I understand that it wasn’t your intention, but by shifting the conversation towards “have these people been near an angry bear? Well I have” you inadvertently detract from the issue at hand. It misses the point of the conversation: everyone knows an angry bear in your face is a more immediate threat than an unknown average male on the street. That’s not why the women pick the bear.

Here’s what you’re missing:

A) it’s much less about whether the bear is a bigger threat and much more about how fucking awful men must treat women for the average woman to go “hmmm… Maybe the bear, tbh?” The fact that it’s even something women have to think about for more than a split second is a dramatic failure of our society. THAT is the point, and any discussion of “well you don’t know about bears then…” is reply-guy shit that misses the entire point and simply serves to further solidify how blind most men are to what goes on in the day to day life of women.

B) An aggressive bear is a known quantity. Is it a threat? Obviously. But it’s a threat that we understand extremely well. Like, a quick Google search will teach you everything you need to know about what to do if you see a bear. But a strange, unknown man? Who the fuck knows. They might seem perfectly pleasant and reasonable, act like your friend, and then flip the fuck out when the woman refuses to sleep with him that night in return for all that manly protection he provided during the day or whatever. THAT is why women pick the bear: a known problem is often preferable to uncertainty that could lead to being extremely vulnerable against a really smart attacker.

Remember, the question wasn’t “would you rather be in a locked room with a bear or a man?” It was “would you rather be stuck on an island with a strange bear or a strange man?”

And to your final question, why can’t we just respect other humans? Great fucking question, but the misogynists should be the ones facing that inquiry, not the people on the internet trying to point you towards them. It may be more uncomfortable and even dangerous to confront them, but don’t take the easy way out by asking victims and their allies to be “nicer” instead

THIS is EXACTLY the point of the meme. If you understand this, and are a man, you stfu and nod along, or support the women talking about it as a good ally should. The men who don’t understand this are the reply-guys trying to explain how all the women are unreasonable and this is discrimination against men and blah blah blah

Some people think “just buy a fire extinguisher”. Other people think “why not prevent the fire in the first place?” And a few people think “I prefer defense in depth. Mitigate the fires to the degree possible and keep a fire extinguisher nearby for emergencies.”

Only one of these people has it right. Can you guess which one?

Punching up and punching down are extremely different and your comparison is deeply disingenuous.

Black men don’t hold positions of power in society simply by being black. Black men don’t get off with nothing but a slap on the wrist for serial sexual assault because “we don’t want to ruin the promising life he has ahead of him”.

Knock it off with the false equivalence.

Good job telling on yourself! This is my favorite part of the meme.

You don’t have to be a predator to enable and protect predators.

Try listening to women next time instead of being, you know, exactly the thing they’re talking about 👍

Tl;Dr: a meme went around asking women if they’d rather be stuck on an isolated island with a strange man or a strange bear. Most women chose the bear, largely due to the bear being more predictable and easier to deal with than a man inclined to do them harm, which, based on the experience of most women, is a whole lot of men.

Fragile men took this as an attack on all men everywhere and were offended at being “called a predator”.

There’s a pretty good thread in my comment history where I try to address the issue with one such fellow male and their response is about what you’d expect, confirming all the reasons why women chose the strange bear over the strange man

Except we know what the lifecycle of physical storage is, it’s rate of performance decay (virtually none for solid state until failure), and that the computers performing the operations have consistent performance for the same operations over time. And again, while for a car such a small amount can’t be reasonably extrapolated, for a computer processing an extremely simple format like JSON, when it is designed to handle FAR more difficult tasks on the GPU involving billions of floating point operations, it is absolutely, without a doubt enough.

You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want but I’m very confident in my understanding of JSON’s complexity relative to typical GPU workloads, computational analysis, computer hardware durability lifecycles, and software testing principles and best practices. 🤷

Imagine you have a car powered by a nuclear reactor with enough fuel to last 100 years and a stable output of energy. Then you put it on a 5 mile road that is comprised of the same 250 small segments in various configurations, but you know for a fact that starts and ends at the same elevation. You also know that this car gains exactly as much performance going downhill as it loses going uphill.

You set the car driving and determine that, it takes 15 minutes to travel 5 miles. You reconfigure the road, same rules, and do it again. Same result, 15 minutes. You do this again and again and again and always get 15 minutes.

Do you need to test the car on a 20 mile road of the same configuration to know that it goes 20mph?

JSON is a text-based, uncompressed format. It has very strict rules and a limited number of data types and structures. Further, it cannot contain computational logic on it’s own. The contents can interpreted after being read to extract logic, but the JSON itself cannot change it’s own computational complexity. As such, it’s simple to express every possible form and complexity a JSON object can take within just 0.6 MB of data. And once they know they can process that file in however-the-fuck-many microseconds, they can extrapolate to Gbps from there

Let em figure it out. Wasting their time is a core strategy in reducing their impact and will to continue cheating

I certainly didn’t share it myself but it’s possible my old boss did!

TBH, in my very personal opinion the third party anti-cheat apps are like 50% placebo. Just makes people feel better. They are very protective of their “secret sauce” but I can say none of them are anywhere close to perfect. The thing they’re best at is taking the easy stuff off our plates so we can focus on the more difficult problems of hardening the game itself and analyzing telemetry.

And that is the patriarchy in a nutshell: a system that is advantageous to men, and then teaches men to consider any critique of that system as a whole, rather than of individuals, a threat or insult to be stamped out with vehemence. The people who do this shit genuinely believe that it’s unfair to be treated this way, never realizing that their attitude provides the infrastructure that allows thereally bad people to continue doing what they do.

It’s like ACAB; it doesn’t necessarily mean that every cop will abuse a minority given the chance, but that nearly every cop actively participates in a system that enables and protects the abuse of minorities, and that it is impossible to distinguish who the select few truly “good” cops are.

For the same of checking uniqueness it’s probably fine to just ignore them. Yeah, it sucks if johndoe@obscure.domain and john.doe@obscure.domain can’t sign the same petition but outside of the big email services I imagine that kind of collision is pretty rare

Right I’m saying I always thought that was an optional feature, determined by the person who created the petition. I don’t think it’s a universal requirement for all change.org petitions

My understanding is that signing a petition and creating an account aren’t necessarily linked, and it’s up to the person who created the petition whether verification is required.

Yes! I LITERALLY just set up my stuff there a few days ago for TSA Precheck and CBP because I’m heading to Japan next month. I love what they’re doing.

Oh yeah don’t get me wrong, I think change.org as a product is hot stinky garbage. I don’t take anything they produce seriously lol

I just don’t expect them to do anything differently under the current circumstances is all heh. And their business is married to the design at this point, so I don’t see them pivoting any time soon. As you suggest, they need a competitor that can do it right to come along and actually produce some kind of meaningful results in the political arena, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

I literally have an idea for this, and am kinda just sitting on it until I find the right people. I’ve been on the lookout about 10 years now for a) someone with a comprehensive understanding of constitutional law and b) someone with a comprehensive understanding of political finance and lobbying, both of whom also need to be progressive and interested in 501©(3) work. A bit of a unicorn :p

As it ever will be, much as it may pain our moral sensibilities.

Re: CoD - I loved it. Laughed my ass off. Absolutely a big fan of creative approaches to getting cheaters to tell on themselves. I proposed something similar to my team when we had a problem with players manipulating the position of objects in the world so they were directly in front of the player: add an object of the same type inside map geometry and attach a “kill volume” to it, so it was like a landmine. Move the object in front of the player and they instantly die :P Wish we’d done it but couldn’t get the level designers’ time to implement it unfortunately

One we did do though: back when the product I worked on was on PS3 one of the big problems was hacked consoles spoofing platform entitlements (the thing that tells the game what purchases they should have access to). So we added an entitlement that couldn’t be acquired in any legitimate way, and gave you a specific item in game. Then we just checked player inventories once a week for anyone with that item and banned their account, their console, and any account that played on that console for a meaningful amount of time. Did the same thing with an item you could only get to by clipping through geometry. Even put the word “intrusion” in the item’s name haha.

The cheats are so technically complicated at this juncture that the creative stuff is often the most effective. I mean, people are literally voluntarily installing hypervisor rootkits to run the cheats, so they can talk to their drivers below even the kernel. It’s so hard to come to with technical solutions to a problem like that that doesn’t wind up costing massive server processing power to validate every input.

Funny you mention the robocall thing… I’m literally leaving a company that works on that problem (though not as their primary business) Wednesday. It was a short stint - mostly because they are resistant to solving massive technical debt problems and I’m not trying to doom my future self - but what I witnessed was…depressing. Getting anything done was like pulling teeth, and that’s with the recent FTC pivot to taking this stuff more seriously. STIR/SHAKEN is a reasonable start but it still has almost no teeth behind it.

I’m with you on the identity issue. I mean, if we’re being really honest, the only people losing out by not implementing strong personal identification verification are the legitimate end users because the threat actors have gotten so unbelievably good at fingerprinting user behavior. And it’s only going to continue getting worse. With ML growth as unfettered as it is, there is nothing we can do. So I’d much rather take the reigns and make identity verification a robust feature instead of a bug we can’t squash.

Good info! Sounds like a nightmare :x

Yeah, I can’t say their solution is the most elegant but it certainly makes a kind of sense when their criteria for success is “maximize participation while satisfying ‘uniqueness’ critics”

You’re not wrong, but this isn’t really a security matter, it’s an “apparent uniqueness” matter. Their goal, I assume, is to satisfy critics enough that a given petition’s participants are sufficiently unique while keeping the barrier to filling out the form as low as possible. So they end up in a situation where neither of perfect, but they’re both “good enough” for what the business needs.

I dealt with this in the anti-cheat space: my goal was never to remove all cheating, because that’s too expensive (insanely so). My goal was to make the public believe they weren’t playing against cheaters too often. If the solution was forcing the cheaters to perform at a level that was just below the most skilled human players, that was actually a success, because if the players can’t differentiate between cheaters and pro players, then they can’t effectively determine how prevalent cheating actually is.

Part of me hated that we had to treat it that way, but another part of me understood that if I pushed too hard on “eliminating cheating” my department would become more costly than it was worth and they’d pivot away from gameplay that needed anti-cheat at all