>You want to support Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Yeah, that's a tougher sell here. You're probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for it.
This is not true, which is the worst moderation decision about the site. This site would be greatly improved, if this actually was how it worked.
If you post any actually extremely anti-consensus opinion here you get one or two down votes, your post gets flagged and everyone ignores it. This is obviously an anti-trolling measure, but obviously people will just abusively flag anything they really do not like.
I browse from hckrnews.com and read comments with showdead enabled, so I see both flagged/dead submissions and flagged/dead comments. Flagging isn't abused in a measurable way at either level.
I personally hate micro transactions and avoid games like these, especially mobile games, like the plague.
But we have to be honest here, these micro transactions are what consumers want. There is a reason that gatcha games (and paid mechanics of those games are implemented in the games mentioned in the article) are so successful and so popular. Consumers of mobile games, unlike consumers of PC games, enjoy these mechanics, gatcha games are going so far, that the core system of the game is not the gameplay (which is often disregarded as an automated activity), but rather the gatch mechanics.
Yes, these systems are stupid and insane. But they are giving consumers exactly what they want.
An opioid addiction is no where close to dropping a hundred Euros a month on video games. I doubt that many people on here actually would want to ban adults from spending "too much" money on video games. And my comment is in response to the general sentiment that this represents some kind of "anti-consumer" behavior, when there is a large organic market for this and consumer actively want these features.
Personally I am very paternalistic and would support a total ban on these mechanics, together with legal limits of how much money people are allowed to spend on activities like these. Of course making any of these activities available to kids, should be banned as well. This is obviously an extremely unpopular position, since, as I said, consumers really enjoy these mechanics.
> I doubt that many people on here actually would want to ban adults from spending "too much" money on video games
The problem is not "spending too much" on videos games. It's the reward structure designed to incentivise one to spend unbounded amounts - just like a casino.
And just like a casino, I don't know that making them fully illegal is the correct way to go. But we surely shouldn't let kids in the casino, or let casinos advertise to kids, etc.
>The problem is not "spending too much" on videos games. It's the reward structure designed to incentivise one to spend unbounded amounts - just like a casino.
I do not think you understand how these games work or how they incentivize spending. Lootboxes and gachas work very different to a Casino and equating their reward structure just makes no sense at all. Psychologically they work in very different ways.
I hate to be defending lootboxes and gachas, but the psychology behind those is very different to how a Casino works. Gambling addicts are at an especially high risk of suicide, because they expect some amount of returns on their gambling activity, if those returns fail to materialize the player can be in immense debt. This just can not happen with a gacha, where you know upfront that every euro you spend is a 100% loss. Again, this should not be a defense of lootboxes, but we have to be honest about these mechanics.
And the psychological mechanisms are also different, gachas and lootboxes appeal very much to a collector mindset, where people play until they get a certain rare digital good, but playing after that would be pointless. This is a different mechanism to gambling in a casino.
>And just like a casino, I don't know that making them fully illegal is the correct way to go.
I see no reason why either should be legal, to be honest. We exclude kids from casinos, because their ability to make informed decisions is limited, but the same is true for a gambling addict. Letting people just ruin their lives for whatever reason seems a pretty insane policy.
To be honst I think state run lotteries are a pretty good idea, if they would replace other forms of gambling, which apparently is becoming less and less true, especially with the rise of the completely under regulated prediction markets.
Regarding the subject at hand, I think a very obvious and necessary first step is banning children from participation. Obviously this is easily circumventable, but at will at least be some form of harm reduction.
I think another possibility as a first step is a forced limit on how much an account is allowed to spend in a given time, e.g. the company is only allowed to add digital goods not exceeding X euros to the owners account, together with restrictions on how these items are traded, this will make whaling impossible, which is apparently the most important demographic for developers. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 ]
>Can we agree to stop calling it anything but gambling? Because it's just gambling.
No. It is not just "gambling" it is a very specific form of gambling, which is unlike most other forms of gambling. E.g. for most other gambling activities, the expectation is that the reward is monetary (see e.g. sports betting, roulette).
This should be clearly demarcated from micro transactions, where a predetermined reward is offered for a fixed amount of money. Lootboxes, where a digital reward (which may or may not be resellable) is given and gatcha mechanics, which are a very specific genre of gambling for digital rewards.
I see no reason why all of these should be treated the same.
>Also, the fact that it's called gotcha (got ya) has always had the hair up on the back of my neck.
>i personally (biased bc i work at Mintlify) think a markdown file makes more sense than a bash script because at least Claude kind of has your best interests at heart.
Most of the largest trends in "how to deploy software" revolve around making things predictable and consistent. The idea of abandoning this in favor of making a LLM do the work seems absurd. At least the bash script can be replicated exactly across machines and will do the same thing in the same situation.
Yeah, I'm going to add that as one of the downsides to the docs. The stochastic nature of the markdown vs. a script is for sure a reason to not adopt this.
>Installing software is a task which should be left to AI.
I think the subtext here is actually revealing a deeper issue. Installing software sucks. It’s error prone and every project does it a slightly different way. What we need is standardization, and I can see why prose could be an attractive middle ground. Easier to understand but less precise may result in marginally better outcomes.
I’m concerned that this approach serves to fix the obvious problems while simultaneously introducing subtler problems.
Tangentially, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. There are projects like nix that are excellent at fixing a lot of problems in the software packaging and installation space that are great from a security perspective but are famously difficult to use. I’d personally like to see more work leveraging AI to increase the accessibility of these paradigms and not throw the bathwater out with the baby, so to speak.
No country can compete with China on even footing in regards to car manufacturing, despite the frequent denials, they offer extremely good products, at costs no European or American company can compete with.
Citroën were the first to make diesel filters standard. And my C15 had the HDi engine with diesel filters. And unlike others, they did not cheat and were not part of the Diesel scandal.
Also, I survived.
And when it comes to security features, more important than not having side airbags would have been not to combine smoking weed and fellatio while doing 160.
I am not saying that any of this would be a good idea if keeping your life is a priority.
But even with maniacs like myself on the road, Germany has deaths from fatal car crashes of 3-4 per 100,000, while the US has 12-13.
But again, I am not a lawyer, not a doctor, and this is not health advise, just a true story of what I did 25 years ago that may or may not entertain readers.
>They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode
Which means they are some of the most polluting and wasteful cars available. ECUs are good. They make cars safer, more reliable and more efficient. Car manufacturers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to add adblue, because the Diesel engines are pretty toxic otherwise.
The apologia for old cars is just insane, they are not what you think they are.
>If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
VW was also bound by emission standards, yet Dieselgate still happened.
I would be very surprised if it didn't have some kind of "heavily-restricted debugging interface, only available to select VW engineers, which provides a limited set of fully anonymous vehicle diagnostic metrics" - which in practice is of course used to sell trivially deanonymizable data to anyone with a few bucks to spare.
"The data, which includes detailed location information and even vehicle owner details, was left exposed and unprotected on the internet for an extended period of time."
Wir wissen wo dein Auto steht
Volksdaten von Volkswagen
Dieselgate essentially happened due to the interaction of the EU and US emission standards. EU emission standard got lowered until it wasn't physically possible, without reducing the machine power, which the market doesn't want. Thus, they introduced test mode, which does have the emissions actually allowed, but is worse in all other aspects. This worked in the EU, because the tests environment is defined and no other tests are performed.
The US regulators wouldn't have cared about higher emission levels as all cars in the US have them anyway, but the cars were still introduced with the EU specs. First because otherwise they would need to remeasure all the car emissions and second, because even as the real emissions would still be low by US standards that would have questions why the same car has different emissions in EU and US. That plan however didn't work out, as the US doesn't do tests in a controlled environment, but while actually driving. Thus, the scandal started becoming public. That is the official part.
The following comes from an "industrial expert", that held a guest lecture at our university: This whole thing was actually done with knowledge (and silent agreement) of the EU regulators, as they aren't dumb and know what is physically possible. However they were still forced to act once this became public in the US, as the politicians and the general voter don't like regulators doing there own thing against the law. Also this was done by a VW supplier, which is basically the only shop in town, so of course this wasn't specific to VW.
So in my opinion, blaming VW, while legally correct, is actually kind of dumb. At last a bit anecdotal evidence: We also did the update for our car. Of course we tried to delay it, but eventually the car would have lost it's street legality, so we needed to do it. And afterwards the car is louder, has visible emissions and smells (more). (No, this isn't even a car from VW or any other company of the same business group.) Thanks. Sometimes the best option would have been to just keep quite and stick to gentlemen agreements.
>VW was also bound by emission standards, yet Dieselgate still happened.
Sure, but it is not like they just got away with that (ironically other manufacturers who did essentially the same thing, did mostly get away with it).
>I would be very surprised if it didn't have some kind of "heavily-restricted debugging interface, only available to select VW engineers, which provides a limited set of fully anonymous vehicle diagnostic metrics" - which in practice is of course used to sell trivially deanonymizable data to anyone with a few bucks to spare.
The GDPR allows you to receive a copy of all data a manufacturer has about you, "trivially deanonymizable" is by any reasonable interpretation of the GDPR personal data.
Of course you can believe that VW and other manufacturers are secretly ignoring laws (again) and of course evidence for that would be hard to come by, but it it did come out it would be a massive scandal, with a massive criminal investigation.
In general, do you want to have minimal laws protecting your privacy and manufacturers blatantly not caring about existing laws and individuals having no recourse or do you want strict laws protecting your privacy with manufacturers facing heavy sanctions, when they ignore those laws? The choice seems pretty clear.
The revealed preferences of the general population shows that the only way to accomplish this, is by banning the alternatives.
All indication point to the fact that the general population really, really likes getting angry at fake slop videos, endless discussion about the most inane over discussed topics and today's celebrity gossip.
Great educational content exists on the internet, social media could easily be about close connection to people around the world, but people evidently do not care about that.
Believing in growth just means believing that the future will be better than the past.
And believing this, is the single thing keeping the entire world running.
Germany is currently ruining itself because its stagnating economy means that it can not keep up with the rising costs for its pension system and has to increasingly raise more funds from a smaller, population which is seeing little productivity gains.
>Degrowth, on the other hand, would directly reduce those externalities; and, if imposed via progressive taxation, would have further societal benefits via funded programs.
Do you think that Germany will have social benefits at all, when the auto industry collapses. Where is the money coming from?
Economic growth has enabled mass literacy. It has created industrial agriculture, which eliminated hunger for economic reasons in all countries which practice it. Degrowth means turning our back on the single process which caused the greatest increase in human quality of life.
This is not true, which is the worst moderation decision about the site. This site would be greatly improved, if this actually was how it worked.
If you post any actually extremely anti-consensus opinion here you get one or two down votes, your post gets flagged and everyone ignores it. This is obviously an anti-trolling measure, but obviously people will just abusively flag anything they really do not like.
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