Since this is a .net core project, I am a little puzzled as to why they didn't use the .net AES-GCM classes. It's part of .net core 3.1. There should be no reason to use AES-CBC mode in a newer application.
"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken I am not saying that the ideas you have listed are not without merit, however to say they will fix the 21 Century is a bit over reaching.
It's sounds wise and cynical, but is there actually evidence for this?
I'm not saying any of this is easy to do, but that's because politics and reform is hard. Not enough people can agree what to do != no one can know what to do.
With fields like "mechanism design" we've blurred the distinction between central planned and distributed economics too; never have we had a better menu of options.
Economics is improving rapidly but it’s definitely not shown itself to be prescriptive yet. It’s a crap shoot how well an idea gets executed in the real world and I’d argue that’s not acceptable for something this drastic.
A small issue with number 5. How is an average technologist going to do any better with things like tax policy, immigration policy, energy or foreign policy than an account, lawyer or civil engineer? I wonder if we would all be better of trying to use technology to get good candidates in office that are not beholden to large agenda driven donors.
Absolutely true. However we also need people who do have solutions/ideas to these problems running for office even if they don’t know how to flip bits. It would be nice to see technology enabling skilled candidates rather than troll farms.
Like all things in life it depends on the team and workflow. I have my PM’s make tickets because many times I am in the middle of a different feature or bug and don’t want to have to have the mental load of remembering what the issue was. Secondly I work with very solid PM’s who document the ticket very well and it saves me time having to reproducing the issue. My team does have a lot of tickets but we make it work for us and our process flow.
I agree with this approach for software devs in any business. One of the cool things one of my employers (a manufacturing company) did was send me out for a day to a plant and have me see how everything worked. It made some of the websites I was building for our plant workers much easier when I already had a good idea of what they needed it for.
They already do. Many logistics companies have a "brokerage" area where try and get trucking companies (or truckers) to bid on loads going from x to y. I used to support software that did this. Not a fan of the software, but the people where blast to work with. In the area I worked with, it could get pretty crazy (lots of yelling across the room and the yelling at people on the phone LOL). They occasionally had less than ethical truckers holding loads hostage for more money....
But reaction time in a real time game is also an interesting problem with AI. If they factor out the merely mechanical (the UI itself), reacting to a situation unfolding in real time where you don't have a lot of time to think is a nice test of AI vs human strategic and tactical thinking.
Do you mean Google should write a better AI than the one in Civilization?
Interesting. But also consider this: in casual strategy videogames -- actually, strike "strategy" and just consider videogames -- most players don't want a really hard opponent. A computer opponent that is really very hard to beat is not what we want, because that'd be frustrating and many of us play videogames (yes, even strategy games!) to unwind; we want the illusion of challenge, an opponent that is challenging to beat but within the possibilities of every person who buys the game.
Which, by the way, is also the case with Starcraft II. Most people who bought it aren't tournament players. They expect a challenge, but not a really hard challenge. Game difficulty is all about perception ;)
PS: I shamefully confess I reloaded my X-COM (DOS!) game every time I lost one of the soldiers I was emotionally attached to. I don't like losing! :P
In strategy games like Civilization the "preferred" difficulty level is that hard/easy to beat because it gets extra resources. It would be preferrable to have the same difficulty level through opponents that play better/smarter while having the same game mechanic consequences as players if they make the same actions, but we currently can't, so they get artificial production multipliers and such.
Yes, I understand this. I guess I disagree better/smarter would be better, because in videogames what matters is the illusion of challenge, not a real challenge. So spending resources into developing a real AI for Civilization is probably not the best idea; as long as it tricks casual players into believing it's putting up a fight, that's good enough.
This approach creates a mismatch between singleplayer and multiplayer modes - this means that playing against a computer opponent rewards/requires different strategies than a human; a challenging computer opponent has more income and units but poor usage of them, while a similarly challenging human opponent has less income and units but uses them very differently; so playing against challenging computer opponents doesn't help you improve against other players but possibly is even counterproductive as you learn to adopt strategies that are bad in the other environment.
True. I don't know many videogames in which playing against the computer really helps you against human opponents.
I don't know whether a more capable non-cheating AI would help though. Not unless it specifically imitated how a (good) human opponent would play, which I guess is an additional and difficult to implement constraint.
I mostly agree with you - there is a little bit of a fine line though. I can learn from my opponents strategy playing against someone a little bit better than me. Maybe i lost because i need more or less of X? Tough to learn from when the opponent is creating the illusion of playing well, rather than playing well.
Current civ A.I.s may not be the smartest that the Civ team could do. Sid Meier once said on video that on play tests, when the A.I. would do something brilliant, players would just assume it's cheating.
I used to work at a manufacturing company. I know the company tried renting some robots for putting items on a rack and getting them off said rack. On the surface it seemed like a good idea since this job is repetitive and boring for a human. Sadly it didn’t work out. The amount of change in the parts being put on the rack proved to be a challenge for the robot and the company ended up ending the rental agreement.
