Another sad anecdote: A bank in Finland suspended an account for a text in free-form message field of a bank transfer. The message was for a vet visit of a dog named Ira. When you say "Ira's payment" in Finnish, you add suffix -n, so the text field said Iran, which of course must indicate money transfer to a sanctioned country. It is comforting to know that the bank system catches all the illegal activity that the sanction-busting criminals helpfully announce.
A bank in France (Boursorama, now Boursobank IIRC) locked someone's account because they did not provide the document.
Yes, "the document", without telling which document. When calling the support, they first said that it must be indicated, no kidding. And then they said that it was not possible (despite getting screenshots).
It is sometimes a matter of having the wrong attribute set somewhere in a database and welcome to hell.
At least you got an explanation, I had my Vivid account blocked without one, the only interaction was by chatbot, the only response I got was can't disclose the reason because of compliance issues. For extra fun trying to get the funds on the account back I had to go to an online form, which didn't have the fields I was told to fill in, and again was met by no response. Eventually had to go through EU dispute settlement to get a human response and an email link to an app for digital identity validation, eventually I at least got my funds transferred to my main bank. Why the account was blocked remains a mystery, I only used it for online payments and never even contested, refunded or failed one.
Anyway, it's utterly bizarre to me that banks can get a license to run their business with what seems only a marketing and it-team with virtually no recourse for the customer, it was a WTF moment for me and I hope to never get in such a dystopian situation for something I really rely on, be it banking or (utility) services. (and I got a slightly better understanding how it must feel like for the victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...))
I had a financial company attempt to withhold my money so I skipped the chatbot and went straight to the CFPB. They were suddenly able to ACH the funds back to the account they originally took them from. Just goes to show how arbitrary and capricious all these companies are.
An acquaintance of mine (in Europe) had a default bank transfer message "al-qaeda terrorist fund" for years and years. That did finally raise some flags, but a visit to a bank office was enough to get the account unblocked.
Being a bit stubborn, he still kept the message and just applied rot13 to it.
I once wanted to make a small network of bots hosted at frriend's homes. These bots would talk each other by sending some Shakespeare's play excerpts where you would replace the names of the characters by names of various criminals. Just to see how long before I get caught :-)
Until I read that the law in my country explictely forbids "deceiving" the police...
You got my point. That's why I was thinking about being backed by a lawyer 'cos at some point the discussion between "deceiving" and "acting" could be raised :-)
What's funny about this is that multiple people at this bank think that a terrorist group would just freely advertise itself this way. Like some local cell leader names his accounts "Groceries", "Home Repair", "Bombing Supplies"
No, they don't. The banks know perfectly well that this doesn't catch terrorists. But by law they are liable if a terrorist uses their services if they don't have a program to detect terrorists. A key-word match on Iran, bomb, ISIS, etc. is enough in the eyes of the regulator.
No it isn't (at least in the US). Banks have to adhere to Know Your Customer laws, and have to refuse services related to any person or group that's been sanctioned. OFAC has a search tool for such persons[0], but notably says that even using their tool isn't enough to avoid liability. Just saying "we looked for 'bomb supplies' in the memo" isn't going to cut it.
You might see dumb things because banks will do anything they can think of to ensure they comply, and enough in the eyes of the regulator is that they don't allow banned transactions.
Yes, you're meant to do KYC checks, but also be on the look out for things that your non-sanctioned customers might be doing (post KYC checks) that involves interacting with Sanctioned entities.
Hence lots of pattern matching on names of sanctioned countries/organisations/people.
I chuckled. And I know you have a point. I just immediately translated the story to US and this person would have a hard time keeping that account ( or any if he continued ).
Still, actual terror group would do it the same way intelligence agencies call their division 'room 10' as a code for something else. As a species, we certainly are a little weird.
> but a visit to a bank office was enough to get the account unblocked.
What would have happened if your acquaintance was from Middle-East or Middle-East looking? Probably the story would not have ended so happily or at least not so fast.
Fun fact: one of the biggest banks in France has a branche on “Avenue de Cuba” in some city in South America (maybe Buenos Aires but I can’t quite remember because it was about 10 years ago I found this out). They get bank transfers to and from that branch blocked from time to time for “sanctions busting” because people just string match on the name “Cuba”.
They're scared of the bad press that that one criminal that does announce their payment's purpose and later gets caught will bring "See, it even said in the note field that it's for Iran and they didn't catch it. Bank X is so incompetent"
This is quite interesting, the researchers describe the inhibitor working like a biological mask for your nose. In mice the protection lasted for 8 hours, and human trials are pending approvals.
Compared to, say, steel or aluminum, what is the increased damage? I've read every single documentary news article, read reports from governmental agencies, and I still don't know what's so bad about lithium. Particularly compared to standard extraction of other resources that nobody ever talks about.
Especially oil. Oil and coal and natural gas have horrifying consequences for local environments all the time, and nobody ever talks about that. From fly ash ponds to spills to destroyed drinking water. If there was anything remotely as bad as that, wouldn't any of these articles I have read pointed out the damage? Literally the worst lithium story is political, not environmental, in that indigenous people are not being given enough compensation for their land, or not given enough input.
Cobalt has stories of child labor at artisanal mines, but again that is political, not environmental damage, and the environmental damage is the same as from all the other parts that go into the grid, or a car, and they don't have the horrifying consequences of fossil fuel extraction.
If I'm wrong, and there is something I don't know,I will be forever grateful for a pointer to clear documentation of this environmental damage you speak of. But I have been asking this question for years, and searching for years, and nobody, literally nobody, has pointed me to anything concrete. Just vague assertions at best. Which is not what environmental damage looks like. Environmental damage is specific, horrifying, and all too often swept under the rug as long as its wealthy fossil fuel companies doing it.
We can also cut them to make room for new trees. If we don't burn the C in them to CO2, but use them as raw materials (buildings, alternative to plastics, etc.) there is even more potential for carbon capture in this way.
Of course, the long term solution is to grow as many new trees per year as we emit CO2, so there is an upper limit for our CO2 budget, but this should give use time to convert to carbon neutral energy production and consumption without hampering the the GDP growth too much. In fact, it has been estimated that world GDP can actually grow even during the transition, due to, for example, positive effects of improved environment (health improvements lead to productivity improvements and so on).
From the release notes: "Parchment and vellum are made from animal skin so change material composition and color for spellbooks with those descriptions from paper to leather; eating those books now breaks vegetarian conduct" (emphasis mine)
There is something heartwarming about the attention to detail in some games. NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, ... I wish more games would be made with this mindset. Many modern games seem to overemphasize the "gaming" aspect, and sometimes forget the "playing" with all its joyful intricacies.
Caves of Qud[1] is an amazing continuation of the NetHack/DF tradition in a modern game: incredible depth and attention to detail not only in it's mechanics and rules, but also in it's coherent worldbuilding and dialogue. It's also got a really great interface and cool, ZX Spectrum like graphics. The setting is a lot like Gamma World, or if you don't know what that is, post-apocalyptic Dune but with more pulp sci-fi (and chrome).
Caves of Qud is still in active development, and available on Steam. If you do get it, make sure to go into the menus and enable the experimental UI if you want to see how awesome a Roguelike interface could be if it used graphics.
Also, if you're like me disable Permadeath in the debug menu, the first village you start at is the only non-procedurally-generated village in the game, so if I you don't want to retraverse it over and over, you need savegames.
Play Truekin. They're the best "meta" class; mutants are essentially hardcore mode. Truekins have higher base stats and won't aggro Templar when encountering them. I play with the same Ibul Praetorian build (code "AGOPPOHG11") exclusively, which I think is the easiest base class of the truekin classes. I named it Roland, after the Borderlands char. :3 (Ironically, though, I never use Deploy Turret; it's not that good outside of killholes.)
(As IRL) I only got as far as I have because this build is so inherently great: you start with great gear, a sweet desert rifle, you got blocking and sword skills for when the enemy closes in, and I take a focus on tinkering, which is one the most interesting gameplay aspects and quite powerful if you're smart/lucky (find good schematics and can afford them).
Red Rock and the Rust Wells should be a breeze with it. On other classes, they can be nightmarish.
Also, another tip: there's a convenient shortcut to Red Rock somewhere in Joppa. ;3 (I didn't discover this until embarrassingly recently.)
This is hands down the best way to play CoQ. And it really speaks a lot to the depth of the game that you can play the whole thing hopping from mind-controlled character to mind-controlled character and the gameplay just adapts...
I find Caves of Qud to be an especially good foreground for music. (Or background?) Its character of visuals and storytelling is somehow both strongly stylized and sparse. Serves as blank slate but also stimulates. Music resonates especially well with it I find. Impact of both game and music are multiplied.
Agreed! I was going to mention the music but I know some people hate it so I figured mentioning it wouldn't really strengthen my case (:. Personally I think the very unique, heavily stylized art and music (especially the latter) add so much to the game. Plus, the dialog is actually really embedded in the world.
I find that games that have that amazing intricacy are often passion projects by one developer or a very small team and have been in development for a long time, often decades. Besides NetHack and Dwarf Fortress, I would highly recommend Factorio to anyone with an interest in any kind of engineering and Aurora 4x to anyone who played Stellaris or other space 4x but wants an insane amount of complexity
Love those games too. Rimworld is the latest in my opinion. All the fun of Factorio and Dwarf Fortress plus a fairly good UI and space faring feel. Wasted/played too many hours. Make sure to use mods too. On steam.
Personally, I could never get into rimworld because I didn't know what to do. Never /really/ got into DF either, but despite the awful UI it seemed much more like something that could really suck you in, that was really engrossing and fun to play.
I'm going to mention "Oxygen not included" which I believe is by the same people as "Don't Starve". Power, gas and liquid flow has to be regulated across your entire base and it always eventually gets out of hand a bit like Dwarf Fortress. Either you run out of oxygen or are drowning in CO2 or Natural Gas, or your power sources are consumed before you can harness another one and everything grinds to a halt.
> In Nethack, I’ve polymorphed myself into a cockatrice, layed cockatrice eggs, polymorphed back, picked them up (with gloves on) and used them as hand grenades of petrification.
> And to complete the chain of "the dev team thinks of everything": There's a luck penalty for breaking eggs you laid.
> The number of ways you can solve any specific problem is just ridiculous. I also love that a lot of them are pun based. (i.e., to make a quick escape you could drink a cursed potion of gain level, which will cause you to float up through the ceiling to the previous dungeon level instead of increasing your experience level, or removing cursed levitation boots by floating over a sink - which causes you to sink to the ground).
Nethack was the first large C codebase I ever got familiar with / tinkered with, and honestly I think it did some damage.
I mean it's great for what it is -- an organic codebase that evolved over decades (so there's a lot of performance/memory optimizations that make the code somewhat less clear like a lot of bitwise operations) and targeted a dizzying array of platforms (so there's a million #ifdefs that you have to climb through, many of them nested) and also compilers (so there's a legacy of really short file and function names that decrease clarity as well).
The attention to details is truly inspiring. But as a codebase, it's a mess.
On the other hand, Brogue [0]'s code is very clear and enjoyable to read.
Succubus/incubus seduction might result in loss of levitation which in turn could drop the hero onto a trap that transports him/her elsewhere; seduction was proceeding as if nothing unusual had happened
That's just crazy! Wear ring/boots of levitation over a teleport trap and let the succubus remove them for you. Who does this?! Love it.
Same thing has happened in Sweden. There's a cohort of elderly people who arrived to the country as children during WW2, e.g., from Finland. Many were under 10 when they arrived, and now that they have gotten old, some of them have lost most of their ability to speak Swedish, and are only able to speak in their native language from early childhood.
I have that dream too. It seems that the more years I spend as a developer, the less I am comfortable to taking on technical debt. Maybe it is because there are so rarely opportunities to pay it off - and the interest rate is almost always way higher than anticipated.
Management acts this way because they have no way of evaluating the effects of maintaining code quality. Only developers with significant experience are able to evaluate the long-term impact of each technical decision (and even we are still not very good at that).
<rant target="not you">
And why should management be able to evaluate technical decisions and code quality in the first place? That's our job! The problem is that we have given management the false choice of lower quality + faster shipping vs. higher quality + slower shipping, when in fact we should not have given them any say in the matter. And before we hit me with the but we have to be first to the market and fix it later line, I need to point out that companies don't die because they were not first to the market, they die because their operations and development became so slow and costly that they could not compete anymore.
What we should do as developers is to stop talking about code quality to our managers! When we are asked for an estimate, we give them as accurate estimate as possible with the code quality that we feel is sufficient for long-term maintainability of the system. And we don't negotiate on quality anymore, and especially we don't negotiate on estimates! Only functionality (MVP and all that). Then we don't need to ask for refactoring time, rewrite time, code polish time, stabilization time on our systems (that we hardly ever get anyway), because it is all in there in the original estimate.
Management expects stable productivity, they base their estimates of operational costs and investment costs on the number of people working on the system, not on the age of the codebase (why should an old codebase cost more to work with? they ask). If we give them false hope on the productivity of the team by producing crap fast in the beginning, the whole business case may collapse when we produce the same crap slower and slower and slower later. Management is in no position to evaluate the effects of bad code on the business case, because they don't understand that. We do. The only thing we can do as developers, is to remove the option of low quality code altogether.
And we say that it is so slow to create quality code? And estimation is hard?
We learn it. We can write high quality code as fast as the usual junk we see in most systems. We keep track on our estimates and evaluate how well we did, and improve. But it takes effort. All I can say is that it is our responsibility.
</rant>
On a positive note, the solution to this on a personal level is to find a place to work where technical excellence is built in the development culture (and there are such places), and cultivate that culture especially with the new hires (mentoring, pairing, etc.).
