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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • I’d argue that with their definition of bots as “a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet” and later their definition of download bots as “Download bots are automated programs that can be used to automatically download software or mobile apps.”, automated software updates could absolutely be counted as bot activity by them.

    Of course, if they count it as such, the traffic generated that way would fall into the 17.3% “good bot” traffic and not in the 30.2% “bad bot” traffic.

    Looking at their report, without digging too deep into it, I also find it concerning that they seem to use “internet traffic” and “website traffic” interchangeably.



  • I’m pretty sure this was already the case in some games before, depending on the netcode of the game.

    The old FAQ said:

    What if a borrower is caught cheating or committing fraud while playing my shared games? Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a borrower cheats or commits fraud. In addition, not all VAC protected games are shareable. We recommend you only authorize familiar Steam Accounts and familiar computers you know to be secure. And as always, never give your password to anyone.

    If it’s a game with VAC it probably always worked as described above, but for example: People in Fall Guys did use this trick to avoid getting banned for cheating until they turned off Family Share for Fall Guys shortly after release.


  • The one year period of waiting after leaving one seems excessive.

    It’s slightly better than that for the person who leaves. It’s a one year period starting the moment they joined the previous one. So if you’ve been part of a family for 1+ years you can join/create a new one right away.

    The slot you occupied however does stay locked for an additional year.

    I also have my current setup with found family and as I live close to a country border I cannot switch over properly as I have members on both sides of the border. I understand their intent is “same household”, so I do understand why this is the case, still sucks for me though.

    I hope they have good separation of the logical family and the physical pc’s, It’s really annoying to resetup stuff with my partner every time one of us installs a different linux distro.

    After toying around in the beta, this seems to not be an issue anymore as they seem to actually go off accounts now and not hardware anymore. It was quite frustrating in the old system though.


  • Without knowing any specifics of the TOS or the exact setup beyond what I could gather in this thread: generally speaking they could still send you a bill through email or otherwise.

    After that, if you’re not paying up, they might be able to successfully get the money out of you through court regardless, depending on a few factors. What’s more likely for smaller sums is that they’ll just drop it and ban you though.

    IANAL of course.



  • That was a response I got from ChatGPT with the following prompt:

    Please write a one sentence answer someone would write on a forum in a response to the following two posts:
    post 1: “You sure? If it’s another bot at the other end, yeah, but a real person, you recognize ChatGPT in 2 sentences.”
    post 2: “I was going to disagree with you by using AI to generate my response, but the generated response was easily recognizable as non-human. You may be onto something lol”

    It’s does indeed have an AI vibe, but I’ve seen scammers fall for more obvious pranks than this one, so I think it’d be good enough. I hope it fooled at least a minority of people for a second or made them do a double take.





  • I’m not really sure how to describe it other than when I read a function to determine what it does then go to the next part of the code I’ve already forgotten how the function transforms the data

    This sounds to me like you could benefit from mentally using the information hiding principle for your functions. In other words: Outside of the function, the only thing that matters is “what goes in?” and “what comes out?”. The implementation details should not be important once you’re working on code outside of that function.

    To achieve this, maybe you could write a short comment right at the start of every function. One to two sentences detailing only the inputs/output of that function. e.g. “Accepts an image and a color and returns a mask that shows where that color is present.” if you later forget what the function does, all you need to do is read that one sentence to remember. If it’s too convoluted to write in one or two sentences, your function is likely trying to achieve too much at once and could (arguably “should”) be split up.

    Also on a different note: Don’t sell your ability to “cludge something together” short. If you ever plan to do this professionally or educationally, you will sadly inevitably run into situations where you have no choice but to deliver a quick and dirty solution over a clean and well thought out one.

    Edit: typos