’t do/want that.

In a way I understand him, the culture is too one sided in its values. There isn’t a balance or a good middle ground. If you appreciate irony, it’s too optimised for “features”. For which I generally agree. So the people upholding these values are too lazy to find the balance.

As an aside, every Dev I know would love to endlessly iterate and improve a single thing. So I understand finding that balance isn’t easy either.

Unless it’s Teams apparently, that’s the last Electron app I want to install.

How is that mindset lazy? Unhappy customers also have a cost! At my last job the customer just always bought hardware specifically for the software as a matter of process, partly because the price of the hardware compared to the price of the software was negligible. You literally couldn’t make a customer care.

Oops, forgot the AI step

Optomisation often has a cost, weather it’s code complexity, maintenance or even just salary. So it has to be worth it, and there are many areas where it isn’t enough unfortunately.