In this context, “drug-free” should probably be read as “they got permission to skip clinical trials, drug manufacturing oversight, Drug Facts labeling laws, and so on”.
granted, the article says the bug lasted about a week, making $23,000 on the bug, and refunding all players before any intervention.
it is a bit sketchy they did not inform any players of the reason for the refund, but im not sure how they could have handled this better. what are your thoughts
Re: how could they have handled this better, they could've caught this on the first or second day.
No one should need to tell you that an easily measurable and obviously critical metric is wrong. You should have alerting in place for that. A difference of 95% to 0% should light up like a Christmas tree.
If you release a game that's impossible to win, you didn't do a meaningful amount of testing or QA when it hit production. I assume a dev played at least one game as a sanity check, but they didn't sit there and play until they won. A QA person wouldn't sign off on something if they only observed 1 of the 2 states it should reach.
I used to work on these sort of games and one would play a few rounds to get a feel that everything was working correctly and to see things like the transition to win states etc. Obviously, we wouldn’t be spending our own real money to do this: we would be playing against a dev server that produced the results. I find it hard to believe there would be zero QA before launch so I can only assume there was a mismatch between the dev and release versions of the backend.
> but im not sure how they could have handled this better.
Immediately alert the relevant oversight body, and notify the players about the problem when issuing the refunds. Providing adequate detail in both cases.
At least, that sounds like the right approach to me though I'm just guessing. :)
Sure, but what about their other games? And can they guarantee that this game is now "bug"-free?
Gambling is already bad enough when it is done fairly. It's essentially a license to scam people. But it's absolutely disgusting that it is even possible to turn that into outright stealing. Why is not not mandatory for them to publish full reports on all rolls so that it can be verified whether it matches their advertised odds?
> it is a bit sketchy they did not inform any players of the reason for the refund, but im not sure how they could have handled this better. what are your thoughts
Well... just rig the machines again to give out $23,000 to the players over a handful of games!
I saw that too, but from the article the 19k fine is after they (seemingly proactively?) refunded the bets.
It _sounds_ like the fine is a result of them failing to inform users of why the refund was issued (honestly it seems like saying "hey, we found an issue, we've refunded your gambling" seems like a better bet from a customer appreciation PoV, but maybe they were concerned about lawsuits or something? but going a step further and saying "hey we found a bug, so we've refunded your bets because the bug means the game was unfair[1], and here's $50 credit on your account" seems like it would do much better, and be functionally free because it would encourage more gambling)
[1] Gambling like this is fundamentally unfair, but there's a weird pretense of fairness that gambling companies are allowed to present to the world for some reason.
I think giving a slap on the wrist for first offense can still be very effective, as long as subsequent offenses are harsher. Especially if it doesn't appear the offense was comitted with intentional malice, and the company did what they could to rectify it once it became known.
Would it be bad form if I linked to this story every time someone here says RTO is essential for ‘vibrant and lively’ communication between colleagues?
Not a lot of communication with your colleagues when you die on Friday and nobody notices until Tuesday. People came in and worked an entire day while she was in her cubicle decomposing.
Yeah, and it's a bad example since the timeline could easily be that she was working until a bit later on Friday, passed away, and wasn't found until Monday afternoon. However, since this was submitted on a Friday the brain automatically thinks about it happening Mon-Fri if you don't read the article.
It can certainly be obnoxious (I remember everyone calling Microsoft, M$ in the early 2000s), but if the goal is communicating an idea to an audience spelling it iPhone vs IPhone vs iphone vs Iphone doesn't make a difference.
What I don't get is advocating for radical civil obedience to a company's preferred trademark names.
Calling any of this "radical" is rather dramatic and framing it as "obedience" misses the point.
If someone says "My name is spelled e. e. cummings" then writing it "E. E. Cummings" is weird. It feels either uninformed or a deliberate, though tiny, mark of disrespect.
It would also be weird to spell the Motorola "Razr" phone's name as "Razor" as that's not the spelling Motorola gave it.
It isn't about "obeying" the poet nor the corporation but rather following social norms to spell things as the named person (or the namer of the item) prefers it to be spelled. And if you don't follow this convention then... oh well, most people will probably forget about it seconds after they notice it as they have other things to think about.
I remember many years ago representatives of Photoshop® visiting forums to tell us that we must always add the registered trademark symbol whenever we mention Photoshop® - sorry, Adobe Photoshop® - and that we mustn't use the verb "photoshopped" but must instead say "digitally altered with Adobe Photoshop® software". And we told them to fuck off. But as you say it all depends on social norms and conventions ... which are not homogenous, so these things are always being tacitly fought over.
I’ve had the Scribe for about six months and absolutely love it: I actually relish using it every single time I open it up.
I’ve had Kindles for probably 10 years, gradually upgrading until the latest warm-screen version Oasis.
But reading on these smaller screens always felt like a compromise: having to constantly flip pages was a nagging mental reminder that the platform was digital, and for some reason this always impinged slightly on my enjoyment.
I use the Scribe in portrait mode and now it feels like a luxurious hard-back page I’m looking at. The only thing that would make it conceivably better would be a yellower tint to the base color, which even the warm light doesn’t quite achieve - making it feel even more like a paper-page.
I also write work notes on it every day. The pen feel is beyond comparison to ‘writing’ on an iPad - which is really nothing more than sliding around with a piece of plastic on a sheet of glass.
I haven't used the Scribe much for reading, I do most of my kindle reading before bed, and I find the smaller Oasis is a nicer form factor for me to read while holding it. Using the Scribe as a reader, if you wanted something bigger, is probably a great experience. I agree that the pen feel on the scribe is great.
It would be great to know if there’s more than one post on ‘X’ - if there’s a resolution to this story; some sort of follow-up or discussion.
But since Elon decided I have to log-in to see the content that others have provided for his private social network, I guess I’ll never know.
My bet is that the recent stupid culling of wolves and lynxes in Nordic countries is also directly linked with appeasing people in rural communities for the next European elections. It will be an expensive mistake, as people will discover soon, but politicians are extremely concerned by the raise of the populist parties.
I think the suggestion is that the rise of populist parties is making the otherwise “responsible” politicians take more populist decisions to win back votes, especially before an election.
It is much easier and cheaper to endanger a especie than to recover it.
Once that you reach a point of small number of individuals the lack of genetic variability and the problems finding a matting companion makes it hard to recover
Can you breed them with other very similar cats in captivity to introduce genetic diversity, then keep breeding them with more Iberian lynxes so that they're mostly still Iberian lynxes?
Crossbreeding is necessary if you have too few specimens left to prevent inbreeding, but if you don’t, I think you’re better off using the entire population for a breeding program.
If you have sufficiently many “more Iberian lynxes” to get rid of the foreign DNA in the population after mixing that in, wouldn’t you also have sufficiently many for a breeding program that doesn’t introduce foreign DNA?
> Can you breed them with other very similar cats in captivity to introduce genetic diversity
Not.
Or at least not a thing to do without a lot of previous planning and backups. Lynx hybrids can carry a sterile gen.
Messing with biology is messing with millions of years of fine adjusted DNA technology. Would be like finding a marooned alien spaceship and starting to press buttons randomly. At this time we are just struggling to understand a small part of this natural technology.
Norway too. Due to a strong distortion field surrounding the rather dubious impact of large predators on the viability of livestock farming, there's a political consensus between the 3 largest parties(labour, conservatives and the agrarian party(officially the "centre party")) that the minimum viable population numbers agreed on in the Bern Convention are actually maximum limits. The resulting policy is that any population beyond that is culled every year. This is unironically referred to as "getting down to population targets".
This is of course not ideal for the ecosystem. Game populations are out of control, which has lots of harmful effects on forests, etc. And though I'm not an ecologist, it seems likely to me that predator populations will eventually collapse from a lack of diversity as they're artificially kept at a bare minimum for extended periods of time.
> And though I'm not an ecologist, it seems likely to me that predator populations will eventually collapse from a lack of diversity as they're artificially kept at a bare minimum for extended periods of time.
It's a complicated topic of conservation, because the reproductive strategy, genetic makeup, and history all influence the species' minimum viable population, and thus its reaction and trajectory following new genetic bottlenecks. Some species can somewhat recover from very extremely little e.g. the black robin went as low as five individuals, including only one fertile female, today there are 300; or the mauritius kestrel which was down to 5~6 known birds of which a single fertile female, for mammals the northern elephant seal went down to ~30.
One of the massive risks for species surviving a genetic bottleneck is that the low genetic diversity will let diseases spread like wildfire, especially for the more social species.
Yeah it's amazing. The Swedish narrative includes the logical somersasult that the population must be slashed in half to reduce the risk of inbreeding. Like I don't even.
It's kind of shortsighted though. If we kill all the other predators, we're left with rampant overpopulation of all their prey animals, even the ones that harm our own interests and are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with (like boars).
Shameful. You would expect rich assholes to gradually move away from the least sustainable form of sport, but nope, it’s actually ramping up with explicit backing from politicians. Time to build a Westworld for these rich assholes.
The wolf cull has very little to do with hunting for sport. It's above all agricultural interests that are lobbying for this.
If anything the hunters are pushing back against it, especially with regards to moose. They're in some cases straight up refusing to shoot their allotments because they can tell the population is shrinking. (The forestry industry want them gone because they're feeding on younger trees.)
> If anything the hunters are pushing back against it, especially with regards to moose
I’m not sure how you jumped to the restraint some hunters are showing when deciding not to shoot moose (älg) in Sweden - it’s totally unconnected to the gratuitous and stupid shooting of wolves and especially the endangered lynx.
They’ve decided to hold back hunting moose because they’re worried about how the hunt will be in the future, not some enlightened ecological concern. I know this because it’s a common discussion topic amongst friends and relatives who hunt.
The connection was made to illustrate that the hunters aren't deciding the hunting quotas, but that the quotas are set to appease the farming and forestry industry.
How would Apple then sell any of their MacBook Air range? (I don’t mean this as a criticism of Apple either - they need to differentiate their products somehow, and giving the iPad Pro MacOS would simply cannibalize their own products).
I’m not sure whether you’re suggesting they just made up this detail?
In another HN discussion about this, there was a link including the close-up of the gun, resting as described on the middle of the deck.
Incidentally dinner plates and a boot are also intact on the deck. No-one is adding fictional details to how incredibly well-preserved this wreck is.
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