> The second sentence is false. Lots of people blindly follow things and don't understand consequences until they brick their devices. Those who don’t break something won’t notice if they’ve silently backdoored themselves.
"Lots of people", how many though? Can that number be reduced? What number would be acceptable?
I feel like it _has_ to be possible to devise an unlocking procedure that dissuades most people from self-harm.
The problem is often treated as intractable, but intuitively this seems really unlikely to me. I don't think more than a tiny percentage of Xiaomi owners, for example, would go through the bootloader unlock process which often has a mandatory wait period attached to it without a reason more compelling than an impulse to randomly and blindly follow instructions on the internet.
I would like to see user studies with good methodology before other people decide to barter long-term freedoms away for insufficient benefit.
Why do I so rarely see people who are concerned about the security issues of bootloader unlocking calling for designing hassle and warning into the process. Instead, it's more common to hear that in the name of the average user, all escape hatches must be removed.
After a certain point, someone else's insistence on self-harm ceases to be a good excuse to infringe on my freedom. We don't ban hammers because some people accidentally damage their property/body, and it's a lot easier to do that with a hammer than an unlocked bootloader.
I felt like outside of bug fixes and QoL improvements, Revision's maps and soundtrack were a downgrade compared to the original. I feel quite strongly about this, but I recognize it's also largely up to taste and it's valid to like those changes.
But for me, they made the experience worse and they were enabled by default. As a result, I gave it a thumbs down on Steam and did my best to explain my thoughts in detail. I received a couple dozen negative comments over the years on that review, largely in the vein of how dare I give negative feedback to a labor of love provided for free. That kind of argument did make me feel guilty, like I was being unfair to the developers. I eventually changed it to a positive review, and now I regret doing that. I allowed my genuine opinion to be clouded.
This was an extremely tame internet conflict overall, I'd feel ashamed to frame myself as a victim over so little. What I'm trying to say is that both sides are capable of failing to genuinely engage with the other.
It's definitely true that Revision has been to some degree unfairly attacked. There are purists who do not give it a fair shake and make ludicrously confident statements, peddling opinion as fact. But there's also legitimate reasons to dislike it. Not knowing you, I am not at all accusing you that you'd be lacking nuance on this topic. I'd just like to say as a general statement that discourse ends up healthier when people care about distinguishing between people who disagree with you versus people who disagree with you _and_ that are acting in bad faith.
Are you sure that the jankiness you describe is not related to you not being close enough to the enemy for it to count as a point blank hit? The engine does a simple distance check which is rather unforgiving, and if you utilize the range your melee weapon affords you, you will fail this point black attack check. This is just a guess on my part, but it's the #1 reason I've seen people be perplexed at seemingly inconsistent melee stealth takedown behavior.
If you first push yourself as close as you can get to the enemy model and attack the general area of their torso, it works every single time. But again, this is just me taking a guess as to what the problem you're referring to is!
Well that's the problem. In the first mission you have to figure out to stun the enemies in the center of their back rather than directly in their head. Its super counterintuitive and probably leads to many players not getting past the first mission.
The minicrossbow is even harder than the prod, especially at lower skill levels and with no weapon mods. The prod at least stuns enemies momentarily. With the darts they still stand around shooting at you and set off alarms, and that's if you manage to hit them at all. You can run up to a guy and get a guaranteed stun in the time it takes him to spin around like a dumbass to look at the source of the footsteps.
My first playthrough, when I was 12, I opted for the GEP gun, but had to go to the minicrossbow after running out of ammo, thereby leaving me with no pistol skill. The worst of both worlds on the very first mission. Ended up climing up the back of the statue of liberty and throwing gas grenades. Good times.
The GEP gun is ironically the pro choice to make if you know what you’re doing. All of the other weapons on offer can be found in the first level, and the GEP works as a fantastic “lockpick” even if you never fire it in anger.
This is true, but the upside of the crossbow is that for most soldiers it only takes a single shot to take them out, even if it takes a while, and you can do it from a safe spot, this can be beneficial if your JC sucks at combat or is low on ammo.
I don't think any amount of ethics education will matter in the end in the face of the incentive structure that appeared in the industry.
Strong cultural norms (e.g. hacker culture) might help for a while. But incentive structures eternally erode opposition.
It could make it easier for developers to band together and try to collectively veto things like this. But corporations with money can always buy the expertise of people, have them undermine the community, create their own parallel communities and influence public opinion and legislators.
FAANG salaries supercharge people's cognitive dissonance. They will find ways to excuse, minimize and ignore their contribution to the current situation.
Even HackerNews developed a sub-subculture of people that were constantly going on threads and calling remote attestation worries as "FUD".
It's unclear how to preserve cultural norms that stand in the way of market dominance. The only thing I can think of is having competing interests in the market. But whenever these align -- hell breaks loose.
I wonder if you could obtain stimulants and if it would help your particular situation. It's not like ADHD meds are somehow chemically designed to help only with ADHD. They can help with working memory issues and with chronic fatigue like symptoms.
I'm thinking about something like Concerta, aka extended release Methylphenidate. Probably low or medium dose. I'm specifically mentioning this because you seem like you could be at risk of burnout or just pushing yourself too hard. And being on a lower extended release dose limits how much a stimulant enables you to push yourself too hard, in my experience.
I've read studies referring to stimulants as helping "normalize" an ADHD brain over time, so it's not unthinkable it could help "normalize" a brain in other situations, though what exactly that word means is probably medically tumultuous. But, in short, I think stimulants have the ability to change a brain over time, not simply be a "pick me up".
I don't know what the chance of this helping is, but I felt obligated to mention it, because in your situation I'd be willing to try anything that didn't have a chance of further messing me up. And stimulants in therapeutic doses have an extremely low rate of long lasting side effects, but again, your situation could be really different.
"Lots of people", how many though? Can that number be reduced? What number would be acceptable?
I feel like it _has_ to be possible to devise an unlocking procedure that dissuades most people from self-harm.
The problem is often treated as intractable, but intuitively this seems really unlikely to me. I don't think more than a tiny percentage of Xiaomi owners, for example, would go through the bootloader unlock process which often has a mandatory wait period attached to it without a reason more compelling than an impulse to randomly and blindly follow instructions on the internet.
I would like to see user studies with good methodology before other people decide to barter long-term freedoms away for insufficient benefit.
Why do I so rarely see people who are concerned about the security issues of bootloader unlocking calling for designing hassle and warning into the process. Instead, it's more common to hear that in the name of the average user, all escape hatches must be removed.