MudMan

I can’t.

But I can call it out before it evolves for being used incorrectly in a confusing manner. Particularly when used in a conversation regarding technical guidelines for age certification, or when calling for outright banning specific creative products out of concern for their impact on children, both of which seem to be very serious things that at the very least benefit from some precision about what exactly we’re talking about.

No it hasn’t. Some site not knowing their dark patterns from their anti-features (or deliberately mushing them both together for marketing purposes) doesn’t mean it’s not a misnomer.

I mean, I’m open to it becoming the new standard at some point. There is no coming back from the incorrect meaning of “metagame”, or at least of “meta”, so it’s no longer a misnomer.

But this? Nah, it’s gonna take a minute, if it ever happens. “Anti-feature” has become a buzzword in midcore techie spaces itself, so I don’t know that extending “dark pattern” to (incorrectly) include every undesirable feature will ever take. Plus, what would you call actual dark patterns at that point?

Every time I accidentally pay attention to US politics in any way I end up with a headache, but…

Addressing the issue of the strait, Hegseth disparaged reporting that the US had not been prepared for Iran’s effective closure of shipping route. “The only thing prohibiting transit in [Hormuz] right now is Iran shooting at shipping,” Hegseth said. “It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

…what?

Yeah, that number went up pretty fast during the 2010s and 20s. Honestly, I think at this point it’s a cost/manufacturing reliability thing. There aren’t that many panel manufacturers, and these days a 65 inch OLED can be found for like a grand and a LED one for half of that. That’s sort of been “what a TV costs” for most of this century, so cheaper panels at scale in that price range probably means people go for the bigger one they can get in that price range unless they have some hard space limitations.

Yes.

I mean, for one thing, that’s a misrepresentation. You don’t need a behavioral scientist to figure out that “come back tomorrow for another reward” is a good engagement tool. For another, it’s a misnomer, because that’s not a dark pattern, it’s a deliberate, out-in-the-open design that is transparent about how it works.

But do I think that people freaking out about engagement tools they don’t like while giving functionally similar ones they do like a pass is a moral panic?

100%, absolutely yes.

There’s a reason why the PEGI rep talking to Eurogamer clarifies that this specific wording would absolutely have unintended consequences and they’re limiting the age ratings impact and leaning on content descriptors instead:

“There was some discussion here,” he added. “Some people pointed out that these are features that make the game engaging and fun - this is enriching the game experience similar to a cliffhanger in a Netflix series. So we mostly want to inform parents about this, because there’s no reason why we should give Animal Crossing a very high rating. So this is going to stick to a PEGI 7 but it will have a descriptor that explains this. The exact language of the descriptors still needs to be figured out.”

So yes. Slippery slope, moral panic, will somebody think of the children stuff.

EVER is a long time.

The current implementation? Not unless they stoip training along the same lines they currently are. I think there’s some value, and you can access it pretty easily with the open source freely available models that are out there and some semi-decent hardware, but hundreds of billions to trillions in revenue for multiple corporations? Nah.

They’ll maaaaybe mitigate it by shifting people away from home computing and into connected systems, but I suspect the moment the bubble pops or hardware production levels off with their current demand people will end up realizing they can run 90% of what’s being offered in a gaming laptop from 2020.

Myeh. I think they mostly do fine, but they’re certainly not perfect. These are reasonable, but some of the stuff they’re saying about it is factually incorrect, too (like I said, there ARE age-based commerce lockouts in games already despite their statements).

All they need to do to be functional is have a modicum of consistency and at least be reactive to feedback. The Balatro thing sucked, but they did correct it. Some of these changes seem to be specifically a reaction to the Balatro thing, in fact.

See, I have a real issue with the “12 year olds (or anyone, really)” bit there in juxtaposition to all the pushback on OS age verification.

The gaming community has spent the past decade and change doing the exact same moral panic routine that anti-game violence crusaders did in the 90s and are in the process of finding out why it’s a bad idea.

Age ratings and content warnings? Awesome. Gating content and design concepts on moral grounds? Not that.

It doesn’t need to be too specific, in that PEGI actually reviews the products it rates. You get to send them a preview and then talk to them about the rating.

I also think some of the stuff Eurogamer is reporting is weird, or maybe PEGI is just not aware of some tools? For instance,

A game will be able to reduce this PEGI rating to 7 if it contains in-game controls that allow you to turn spending off by default. As Bosmans noted, these systems don’t really exist yet, but the hope is this change will incentivise them to be developed.

Is not actually true. Many games do include turning spending off based on the user’s reported age or whether they’re on a child account (Nintendo and Sony both support this as a feature, I believe).

So there is some confusing stuff going on here, but it all seems mostly reasonable to me.

Well, cool, then. It’s a genuine struggle to find a 32 inch TV of any decent quality these days.

But by far the most popular TV size today is 65 inch, which as far as I know isn’t available as a PC monitor at all, and even 32/40 inch PC monitors with a similar feature set can be as expensive or significantly more expensive than an equivalent-sized TV. That’s probably partially due to the focus on speed and responsiveness and partially due to the whole… you know, monetizing your data and selling ads thing.

The difference is the LG TV has a computer already in it. Otherwise the panels are pretty similar.

But some types (and especially sizes) of panels are hard to find in “dumb” PC monitors and vice versa. You can (maybe) find a 42 inch TV, but I’m not aware of a 65 inch display without TV features, let alone any larger sizes.

This is not it. Not only is there a microinverter and a breaker there to address that issue, but my understanding as a layman is the load in the circuit is down to how much you’re drawing (i.e. if you’re generating 1200 behind the microinverter and pulling 1500 you’re pulling 1500 through the circuit, not 2700).

The bigger fire hazard here is the battery many of these come with for storage, honestly.

That’s not to say there isn’t a bit of a risk. You need to be careful if you need to do something in the installation that you disable both the grid breaker and the microinverter. Otherwise it’s entirely possible for the grid safety to blow and the inverter to keep pumping power into your house. But as the previous poster says, there’s a reason these are legal to install in apartments all over Europe, and it’s not just European grids being set for higher amps. FWIW, most of these kits come with 800W max out. My understanding is they’re perfectly fine to use as a cost mitigation and they’ll keep your fridge going in a blackout but no, they won’t be constantly tripping your fuse.

I mean… good luck finding a 65 inch PC monitor.

That does seem like a bit of a downside.

Well, the problem is less setting up the birthdate and more whether the birthdate needs to be verified.

Plenty of OSs already query for a birthdate, particularly on gaming devices. And yes, they will provide age-based protections already.

The question is, does the parent/account creator need to enter an accurate birthdate or not, and how does the system know?

If they don’t, then whatever, it’s the same self-declaration we already have all over the Internet. No biggie. Everybody was born in 1901 and we’re all chill about it. It still makes for an absurd situation where you HAVE to have a personal profile for every user on every computer, which a ton of computers aren’t expecting, so it’s still dumb on top of being useless, but it’s a solvable problem.

If they do, then you know have one of the biggest cryptographic and data management challenges in computing history. How do you have every single device across the entire planet interface with every single piece of software and server to authenticate a piece of personal data and safely store it so you don’t have to constantly re-check? It’s insane. Plus it removes a parent’s ability to enable their children to engage with content at whatever speed they see fit. And there are potentially different regulations in different areas, where both the server and user location may change the required behavior, so the whole thing is an absolute mess from the concept up.

I keep thinking back to all the conversations with alleged leftists here on how they were both the same and Biden was too soft on Israel, which disqualified Harris and at least Trump was running on ending foreign wars.

Still haven’t seen any “oh, wow, yeah, that’s way worse than I thought it’d be, I was kinda wrong on that one”, either.

I know I should not be pushing the issue in hopes that they quietly show up for the midterms, but at this point US politics is not worth engaging with and you can only take so many middle class cosplayers smugly calling you a naive centrist for even entertaining a gradient of madness between US political factions before you start getting flashbacks the circling of the drain speeds up.

In places with a strong Apple presence, maybe. Android, and Samsung specifically, are very much in a position of absolute dominance of the market in many regions. Samsung phones have no “selling points”, they are the default choice.

The future of what?

I mean, most people won’t know or care, and there are plenty of worse things Samsung has done in the past decade. I stopped buying their stuff for those reasons after the S10. I’m sad to report they don’t seem to have noticed or shown the adequate amount of remorse.

If the class and test is the entire intended application then what’s the point? I mean, at least throw personal growth in there or something. If going to the gym made you fat and unhealthy we wouldn’t go around telling people to exercise.

Look, my point is that you learn about things when you use that knowledge repeatedly. It’s a chicken and egg situation and you do have to start from memorization (you wouldn’t expect a medical doctor to look up the names of body parts until they just naturally stick, and you WILL have to learn some vocabulary from scratch to learn a language), but by and large if something is written down and you have access to it that’s probably enough to learn it over time.

There’s a bit of a sense that study has to be pain and work because… well, old people like to see young people suffer like they used to suffer, whatever. But man, I can tell you I learned far more from the teachers and professors that gave us something to do and the tools to do it than from the ones that showed up with a power point deck and asked us to memorize bullet points.

As for what AI is useful for… I mean, yeah, it’s not a lot. That was my point. AI is decent at reminding you of things you sorta vaguely know but can’t recall, does ok at summarization and at some coding tasks. Some of that is useful in school (I certainly would have spun up a OCR system instead of giving myself carpal tunnel cleaning up notes), but it’s not much use for you if your job is to go to a lecture and… you know, learn from it.

I will say that they are not terrible teaching aids, though. Stuff like explaining language stuff, or answering specific, precise questions that you can otherwise verify are not terrible uses. And, as a very much amateur coder, AI haters may have to accept that I’ve actually gotten better at coding by myself via using a chatbot to fix my problems (if only because the chatbot sucks at doing the thing from scratch, so I still do the parts I can do). You can use reference and technology to learn stuff on your own, it doesn’t matter if it’s a chatbot or Wikipedia. It won’t do you much good to try to have it replace you at doing the work if the point of the work is to teach you how to do it, though.

There’s a difference between knowing things and memorizing them, though.

I agree on the broad notion that using reference is perfectly fine at all levels of academia. You memorize information by putting it to use. Repetitive reading with no application intended just for memorization is a massive waste of time.

That is fundamentally different to attending lectures, reading books or paper and definitely not the same as putting in the work of writing your own or doing your own research.

My concern with this idea is the same as my concern with every other attempt at a “disruptive” AI product: you can already do all the valuable parts of this with existing tools and the novel things this can do aren’t particularly useful or something that chatbots do well.

By all means use AI tools to do schoolworks if and when they’re useful. It’s just that this doesn’t sound like it is.

The Xenoblade Chronicles series and maybe FFXII.

Xenoblade Chronicles X in particular feels like it was meant to be a MMO and then they just kinda… gave up on the multiplayer part.