
An easter egg for one user: Luke Skywalker - einaregilsson
http://einaregilsson.com/an-easter-egg-for-one-user-luke-skywalker/
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dankohn1
This is similar to the story of the guy who pranked his roommate by buying
Facebook targeted ads that only targeted him [0]. Perhaps in the future, the
AIs will know us all so well that every interaction will be filled with little
in-jokes.

[http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-
pranking-...](http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-
roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

~~~
Systemic33
Unfortunately this is no longer possible :(

Facebook has removed the ability to make such narrow target groups.

~~~
takeda
There is an update. He mentions that they restricted to minimum of 20 people,
but there is a loophole, because you can select criteria on that group.

He gives example that if your want to target a guy friend, you can create a
group of 1 male and 19 female friends and then create ad targeting just males
to get around it.

~~~
amenghra
... or create 19 fake accounts (or pick 19 random people you don't care about)
and then target'em all.

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nojvek
The fact that you can do this make me very paranoid. I am so glad I don't use
facebook. I'm pretty sure with the rise of face recognition, object
recognition and NLP you can create insanely targeted ads that are almost
ransomware by crawling people's social profiles and correlating them with
hacked datasets.

~~~
saurik
How is this different from the ability to send someone an email? I just don't
understand the concern of being able to send ads to one person other than
"random non-technical people will not expect that and think it is a ghost".

~~~
jnky
I don't know how precise the ad targeting exactly, but what if you narrow the
base group down to your 19 fake accounts and your target user.

If you could the further filter your ad based on gender (as mentioned above),
personal interests or other private data, you may be able to use your ad
impressions to figure out things about an unsuspecting person.

I'd consider that a huge breach of my privacy.

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carrier_lost
This is clever! Also worth praising: This site is free, loads quickly, doesn't
require a user account, and has an easy-to-understand privacy policy.

~~~
einaregilsson
Thanks :)

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scandox
Well Hamill is a better man than I.

I would hate this. If I imagine being him, this is like having to turn up to
the office at 7am on a Saturday for a meeting. It's work. In analogy we're
watching Mark Hamill get out of bed on a weekend, groan, drink some Pepto-
Bismol and get his best shit-eating grin on his face.

~~~
ClassyJacket
Yeah, I feel sorry for the guy. He still is expected to do work for free
promoting a movie he was in forty years ago. He must be incredibly sick of
Star Wars by now.

~~~
the_watcher
He's clearly not sick of it. Harrison Ford is a bigger star than Hamill, Han
Solo is at least as iconic a character as Luke, yet Ford did far, far less PR
around TFA than Hamill's done for TLJ. Ford is fairly well-known for being
sick of Star Wars (he wanted to die in Empire), so Hamill clearly had the
option of being less involved in the PR yet chose not to.

~~~
qbrass
Harrison Ford did well outside of Star Wars and could afford to walk away from
it.

Mark Hamill's career hasn't gone as well. He would be foolish to not embrace
it, even if he hated it with a passion.

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comice
Must admit that this seems a bit creepy to me! I guess he's just amused but I
wonder if it starts him thinking, is this game monitoring me personally? How
else can I be targeted?

~~~
einaregilsson
Well, given that he retweeted a tweet that had the explanation of how it
worked, and he added the #BestFansInTheGalaxy hashtag I think he's OK. But
really, I probably wouldn't have done anything like this for another
celebrity, if Bruce Willis had tweeted I wouldn't try to make a Hans Gruber
avatar or anything :D

~~~
LordKano
If Bruce Willis Tweets, you should totally make a chubby black cop named "Al"
for his opponent.

If he rolls a Yahtzee, you could make it pop up a message that says "Yippee Ki
Yay, Roy!"

Because of my near-encyclopedia knowledge of 80s pop culture, I just had a
bunch of ideas. Then again, who knows how many 80s celebrities are playing
your game.

~~~
edelans
Ahah, don't try this with Liam Neeson, or he's gonna find his way up to you
and kick your ass.

~~~
LordKano
With Liam Neeson, I'd try a different tack. I'd make the opponent Joey
Rosselini.

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cestith
I'd make it The Beast from Krull.

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mwpmaybe
Bruce Wayne... Bill Cutting... Darth Maul... the possibilities are endless!

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animal531
What about Jar Jar Binks? But perhaps that would be too evil.

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eeks
That's just too cool. I have not read such a faith-in-humanity-inspriring
moment in a long time.

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takeda
What exactly this did to restore your faith in humanity and since you're
saying it did, what made you lose it in the first place?

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kbutler
Wonder how many people got "Dad" and wondered why in the world I'm playing
against Darth Vader?!?

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zitterbewegung
So the probability of picking the correct configuration is 1/72 and the
probability of picking the right game is 1/27 so it would be 1/1944 or 0.00051
which is better than navigating an asteroid field of 3720 to 1 .

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Beltiras
Droids are apparently bad at estimating outside odds since the two instances
we see in the movie end with an unlikely outcome given the estimate.

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devrandomguy
And humans see patterns in a sample size of two ;)

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Beltiras
Maybe it will rain today. Maybe it won't. 50/50.

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tripzilch
_" Even though the chance of rain was higher than predicted, it wasn't quite
so high that it actually rained that day"_

(translated from a cartoon by Dutch absurdist/cartoonist "Gummbah")

~~~
fineline
They said on the forecast yesterday there was a 50% chance of rain today, and
looking outside I can see they got it right. Uncanny.

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bcg1
Tried it out to see the easter egg... not only does it work, but the game is
pretty awesome too

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erikb
And this is how you do marketing the right way.

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chrisan
The get lucky with a celebrity who likes to play your game part?

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crusso
1\. It wasn't lucky that he made a good game that people like, it was hard
work. 2\. Doing something cool when he saw an opportunity with Hamill was also
not luck. It took creativity and initiative.

Maybe he didn't do the fun little easter egg for marketing, but for whatever
reason he did it, he created the opportunities through hard work and
cleverness.

~~~
chrisan
Look, its a great story. I shared it with everyone who is a fan of SW or codes
as it made me smile.

This is nothing to do with einaregilsson as it is a _very cool_ easter egg,
more just the comments on marketing.

Lots of people put lots of hard work into games people like. How many of them
get a celebrity to play their game, let alone post on social media? There are
plenty of games out there with thousands of users and 0 celebrities.

On top of that someone reached out to him and request they prank Mr Skywalker.
Where is the initiative in that?

He was lucky to have a celeb play his game. He was lucky the celeb tweets
about his game. He was lucky a friend of the celeb requested they prank him.
He clearly capitalized on the opportunity and every nerd like myself loved
this story because Star Wars + coding fun and now we are all checking out
cardgames.io.

But to claim "this is how you do marketing" is a stretch for me.

~~~
einaregilsson
I agree :) This was definitely luck, most people never get celebrities
tweeting about their games. And I guess now I am getting some marketing value
out of it, but honestly I just wanted to share this with an audience that I
knew would appreciate it. When you program cool stuff you want to share it!

In any case, I guess I'll get some extra traffic today, but at the end of the
day it's a Yahtzee game, nothing exactly groundbreaking, so I don't think all
the people that saw this post are going to start playing Yahtzee all the time
;)

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bojo
I suppose the more interesting question here is what the author did to
actually detect the avatar.

~~~
saltedmd5
"Using that information I created a trigger that only activated Darth Vader
when someone with that avatar was playing (well, almost, anyone with that
hair, glasses and smile, couldn't be sure about skin tone or hair color from
the screenshot)."

Presumably the avatars are built by combining pre-made features.

~~~
einaregilsson
Exactly. Each avatar is made up of 6 features, hair, hair color, skin color,
eyes and mouth. No nose, because who needs them! So each part has a code, and
I can store a face as a simple 6 character string. Then I just compared
against the ids of the eyes, hair and smile. I actually allowed any glasses
and any smile because I wasn't absolutely sure which one he'd used :)

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the_common_man
On similar lines - [https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-
me-120000](https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000)

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cwbrandsma
Next time he need to put in Batman.

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smhenderson
Wouldn't The Flash be more appropriate?

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cwbrandsma
He played Joker for longer. And his character's voice in The Flash is reusing
his Joker voice (at least that is what my ear tells me)

~~~
smhenderson
Fair enough, was just thinking Trickster was more recent, therefore more
relevant.

~~~
kyle-rb
Hamill has played the Joker in a few things fairly recently; The Killing Joke
and the Batman Arkham games.

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mysterydip
That's great! I haven't put any real easter eggs into one of my games yet, but
I definitely will with my next one. You never know who will play your game
(well I guess you do if they tweet about it, but you get what I mean).

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devgutt
I wish they could have allowed Mark to change the third set by passing his
hand over

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msimpson
This is why we love Mark Hamill.

~~~
hugg
This prank on Mark Hamill will make you cry tears of joy!

~~~
LordKano
One weird trick to get noticed by The Last Jedi.

~~~
ue_
_Notice me Jedi!_

------
_e
If only the easter egg showcased one of his other roles such as cocknocker
from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back [0].

[0]
[http://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000434/filmotype/actor](http://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000434/filmotype/actor)

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lpgauth
Hopefully, this doesn't get shutdown by Hasbro.

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simonhamp
Totally worth it!

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dmitripopov
It should be noticed that there were the times when Mark Hamill was incredibly
pissed off that people only see Luke in him and his acting career was actually
ruined by this role. But now he is older and it looks like he is just fine
with it. Or may be it's just prozac that makes it look this way.

~~~
johan_larson
I suspect he has simply bowed to the inevitable. Leonard Nimoy did something
similar with the character of Spock; he wrote an early autobiography titled "I
Am Not Spock" and a later one titled "I Am Spock". You just can't fight the
tide. (Unless you're Dutch. Which he isn't.)

A whole lot of actors would envy Mark Hamill's career as an actor,
particularly now that he is making bank off the Star Wars sequels.

~~~
dspillett
> Leonard Nimoy did something similar

Also Tom Baker, for a short while, wrt Doctor Who.

Patrick Troughton had some issues as well though IIRC that was more the long
filming schedule and fan attention outside of that while he was in the role
(he found being in character that much mentally tiring) rather than
typecasting (he left the role in part due to fear of that possibility, but I
don't think it actuall was an issue for him in the end).

It seems to be quite common for actors to have a "dark thoughts" spot about
their time in pivotal and/or long-running roles, though for a variety of
different reasons, which tends to mellow or pass completely as their life and
career moves further on.

~~~
scandox
Tom Baker is just an extraordinary person:
[http://cuttingsarchive.org/images/9/9e/1978-03-19_Sunday_Tim...](http://cuttingsarchive.org/images/9/9e/1978-03-19_Sunday_Times.jpg)

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mikeash
Wow, this place sure is filled with curmudgeons.

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gcb0
and why, in your vast non curmudgeon experience, should a game with an engine
much simpler than chess talk to a web server for single player games?

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fenomas
It's a web game that you play in a web page. It'd be mighty impressive if it
functioned without talking to a web server.

Further, it doesn't even have user accounts. What exactly is there to be
curmudgeony about?

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gcb0
from the screenshots I assumed it was an app. my bad

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kstenerud
It saddens me to see all the comments ascribing victimization where none has
occurred.

This is how SJWs operate. Don't do that.

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jessaustin
The game under discussion doesn't collect PII, and all personal information
was freely published by Hamill himself, so there's really no problem here.
However, the same would not be true of most similar circumstances, and I'm
encouraged that at least some people are aware of the issue.

~~~
kstenerud
In other words, think of the children!

We need to think about this non-issue and warn people about this non-issue and
dissuade people or possibly even implement policies for this non issue just in
case it ever becomes an actual issue!

No. I call bullshit.

~~~
jessaustin
You can't think of any examples of unscrupulous sites/apps/whatever misusing
users' personal information? Wow. Do you perchance work for Facebook?

