Update

cheating.md

@@ -14,8 +14,7 @@ The fact that cheating isn't after all such an issue is supported by the hilario
 
 **It's impossible to prevent cheating**, contrary to what capitalists want you to believe. As always a capitalist will want to sell you the idea that anything can be achieved by investing enough money, that if they pay 100 experts on cheating and 100 experts on programming, they will create a miraculous algorithm that will catch any cheater. This is just theatre like any other business, we must realize that some things simply cannot be done. Even if you pay 100 experts on mathematics, you won't be able to solve something that's mathematically impossible -- but for the same amount of money you can convince people that you can. Let's continue with chess -- to prevent cheating, two players would have to be seated naked in an electromagnetically isolated soundproof box with no view outside, only with the chessboard. We know we can't do this, maybe we can come close during world championship, a match between two physically present humans, but not so much in over the board tournaments with hundreds of people around, players and spectators, who can freely walk around, go to the toilet, privacy has to be respected, people can communicate with undetectable visual signals, security and arbiters make errors, they're tired, under stress, lazy and negligent, can be bribed (or you may simply bribe a poor cleaning lady to smuggle you a phone to the toilet) and so on. However that's still nothing compared to online chess -- to think cheating can be prevented there is absolute madness and stupidity. All that can be done is to show exemplary punishments of a few blatant cheaters to create the illusion that cheating is eliminated. Cheating can't be prevented, you can only make people not notice them too much by eliminating those whose cheating is too obvious. There can exist no algorithm that will reliably detect a cheater from play alone (or even from a huge set of games), it's mathematically impossible -- like Daniil Dubov said: "the algorithms only detect idiots" and likewise it can be said that the existence of such algorithms only comforts idiots. A smart cheater won't be caught, only the stupidest that copy paste every single move from the latest stockfish will be spotted and publicly executed to assure the audience that "cheaters will get caught", but the smart ones won't be, those that will use the engine only sometimes, in critical situations, who will combine different engines and their older versions so that the moves will never match an output of any single one. There is no way to tell if a player is simply good because he sees the moves with his brain or because he sees them with an aid of a computer. Not even multi angle cameras all around watching the player would prevented cheating, there are thousands of ways to cheat this (feed false video, feed false audio while listening to advice, buy a miniature earbud, [anal bead](anal_bead.md), use Morse code tapping on the floor, let someone wave you signals through the window from the camera's blind spot, let someone communicate you advice through a single pixel on your screen that will get lost in video compression, ...). Of course the capitalist won't let you see the algorithms or his data, he'll say "trust us, we have a good algorithm and we are reducing cheating to minimum", he'll say the details can't be made public so that cheaters won't exploit the knowledge ([security through obscurity](security_through_obscurity.md)), but the real reason is simply that revealing the details would show their system doesn't really work. As always, they're only selling you an illusion.
 
-Back in the day of early Internet there were practically no anticheating measures in online games and everything worked -- yes, cheaters did appear, but we must realize that it's not like EVERYONE will start to cheat immediately if there are no anticheat mechanisms. If you swim in a pool, you may sometimes drink someone's piss and if you play online games, you may sometimes meet a cheater -- unless you're a mentally unstable pussy, you can take it no problem. The existence of anticheat mechanisms may itself incite cheating even more by the effect of forbidden fruit, it becomes a challenge (and to some even business) to beat the system. If top 100 places in the ladder are all obvious cheaters, will anyone see any more fun joining them? No. If you have the need to compare yourself to others, just form a group of friends who you know don't cheat and compare your score or ratings among each other, ignore the anonymous cheaters.
-
+Back in the day of early Internet there were practically no anticheating measures in online games and everything worked -- yes, cheaters did appear, but we must realize that it's not like EVERYONE will start to cheat immediately if there are no anticheat mechanisms. If you swim in a pool, you may sometimes drink someone's piss and if you play online games, you may sometimes meet a cheater -- unless you're a mentally unstable pussy, you can take it no problem. The existence of anticheat mechanisms may itself incite cheating even more by the effect of forbidden fruit, it becomes a challenge (and to some even business) to beat the system. If top 100 places in the ladder are all obvious cheaters, will anyone see any more fun joining them? No. If you have the need to compare yourself to others, just form a group of friends who you know don't cheat and compare your score or ratings among each other, ignore the anonymous cheaters. "B-but I want a whole multibillion dollar capitalist industry existing around my gayme else I can't enjoy it properly" -- well, then fuck you, you're broken and beyond saving, you are why everything sucks nowadays.
 
 **Anticheating also doesn't make any sense.** Why would you want to ban cheating? Usually you'll get these answers:
 
@@ -31,11 +30,12 @@ WORK IN PROGRESS
 
 Here will be a general advice on how to cheat in online games and similar kinds of [competition](competition.md).
 
-NOTE: obviously a lot of this advice revolves around [competition](competition.md), a concept that's itself unethical, so naturally a lot of the advice given here is likewise not embraced by [LRS](lrs.md), but it's simply how you cheat well in current society. In a good society that accepts cheating things would actually get much better, it would get easier to cheat and would no longer for example require lying, you'd just declare you're cheating and be fine.
+NOTE: obviously a lot of this advice revolves around [competition](competition.md), a concept that's itself mostly unethical, so naturally a lot of the advice given here is likewise not embraced by [LRS](lrs.md), but it's simply how you cheat well in current society. In a good society that accepts cheating things would actually get much better, it would get easier to cheat and would no longer for example require lying, you'd just declare you're cheating and be fine.
 
 - **Actually get somewhat good at the game.** This is step number one, a necessary prerequisite for success -- yes, successful cheating requires some "[work](work.md)", sometimes as much as actually getting legitimately good at the game -- cheating won't help you be lazier, it will just help you achieve seemingly better results. You can't fool anyone if you don't know basics of the game, and to fool experts you must at least be familiar with deeper aspects of the game. You must be able to mimic human play and not only that, you must mimic the best human play, answer questions about advanced concepts if someone interrogates you, demonstrate some skill if you're asked to show you can play or if you simply find yourself in a situation where you must play and can't cheat, like a real life event. If you just use chess engine to play better chess moves than the world champion but keep taking 1 minute to make absolutely obvious moves, or if someone talks to you and finds out you don't even know what "en passant" is or who Bobby Fisher was, you're absolutely busted right there. The most successful cheaters were actually often the BEST people at their game, for example Lance Armstrong, Riolu in Trackmania and so on. Successful cheating is not easy, it must be smart cheating, and smart cheating absolutely requires deep understanding of the game.
 - **Get familiar with how they detect cheating.** Spend a lot of time on researching anti-cheating systems and how people detect cheaters, study how other cheaters got caught and avoid that. For example in chess the time you take to make certain moves is used to detect cheating, so you want to have this covered -- don't blindly copy moves from an engine, rather try to play yourself and then only in a critical situation quickly let engine suggest a move, but still think about why it's good etc. Let the engine only give you a slight push, like a wind in your back -- if you fly a jetplane against a sprinter, someone's probably going to notice. In [speedrunning](speedrun.md) every game has quirks that are used to detect for example splicing (likely the most common form of cheating speedruns) -- for example in Mario 64 they use the fact that Mario blinks regularly, so if the video is edited there will be a discrepancy, you must think about this. Audio is used for this too, make sure regular patterns in the background noise don't give away that you cut the video, check the audio spectrogram if it doesn't show the cuts etc.
 - **Don't cheat too much, you increase the chance of providing proof of you cheating and/or making a mistake.** It's easy to cheat more and more once you see it's working, it becomes a very comfortable habit AND it also comes with you becoming more relaxed, careless and prone to making a mistake. But remember: this is what will most likely get you caught and this is what anti-cheaters also rely on -- they may already be suspecting you but waiting for more evidence, you don't want to provide it. Perfect cheat detection doesn't exist -- they like to pretend they have bulletproof methods but it's a facade, they in fact rely on you fucking up, you have to cooperate a bit to get caught -- don't do it. Serial killers usually get caught because they don't stop, they keep doing it over and over until they make one small mistake, or they simply give the investigators so much data that statistics eventually extracts proof and predictions from it: each new murder simply gives a new data point to the detectives that reveals a little bit more about your location, habits, modus operandi etc. Be paranoid: if no one is suspecting you, it may be the case they are secretly suspecting you and want you to think you're safe, they may be closely watching you, so if you can, stop cheating for a very long time, then it's more likely they stopped watching you due to spending too many resources for long time without any results. Also know that each new cheating attempt is also a new risk: more attempts equals greater overall probability of failure; even if there is just 1 in 100 chance of you getting caught, cheating 100 times is suddenly pretty dangerous. So only cheat very, very sparingly -- save it for when it matters. For example in a chess tournament play yourself against opponents you know you can beat alone and against the strong opponents only cheat in the key, decisive moment; then outside tournaments, when losing doesn't matter as much, try again to play yourself as much as possible.
+- **Keep the disparity between your actual skill and cheated skill as low as possible** (this is related to "get good at the game" and "don't cheat too much") -- this makes it much harder to detect, prove and so minimizes the chance of you getting busted. Say that given some amount of invested energy you could make it to top 300 in the world, which may be fine but not good enough for you, you aim for top 100 -- then split the energy, invest part of it to legitimately getting to top 500, then spend the rest on boosting it with cheating to top 100; now if someone sees you legit playing, it's not immediately clear you're not actually on that level, they may think you're overrated, you've been lucky, that's you're just rusty at the moment, but no one can be sure you're cheating.
 - **Be good with technology, know your shit.** If you're a [Windows](windows.md) used who tries to cheat by googling  "minecraft cheating programs free download", you probably don't know shit about technology, you have to actually learn something. Many get caught for stupid shit like leaving metadata in their video that says the video is edited, or they have no clue that cheating software leaves [watermarks](watermark.md) in videos (this actually caught many geometry dash cheaters). Ideally you want to [program](programming.md) YOUR OWN tools, develop your own methods of modifying the game etc.
 - **Don't overcomplicate it, [keep it simple](kiss.md).** Remember that less is more, a complex way of cheating is probably more likely to fail due to just one part failing.
 - **Practice**, a cheater is like illusionist, he comes up with a trick but then also has to perfect its execution, he must NEVER fail it in public, else he gives it away. However practice in a way that doesn't pose risk, i.e. don't practice online against other people; instead practice offline, record yourself and see if you look convincing, if there is something suspicious etc. There may be a good way to e.g. fake blindfold plays by hiding a secondary monitor somewhere while wearing fake blindfold, however it's extremely hard to do many things at once so that you don't fuck anything up, some got caught like this because they were blatantly staring in the direction of the monitor and then sitting in very weird positions to see through the blindfold; one shitty [female](woman.md) streamer actually even fucked up by responding to Twitch chat she was reading on her hidden monitor when she was supposed to no longer see the monitor. You think it's stupid -- it is -- but under pressure it's extremely hard to do many things simultaneously correctly, you absolutely must train to avoid this kind of fuckup.