🔥🐦‍🔥FireSourcery🐦‍🔥🔥

Elon Musk is a trillionaire but it’s def the people on SNAP ruining your life

Well, that escalated quickly. There’s been a wave of claims by cheaters about Vanguard “bricking” their PCs, so let’s clear that up: Vanguard does not damage hardware or disable your devices. The photo we posted is a picture of cheat hardware devices that are sold explicitly for cheating in VALORANT (not normal PCs or PC components). Through our latest updates, Vanguard now makes those devices worthless for VAL, but does not in any way brick PCs or PC components or PC software. Our latest update enforces standard platform security features, like the Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU), on accounts identified as using Direct Memory Access (DMA) cheating devices. These protections are already part of modern systems and when enabled, they block DMA cheat devices (such as those shown in the photo) from accessing memory in downstream applications, like our games. If a cheat setup continues attempting to cheat after those protections are enabled, the system may generate hardware faults or instability. This is expected behavior under IOMMU when attempts are made to read protected memory. Disabling IOMMU allows the cheat device to function again, but IOMMU will still be required to play our games. This means the cheat device won’t work with our games, but your PC isn’t “bricked.” We would not, and cannot, impact your PC’s functionality in any other fashion. This functionality only applies to systems attempting to use DMA cheat devices, and players who are not using DMA-based cheat setups are not affected. We’ll keep investing in anti-cheat to protect competitive integrity, and we’ll keep being as transparent as possible about how those systems work.

Riot Games. No other company has a cooler group of people. If I can pick a single company to work for, I would pick Riot Games 10/10 times. I genuinely loved the environment and the work being done. Even now, my opinion of this is unchanged. I was at Riot Games for 3 years. In these 3 years, my official role was on the Game Analysis Team. This was the only team at Riot where there is an elo requirement, since the work has a lot to do with being a high level player and giving valuable feedback to teams such as the champion designers, the balance team, etc. I loved the work. I loved playtesting. I loved being an analyst. In a lot of ways, it taught me a lot on how to think deeper on problems. If we did X, what would happen to Y and Z. On top of my work as an analyst, I built things. Most of which landed extremely well. Through it all, I learned exactly what tooling is needed at the enterprise level. Where the gaps are. The best ways to cut down tedious manual labor. Where it can benefit from broader scale efforts. As a person, I am very ‘strong willed’. When something should be done a certain way, whether that has to do with design or tooling or broader changes in the company, I will say it, regardless of who I might piss off. This is obviously not how it works in a corporate environment. Regardless of how much a company claims to be ‘open to ideas from everyone’, raising your ideas in cases when people higher than you on the ladder disagree with you is obviously terrible for your personal career growth. I have 2 examples here that I can share, since it’s already shipped and not under NDA anymore. One was where I first joined the company, and was put onto the Skarner Rework pod. I straight up said the reworked kit was awful, and that we should probably put more additional work into the kit design. No one listened since the design was “locked” already. The new Skarner shipped a couple months later. We all know how that one landed. The second was Mel. It was early on in its development cycle. I had many pieces of feedback written around how problematic the W is. An hour-long meeting with the designer in charge of her back then where I said “I don’t see a version of this spell shape where it’s not going to be a huge problem for us later on in terms of balance.” Did it matter? Nope. All it got was a few reminders about how “you shouldn’t push so strongly against things already decided by leadership.” We all know how Mel landed. I sucked at playing the corporate politics game. I will admit this. I probably pissed off a good number of people in my years at Riot. No one higher than you on the ladder likes being told they’re wrong by someone lower, and the insult is only multiplied by the fact that it came from a young woman. I had big ideas. Great ideas. Incredibly innovative Ideas that could have made Riot the absolute leader in the entire video game industry and 100x-ed profits. I wish I could say I’m kidding. And no, it wasn’t cutting headcount and replacing Rioters with AI. Ideas that were pure wins for the company. So I cold dm-ed Marc Merill, a man whom I highly highly respect. Out of everyone in the company, he was the person I looked up to the most. He took my ideas seriously. Set me up in chats with other people who only took me seriously since Marc set them up. I began finding myself in important conversations where everyone else in the convos were 10 levels higher than me on the corporate ladder. They listened, since I truly brought an insane amount of insights into each of these. And not to throw shade, but I don’t believe Riot at the time had anyone remotely close to my level in terms of Applied AI expertise. Riot had fallen prey to the same mistake a lot of companies make, which is primarily hiring ML guys for AI when what they actually need is Applied AI guys. I began drafting up and prototyping larger scale projects. One of them was a revamped system to how toxicity is addressed across all of Riot’s games (let’s be real here, current system lowkey sucks. It punishes those who don’t deserve it, and let’s slip the people who do. player support is rarely, if ever, helpful). The other was a Riot core knowledge base. A knowledge base that will allow Riot to build an infinite number of useful tooling on top of, such as automation that streamlines both player feedback and internal feedback directly to the Rioters we’d want eyes on for any specific issue. Tooling that can cut millions in fees currently paid out to external vendors that does half the job at 10x the price. These weren’t the ideas that I mentioned can 100x profits btw. The docs and pitch deck where the ideas are, all the execs have already read on repeat. Thanks to Google Docs history tracking, I quite literally have proof that Dylan (the CEO) has opened my strategy docs on 10+ unique days. Everything was going well, or so I thought. The few days before I was fired, I had even flown down to LA, to chat w/ Brandon Beck and a couple other leaders. Brandon had canceled, to which I didn’t think much of at the time. The talks were all around the specific projects that I was solo driving, and where exactly on the Riot’s corporate ladder do I fit into. First thing Tuesday morning, I was called into a meeting with my direct manager. He told me that I was fired, then left me alone in the meeting with the HR rep that joined us. Shock. All I felt was shock. Throughout everything, I never considered myself being fired even remotely within the realms of the possibilities. They gave me some BS reason (my pitchdeck), and informed me that I had some infosec violation? Come on now, this was NOT the reason. My immediate thought was that I pissed someone off. They’re taking the opportunity to get rid of me. Maybe I can message Marc somehow? They already cut my Slack access, but maybe if I can get a message to him that this was happening. He’s the one who’s been encouraging me to speak my mind and opening doors for me after all, there’s no shot he knew about this and would let it happen. “Marc knew about this.” That’s when it hit me. The years of effort, of going far and beyond what was required of me. The last month where I averaged 16 hours per day. Countless all nighters to get everything done and shipped. It didn’t mean anything to the company. Nothing at all. It fucking hurt. As the HR rep Malasavanh Thavonesouk can verify, I had kept my cool up until that line. Then I started bawling at the sheer betrayal of it all. In my grief, I almost signed the separation agreement on the spot during the meeting. The one that would have given me $15k in return for my silence. Thank god I didn’t, or I’d probably be sued for this post that I’m writing now. I don’t think a single person there expected me to have the balls to go public with it all LOL, who’d be crazy enough to blacklist themselves after all? I had no closure. My Slack access was cut the second the meeting started. No emails from them clarifying anything regarding my termination other than how I can’t sue them for wrongful termination, they are an ‘at will employer’, and reiterating how I cannot break NDA for anything I worked on during my time at the company. I’m ngl, this whole thing has me fucked up still.