Was ist ever confirmed that it was in fact a laser? I wanted to make a trivia question out of this ProLok protection, because “lasers for copy protection” sounds just weird enough to potentially be a nonsense answer without context, but I couldn’t confirm that the holes were indeed made with lasers, and not with other means.
Good question. I don't know the answer, but I'm quite certain that it didn't really matter what mechanism was used to mark a diskette. Any damage would be equally strong as a way to detect copying.
I would guess (more or less) identically damaging multiple floppy disks in the same way would be easier with a laser than with something mechanical (e.g. a knife or a drill) (it is fairly easy to control power and duration of a burn), so it might well have been a laser.
On the other hand, disk tracks weren’t exactly tiny at that time in history.
It could be a tiny drop of something corrosive, but with that I’m also still wondering if a laser isn’t simpler, yeah.
I have almost no doubt that it could be a laser, it’s just unfortunate (and maybe a little bit suspicious) that I haven’t found it confirmed anyway. Almost like they wanted it to be a laser (hence the folklore around it), but had to use a less cool method to do it. But of course it might as well just have been a laser, and they for some reason declined to market or even just document it that way, for whatever reason.
Maybe give it another try? I have been playing lots of games for the past few years, some vigorously. Not a single one of them has a single microtransaction, because that's an immediate turnoff for me.
Into the Breach only came out 8 years ago, but I'm still playing it vigorously.
I'm sorry to say, your nostalgia-colored-glasses are so strong, you're actually blinded by them. I grew up in the same gaming era as you (started around early to mid 90s, but the peak was later), and I too have fond memories. But there undeniably has been some magnificent progress in pretty much all aspects of gaming.
Somewhere between 2005 and 2010, I thought I had outgrown gaming, and that no game would have anything to offer to me anymore. But years later I learned that that was just because I was stuck thinking that JRPGs were the pinnacle of gaming, it turned out that I had grown out of those. Obviously your story will be different, but I bet there is some story to you somewhere.
I loved Half Life 2, and it was highly influential, but that influence lives on.
Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Dark Souls, and Return of Obra Dinn were among the mentioned titles. All of these games tell a story, each of this game does it in its own, magnificent way.
You act a bit like those kind of games are hard to find, but some of them are highly popularized best sellers that keep getting remasters (I don't mean remakes), and still find a huge audience in entirely new YouTube Let's-Plays alone.
Those may be difficult games but they don't have the twitchiness of a game like Super Mario Bros. They're on the order of 1/4s to 1/2s maneuvering (with great anticipation) whereas SMB is loaded with 1 frame tricks (1/60s). It's an order of magnitude difference.
This still feels like a lack of knowledge on the medium, and a bit of faffery around the meaning of "twitchiness". There are still a ton of momentum platformers being made, UFO 50 alone has like 5 included. Even ones with full on mechanical restrictions, such as Yelow Taxi Goes Vroom, which tried hard to go the opposite way, and has has no conventional jump button to preserve momentum with, it's almost entirely about precision setup and aerial readjustment.
Huh? 1 frame tricks are the top shelf of speedrunning moves, definitely breaking how the games are designed to be played by orders of magnitudes.
Speedrunners use 1 frame tricks in more modern games as well. It is considered extremely hard even amongst the already insane speedrunning community, no matter whether the game is SMB, Odyssey, or anything recent.
Of course it's extremely hard but you can't do it at all on modern games with unresponsive displays. The point is that when you press the button in SMB, the action happens on the screen an order of magnitude faster than a modern game. Modern games have slow, floaty, laggy controls.
It's not just games though. Computers have done the same thing [1]. Modern PCs are an order of magnitude slower, latency-wise, than an Apple II.
This is why on Rock Band, you had to “calibrate your TV” because of input and audio lag from when the game generated it.
As a game dev, this is true. Old hardware input was very fast whereas today it’s software and it’s 50ms give or take. Add more milliseconds for your TV to refresh. It was common to see 150-250ms lag.
I personally hate CGNAT, but I cannot deny that nowadays, the overwhelmingly vast majority of customers most likely does not care (and much less know) that they are behind CGNAT, so this is valid.
Come to think of it, for my use cases, I would probably be fine to be behind IPv4 NAT as long as I also have an un-NATted IPv6 prefix. But a big part of the question here of course is whether IPv6 adoption is worthwhile...
For your example, shouldn't you either present two "private" IP addresses, in which case you'd replace the IPv6 address in your example with what is likely to be an autoconfigured link-local address (though any ULA address would be valid as well),
OR present the two IP addresses that the targets would be visible as from the outside, in which case you'd replace the IPv4 address with the "public" address that 192.168.0.1 NATs to, going outbound?
Then, the stated difference is much less stark: In the first case, you'd have a local IPv6 address that's about as useless as the local IPv4 address (except that it's much more likely to be unique, but you still wouldn't know how to reach it). In the second case, unless your target is behind some massive IPv4 NAT (carrier-grade NAT probably), you'd immediately know how to route to them as well.
But presenting a local IP for IPv4, and a global one for IPv6, strikes me as a bit unfair. It would be equally bogus to present the public IPv4 address and the autoconfigured link-local address for IPv6 and asking the same question.
I do concede that carrier-grade NAT shifts the outcome again here. But it comes with all the disadvantages that carrier-grade NAT comes with, i.e. the complete inability to receive any inbound connections without NAT piercing, and you could achieve the same by just doing carrier-grade NAT for IPv6 as well (only that I don't think we want that, just how we only want IPv4 CGNAT because we don't have many other options any more).
In these contexts - neither of the addresses was intended for internet consumption. A misconfigured firewall exposes you in the case of IPv6 routable addresses, and is less relevant in the case of IPv4; the ULA IPv6 address is roughly the same as an RFC 1918 address with it's lack of routing on the Internet.
The point I was (poorly) trying to make is that non-routability is sometimes an explicit design objective (See NERC-CIP guidance for whether you should route control traffic outside of substations), and that there is some consideration that should be made when deciding whether to use globally routable IPv6 addresses.
Mac address is absolutely safe in IPv4 world - the only info it gives is the network card manufacturer.
And people don't usually share "curl ipinfo.io" output unless they plan to share their external IP (unlike "ifconfig" output, which is one of the first things you want to share for any sort of networking problems)
Target #2 [IPv6] gives aways 90% of the game at attacking it (we even leak some device specific information, so you know precisely where it's weak points are)
You may not consider Mac address to he important, but the context of this conversation did bring it up. Of course they forgot the fact that most v6 addressing doesn't expose Mac addresses anymore.
Especially as if someone is able to capture ifconfig data, they can probably send a curl request to a malicious web server and expose the NAT IP as well.
Just because you can think of scenarios where the IPv4 setup doesn't make a different doesn't discount that there are scenarios where it does.
Someone being able to observer some state is a different model from someone being able to perform actions on the system and the former has many more realistic scenarios in addition to the ones of the latter.
I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.
And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.
I’ve been depressed in the past, in my 20s even severely. Clinically, you could say. But in the end, every one of those depressive episodes were because something was not right in my life.
Whether I acknowledged it or not, whether I even realized that there was a problem, once I figured the issues out and took the sometimes very painful and exhausting steps to sort them out, the depression faded away.
Over time, I’ve become better at introspection to figure out what’s really bugging me, and also in recognizing a budding early depression as warning signs.
As someone with treatment resistant depression, it is odd people are against medication. Medication is proven safe and effective for treating depression. Therapy and medication should be used immediately in conjunction because 1. therapy is most effective when paired with medication, and 2. depression is a vicious cycle. The longer someone spends depressed, the more likely they will spiral into deeper depression, isolation, unemployment, etc.
No one should delay any part of depression treatment.
Same for me. Its so odd having an illness, and taking medicine against that illness, and mostly reading an "universal truth" that the medication that helps you is bad someway. As you say, therapy but also getting a better sleep hygiene, better nutrition and exercise is so much easier with medicine.
> And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.
It’s very well possible that you, and the person you answered to, are solidly part of the “needs medication” fraction. I do not believe that medication against depression is bad in general.
Agree that medication isn't necessarily the answer - mine was therapy not pills. But all of it is still medical assistance. And the medication helped me get started on the therapy, I'm not sure I could have got to a place where the therapy could have helped without it.
There’s little reason to avoid prescribing medication alongside other approaches. It’s not that meds are the only option or they should be reserved for the most severe cases, it’s people’s reactions are different and there’s no way to tell without trying them. For some people they really do work wonders and you simply don’t know ahead of time.
Not everyone has a support structure they can count on as they fall apart. So some people just need help to get through a rough period even if a solution isn’t long term viable. When a spouse dies being able to function for the next few months can mean keeping the roof over someone’s head.
> There’s little reason to avoid prescribing medication alongside other approaches.
There absolutely are downsides and risks. There is a reason the
SSRIs carry a "blackbox" warning for youths due to increased suicide risks. There's a reason they should only be used under supervision of a doctor and need to be tapered off of.
That is not to say they aren't useful and necessary for some/many people but they aren't and shouldn't be a catch-all treatment.
A very specific edge case: If you ever think you might want to become a pilot, even just to fly small airplanes, the FAA still considers ADHD, depression, social anxiety, and other conditions where you are prescribed medication, to be disqualifying. And this is a "have you ever in your life" question on the medical form. So if you're prescribed ADHD medicine, even as a child, I understand that while it's not impossible, you are going to have a major uphill battle if you ever want to fly airplanes.
Mm. I'm glad for you that you can just think about your problems harder and get better, but that's not the reality of it for most people with depression.
Meds don't magically make you happy and they don't magically get you out of fixing the problems in your life. They make it easier and therefore possible to do so. I'd describe it as the crane that lifts up the heavy weight enough for you to shuffle out.
If you can just think harder about your problems, by all means, do that. But there's zero virtue to rawdogging it when help is available, especially as this can easily lead to an isolation spiral and become deadly.
>I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.
My experience from being a mental-health patient is that things take too much time. For me I struggled with how it seemed like that the society universally had agreed that medication for my condition is bad. Taking medicine doesn't mean that you cant threat your illness in other ways as well, in my experience taking medicine helps you to be able to take the changes you need in life.
As someone medicated I actually fully agree with you.
Depression is also a broad spectrum condition (much like autism). Years ago I watched this lecture by Sapolsky[0] and it really helped. Breaking down the different classifications is really helpful. The SSRIs always made me feel worse, and this (along with a lot of other research) helped make sense of it. A few years back I was diagnosed with ADHD and a psychologist friend encouraged me to give Adderall a try. It was the first time that medication "worked" and it really made a big difference in my life. The big reason why being that psychomotor retardation and anhedonia were my biggest symptoms. When coupled with an anxiety disorder it creates a strong negative feedback loop.
But here's the thing: medication isn't the cure. For me it alleviates (not eliminates) symptoms but at the end of the day it still requires work from me to ensure I create a positive feedback loop and don't let myself fall into that destructive loop. This is all stuff I had to learn on my own and through reading and seeking out friends with people who are more experts in the area. That's where I think our care system fails.
The best thing I can recommend to people is to be introspective. Each journey is personal, but whatever your issues are try to find the early warning signs. For me it can be little things like the dishes piling up or my desk getting messy (these seem you be common). Things like depression build up, so look for the signs. And most importantly, open up. This was the hardest for me and makes me feel demasculated and embarrassed much of the time. But I've also found it to help build stronger relationships with my partner and friends. That it helps open a door to communicate both ways. Maybe you open the door for you, but you also open a door many are too nervous to open themselves. It's worth the discomfort and gets easier with time. (Talking behind a handle is a great way to start too. So make alt accounts if you need to. That's how I started)
you took amphetamine and weren't depressed suddenly? in my experience, that lasts a bit, but give it another decade or so. it tends to bite in other ways.
Going to depend on your dosages. I try to stay low and will take breaks to help reduce dependency. I actually really dislike the feeling of a high dosage and it does have negative effects at that end.
Also remember that everyone reacts differently to things. SSRIs work great for some people, but not for me. So it's worth trying different classes of medicines too but also to make sure that when having more dangerous ones. I made sure close friends knew too
> were because something was not right in my life.
THIS! Thats the reason why I always refused to take any medication: Doctors said you could "try X or Y and in some days I should feel better" - while the problems where mainly because of problems at work or within relationship.
Why should I take medics if I have problems at work with bad colleagues? This logic never made sense to me.
And my 2ct: If this wouldnt be a hardcore capitalist society in which most people struggle despite the fact living in a rich country, possessing nothing and having no homeownership, then there would be near zero demand for any psy medics.
But as I mentioned in a sibling comment, I’m not sure it was ever confirmed that it was really a laser that made that mark.