throw_a_say
If you take it to the extreme, a youtube video being posted and everyone having to wait 5 minutes to comment, there is enough people that will see it at 4.30 to have a visceral reaction and post inflammatory comments. You can extend that down to each level of comments.
Presumably you are talking about HN discussions but what your are saying sounds extremely general
A sibling comment mentions that tech is not immune to the divisiveness that is happening to at the moment, and I think that's right.
I also think that tech, or just humans in general, are not immune to being self-interested. Once you have a 100k+ salary and potential for more in the future in the USA, it's not in your interest to support social unrest or anything that upsets the status quo. I imagine this does subside a bit once you get real security in your life ( some significant property, savings, strong network, etc ) but there is a large gap between being secure enough to be comfortable in your own life and being comfortable enough that your own interests are secondary.
This _definitely_ does not apply to all people and all situations, but I think it is an effect, it's typically framed as "as you get older you get more right-wing" but I don't think it's anything related to age particularly and more to do with where you are on the ladder.
Who the fk cares if people cheat in online games? Funnily enough, a hell of a lot of people, but they are generally not talking about online video games, instead they are talking about protocols like DNS, HTTPS, amplication DoS attacks, cryptocurrencies, elections, any number of other things, and it turns out these really hard to impossible to solve, and they definitely don't lend themselves to real time multiplayer games easily.
For games it much easier, you just let people host their own servers, you let them own the compute, you let them manage and mod the servers, you let them build communities of people they want to play with. See Minecraft. Pretty sure that made a bit of money without worrying about losing revenue to some inventive kids who priate/mod/whatever the game. -_oo_-
And yes its a classic arms race, in the simple example I can connect my bot to the display output and to input as keyboard and mouse / gamepad and you could probably pretty easily get an aimbot that's superhuman.
The solution is not a technical one, just like DRM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
First off, undocumented binaries, and inspecting kernel drivers from user-space is absolutely no barrier to RE/Cracking/Cheating on any platform. I'm pretty sure 50%+ of the people on this site can put arbitrary hooks on the windows kernel, given some motivation, and importantly, when they actually control the hardware they own.
From what I know (not an expert) the state of the art in DRM for games is Denuvo which uses undocumented idiosyncratic CPU instructions, that the activation server has a database of and sprinkles some magic patch to activate the game for that CPU, ie, nothing to do with OS. Anything else AAA is cracked pretty much immediately.
Whatever about the technical details, we can do risk analysis on a lot of things. We can do risk analysis on whether a kid is likely to commit serious violence to other people later in life and lock them up, or otherwise exclude them from society in anticipation of that, but we don't.
Some things are important, some things are not. Personally I rate open computing hardware a lot higher than some game company's 2% profit, and imo any company employing the tactics described in the GP should be rightly called out on it, and they should just make better solutions to the (very small) problem of people cheating in online games.
It's pretty clear that Elon was from a wealthy*N background so the details are kind of irrelevant. Who bought the plain ticket?
There is also security, it's easier to take risks with strong familial support and fallback. Not saying this is a bad thing at all, it just is what it is.