I believe the problem here is that that works precisely once, then they stop inviting you to the classified parties.
So as he gets older, the cost/benefit changes, but I believe that's why he hasn't, is that his calculus involves him being the only one this reliable on screaming about what's going on behind closed doors.
The problem is that you need humans to run datacenters, and so that puts ceilings on how far away from humans you can put them without the humans no longer being willing to commute there.
And the cost of building all the infra to support humans living in an area that humans are not already populating is enormous.
Well, evidently you don't need humans to run datacenters, if we're talking about launching them into LEO!
Here's an idea, let's do this instead: we put them in the desert, or on boats or zeppelins or whatever, and we pretend they're in space. If anybody asks, those fuckers are in space, man. Computin' in the cosmos.
As far as I can tell from random articles online, it seems that as a rule of thumb, you need about 6 humans +1.5 humans per megawatt - and that's just for running the datacenter part, different people maintain the power generation infrastructure. Now, if you have to house those people in space or fly them up whenever they have to do anything, that's going to destroy your budget.
If you want to assume a level of automation that makes that unnecessary, that's fine, but then you need to also assume that same level of automation in earth based data centers too, and everything that goes with that.
Obviously you need to require enough friction that the experiences are comparable (e.g. no letting someone impulse buy 100 times in half a second without having to re-type their "I am an adult" payment info or something analogous, possibly just a hard ceiling for everyone), but I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge, and you can't mandate that parents teach their kids how to handle it.
So I think the best you can do is put hard limits on people's ability to hurt themselves without at least an "are you really sure" check, and maybe something like not allowing cash in the exchange without adult verification so the kids might, at worst, gamble their FunBux they earned playing a game and get burned on having lost a lot of FunBux, rather than their or their parents' cash. (This doesn't stop parents from giving their kids their credit card, but that's not really a problem you can solve...)
I do, generally, think that banning (or legalizing) things in their entirety is often ineffective, and if you just make them entirely and equally illegal/legal you no longer have any levers to stop people making them as toxic as possible. (Look at how insanely pinpoint-targeted at addiction exploitation sports betting has become in the US, for example.)
In this specific case, it's because I don't think you can whack-a-mole things that tickle the addictive feedback loops in people's brains everywhere faster than people can engineer their ways around it or find new ways to exploit things that do those same things without being caught in the laws, so I think you need to both:
- raise the cost of making it too painful for people who aren't self-moderating enough and keep the most lethal edges off it (e.g. ceilings on how much you can spend, making you have to take active action that takes more than a few seconds so you can't impulse-click and blow a fortune on One More Hit, no feedback mechanisms that incentivize spending more when you already spent a lot...)
- limit how harmful it can be to people who are too young and haven't yet learned what it does to them and that they need to be careful (e.g. use something like having access to a credit card you can input on request as a proxy for verifying you're an adult, and try to ensure any of the foam padded Kid Slot Machines(tm) can't be traded in a useful fashion for cash or paid for with cash, even with verification)
In some sense, the original video games with this kind of feedback loop were arcade games - you got a variable amount of reward for your input token, and they had to give you enough to convince you to keep doing it. Microtransactions with lootboxes are just that feedback loop taken to the logical limit, but I don't necessarily think people who hate microtransactions would consider games like that as a similar evil, precisely because, like physical blind boxes, the quantization and scale is so much smaller, and it's so much higher friction to blow a fortune on it.
I think the reason for that is less that they didn't want to do it and more that they hadn't polished the mechanisms for it.
I've said before that the analogue for these sorts of games is arcade games - where you had to put in currency per unit time of enjoyment, and they had to try to guesstimate play time versus amount they're willing to pay for it and then would go in person to "test" arcades with early versions of games to see if they were wrong.
The internet reduced that feedback cycle to minutes, so we speedran evolution on it.
TBH, I don't see monthly fee games as even in the same category of concern - at least, not in a vacuum. Games with microtransactions, yes, absolutely, but that's true whether it's nominally a pay-once game or not, I think.
I said in another comment, I don't hate the idea of allowing microtransaction/gambling-style mechanics in games as long as they can't involve real currency on either side, if children are the market - not because I think it's great for kids, but because I think you're not going to manage to ban everything that's the same addictive "shape" as those, and allowing people to be exposed to that in a venue they care about, but with foam sword padding so you can't blow actual money on it, is probably a reasonable risk/reward balance.
(You might reasonably argue that this is just going to lead to kids being primed for addictive behaviors as adults, but the only thing that's going to help that is being mindful about it, e.g. education, and nothing short of people the kids respect reinforcing that is going to change that whether the games allow this sort of soft pain or not...and being exposed to something like Vegas naive or primed is going to, I think, have the same outcomes either way if you're not mindful about it.)
I would, I think, probably argue that the problem is less that they're gambling and more that they involve actual money.
I think exposing people to addictive mechanics with guard rails is probably useful for teaching you how you respond to them, before you go to Vegas and blow far more than you budgeted.
In particular, I don't think you're going to ban addictive things faster than people can build them, and I know you can't rely on parents having conversations with kids, so I feel like all you can do is try to remove the whirring buzzsaw of real money incentives and let people learn that it's sharp, but foam sword sharp, where you can't ruin your life permanently (easily) with it.
The fact that gacha games are so popular is _why_ they had enough attention to explicitly ban the most toxic patterns at the time. [1]
There's an interesting question of how far to push the bans, though - "in theory" your goals should probably be "don't let people prey on addictive behaviors" and "minimize people impulse buying more than they can afford", but the latter especially is...very hard to make an empirical rule for, and then you get into logistics like people just making additional accounts to get around it...
I would speculate it's something like, if your innate immune system is running "hotter", it's going to reduce the amount of time it takes to clear anything it runs into, leading to less time spent inflaming anything, in a similar fashion to how it significantly reduced viral payloads, leading to negligible symptoms when the adaptive immune system batted cleanup.
I see a fair number of them, scattered around, not even in ultra-populated areas, but the last 3 or 4 times I've stopped in to try and buy things for e.g. holiday gifts, they've had none of the things I was looking for in stock, and they always seem empty.
The simplest way to do this, what I believe memtest86 and friends do, is to write a fixed pattern over a region of memory and then read it back later and see if it changed; then you write patterns that require flipping the bits that you wrote before, and so on.
Things like [1] will also tell you that something corrupted your memory, and if you see a nontrivial (e.g. lots of bits high and low) magic number that has only a single bit wrong, it's probably not a random overwrite - see the examples in [2].
There's also a fun prior example of experiments in this at [3], when someone camped on single-bit differences of a bunch of popular domains and examined how often people hit them.
edit: Finally, digging through the Mozilla source, I would imagine [4] is what they're using as a tester when it crashes.
That would tell you if there's a bitflip in your test, but not if there's a bitflip in normal program code causing a crash, no? IIUC GP's questions was how do they actually tell after a crash that that crash was caused by a bitflip.
The example I gave in there is of adding sentinel values in your data, so you can check the constants in your data structures later and go "oh, this is overwritten with garbage" versus "oh, this is one or two bits off". I would imagine plumbing things like that through most common structures is what was done there, though I haven't done the archaeology to find out, because Firefox is an enormous codebase to try and find one person's commits from several years ago in.
This doesn't always protect against out-of-bounds writes. Although if these sentinel values are in read only memory mappings it probably gets pretty close. (Especially if you consider kernel memory corruption a "bitflip".)
I would imagine it's the GDPR "ACCEPT ALL COOKIES" in big font and then in very small low contrast text "select some cookies" or "reject cookies" that they were describing.
technically, it's the ePrivacy directive. GDPR requires the consent to process personal data and governs the data but the ePrivacy directive is the instrument that requires that god-damn-please-make-it-stop-banner.
So as he gets older, the cost/benefit changes, but I believe that's why he hasn't, is that his calculus involves him being the only one this reliable on screaming about what's going on behind closed doors.