The drawing including a couple of anthropomorphised animal characters hardly seems surprising or even noteworthy.
The project/product has always had a heavy emphasis on being "fun", including its dolphin mascot/theming/naming.
From the home page[0]:
> Flipper Zero is a tiny piece of hardware with a curious personality of a cyber-dolphin.
One assumes that that "curious personality", the creator's attitude and the styling/presentation of the product/project is part of the reason for the success of the product.
The "furries" (as you call them) don't seem like the primary focus focus of the picture anyway -- there's a wide variety of characters doing a bunch of stuff in the drawing. There's also a dog, a shady-looking person stick up a poster, someone with pink hair, a cyber-dolphin, and I think there might even be more than two genders being represented.
Would there be a problem if the Flipper Zero community was "intertwined with the furry community"?
PhysX itself (assuming Unity still uses PhysX, but any major physics engine will be the same) is unlikely to be your problem, although it is possible that Unity compiles it with undesirable optimisations, or some aggressive multithreading strategy, etc.
In any case, it's quite likely that the physics simulation is not being initialised with identical state on each instance, so the physics engine -- even if it claims to be deterministic -- cannot be expected to arrive at the same solution across instances.
From the scripting layer atop Unity (et al.) you are essentially out of luck. You don't have the requisite control/access to guarantee the simulation input is consistent.
To expand on the "quite likely" variance in the simulation input, there's an unending list of possibilities, so just a couple of points: Unity is really really big and complicated.
The physics engine in Unity is not primarily there to be a FEATURE: physics engine. It's a general purpose collision system, and it's fundamental to Unity's whole world/scene/components. It's always running. Stuff that has nothing to do with what you see as your simulation can affect your simulation.
My unopinionated advice is: read Glenn Fiedler's classic networked physics articles[0].
My opinionated advice is: you're making a game where the physics is the whole game. It's also a very nicely contained problem space. Write your own physics simulation. It's gameplay code. Also, typical rigid body physics engines certainly can do a billiards sim, but they aren't actually that good at it.
> I would also not be surprised if the [staff] on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie
That's almost certainly the case, yes. Anything like royalties / residuals is pretty much unheard of in gamedev. You do the work, you do the crunch, you don't talk about conditions, you don't talk about pay, you are actively hostile towards the 'U' word, your boss _________ ____ __ _____.
For your service, you get the chance to be in the credits, provided your service continues after going "gold"[0], of course. Then you get laid off which is actually a win because you get to leave the company without getting blacklisted. Please forgive the gentle hyperbole, it's illustrative.
The situation may have improved (slightly)[1] with ~actors as SAG-AFTRA was a growing influence in the industry some years ago. I'm a bit out of the loop on that side of things, though.
[0] not that anyone ships after going gold anymore
[1] improved slightly relative to "I'm the voice of Niko Bellic and I got paid in Famista cassettes" -- no this is not a true story, I'm actually not even a voice actor.
First they came for the [clients with specific timezones and/or bizarrely formatted dates] and I did nothing. Then they came for the [users that spell favour the good way, with a 'u' in it], etc.
> why would I care about this
It's up to you, of course.
But I think you're making a mistake in assuming it could, in any way, benefit you as a customer.
This isn't specific to this company or the particulars of the business that they're in.
Simply put, you stand to lose more than they do and they are relentless in seeking, maintaining and exploiting any leverage they have over you.
Further, any power they gain over one individual customer tends to generalise to all customers.
Further further, one company's leverage is another company's right.
Not being bothered by the practice is accepting the terms set by the business. Acceptance invites escalation. Relentless.
Even more simply put, you should care because this is how you get John Deere.
The article is really quite reasonable and calmly presented, actually.
Your claim re. the intent of the fingerprinting is a guess.
Normal developers are the users that aren't taking steps to avoid being flagged by this system.
The software is written in a deliberately obtuse way, presumably in service of some (unknown to us) goal. This is a deceptive and anti-social thing to do, it is by nature an adversarial stance to adopt. An already adversarial actor may be "punished" by this, but in such a relationship, hostility can be expected. A non-adversarial actor -- a normal developer / user -- is being harmed by this because the software is treating them as an adversary.
Further, lets assume your guess is correct and, in addition, that Anthropic elects to alter/downgrade/poison their service[0] for users that fit a particular pattern of markers.
It's obvious how this system would "punish normal developers" (i.e. not the intended target/victim) that happen to fit those patterns.
[0] to some extent, the service already has been altered as its behaviour depends on the prompt text
Even if you think Fender is solely responsible for the design, which is frankly ridiculous, the bloody thing's been around forever and now they're suing?
Having a court stop actual counterfeits -- sure, nobody has a problem with that. That's not what this is.
Then there was the headstock thing, Fender was notorious for pursuing makers of guitars with headstocks that had any resemblance to the Strat headstock. Let's ignore how limited the design space is considering the constraints of six strings - six tuners at the end of a narrow strip of timber. Fender was obviously acting in an anti-competitive way at that point. At the same time, the quality of their own products continued to drop. Coincidence?
Now they are going after anything that looks like an electric guitar.
The general "S-style" body form, as popularised/iconified by the Stratocaster is popular for many reasons. A lot of those reasons (I would say most) are practical/functional.
Fender shouldn't be allowed to possess the shape, let alone use it as an anti-competitive weapon in order to coast along for another century just because the brand happens to come with some notable IP.
Fender's monopoly over the shape shouldn't be protected by law/courts. Here's why:
It's a functional design -- a matter of ergonomics and practicality. For a lot of guitarists, the S body style is the most effective, comfortable shape to play.
For a concrete example of an "iconic", yet clearly functional design feature: the top point of the "S" is where the front strap hook is. Having this point protrude forwards (along the neck) helps balance the weight and this provides the player with physical control over the mass of the guitar.
Many of the subtle features of Stratocaster body are obvious practical improvements -- it's the result of filing down sharp edges that were noticed when attempting the play the instrument. Imagine you're starting from a classical acoustic design, what steps would you take to make it more playable and make it electric at the same time?
It's an incremental design built on forms that have been used by luthiers for centuries. It's not a Fender shape -- it's an (electric) guitar shape.
Labelling (all?) American (Allied?) personnel as "antifa" or even "anti-fascist" is an interesting move. The article doesn't seem to demonstrate what you suggest it does nor does it seem particularly relevant in general.
What are you trying to say?
I don't think you've understood the story you're commenting on.
These people weren't "flagged" as terrorists, they were convicted and sentenced (extremely) harshly.
git is not a particularly suitable VCS for gamedev for reasons so much deeper than what messages it prints for a given command.
git is a tool built to solve versioning text files in a collaborative, open software development context. That is the problem git has in the gamedev space.
I think your criticism of git's output is fine -- fair enough.
What I will say to that directly is that everyone's different and expecting a UI to match every user perfectly is unreasonable. I don't think it's fair to call output that's more verbose than you'd like "user-unfriendly" without qualifying who the user/s is/are.
The thing missing from most of the responses to this is: you can only get this information once. It's effectively impossible to have any of this information repeated -- you can't run it a second time with `--verbose`.
I don't mind things telling me what's going on, and git's push output is perhaps verbose, but not by a margin that causes me trouble. Maybe that comes with always running less than ideal hardware and having second rate internet connections. I want to know why a command took longer to run than I expected.
Oh have I got a treat for you! The ability to make the magic pictures appear in your mind is not actually a universal human experience. There's a broad range of related topics, but the place to start is probably 'Aphantasia'[0].
It's quite interesting to talk about with friends and compare experiences. Good if you're all comfortable enough to allow a little bit of "treating the witness as hostile".
It will rot your mind! It will make your eyes square! Stop doing something that I am not doing!
> "junk literature" ... fascinating ... panic
Yes. It's funny how old this meme is. It's about as old as novels, at least. It's fun reading centuries-old novels and finding references (well, thinly veiled protests) to the holier than thou impeccable paragons of virtue that have nothing better to do than hassle someone who wishes to read a book.
I suppose there's been some progress, if the fiction police have had to retreat to a limited subset of fiction to call sinful.
I don't mean to put this report down -- it's a good thing to monitor and report on. I'm glad someone is paying attention.
And how are the parents/adults doing?
It's just that the obvious first place to look every time some statistic like this comes out is the parents/teachers/adults. I'd put money on 'Reading for pleasure: all-time low'.
Is it true? No idea. It's plausible. My point was that one example of a heavily compressed track doesn't make a loudness war. I offered a plausible alternative explanation of the same facts.
It seems likely that someone buying a mass market album today would expect it to sound pretty similar across all formats.
I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.
What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
I mean it's inevitable that businesses will unify the pipelines. If there's profit in vinyl records, there's obviously more profit if you don't have to put any extra effort in.
The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.
Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.
There's a lot of good responses here, which I agree with. Namely: it works for them and anti-trust law (enforcement) is weak. Competing with a such a well-engineered, deep (vertical integration, etc.) monopoly is extremely difficult and the smart business strategy for a ~startup in the space is to sell out to Ticketmaster. Attempting to challenge them on their turf is more or less impossible at least as a relatively small entity.
But I'm interested in the framing of the question. You say "yet", "still" ... when there was.
There was a healthy (at least healthier) market that was cynically, systematically corrupted over years/decades to get to the state its in today.
During that period, there were warning signs. There was a lack of an effective counter to the behaviour.
It's easy to say that "nobody cared" which isn't quite true, of course. Nobody in a position of power cared. The venues were in a precarious position by default -- easy to squeeze. The acts aren't your friend, they're businesses. Regular people that speak up about this sort of thing get silenced because "businesses exist to make money".
Whoa, first name basis with Dario but not Sam. Ouch. [I actually have no idea who Dwarkesh is and it sounds like a first name to me but that's not a particularly reliable indicator so I won't comment on your relationship with Dwarkesh.]
Oh, are they filing now? I think their financials look somewhere in between devastating and criminal, so I'm really looking forward to the IPO!
From the home page[0]:
> Flipper Zero is a tiny piece of hardware with a curious personality of a cyber-dolphin.
One assumes that that "curious personality", the creator's attitude and the styling/presentation of the product/project is part of the reason for the success of the product.
The "furries" (as you call them) don't seem like the primary focus focus of the picture anyway -- there's a wide variety of characters doing a bunch of stuff in the drawing. There's also a dog, a shady-looking person stick up a poster, someone with pink hair, a cyber-dolphin, and I think there might even be more than two genders being represented.
Would there be a problem if the Flipper Zero community was "intertwined with the furry community"?
[0] https://flipper.net/