Yeah they use DMA hardware controlled by another PC to completely bypass the kernel level anticheat. It basically makes their wallhacks and some other things that aren’t replicated by the server completely imperceptible. I think anti cheat lost the arms race, we need to return to community run servers with dedicated teams of mods and admins to keep an eye on this stuff.

I use Lemmy and moved here in protest of the Reddit API pricing changes, but I’m not entirely opposed to other forms of social media. I’m aware of the privacy implications of a lot of them, and try to manage my use of them accordingly. I have Instagram and Snapchat etc which I have used for years to keep in touch with friends. 90% of my friends use Facebook messagenger to IM and I think that’s pretty standard in Australia. I can’t justify cutting that many people off for privacy reasons. I understand the privacy implications of using these. It’s a balance. Social media can be bad for mental health, but a lack of social connection can be too. You need to find your own balance.

I think AR and VR are actually progressing at a reasonable pace, tech like the apple vision pro and the bigscreen beyond are beginning to converge to a comfortable and powerful experience and AR will be better supported by a platform like the vision pro than by any previous major industrial AI offerings like the hololens. I think in the short term people will move to external compute on a puck worn on the waist much like the battery of the vision pro was but with all or most of the compute power.

I think BEVs will continue to advance, without even considering a major technological breakthrough I expect they will out-range many ICE vehicles very soon. If solid state truly goes commercial scale it will be even sooner.

Mobile phones I actually think are stagnating. You’re right that there’s more power in them than necessary these days. Batteries get bigger and cameras get better but not much else changes. Interested to see where they go.