One that comes to mind was the manuals and bits and pieces that came with Infocom text-based adventure games. They were nice bits of cruft to have alongside the actual game but in certain instances puzzles within the game could only be solved by referring to something on the card, or booklet, supplied with the game. I can't recall if it was The Hitchhiker's Guide, or Leather Goddess of Phobos, but the requirement popped up quite deep into the game.
They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.
Leisure Suit Larry had a twist on this where it “verified” you were an adult by asking questions that older people were much more likely to know: “During the 70s, Carroll O'Connor portrayed a…”
They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.
Ironically, I can't see your image because Imgur assumes my VPN is malicious and rejects traffic from it. (Instead of saying this, it lies about being over capacity. This situation mysteriously resolves when I disable the VPN.)
403 would also be a weird error code for over capacity - 503 would be the correct error code.. The fact that it returns 403 as the error code is more proof that it isn't just 'service being over capacity'.
Useful idea. I, and many peers, are your target market. However, this looks like it might be US centric, based on searches in the merchant/wallet search on the main page.
Is it? Might be worth mentioning that somewhere so a large international audience doesn't waste time signing up.
The pattern didn't work on me, but maybe because I only watched a couple of cycles on my phone.
Has anyone had the experience where if you try to watch an anthill (or just many ants in one place), your vision gets out of focus after a couple of seconds? And you can't just re-focus, even after turning away from the ants. It takes a while until you are able to focus again.
It's very relaxing. I'm wondering if this is the same effect they are after with the animation.
Paul's animation wasn't playing at an even rate for me, for some reason, so I created two video versions (8Hz and 12Hz) with the 16 second on/off period, starting with an off period, running for 254 seconds, as per the paper. These versions end with an an additional off period, as a 'cool down' from the flicker.
Framerate of 24Hz differs from the 120Hz as presented in the paper, but here there is no 40Hz flicker attempt so it shouldn't be an issue.
Compression may affect the edges of the lines, but downloads are enabled.
I stared at the 8hz one, for the entire duration, and I feel a calm afterward, however I'm not sure if this is because I stopped doing/thinking for a few minutes with measured breathing or if it is me noticing the difference now that there's a lack of stimuli after the video ends.
What measurements or tests can I do to judge whether something is happening, or has happened after watching the videos?
> The idea that watching a video triggers some waste clearing mechanism is pretty wild.
It kind of makes sense. We can look at images of food and get a physical reaction like hunger, or look at macabre images and feel disgust, or stare at animations for one minute and then be affected for many minutes afterwards when we look away.
It doesn't surprise me we're still discovering new mechanisms for triggering physical reactions in our bodies.
Edit: I do agree it's pretty wild regardless :) Especially wild if we're finally discovering mechanisms that have useful effects, not just "fun" effects like visual distortion.
Wow! So a visual effect similar to some psychadelic hallucinations is associated with brain cleaning!
Also, I've been at concerts where the light show guy seems to have reverse-engineered the filters our brains use to process raw signal into "images", and could use the lights to create just the raw primitives.
A few hours of that and it was like I was learning to see all over again, a tune-up/calibration of my visual system.
My understanding from the paper is there is no difference between 4, 8, 12, and 40Hz frequencies on the neurobiologcial effects, but I found the 8Hz a bit less comfortable than the 12, so I uploaded both.
Do these need to be full screen with your face close to the screen to fill my field of vision, or would it work just as well watching it in a smaller window, on an iPad or even on a phone?
Reminds me of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal [0], where 26,000 families were unfairly labeled as having committed tax fraud (11,000 of which had been targeted via "risk profiling", as they had dual nationalities [1]). Bad policy + automation = disaster. The wikipedia article doesn't fully explain how some automated decisions were made (e.g. You had a typo in a form, therefore all previous benefits were clawed-back; if you owe more than €3.000,- then you're a fraudster and if you called to ask for clarification they wouldn't help you — you're officially labeled a fraudster, you see).
Edit: couldn't find a source for my last statement, but I remember hearing it in an episode of the great Dutch News podcast. I'll see if I can find it.
Just for posterity, I couldn't find the specific podcast episode, but there are public statements from some of the victims [0] available online (translated):
> What personally hurt you the most about how you were treated?
> Derya: 'The worst thing about all of this, I think, was that I was registered as a fraudster. But I didn't know anything about that. There was a legal process for it, but they blocked it by not telling me what OGS (intent gross negligence) entailed. They had given me the qualification OGS and that was reason for judges to send me home with rejections. I didn't get any help anywhere and only now do I realize that I didn't stand a chance. All those years I fought against the heaviest sanction they could impose on me and I didn't know anything. I worked for the government. I worked very hard. And yet I was faced with wage garnishment and had to use the food bank. If I had known that I was just a fraudster and that was why I was being treated like that, I wouldn't have exhausted myself to prove that I did work hard and could pay off my debts myself. I literally and figuratively worked myself to death. And the consequences are now huge. Unfortunately.'
The icon is the teal/white circle just in line and to the right of the social media icons at the bottom of the page. I missed it on first glance and would have no idea what it did.
Oh. I thought that was a light mode / dark mode button... Unlikely on a retail site I guess, but discoverability feels pretty bad. It's not like you couldn't just write "suffering from domestic abuse?" on there because the person doesn't have to click it in situations where that would be risky, and could come back later if they spot it at the wrong time.
I don’t know if you’re a kiwi but I assume that what it does is more common knowledge there.
I do think there is real value in being able to report domestic abuse without leaving an obvious paper trail. Call logs can be accessed by the account owner, I imagine a lot of people don’t know how to clear their history or aren’t confident enough they can do it correctly, etc.
It’s some small amount of peace of mind for victims who file reports, and with a cost of “adding a fake social link and a devs salary for a month” I’m pretty okay with it even if it literally only helps a single person. Bandwidth well spent.
Considering you can fly from London to Chișinău for around £36 at present ($45) on a low cost EU airline, then it probably isn't. The Telegraph is a right leaning newspaper for a wealthy readership, so their travel articles offer luxury. (The details of the holiday provider mention 4 star hotels.)
Plenty of indie travellers potter around in Eastern Europe via flight hops or train, and could spend a similar amount for a whole summer's travel.
They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.