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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

eieio.games

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Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#151

Post by eythian »

astrobe_ wrote: post #143

It reminds me the Contact movie [1]: Arroway [the protagonist] discovers the signal contains over 63,000 pages of encoded data. Hadden meets with Arroway and provides her with the means to decode the pages. The decoded data reveals schematics for a Machine that may be a form of transportation for a single individual. Actually, IIRC there's a subplot in which an autistic child draws pages over pages of 0 and 1 while w…

Wasn't that from the X-Files? Or maybe I'm misremembering. I think I'm thinking of this: https://x-files.fandom.com/wiki/Conduit but I also remember it being seen from a balcony, so maybe I'm conflating two things I've seen together.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#153

Post by pavel_lishin »

Once back in the day, when I used to admin a vBulletin forum, we installed an arcade system. It was a fun way to play games, and earn pointless currency ("XMB Bucks") to lord over each other like it mattered.

But a few months after that, I realized that the arcade had a hidden sub-forum feature, that was being very actively used by a bunch of people. They managed to bypass the registration screen on vBulletin, and somehow register directly for this hidden arcade feature. They'd been chattin' it up, like a colony of rats living under our floorboards.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#154

Post by spieswl »

eieio wrote: post #5

author here :) this is my favorite story from running the site, and possibly the best story I've ever been a part of. I'm not a big crier but I have cried so many times thinking and trying to write about it over the past 2 months. And of course, the process of discovery (and going from panic to excitement) was pretty crazy too. One of my favorite things about this is that it validated one of the core beliefs I have w…

Your story brought a huge smile to my face. Thank you for sharing, those kids are alright.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#155

Post by c-oreills »

adityapurwa wrote: post #97
c-oreills wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. This is a lovely phrase. Is it an idiom or your own creation?

Thank you. I wrote it as I was inspired by the Silverwash from Witch Hat Atelier, a disease that causes the eye to see grayscale. Its also because silver is a symbol of money, and as an adult; the responsibility to provide for our family, pay here and there, taxes, tuitions, mortgage, etc - can make life feels bleak.

Ah, nice. I initially interpreted silver as age (grey hair) but that made me intrigued: age can make you jaded but can also give perspective to appreciate the good.

It works on different levels, I guess. =)

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#156

Post by zelphirkalt »

adityapurwa wrote: post #97
c-oreills wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. This is a lovely phrase. Is it an idiom or your own creation?

Thank you. I wrote it as I was inspired by the Silverwash from Witch Hat Atelier, a disease that causes the eye to see grayscale. Its also because silver is a symbol of money, and as an adult; the responsibility to provide for our family, pay here and there, taxes, tuitions, mortgage, etc - can make life feels bleak.

I interpreted it to mean "many shiny new tools" so that any project just feels like "nothing special" any longer, queueing up with all the other shiny tools.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#157

Post by atum47 »

adityapurwa wrote: post #29

I don’t know. Reading this made me tear up a bit. I learned software engineering when I was in junior high school. I learned it because I sucked at math, and I want to write programs that solve my homework. Then I continue writing LAN chat, HTTP server, Anti Virus, and a lot more things just because it was fun to do. It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing. Now that I’m working, with the endl…

From time to time I write code just for the heck of it. That endless debate on how you could've done this better with x instead of y don't happen in a personal project. Unless you're a jerk to yourself (like I sometimes am)

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#158

Post by BubbleRings »

eythian wrote: post #151
astrobe_ wrote: post #143

It reminds me the Contact movie [1]: Arroway [the protagonist] discovers the signal contains over 63,000 pages of encoded data. Hadden meets with Arroway and provides her with the means to decode the pages. The decoded data reveals schematics for a Machine that may be a form of transportation for a single individual. Actually, IIRC there's a subplot in which an autistic child draws pages over pages of 0 and 1 while w…

Wasn't that from the X-Files? Or maybe I'm misremembering. I think I'm thinking of this: https://x-files.fandom.com/wiki/Conduit but I also remember it being seen from a balcony, so maybe I'm conflating two things I've seen together.

Yeah, you are right, the “TV noise” sub plot is not part of Contact.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#159

Post by hunter2_ »

kelnos wrote: post #108
hunter2_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good if there's something to buy, but in my scenario it's free. The resort's goal isn't to charge for this parking, it's to ensure that the number of vehicles on the roads leading to their parking lot doesn't exceed the number of parking spaces. So if they have N parking spaces, they allow N reservations to be made, but people are cautiously greedy and make a reservation (when the opportunity begins on the pri…

> What if the person on the wait list doesn't see that they've won at the last minute, do they get a penalty for not having proactively removed themselves from the wait list upon deciding to ignore email the rest of the week? No, when you get the "you won a spot" email, you have to click to confirm. Probably it should be set up to give you 12-24 hours to do so, and if you don't, it draws a new person and sends them a…

The deadline to cancel without penalty is 9am day-of. In reality people will cancel at all different times, but for this exercise of designing out enough of the stampede conditions, let's say the first cancellation occurs at 8:55am day-of. So now it sends the "you won" email -- maybe the recipient even knew they were at the top of the waitlist so they can anticipate this. They've only got 5 minutes of cancellation window themselves! There is no way of giving another 12-24 hours RSVP time.

Now here's where it gets interesting: this means a rational no-bot human ought to ignore the whole system until 9am day-of, at which point the greedy "just in case" reservations have all been canceled, so all reservations are real people, and the ridiculousness of the system has led enough people to find alternative transportation that plenty of spots are available for easy taking, right? If no-show penalties are enforced properly.

I was out there in early March and this consumed me for a few weeks leading up to it, but it was fun.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#160

Post by Sophira »

memorabilia wrote: post #136
Sophira wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the people who found the original Discord server back when the site was live, I can attest that this is absolutely true.

You were one of the elites! How did you find the link? Please share... Really interested to find out.

In my case, I kind of worked backwards from the way eieio found it. I was at the very bottom of the million checkboxes when I noticed there was a repeating pattern. And if you zoomed out enough, and sized your window large enough, it looked like this: https://matrix.theblob.org/omcb-repeating-pattern.png

It was obviously a bot, but it definitely wasn't random. It was a pattern that repeated every 208 checkboxes. At first I thought it was a barcode, but it wouldn't scan even when I turned it into a form that should scan. Then, I figured it could potentially be a binary code, so I tried treating the repeating pattern as binary, with the checked boxes as 1s and the unchecked boxes as 0s. That got me the URL that eieio talks about in the original article.

Once I was there, I discovered from the other members that I had taken a more arduous route than I needed to; it turns out that the site's API was such that it sent its initial state as a base64-encoded version of the full binary state of the board. Decoding the base64 and looking at the end of the data would also have gotten you the same URL, and as such many of the people in the server were bot developers who had done exactly that because they wanted to reverse-engineer it.

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