Reading AI dialects feels similar (though somewhat easier) to reading Middle English text; the words individually make sense, but you’re much more aware of the communication medium and you have to concentrate a bit to pull out the meaning.

My main thought while reading was “carefully crafting efficient, clean, and effective breakdowns is hard. I really appreciate that time and effort more now than I did before.”

You're doing really good. You're beating your high score. You've shown that you will watch ads because it gives you "rewards". Watching an ad after you failed ? You get to go back in the past and fix your mistakes. The next available ad is marked as particularly valuable by their ad network, paying them close to 4 times as much. They know you'd do anything to keep playing, even watching more ads.

It's the perfect time to put out a puzzle that you will almost instantly fail.

The page looked LLM made so I bothered to read I looked at the headings. Every one looked like nonsensical slop.

If they can't be bothered to write, I can't be bothered to read.

We’re coming up on the _second_ generation of the best and brightest programmer minds being wasted on getting ad clicks.

If you're playing an ad supported game, you kind of know the deal already. It still is sad of course, but it is what it is.

I heard that with the latest policy update last week, Apple rolled out some heuristics that aim to detect feature flags that bypass App Review.

Supposedly this can also fire for legitimate A/B tests or other debug flags that aren't stripped from the Release build.

I suspect these games will be fine as long as they have an Account manager and pay Apple millions in commissions or for paid acquisition.

Is it anywhere else besides Instagram?

Same. The underlying story is interesting and horrifying (but also unsurprising), but the LLM write-up sucks all the air out of it.

I want to hear about the human author's motivations for doing this, the hard parts of doing the deobfuscation, their emotions when finding out what it did, etc. This is none of that.

Hah, you can literally tell from the subheader.

> Rules downloaded from their server decide your pieces, your score and your ads. One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.

I started reading on the assumption it was posted here because it was interesting, but this paragraph cinched it:

> 1. You finished your last three rewarded ads. Every time a rewarded ad starts, the rule pushes false onto a list and keeps the latest three (lines 174–183). If the ad SDK reports that the reward was earned, it flips that entry to true (191–199). The check needs all three to be exactly true:

Pointlessly spun out prose. Pointless headers everywhere. Pointless lists. Yes, we understand what a list of booleans is, and that the game looks for a state where the last three are true. No need to spell it out like that.

Why do people post crap like this? Why do people post it to Hacker News? There is some merit to dissecting an attention sink ad-driven game, but this article just makes me feel like my attempt to grasp the meaning and writer's views fails every time — like I'm trying to grasp stalks of grain in a field, but my hand keeps passing through them as if they were holograms.

I would very much like to read people's thoughts with a forbearance for awkward prose, bad spelling, or suboptimal outlining, instead of that I get rewarded by text where the human who prompted it is suddenly absent.

Fuck this new AI world.

If metrics have found any statistical difference among people with vibration activated or not, then there's a value in knowing. The game refuses to vibrate on my phone (no idea why; Duolingo vibrates fine) so I can't say what they do with it or not, perhaps they have "soothing" type vibrations my phone doesn't support, that have an impact on your emotional reactions (statistically speaking).

They want to ensure you watch it.

If you tend to watch ads and have a high score then when killed it's likely you will watch the ad to revive.