It's not just a game, ...

... it's an an application of polynomial least squares to build a fundamental economic model.

The price modifier was a particularly important addition, because it worked to reduce purchasing power over time. Essentially it meant that for particularly wealthy players, merchants would always sell for more and buy for less, a clever move that prevented a player from abusing the system and attaining infinite wealth. The final version of Steinke's system, which took everything he learned and wrapped it up in some software, was called "Reactor." Instead of setting a static value, Reactor calculated prices at run-time, making every trade unique and creating a living economy where every item had a different value based on the type of merchant the player was interacting with and the state of the world around them.

The ne plus ultra of gaming

My computer struggles to play on regular settings, so I can only just sit and ogle these unbelievably gorgeous panoramas taken on Settings=Ultra: The Witcher 3 panoramas. Watch out for the harpy that guards this lighthouse!

Also:

• We Talk About The Witcher 3's Awesome Quests

  Luke: I think the “no resolution” thing is what makes so many of these so special. Bloody Baron is obviously the same: there’s sadness and emptiness in that plotline regardless of how you decide it. This isn’t a game that’s going to give you “good” and “bad” results very often.

• The Complex Women Of The Witcher 3

  The Strenger family’s story — an admittedly tiny fraction of a colossal game — has two possible endings: sad, or the most depressing thing you can imagine. Even in its darkest moments it remains thoughtful and treats its characters like people with realistic motivations.

  The Bloody Baron quest represents a big, daring creative decision. Honestly, it’s hard to read over a recap and believe all of that made it into a modern, big-budget game. At times, it’s even hard to believe it’s in The Witcher 3. That’s because — while often brilliant in its handling of sex, women characters, and even sexism — it’s a game frequently at odds with itself. It’s been called out for depicting a fantasy world where women are treated poorly to up its surface level edginess factor, even as others have praised it for confronting real-world issues, offering players a mirror upon which to view actual problems. It’s even been praised as a feminist game. Of course Witcher 3 has caused arguments between players. It sometimes feels like it’s arguing with itself.

• The Witcher 3 Vs. Dragon Age: Inquisition: The Comparison We Had To Make

  Partway into Wild Hunt, Geralt attends a poetry reading by Priscilla, Dandelion’s writing partner and I-guess-girlfriend-it’s-sort-of-unclear. She sings some poetry for a rapt audience. The song goes on for approximately one hundred years, is extremely dorky, and is also wonderful.

And don't forget to celebrate Trollolol, the greatest singing troll ever.

A week in review

Happy August! (White Rabbit)

• At Last: An Ebola Vaccine That Might Actually Work

  The results are so promising, in fact, that the research itself has changed. Instead of using two randomized groups of subjects—one that receives the vaccine immediately after potential exposure and one that receives the vaccine 21 days after—the researchers are now giving the vaccine to every subject immediately.

• How a Piece of Malaysian Flight 370 Drifted 2,300 Miles

  In retrospect, the absence of any physical evidence from the crash shouldn’t have been that much of a mystery. By the time the search shifted to the Indian Ocean 10 days after the jet disappeared, the flaperon was already on its way and riding the current towards Africa.

• Drones and Spyware: The Bizarre Tale of a Brutal Kidnapping

  FBI court filings unsealed last week showed how Denise Huskins’ kidnappers used anonymous remailers, image sharing sites, Tor, and other people’s Wi-Fi to communicate with the police and the media, scrupulously scrubbing meta data from photos before sending. They tried to use computer spyware and a DropCam to monitor the aftermath of the abduction and had a Parrot radio-controlled drone standing by to pick up the ransom by remote control.

• Mare Island Kidnapping: Denise Huskins was not the intended target

  “At some point, that member of the team informed me that the person we had was Victim F and not [Victim M’s ex-fiance]. This threw a monkey wrench into our plans. Disagreement broke out among the three of us. I insisted that we should continue and carry out the operation, that it was a training mission anyhow, and that we needed the experience so that we could have successful missions later. So we continued,” the sender wrote.

• One font vulnerability to rule them all #1: Introducing the BLEND vulnerability

  To make a long story short, the one vulnerability mentioned in the title is CVE-2015-0093 (also dubbed CVE-2015-3052 by Adobe). What makes it unique is the fact that it provides an extremely powerful primitive, making it possible to perform arbitrary PostScript operations (e.g. arithmetic, logic, conditional and other) anywhere on the exploited thread’s stack, with full control over what is overwritten and how. This, in turn, could be used by an attacker to craft a self-contained malicious Type 1 font which, once loaded in the vulnerable environment, reliably and deterministically builds a ROP chain in the Charstring program, consequently defeating all modern exploit mitigations techniques such as stack cookies, DEP, ASLR, SMEP and so on. It also affected both Adobe Reader and the Windows kernel (32-bit), enabling the creation of a single PDF file, which would first achieve arbitrary code execution within the PDF viewer’s process, and further escape the sandbox by exploiting the very same bug in the operating system, elevating chosen process’ privileges in the system and removing the associated job’s restrictions.

• The adblocking revolution is months away (with iOS 9) – with trouble for advertisers, publishers and Google

  User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else, and they’ve decided that they don’t like it the experience available through the ad-supported web, and so they’re going to do something about it. Hence content blockers for Safari (and all web views) on iOS 9, which wasn’t announced onstage at WWDC but was one of those “Whoa!” moments on browsing through the Settings in the first iOS 9 beta. (Do read the link in the previous sentence, which explains what iOS 9 content blockers are, and are not.) Hence also Apple News, which is basically “all those sites but with the crap taken out”.

• Newegg wins TQP patent case after challenging judge over delays

  TQP, which was owned by well-known patent asserter Erich Spangenberg, claimed that the 5,412,730 patent covered any website using the SSL together with the RC4 cipher, a common Web encryption scheme for retailers and other sites. Under Spangenberg's guidance, the TQP patent was used to sue more than 100 companies, garnering some $45 million in settlements by the time of the Newegg trial.

  In post-trial motions, Newegg argued that it couldn't be found to infringe, because it doesn't change "key values" with each block that's transmitted. Gilstrap's new order embraces that argument, vacates the jury's verdict, and finds that Newegg doesn't infringe the patent.

• HAMMERTOSS: Stealthy Tactics Define a Russian Cyber Threat Group

  We have broken down the malware communication process into five stages to explain how the tool operates, receives instructions, and extracts information from victim networks. The stages include information on what APT29 does outside of the compromised network to communicate with HAMMERTOSS and a brief assessment of the tool’s ability to mask its activity.

• Can't Touch This: 'Hammertoss' Russian Cyberspies Hide In Plain Sight

  The attackers automatically rotate Twitter handles daily for sending commands to infected machines, and use images embedded with encrypted command information and then upload stolen information to cloud storage services, for example. They also recruit legitimate web servers that they infect as part of the command and control infrastructure.

• Git 2.5

  The latest feature release Git v2.5.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 583 non-merge commits since v2.4.0, contributed by 70 people, 21 of which are new faces.

• Dat Goes Beta

  Dat is a data collaboration tool. We think most people will use it to simplify the process of downloading and updating datasets, but we are also very excited about how people will use it to fork, collaborate on, and publish new datasets for others to consume.

• TIMELY: RTT-based Congestion Control for the Datacenter

  We show using experiments with up to hundreds of machines on a Clos network topology that it provides excellent performance: turning on TIMELY for OS-bypass messaging over a fabric with PFC lowers 99 percentile tail latency by 9X while maintaining near line-rate throughput. Our system also outperforms DCTCP running in an optimized kernel, reducing tail latency by 13X. To the best of our knowledge, TIMELY is the first delay-based congestion control protocol for use in the datacenter, and it achieves its results despite having an order of magnitude fewer RTT signals (due to NIC offload) than earlier delay-based schemes such as Vegas.

• Challenges to Adopting Stronger Consistency at Scale

  There have been many recent advances in distributed systems that provide stronger semantics for geo-replicated data stores like those underlying Facebook. These research systems provide a range of consistency models and transactional abilities while demonstrating good performance and scalability on experimental workloads. At Facebook we are excited by these lines of research, but fundamental and operational challenges currently make it infeasible to incorporate these advances into deployed systems.

• Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network

  We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago.

  ...

  Our datacenter networks run at dozens of sites across the planet, scaling in capacity by 100x over ten years to more than 1Pbps of bisection bandwidth

• Stop pushing the web forward

  The moratorium would hit Chrome much harder than it would the other browsers, since it’s Google that is proposing most of the new features nowadays. That may not be entirely fair, but it’s an unavoidable consequence of Chrome’s current position as the top browser — not only in market share, but also in supported features. Also, the fact that Google’s documentation ranges from lousy to non-existent doesn’t help its case.

• Java in Flames

  Java mixed-mode flame graphs provide a complete visualization of CPU usage and have just been made possible by a new JDK option: -XX:+PreserveFramePointer. We've been developing these at Netflix for everyday Java performance analysis as they can identify all CPU consumers and issues, including those that are hidden from other profilers.

• Tuning Tomcat For A High Throughput, Fail Fast System

  Since this was a mid tier service, there was not much use of apache. So, instead of tuning two systems (apache and tomcat), it was decided to simplify the stack and get rid of apache. To understand why too many tomcat threads got busy, let's understand the tomcat threading model.

• Freshwater Feedback Part 1: “Everybody does it”

  In a series of three posts that summarize what I have learned since publishing that paper, I will try to stick to positive assertions, that is assertions about the facts, concerning this difference between the premises that freshwater economists take for granted and the premises that I and other economists take for granted.

• Feynman Integrity

  My conjecture is that the fundamental problem in macro-economics, and the explanation for the puzzle I noted in my reply to Luis, is that a type of siege mentality encouraged people in this group to ignore criticism from the outside and fostered a definition of in-group loyalty that delegitimized the open criticism that is an essential part of the scientific method. Once this mentality got established, it fed on itself.

• Managing Change: The Sailboat Tack Principle

  That is, the skipper does not actually begin the maneuver until every involved crew member has indicated they are ready. This prevents partial execution, people getting hit in the head with booms, and people getting knocked off the boat. It also implicitly makes clear when we are discussing a possible course change (e.g., “I think we should set course that direction”) from when we are actually doing it (e.g., “Ready about”).

  For those with CS degrees, the sailboat tack principle is a two-phase commit protocol, used commonly in distributed transaction processing systems.

• Even If The State Of Georgia Can Copyright Legal Annotations, Should It?

  The state of Georgia hired LexisNexis to create these annotations, and LexisNexis then assigns the copyright that it receives on those annotations over to the state of Georgia. Part of the deal between Georgia and LexisNexis is that LexisNexis does the work and the state gets the copyright, but then LexisNexis gets to host the "official" copies of the laws of the state, while selling that annotated version (in both digital and paper versions). The state argues that this arrangement is actually more beneficial to consumers, because rather than relying on taxpayer funds to do this, LexisNexis gets to recoup the costs in the form of customer fees.

• Getting Started with Windows 10

  Windows 10 comes out July 29th, and it takes what was familiar about Windows 7 and what was great about Windows 8 and takes it forward. It's nice on a tablet, it's nice on a laptop, and I'm on my desktop with it now. Features like game streaming from an Xbox are amazing. The Office Touch apps look great.

• Researchers Disclose Further Vulnerabilities in Google App Engine

  A Polish research group claims there are still several outstanding vulnerabilities in Google App Engines for Java, including three complete Java sandbox escapes. After three weeks of radio silence from Google, it decided to disclose on Friday the vulnerabilities, along with proof of concept code.

• The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly

  On the evening March 14, 2013, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home in Annandale, Va., after responding to a phony hostage situation that someone had alerted authorities to at our address. I’ve recently received a notice from the U.S. Justice Department stating that one of the individuals involving in that “swatting” incident had pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy charge.

• John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician

  The students loved their new lecturer as much for his mind as his high jinks. He had a homely lecturing style, discussing abstract concepts in terms of trains and cars, cats and dogs. In lecturing on symmetry and the Platonic solids, he sometimes brought a large turnip and a carving knife to class, transforming the vegetable one slice at a time into an icosahedron with 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went.

• Playing Chess With the Devil

  Today Ken and I wish to talk about whether we can ever play perfect chess—or at least better chess than any one chess program—by combining output from multiple programs that sometimes might “lie.”

• The Miracle of SolarCity

  SolarCity, which focuses on putting solar panels on the roofs of homes and buildings, didn’t invent the solar panel. But, like Ford Motor Co. did a century ago, it has put together and perfected a combination of functions and disciplines—efficient assembly, economies of scale, vertical integration, and innovative financing techniques—that could make mass adoption possible. And it continually seeks and finds ways to expand its market.

• Book: Armada

  Ernest Cline’s second book, Armada, is almost as wonderful as his first book, Ready Player One. While plenty of folks on Amazon are giving it mediocre ratings, I think it’s because they don’t understand what Cline really did here.

• Meet Syd Mead, the Artist Who Illustrates the Future

  For decades, his groundbreaking designs and artwork for a variety of corporations, creative firms, and cinematic projects have become synonymous with looking forward. His film work alone, which includes Blade Runner, Aliens and TRON, gave a generation a glimpse into what technology and design may have in store. Mead says that he would use architecture as a sort of "magical background" in his work. Curbed spoke with him about his architectural influences and his current views on the future of urban design.

I see through a glass, darkly

For 4 days and nights things were a blur. I was on the move, from place to place, it was all noise, and brief images flashed by and were gone. I tossed and turned and could not sleep.

Things were all new and different and unusual, but there was also a sameness, a constant, one who was by my side, me-but-not-me, someone I knew, had always known, but was yet new and different and unusual at the same time.

Then, unexpectedly, the shaking and rolling and flying ceased, and was gone, abated, finis.

I collapsed and slept for hours.

When I awoke it was as if nothing had happened, all was as it was.

But there was a piece of me somewhere different, in a new place, a new person, once again renewed, once again restarted, once again on a new path.

And there were a number of new pictures on my phone.

boy, snow, bird: a very short review

Somehow, on my nightstand (I suspect via my daughter, the insatiable reader), there appeared Helen Oyeyemi's boy, snow, bird.

(On the cover, and elsewhere on the Web, the title is capitalized, but in the book itself each page is headed boy, snow, bird, and so shall I.)

From the title, you might think this is a nature tale, some sort of Jack London youthful adventure, but you'd be wrong. Boy, Snow, and Bird are actually three separate women: Boy Novak, her stepdaughter Snow, and her birth daughter Bird.

Boy has escaped her horrifically abusive home in New York City in the early 1950's, and ends up somewhere in rural Massachusetts, where she marries Snow's father, and some time later has a daughter of her own.

There are lots of discussions of social issues, class and race and gender questions, as well as the more complicated issues that confront mothers, daughters, and (step-)sisters.

And of course, as so many reviewers have observed, it is vaguely a retelling of the fable of Snow White, though I'm not really sure that Oyeyemi cares all that much about that aspect, except insofar as it involves the complicated role that the ideal of female beauty plays in human life, and how that ties into those aforementioned class and race and gender questions.

I guess I'm making it sound rather dry, which is a shame, because boy, snow, bird is anything but dry. Oyeyemi is a marvelous young writer, absurdly talented and yet still confident enough not to flaunt that talent by rubbing your face in it.

Seemingly effortlessly, Oyeyemi produces astonishing, spellbinding passages such as this:

Bird really likes her bedroom. There are quite a few cobwebs in it and Bird has no intention of tampering with a single one of them, no matter how many times her mom says her room is a disgrace. At the very most Bird might dust a cobweb off with the tip of a feather, but only to keep it looking spick-and-span. A lot of the time there are tiny memorials on the walls, in the corner behind the wardrobe, little specks only Bird and the spiders understand the importance of. Flies and other weaker insects have fought epic battles against the spiders and they've lost, leaving behind them a layer of wing, or a thin black leg joint that holds to the wallpaper for as long as it can before drying out and peeling away. Bird enjoys the stealthy company of the spiders, and in all other respects her room is tidy. Her mom has asked her if she thinks she'll continue to enjoy the stealthy company of the spiders after one of them has taken a bite out her, and Bird answers: "We'll see." In the evening, when the street lamp just outside Bird's window switches on, the gray cobwebs quiver and glow around the blue moons. It's the kind of view that Bird doesn't mind risking a spider bite for. Back when she used to say bedtime prayers, right after she'd prayed for her mom and her dad and her grandparents and the Chens and Aunt Mia and Snow and anybody who was sick or in trouble or all alone, Bird would throw in seven words for herself: Let spiders spin webs in my hair. It'd be great if they could be persuaded to spin little hats for her, dusty towers of thread that lean and whisper.

You'll never think about spiders the same way again, even if you yourself never come to enjoy their stealthy company.

I have no idea what Oyeyemi will do next; I have this feeling she's just getting started.

Keep your eyes open for her; she's worth your attention.

Those old 3M games

It will probably come as no surprise to you to hear that I have a copy of nearly all of the games described here: The Post-It Note company's obscure boardgames.

In fact, I have TWO copies of Acquire; not quite sure how things ended up that way, but I don't mind, because one of the copies is very worn and all the paper stock nearly crumbles in your hands from play.

Our copy of Acquire has now been played by four generations of my family: my parents bought the game, and played it with me and my brother; I later kept their copy of the game and played it with my children; more recently, my wife and I still play Acquire with my grand-daughter.

Of the other games:

• I don't have Executive Decision, and don't know why. Perhaps it never appealed to my father (who was the one who bought these games back in the late-1960's).
• We had Quinto once, but it disappeared.
• We still have Ploy, Jumpin, and Twixt. They are EXTREMELY abstract and, frankly, not much fun. The best thing about any of them is that fake Leonard Nimoy on the cover of Ploy, who makes that game look like it will be much more fun than it actually is.
• As I said, we have two copies of Acquire and still play it regularly
• Feudal, which is the one behind the gorilla and the propeller toy, might be the best of the bunch. It has these wonderful pieces which are sort of medieval toy soldiers, and you get to set them out on this chessboard-style grid and attack your opponent(s). The biggest issue with Feudal is that you really need 4 people to play it and we could never get 4 people who were willing to play it. So I'm afraid it's gathering dust somewhere.

Ah yes, those pre-Facebook days. When people entertained each other by setting up a boardgame on the table.

Try it sometime: go get Castles of Burgundy or Carcassone or Puerto Rico.

Or maybe just go check your email again.

Close readings of code

In literature class, we all learned the notion of close reading, a disciplined approach to really studying and really understanding a work of literature.

Although program code is (usually) not literature, the techniques of close reading apply there, too.

Last winter, John Regehr's Nibble Sort Programming Contest inspired a number of truly wonderful close readings of code:

• Nibblesort: Adventures in Optimization

  I decided to enter the contest because I don’t usually work on low-level optimization, either writing hand-tuned code or working on compiler transformations to make “normal” code execute in a more efficient way. I eventually submitted an entry that did pretty well (top half of the non-SIMD entries), and learned several “morals” about optimization along the way.

• Parallel Nibble Sort

  I chose to implement the sort using a sorting network. I used the following minimum-depth network to sort 16 items, which was designed by David C. Van Voorhis.

• Nibble Sort

  Being susceptible to nerd sniping, this problem stuck in my head and I ended up spending two Saturday afternoons trying to implement a fast solution.

Of the three essays, I liked Jordan Rose's the best, although all three are nice.

Let's hear it for close reading of code!

Oh, and lastly: I particularly enjoyed that the prize for the competition was a copy of Hacker's Delight, perhaps the most unusual and most wonderful, if most challenging, computer textbook ever written. I have the first edition of Warren's incredible book on my reading stand, and every so often I crack it open at a random page and disappear into half an hour of reverie...

Too bad I was never a compiler writer; I suspect I would have enjoyed it.