This is really interesting but I wish LLMs wrote text that was a bit easier to understand.
> It requests the lethal puzzle exactly when all three conditions hold: 28 cases, including two ads instead of three, one ad closed early, a score 1 point short, and an ad worth just under 3.5×.
> Then we ran it live, in a test copy of the iPhone app running in Apple’s simulator, and read the rule’s inputs while we played. It had three good rewarded ads on record. The score was past the line. A rewarded ad from Google AdMob was loaded and ready. The rule priced it at 72.39, against 37.41 for the last one, which is 1.94 times. It needs 3.5. So on iPhone the rule is live, reading real ad prices, and waiting for an ad worth 3.5 times your last one.
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.
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.
I understood that much from the rest of the article, but I don't understand specifically the part I quoted. There is a lot of detail in there that doesn't seem to have made it into your translation.
I think it is so sad that humanity puts so much effort into things like this.
I thought by the 2020s we would have fusion power, and be busy exploring and colonizing space.
Instead, we got greedy corporations with moral-free executives (remember the "don't be evil" declarations? good times, huh) and incredible amounts of developer effort being poured into useless garbage.
The fact that impossible puzzles are generated to bait rewarded-ad views is something I've always suspected in mobile games, but I dismissed it as a skill issue on my end.
> Apple does let apps download JavaScript updates like this, which is how tools like Expo Updates work, as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is. Whether changing your pieces based on ad prices fits that is up to Apple.
But there is no way for Apple to verify "as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is" right?
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.
I don't know precisely what to call it, but there is something about AI's word choice and phrasing that really stands out to me.
It's like it chooses "simple" words, but uses them in unclear or fuzzy or slightly abnormal ways that make the overall meaning more difficult to parse. On its own, each instance is defensible, but the aggregate result when it happens many times over is very tiring to read. It reminds me of XKCD's "Up Goer Five": https://xkcd.com/1133/
Like this:
> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.
It reads as though it started with a straightforward idea, and then was forced to express it with words of only one syllable.
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.
I wonder how such games can bring in millions per month.
Perhaps when your ads outperform the competition due to these devious optimizations, you can afford a higher bid for paid acquisition, keeping users coming.
I only forced myself to read through this slop prose because I found the topic interesting, but I'd much rather be reading something that doesn't repeat itself constantly and sounds human.
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).
This is really interesting but I wish LLMs wrote text that was a bit easier to understand.
> It requests the lethal puzzle exactly when all three conditions hold: 28 cases, including two ads instead of three, one ad closed early, a score 1 point short, and an ad worth just under 3.5×.
> Then we ran it live, in a test copy of the iPhone app running in Apple’s simulator, and read the rule’s inputs while we played. It had three good rewarded ads on record. The score was past the line. A rewarded ad from Google AdMob was loaded and ready. The rule priced it at 72.39, against 37.41 for the last one, which is 1.94 times. It needs 3.5. So on iPhone the rule is live, reading real ad prices, and waiting for an ad worth 3.5 times your last one.
What on earth is this supposed to mean?
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.
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.
You’re not supposed to read, you’re supposed to have your browser produce an AI summary of it lol.
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.
I understood that much from the rest of the article, but I don't understand specifically the part I quoted. There is a lot of detail in there that doesn't seem to have made it into your translation.
I think it is so sad that humanity puts so much effort into things like this.
I thought by the 2020s we would have fusion power, and be busy exploring and colonizing space.
Instead, we got greedy corporations with moral-free executives (remember the "don't be evil" declarations? good times, huh) and incredible amounts of developer effort being poured into useless garbage.
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.
The fact that impossible puzzles are generated to bait rewarded-ad views is something I've always suspected in mobile games, but I dismissed it as a skill issue on my end.
> Apple does let apps download JavaScript updates like this, which is how tools like Expo Updates work, as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is. Whether changing your pieces based on ad prices fits that is up to Apple.
But there is no way for Apple to verify "as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is" right?
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.
I play block blast classic mode with adguard and don't see any ads.
The original video on Instagram is worth a watch: https://www.instagram.com/p/DecfvksvHiW/
> The lethal puzzle is a generator, and any rule can ask for it.
Ashamed of myself for getting halfway through the article before realising it was AI written.
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 wouldn't be able to tell. No load bearing or is not x, it's y.
I actually don't mind if it's good enough, informative and not overly long.
Haven't really read anything super well written (in terms of language and form) lately, other than a really fun hn comment summarizing Trump's War.
But I just haven't read that much lately.
I've read too much Claude slop. It's very easy to spot the sentence construction.
The tell here is the "One ..., then ... <negative>". This is "not X, it's Y" with the clauses reordered.
For some reason the current crop of LLMs are really insistent on generating contrast between two things in every statement.
The problem is that the "it's not X it's Y" construction is very useful, and shows up a lot in human-written text.
>The tell here
Is this AI written? It has "this is the smoking gun" vibes, just rewritten.
I don't know precisely what to call it, but there is something about AI's word choice and phrasing that really stands out to me.
It's like it chooses "simple" words, but uses them in unclear or fuzzy or slightly abnormal ways that make the overall meaning more difficult to parse. On its own, each instance is defensible, but the aggregate result when it happens many times over is very tiring to read. It reminds me of XKCD's "Up Goer Five": https://xkcd.com/1133/
Like this:
> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.
It reads as though it started with a straightforward idea, and then was forced to express it with words of only one syllable.
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.
While lots of parts of the article isn’t written well, the subject and what is uncovered is very interesting.
That is why it is posted.
I think the bar should be higher. Incomprehensible is not justified by an interesting topic.
That's seriously impressive.
I wonder how such games can bring in millions per month.
Perhaps when your ads outperform the competition due to these devious optimizations, you can afford a higher bid for paid acquisition, keeping users coming.
I only forced myself to read through this slop prose because I found the topic interesting, but I'd much rather be reading something that doesn't repeat itself constantly and sounds human.
Holy shit that is evil.
Why is vibration a parameter?
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).
I’m a bit unsure why they want to change gameplay based on the value of the ad.
It’s not like I get sucked into the game and decides to watch more expensive ads (which is the mechanic of golden berries or whatever)
As far as I understand the rule, high value players are more likely to die - but why?
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.
I guess there’s just a lot I don’t know about this ad market. Is the high value ad only available to show for a limited time?
Very likely yes. Consider an ad for a political candidate: before a particular date it is worth a lot, after that date it is worthless.