This seems like a plausible claim, it all lines up with my preconceived expectations for how the CCP operates, but who knows? There are plausible commercial and political incentives for him to make these claims up (to promote his book, or to hurt a government he dislikes.) I hope NPR was able to corroborate these claims (Desmond Shum might have provided them with a recording of the calls?), because there is nothing in this article anybody else would be able to corroborate.
I'm under the vague impression that newpipe/youtube-dl users don't count towards view counts or watch times at all, since the anti-botting measures youtube has in place to prevent view-fraud would filter such users out of consideration for those metrics. Aren't youtube webpages filled with a bunch of JS telemetry to distinguish "real" viewers from bots?
Fake, refined, optimized, or over-produced.. it's all the same thing really.
With television, there are[were] a limited number of channels. Airtime was a scarce resource, and making a TV show cost money so the companies funding it wanted to make sure they got the best bang for their buck. So they had lots of experts tweaking every show to make sure it was juuust right. Little if anything was truly off-the-cusp. Seemingly impromptu conversations on talk shows are scripted and rehearsed. Too much money on the line for anything more casual. When less money is on the line, fewer people are involved and everything can be a lot more casual. Public access television is cruder but feels more authentic. Low budget art films can experiment more than big budget movies. The production of MST3K was casual and crude when it was on public access, but became serious business when they moved to Comedy Central.
A similar dynamic is in play on youtube. When a channel is just some rando uploading videos with little investment and little expectation of financial return, the content is generally cruder and quirkier. When a channel is run by a major corporation with lots of money on the line, lots of people involved in it, and high expectations for the reception, then everything is taken more seriously. Professional cameras, professional lighting, professional editing. It feels more like television because it is more like television.
This same overproduced aesthetic doesn't only come from corporations though; I think the dynamic is in play whenever the content producer has high expectations or aspirations. An individual creator working alone who has aspirations of becoming an "influencer" will put more effort into their content than somebody who has no expectations or aspirations for their content. Their content will become overproduced as a consequence of their lofty aspirations. Maybe tiktok inspires or nurtures these lofty aspirations more than youtube did in the early years.
Okay, comparisons within a particular artistic style then: Splinter Cell vs Metal Gear Solid V. MGSV has somewhat realistic doors, but much simpler than the door system SC:CT has. I've heard quite a few player complaints about MGSV, but never that the doors are less complex than the doors in a stylistically similar game ten years older. Splinter Cell gets some praise for doors, but Metal Gear doesn't get criticized for for falling short of that high bar.
Another example from beenBoutIT: The Last of Us and its sequel have the same sort of style. The sequel has superior doors but is generally considered an inferior game. The quality of the doors really doesn't seem to be a major factor in how these games were received.
Minecraft itself: minecraft doors having no animation was not a foregone conclusion derived from the broader style of the game. Minecraft pistons do have animations when extending or retracting. I've never heard a player complain that minecraft doors are lack what minecraft pistons have.
I think that most video game players are accepting of doors behaving in unrealistic ways. Simple doors don't actually bother most players, and complex doors usually go unappreciated by most players. Contrary to what the video claims, doors can 'just magically fly open', and players don't care.
Redstone: The surprising complexity of a redstone torch does not confer complexity to a minecraft door, even though you could use that torch to open or close a door. A minecraft door has one binary state relating to redstone, powered or unpowered. That's it. The redstone functionality a minecraft door has is very simple by the standards of many other redstone-capable blocks in the game.
Piston doors: Can be arbitrarily complex, but these do not confer complexity to regular minecraft doors.
Placement: Minecraft doors are not the simplest block in this regard, but they are far from the most complex. Just compare them to stairs. Stairs have four attributes: facing[east,west,north,south], half[bottom,top], shape[inner_left,inner_right,outer_left,outer_right,straight]. There are 80 ways any stair block can be configured. There are only 64 configurations of a door block in minecraft (as far as the player need be concerned, it's only half of that since half a door implies the other half, similar to an extended piston.) Incidentally, there are 9 materials a door can be made out of, but 48 materials stairs can be made out of. And 8 of those 48 stairs have the special behavior of turning into other material, while only one of the 9 door materials has special behavior.
Waterlogging: Regular minecraft doors have never waterlogged. Waterlogging is complexity added to other blocks in the aquatic update, but doors were not changed. There was no complexity added here. And doors are not the only blocks which weren't updated for waterlogging; there are dozens of other blocks like this.
Trapdoors: Are more complex than regular minecraft doors. Trapdoors being complex does not mean that regular minecraft doors complex.
Players wishing doors had more complexity: Is not doors being complex.
> Doors are hard, no matter how simple the game.
Doors are extremely complex in some games, and significantly less complex in others. Complexity is not a binary trait. I claimed that minecraft doors are comparably simple, particularly when compared to the doors in TLOU2. I stand by that.
> If the swiss authorities make a legal order demanding that protonmail include a rogue JS file when a specific IP address requests their inbox, they will have to do it.
Didn't Apple successfully resist doing similar when the FBI asked Apple to crack into the San Bernadino terrorists' phones by pushing special code just to those phones? Hypothetically, would Swiss law have allowed Swiss-FBI to compel Swiss-Apple to comply with this demand?
I understand how artists would think that way. Obviously they have passions and care about details few except other artists would notice. But on a commercial project, shouldn't managers reign in on this sort of thing and redirect the efforts of artists in a more productive direction?
> All those who stop using ProtonMail after this incident - could you please describe what PM should've done differently?
Somebody no longer valuing what ProtonMail provides is not mutually exclusive with thinking ProtonMail could have done differently. I expect many ex-ProtonMail customers realize ProtonMail could not have done differently, but nevertheless no longer value the service ProtonMail provides. How could this be? It's simple: They previously had mistaken beliefs (namely, that ProtonMail could have done differently), and decided to no longer be customers of ProtonMail when the truth became clear to them.
If you sell me electricity from your cold fusion power plant, I am going to cancel my subscription as soon as I figure out that cold fusion isn't possible and you were selling me coal power all along. That I now realize it was impossible for you to sell me cold fusion power in the first place doesn't change the fact that I no longer see any value in doing business with your power company.
All the mainstream reputable news organizations use stock photography extensively, so the public is generally willing to accept that the photograph attached to the headline needn't have anything to do with that headline.
Personally, I think this practice should be ended or at least decreased greatly. An article about a ship doesn't a stock photograph of a ship. It probably doesn't even need a photograph about the particular ship the article is discussing, unless there is something visually unusual or notable about that ship. The formula "Ship A is late to port, here is a stock photo of Ship B" is basically worthless. I guess they're tossing a bone to the borderline illiterate who are stuck at the "I can read picture books" level of literacy? But generally articles themselves are written at a higher 'reading level' than that.
While I'm duly impressed by the achievement of hyper-realistic door physicals, the effort:payoff ratio seems completely wack. I think these game developers are overthinking it. Minecraft does doors right in comparably simple way, and I think few if any players have a problem with it; it's a more popular game than any game with fancy doors. The most realistic doors in the world won't make a bad game any better, while simplistic doors won't make a good game any worse.
Chimpanzees often have 'white' and human-life faces. Are these algorithms ever classifying white people as chimpanzees?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#/media/File:Chimpan...