constantcrying

>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.

Pure coincidence. The name comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon

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 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.

>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.

>Installing software is a task which should be left to AI.

This is such an insane statement. Is this satire?

Which just means that most new cars in Canada will be made in China and that this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_Canada will soon be a thing of the past.

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.

>Still: Under the definitions I work with, an ECU is Hardware.

What a silly definition.

This is just a lie you just made up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_control_unit

>Citroën were the first to make diesel filters standard. And my C15 had the HDi engine with diesel filters.

Modern Diesel Engines have gotten so much better in every single area.

>And unlike others, they did not cheat and were not part of the Diesel scandal.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/dutch-court-says-dies...

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37TT6PxW4 to see just how common cheating was. Also have a look at the graph at 17:47 .

>Best car I ever had.

You were doing 160 in a death trap with minimal safety features, which was literally making the air unbreathable.

>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.

This is just delusional.

>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.

They are bound by the GDPR, which automatically puts them ahead of every American or Chinese manufacturer.

E.g. Tesla, even in Europe, is pretty blatantly ignoring privacy laws and is used to surveil the population: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/tesla-waechtermodus-f... (paywall)

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.

Looking down on the US is just masking the enormous dysfunction in the EU and many European countries.

I have been to some countries outside of Europe. Some were much worse some were much better, but I do not particularly care. So many cities in Europe are awful places to live.

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.

As a European, the commentary felt very biting and accurate. An entire continent defined by being smug about not being the USA. Where not competing is seen as a great virtue and where significant parts of the electorate are actively voting against fixing the glaringly obvious problems.

The supposed niceness of the cities also is just not true. Many European cities are awful places. Where, maybe with the exception of a few tourist areas, you will only find dirty streets, rows of old apartment building regularly smeared with graffiti, shops selling used phones and vapes and food stores competing over who can sell the cheapest, still edible Kebab.

>I am sorry, but comments like this are caused by the naivety of not knowing how the function evaluations are actually implemented.

I am sorry, but comments like this are caused by the naivety of not knowing a single things about mathematics.

Do you not understand that mathematics is not just about implementation, but about forming models of reality? The idea of trying to model a physical system while pretending that e.g. the solution of the differential equations x'=x does not matter is just idiotic.

The idea that just because some implementation can avoid a certain constant, that this constant is irrelevant is immensely dumb and tells me that you lack basic mathematical education.

The Megalag demonstrated that they lied to the businesses and enabled extraordinary deals for consumers. I do not think that this is disputed.

It is just so insane that the web is just full of 100% AI generated slop.

The title image is AI and presumably the text is AI generated, this appears to be true for everything on that website. Just 100%, everything AI generated, likely zero human oversight and fully automated.

And it even has auto translation which turns the whole page into literal nonsense, but surely looks good for SEO.

People need to keep in mind how rare CO2 is in the atmosphere. It currently is at around 420 ppm and was at around 100 ppm less in the 60s. CO2 is a miniscule part of the atmosphere, which is why large relative changes are caused by human activity.

To remove 10ppm of atmospheric CO2 from the atmosphere (which would do nothing to sustainably lower CO2 in the atmosphere) would require processing 10ppm of the entire atmosphere. That is one in 100.000 parts of the atmosphere. The entire atmosphere is around 5x10^18 kg, so we need to process 5x10^13 kg of air. Which is 50 million million (no typo) kilos of air.

The industrial task of doing this unfathomably large and by itself would have no long term Impact.

Human fabricated carbon capture from ambient air is a complete fools errand only promoted by the scientific illiterate or those who benefit from scientific illiteracy. You can essentially just look at the first graph on wikipedia and see that it is never going to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphe...

>but there is no need to use it in any application.

Applications such as planes flying, sending data through wires, medical imaging (or any of a million different direct applications) do not count, I assume?

Your naivety about what makes the world function is not an argument for something being useless. The number appearing in one of the most important algorithms should give you a hint about how relevant it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform

That is correct, but the article explicitly addresses this point and argues that the evidence points to Lilienfeld producing a working transistor.

"Later, some people claimed that Lilienfeld did not implement his ideas since "high-purity materials needed to make such devices work were decades away from being ready,"[CHLI] but the 1991 thesis by Bret Crawford offered evidence that "these claims are incorrect."[CRA91] Lilienfeld was an accomplished experimenter, and in 1995, Joel Ross[ROS95] "replicated the prescriptions of the same Lilienfeld patent. He was able to produce devices that remained stable for months."[ARN98] Also, in 1981, semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman confirmed that "Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many occasions".[EMM13]"

For many things (computers, rocketry, aerospace, etc.) and different reasons, Germany in the years around the second world war, was a pretty bad place to get international credit for your accomplishments.

To be honest, the Megalag video really made it clear what a great product Honey is. It is very explicit about the fact that you, as the consumer, can get extraordinary deals by using the extension.

This also makes me think that the whole campaign is astroturfed. The only "victims" of Honey are influencers and storefronts, who of course will do their part in trying to get their customers to stop using the product, but for the consumer there really are only benefits with using the extension.

The only arguments against Honey is that they are supposedly breaking some internal rules of the advertising industry (and who cares about those? Certainly not me) and that they are offering deals better than the store wants to offer to you, which makes an extremely compelling case for using that extension.

I always considered extensions like Honey to be quite scammy and believed that they offered little benefit, but apparently I was wrong.

I think the idea is interesting, but immensely flawed.

The following is just disingenuous:

>industrialisation of printing processes led to paperback genre fiction

>industrialisation of agriculture led to ultraprocessed junk food

>industrialisation of digital image sensors led to user-generated video

Industrialization of printing was the necessary precondition for mass literacy and mass education. The industrialization of agriculture also ended hunger in all parts of the world which are able to practice it and even allows for export of food into countries which aren't (Without it most of humanity would still be plowing fields in order not to starve). The digital image sensor allows for accurate representations of the world around us.

The framing here is that industrialization degrades quality and makes products into disposable waste. While there is some truth to that, I think it is pretty undeniable that there are massive benefits which came with it. Mass produced products often are of superior quality and superior longevity and often are the only way in which certain products can be made available to large parts of the population.

>This is not because producers are careless, but because once production is cheap enough, junk is what maximises volume, margin, and reach.

This just is not true and goes against all available evidence, as well as basic economics.

>For example, prior to industrialisation, clothing was largely produced by specialised artisans, often coordinated through guilds and manual labour, with resources gathered locally, and the expertise for creating durable fabrics accumulated over years, and frequently passed down in family lines. Industrialisation changed that completely, with raw materials being shipped intercontinentally, fabrics mass produced in factories, clothes assembled by machinery, all leading to today’s world of fast, disposable, exploitative fashion.

This is just pure fiction. The author is comparing the highest quality goods at one point in time, who people took immense care of, with the lowest quality stuff people buy today, which is not even close to the mean clothing people buy. The truth is that fabrics have become far better and far more durable and versatile. The products have become better, but what has changed is the attitude of people towards their clothing.

Lastly, the author is ignoring the basic economics which separate software from physical goods. Physical goods need to be produced, which is almost always the most expensive part. This is not the case for software, distributing software millions of times is not expensive and only a minuscule part of the total costs. For fabrics industrialization has meant that development costs increased immensely, but per unit production costs fell sharply. What we are seeing with software is a slashing of development costs.

This argument only makes any sense at all because the demand for software developers continually grew.

As long as more software developers are needed your logic obviously holds, it is irrelevant whether you are a master. There are enough jobs for "good enough". But what if "good enough" is no longer a viable economic niche? Since that niche is now entirely occupied by LLMs.

Running a government and banning the representatives of your economy from talking to you is insanely stupid.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with lobbying, it is an essential part of the government and can not be legislated away, without crippling the entire country.

There is a very hilarious genre of political "thinkers" whose entire view of politics is entirely delusional and who are so disconnected from reality that both their diagnosis and their solution looks ridiculous.

I get that Yarvin is an icky fascist bigot, but just read the political thinkers he got his ideas from. The idea that the elected representatives, much less the method by which representatives are chosen, have any meaningful impact on politics is just laughable.

Just aesthetically one of the worst websites I have ever seen.

It is obviously impossible to engage with every single idea proposed at once, but I think the main thrust of the argument is encapsulated in

>"Personally, I feel like the world might be a happier, more cooperative place if situations were by default framed as Stag Hunts."

Which is just so bizarrely and obviously false. Especially when just sentences before the issue of climate change came up, which certainly is not a positive sum game and we would be lucky if it was a zero sum game, but given all evidence it is very obviously a negative sum game, where governments get to talk about who has to bear the most pain. (And it isn't clear that cooperation even is the best opportunity for survival)

The optimism strikes me as so blindingly naive that it makes it hard to take anything said seriously. Maybe this is just a generational divide, many of the older people I know, in their 40s or older, seem much more optimistic about the state of the world. And the attempt to justify affirmative action is just so bizarre. If historic grievances are legitimate arguments for preferential treatment, then you will never get me to accept that this is anything but a brutal race to the bottom, which is about who can make the other suffer most. No, the world is not a positive sum game and I will never live under the delusion that it is.

We can have hundreds more of studies like these and we can endlessly talk about whether X problem is caused by screen usage. I do not think that this is helpful or relevant.

The facts are:

- These games/apps are designed for commercial purpose, specifically to get parents to buy things. To do that they are designed to be exploitative and addictive. Adults are very susceptible to this, children even more so.

- These games/apps are inherently anti-social (and in all ways in which they are social is being exploited by pedophiles, see e.g. roblox)

- These games/apps are used by parents to avoid interacting with their children and to outsource parenting (often so that they themselves can scroll on their phone)

- These games/apps are used by children instead of real world interactions with other children

If you take all of these facts together the idea that there aren't serious negative consequences is just laughable. Of course there will be and the only real question is whether they can be mitigated and what avenues exist to reverse the damage.

None of this is to says that no child should ever play a video game, but obviously there will be consequences if a large parts of a child's early life consists of staring at a screen.