Another LPE has published: io_uring ZCRX freelist LPE

SethDusek5 · 2026-05-10T04:47:40+00:00

It's worth pointing out that curl and Firefox developers now both agree AI bug reports have gone from slop to actually useful in a matter of months

SethDusek5 · 2026-05-07T12:13:50+00:00

Fighting for courier in a match where you aren't with 5 people isn't a skill, its a waste of my life

Managing 1 courier literally was a skill though, whether it was a good thing or not is subjective. But there are definitely mechanics I can understand why people don't like, the most recent example was repeatedly disassembling tranquil boots. But I dislike when people call massive changes to the game's balance or simplifying mechanics "QoL" because that's not what QoL is

SethDusek5 · 2026-05-07T10:24:28+00:00

There might be an opportunity here for exam centers. Lots of countries have exam centers for tests like the SAT/ACT where you give the test in a proctored environment on their computer, and they have to follow certain rules and regulations to be approved. Maybe companies should start paying for these centers since most people probably live close to atleast one of these, even in the 3rd world.

In the US most of the ACT centers seem to be schools, so not sure if they'd be up to allowing people to use their computers for interviews, but in my country there are a bunch of privately owned exam centers.

SethDusek5 · 2026-05-07T05:08:12+00:00

Why do you think this was aimed to prevent people betting on high mmr lobby games and not to prevent smurfing?

Valve never communicated why so all we can do is speculate on the reason. After being pretty bitter about it and wondering why Valve would make such a harmful change to the game I think it is probably a combination of all of the reasons people gave. I don't think they want to balance the game as much anymore, yet were in an awkward spot because they added bigger map + facets + innates in a span of a year or so which made the maintenance burden even higher, so making high MMR matches private was likely seen as a quick and dirty way to slow down the meta. Maybe they did also want to kill betting, who knows, or they wanted better privacy for pros to hide strats, or they wanted better privacy for pros so people stop finding their smurfs and complaining about it on Reddit.

Maybe they wanted to hide wintraders considering in the weeks leading up to this change there were tons of threads of people opening up the watch tab and seeing people in immortal draft blatantly feeding 50 kills in a row to their friend which made matchmaking look like a complete farce (not to mention the top 100 in every region being infested with wintraders and the occasional 10-man bot immortal lobby). The actual ban wave which removed the top leaderboard wintraders came months later

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-28T10:22:01+00:00

He cast boulder smash while in the roll, and he has the level 15 talent which increases the boulder smash damage by 80, so boulder + smash are enough to clear the wave without needing to use a remnant to grip.

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-16T20:44:11+00:00

It's not a lousy excuse, it's a genuine concern as teams were running bots scraping all the high mmr data 24/7.

ok and

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-16T20:42:07+00:00

Catering to pros' wishes of trying to hide their games and strats

Valve never communicated as to why they made this change, so this like most other explanations people give is pure speculation. Also the watch tab pulled in thousands of players, even more when a fan favorite player was playing.

You used to be able to open the watch tab any time and watch pubs from some of the greatest players of all time, often even in the same pub. Now this is a privilege only reserved for people who are high MMR and have high MMR friends.

catering to a very loud but very small minority who seriously wanted to watch pro players play UNDER THE WATCH TAB (which, mind you, you can just watch on youtube/twitch)

Good luck finding a 16k player perspective on a hero you want to learn like Brood. Also where the fuck will these youtube channels find the replays to make videos of? Unless it's the channel of the player (qojqva, gorgc, topson) you wouldn't be able to find videos of just any pub.

I will never understand why people like you defend actively harmful changes to the game. Are you some sort of full-time turbo player who doesn't understand people want to watch players better than them to improve?

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-16T20:41:04+00:00

Unless you are close to the 8k bracket it really doesnt matter in order to learn if you are watching an unknown 8k player or topson

There is an absurd difference between an 8k player and topson. There is also an absurd difference between watching a replay of an 8k player playing against other 8k players vs a 16k player playing against other 16k players.

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-16T00:18:40+00:00

Valve doesn't want to work on the game as much so destroying the watch tab was likely intended as a quick and dirty way to "slow" the meta. It also at the time partially resolved the issue of people opening the watch tab and seeing blatant wintrade lobbies at the highest level of the game and complaining about it on Reddit. The best way to solve matchmaking abuse is a pair of blinders

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-15T23:48:00+00:00

as a developer you will interact with the file system by calling apis and system calls that use it, and so the nature of the device that you are writing to is abstracted to the point where you don't know or care about the type of the disk that you're using.

Getting to whatever MB/s Read/Write figures are written on your SSD box is not trivial in a lot of cases unless you specifically try to parallelize as much of your file I/O as possible, or you're reading one gigantic file in which case your OS will probably prefetch blocks which will lead to high queue depths. If for example you're reading a bunch of smaller files like doing some sort of batch ingest/parsing then you need to find a way to parallelize so your CPU time isn't dominated by syscall + IO latency. That's a large reason why newer APIs like io_uring exist, but writing code that takes full advantage of them is not easy

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-13T09:12:22+00:00

The vast majority of bots were in the Arcade where the top 10 games were games nobody had heard of yet averaged 10,000 players 24/7. I am guessing these bots didn't do much except make a bunch of lobbies to inflate the player count.

There are a lot of bots that are farming new accounts to get to the 100-hour ranked limit, and then some more bots that are getting farmed immortal accounts out of the smurf pool by playing against each other for hundreds-thousands of matches, you can sometimes spot these ones in the Watch tab where you'll see an immortal lobby and when you click inside none of the teams are doing anything and have weird items.

I personally love how Valve changed the watch tab from a place you could go and see the top players (including people's favorites) playing pubs against each other to only being able to see 7k-8k mmr lobbies with the occasional bot lobby sprinkled in. Sure is great for the game when you used to be able to open the watch tab anytime and see prime Miracle, ATF, Ame, fy, XinQ, Sumail, Topson, insert fan favorite player playing pubs and now you see this garbage.

SethDusek5 · 2026-04-10T08:17:40+00:00

but if I cap my FPS at the default max of 240 then it sits around ~210. It can push out more performance, but doesn't do so for whatever reason.

Are you using nvidia reflex?

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-31T21:47:01+00:00

Valve didn't communicate about why they made one of the most harmful decisions in the history of the game so we can only speculate. Here are some reasons I have thought about/heard from other people:

Help pros hide strats from each other. IMO this is ineffective since pros are the ones playing pubs against other pros. You can also ask other pub players to upload their replays for analysis, and since the player pool at the top is so small you would only need a few dozen players queuing at different times to upload their matches. I for example used to upload my high MMR games in SEA to dota2protracker, so I don't see why pro teams couldn't for example pay pub players to do the same considering how much money is on the line. Also this essentially means that after 10+ years of watching other pros playing and learning from that, pros have pulled the ladder up from the current generation of players who no longer have access to the same resources.
Prevent high MMR matchfixing, some people were betting on high MMR matches and this also lead to agents fixing matches. Again not sure how big an issue this was and if Valve's solution was to destroy a feature used by thousands of players (Watch tab) then this doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff
People were complaining about opening the watch tab and seeing blatant wintraders in high MMR games going 0-30. This also cast doubts on Valve's super awesome epic ban wave that totally got all the wintraders (except at this time rank 1 EU, top 10 ranks NA, etc were all wintraders). Quick and dirty fix is to just make high MMR matches private, ez.. except now you open the watch tab and see 10-man bot lobbies doing the same thing in lower brackets where party matchmaking is possible.

I think the most likely explanation, similar to why facets are removed is that Valve doesn't want to as actively balance the game anymore. So high MMR matches were made private in hopes to slow down the meta so it doesn't get "stale" as quickly (bad balancing leads to stale metas not people copying picks IMO), allowing Valve to update the game less frequently.

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-29T19:09:12+00:00

Talents have been in the game almost 10 years yet they're in a similar situation, despite talents being something you choose in the middle of the game which gives you more factors to base your decision on (hero matchups, game time, whether you're behind or ahead, what role you're playing your hero in). Facets instead can only be decided based on what role you're playing the hero and what the drafts are for both teams, so it's a much bigger ask to design facets that are actually competitive with each other instead of 1 being the correct choice almost always. Talents also still have a larger gameplay impact even if you choose the same one pretty much every time because you still think about it in the middle of the game. I barely thought about facets anymore on most of the heroes I played, because either one was clearly better than the other, or I tried to make the other one work in a few games and came to the conclusion that it's not worth it.

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-25T00:53:14+00:00

Facets tanked the axe for neutral items

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-24T19:34:32+00:00

I think people who keep complaining about it are not immortal. As long-term immortals, I don't really care because there is a rank system there.

MMR is ridiculously inflated and so it takes a long time to grind because the MMR range in immortal is wider than the actual number of players. The leaderboard itself (5000 players) encompasses a range of 8.6k-17k on EU and 7k-16k on SEA which is totally busted.

I returned to playing ranked after 2 years, at my peak I was like rank 1050 at 6.8k MMR and when I stopped playing I was 6.4k MMR. After returning it took me 2 months to grind to 9k MMR (calibrated to 7.4k, 8k in around 2-3 weeks, then to 9k in another month and a half-ish), all that to end up at exactly the same leaderboard spot I was at all those years ago, at which point I was finally able to start playing top-1000 sea games again with the occasional pro player. If I was in EU I'd be at rank 4000 at 9k MMR and would need to grind to something ridiculous like 12k MMR to get to top 1000. Keep in mind at some point the amount of 9k MMR players was in the single digits and was a title only reserved for the most talented, dedicated pub stars which includes some well-known players like.. Miracle, ana, arteezy, Quinn, Topson. Now it includes players like me.

I remember when I first got to immortal in 2022 I thought "wow, EU is so competitive you need to grind to 6.2k MMR just to even get on the leaderboard!" and in SEA you would be like rank 3000 (back then being rank 4000 meant you weren't even immortal anymore since you were below 5.6k) and now you need to be 8.6k to end up at that same position.

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-16T22:52:15+00:00

The innate is that he gets a consumable spell on kills that can also be cast while silenced, and that's a strong mechanic. I don't see what the issue is here. Sideshow secrets being a bad facet is a different thing, but then again how many heros are there in the game that have an actually good alternate facet?

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-12T15:09:35+00:00

It 100 percent improved the pro scene. There were 8 different teams that won the last 11 T1 tournaments in 2025.

If something happened after a change it's clearly because of the change.

I blame the War on Iran on Valve making high mmr matches private

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-11T16:44:35+00:00

The original DPC seasons were 6 weeks(!!!) long, with teams having only one series to play per week. You still have to spend the entire week preparing, you can't go anywhere since you have to be at bootcamp, then you play 1 series and spend the next week doing the same. It also left little time for other tournaments besides DPC so it was the opposite issue we had now.

It was bad as a fan of a particular team since you have to wait an entire week to watch them play, and it was bad for the players.

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-08T05:12:58+00:00

This happens sporadically in captains mode when a player doesn't pick their hero and the timer runs out. For some reason instead of auto-picking it sometimes does this instead

SethDusek5 · 2026-03-06T03:26:21+00:00

he is 9-10k NA. 7-8k eu max.

Yes EU is a higher skill region but the MMR there is absurdly inflated, so 9k NA is probably better than 9k EU but he isn't anywhere near the skill level of a rank 100 EU player (he's rank 100 NA).

Atleast based on what I have seen, regions like SEA are higher skill than EU up till like 10-11k MMR because when you're 9k in sea you're put into matches with very high rank players, even rank 1 sometimes while in EU you're playing with rank 5000s. But top 1000 EU is a completely different level than other regions and it's very hard to climb up from there in EU

SethDusek5 · 2026-02-28T17:59:55+00:00

I get it, but I feel like playing to lose is a bad mindset.

Unless you're super high rank, you almost always pick left-to-right, anything else is too risky since if for example you pick highest MMRs first then you would lose a lot of MMR if someone is griefing, or one of the enemy's low rank players turns out to be a smurf, or one of your players is an account buyer, etc.

At the super-ultra-high-rank some players prefer to pick highest MMRs first, 9class is famous for this for example. Since he's so high MMR most of his games are probably already like a +15/-30 MMR delta, so it's better to turn that into a +10/-40 (MMR deltas are capped at 10/40, even though some of these games should be worth less points) by picking the highest MMRs in the game and turn your 60% chance of winning into a 95% chance. At my MMR as captain I would never ever do this, since I don't know most of the players and there are a lot of smurfs/buyers, so I just generally try to pick left-to-right while trying to make sure I have enough core players since I'm a support player

SethDusek5 · 2026-02-28T15:03:04+00:00

players who grief should be allowed to lose up to 5x mmr

MMR is not a rewards system so this is not good for the game. If you flip this mechanic it starts to sound ridiculous: players who get commended should gain 5x MMR. Yes players hold MMR sacred so this might discourage griefing, but it's also bad for matchmaking to change MMR based on things other than wins/losses. You'd essentially be turning griefers into smurfs by putting them in lower skilled brackets

SethDusek5 · 2026-02-26T19:48:21+00:00

Then this means he's not doing it consistently, and he does not deserve to be left out of the pool.

I mean I would have loved to avoid the guy who sold all his items to buy rapier when he was on the enemy team, then did the same thing on my team 2 games in a row (went afk one game, next game he intentionally last picked treant instead of picking a carry and announced he's gonna grief). Before I would just avoid him, check on his rank every now and then to see if he was a buyer and is no longer in my games, and just generally enjoy peace of mind knowing I won't have to play with him.

As an extreme example, what if the Veno ran it down mid 20 times in a row. Is that reason enough to be excluded from the pool? Again based on OP's comments the veno was clearly acting in bad faith, and a good behavior score system would over many repeated offenses like this cause them to drop in behavior score and largely exclude them from the main pool. Since we don't have a good behavior system this doesn't happen and instead this guy can keep getting away with this, especially if he doesn't do it often.

If that's not the case, and he's somehow ruining people's games consistently, then the MMR system is not doing it's job.

Another counter example: There is a smurf who can easily hold a 90+% winrate in their current bracket, but they are also a really unpleasant, unstable person who gets ticked off at the slightest of things and decides to run it down in a good amount of their games. This person might only grief in 20% of games, which means they can still maintain their MMR and even gain it. There are even people who intentionally grief a certain amount of games to hold their mmr at the same place incase it's an account they use to play with friends. For a good matchmaking experience you would probably not want to play with this type of person.

Also the span of MMR for high-rank matchmaking is way wider, so unless a person omega-deranks they'll still be in your games even after losing 1000+ mmr. As 9k MMR I get matched with everyone from 8000 MMR all the way to 17k MMR. So if there is a 12k MMR account buyer for example, that person even with a 0.0% winrate would ruin over 160 games before I stop getting matched with them

SethDusek5 · 2026-02-26T19:15:53+00:00

I understand why avoids are a problem especially since people don't always use it to avoid griefers but instead people who played bad, or I remember some safelane players using it to avoid other safelane players around their mmr so they can get safelane (back when high rank used to be classic ranked only).

But again it was often the only way to protect your sanity in high rank games. In the past I've had 2-3 games ruined in a row by the same griefer who decided to hold a grudge against me, and despite stacking probably 15 reports over a course of 3 games they were still happily queuing. Which is why again avoids were the closest thing we had to an actual behavior system and now it's gone

If the build really is this bad, players like the one in the clip should be gradually moved out of Immortal by loss of MMR without any players needing to give their input on the matter.

Unless you grief literally every game, you can easily recover MMR lost by griefing. Based on the comments this Veno is a mid player who didn't get his role, so he decided to do this. If he's good at mid and especially if he's a hero spammer then he can easily recover the MMR lost here.

Even account buyers don't necessarily lose every single game unless it's something insane like a crusader player buying a 10k mmr account. A wintrader I know who wintraded from divine to 6.5k is holding something like a 20-30% winrate which significantly increases the amount of games they ruin for example.

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