As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.
I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.
That’s a fair call. I just think all reasonable measures should be taken to limit the attractiveness of vapes to children, and that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s not a necessary piece, but I think it would have helped as part of a suite of measures to regulation. I think you’re right in that online glorification definitely had a role to play here as well.
If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.
We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.
The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.
Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.
I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.
This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.
Well, yes and no. Paying that fine once would just be a cost of doing business, but now that the precedent has been set if they continue to do it they’ll continue to get fined in that order. Those fines won’t need court cases, so they’ll need to be paid quickly and in full. Sure, the fine they received didn’t really hurt them but it will change their behaviour. It will also prevent others from engaging in the same behaviour.
I don’t think the EU wants to bankrupt companies like Apple - it’s not in the collective best interest. They need to guide behaviour by setting up punishments that are deterring but not destructive. I think €500m fits that pretty well - it’s akin to giving a child a timeout while their friends play or a smack on the back of the hand. It’s doing what it’s intended to do.
Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.
Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.
I’ve always been partial to [email protected]
My wife and I took part in the survey as people who aren’t in programming and have never used LLM art generators before, and we scored quite poorly. I got all of the photorealistic images correct, but the painting/drawing pictures were much more difficult.
I think a better test would be to give four real artists and five LLM art generators the same prompt, show all nine of those together in a square and you have to pick the real ones. Then we’re comparing like-for-like as opposed to trying to spot an LLM image out of the blue.
Which other Obsidian titles felt like that? Neverwinter Nights 2; South Park: The Stick Of Truth; and Fallout New Vegas all felt like very well fleshed out games to me. I don’t think I’ve played anything else from their catalogue.
Yeah, that’s a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I’m not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.
It’s really sad to me that Americans get put in the awful position of choosing between tipping, which supports the low wages, and taking responsibility for ensuring another human being has a living wage. It’s just such a terrible position for a consumer to be placed in, having to make ethical and moral choices about how much money to pay for goods and services.