Hirom @ Hirom @beehaw.org

Posts

163

Comments

1,159

Joined

3 yr. ago

C'est juste. La mairie de ma ville a bloqué des projets d'isolation en façade. C'est logique de ne pas laisser rogner sur l'espace public. Et c'est compliqué de mettre certains bâtiments aux normes. Mais ce qui ralenti le plus c'est probablement le manque des moyens et l'augmentation des coûts, surtout quand les aides à la rénovation sont coupées.

Il n'est pas possible d'aller (plus) vite tout en baissant les moyens alloués. On revient vite à la politique.

The new digital ID will be held on people’s phones

It'd be wise to separate digital IDs from expensive tracking devices (smartphones).

What's wrong with an actual card with a chip (but no wireless capability) on it?

I'm not convinced an outright ban would be helpful. Regulation focused on harm reduction, ie restricting to adult like various kind of gambling, would be less heavyhanded, hopefully better compromise.

Looping back on the earlier comments, adding extra requirements on age verification is the more controversial part. Especially since privacy-preserving solutions aren't ready. Clearly neither of us are happy with that (not necessarily for the same reason).

I'd be happy if regulators just categorized loot box as gambling, applying the existing declarative age verification that already apply to gambling.

The choice between state regulation and self-regulation depend on various factors, eg exactly how it's implemented, people's opinion on freedom to operate companies without state intervention. A meta-analysis conclude results vary a lot from self regulation, it can go well or fail. This is just an opinion and nothing definitive, but I don't think game editors that make money from loot boxes would setup efficient self-regulation. It would hurt their bottom line.

If loot boxes were on the wane even before hard regulation was passed, then maybe the hard regulation wasn’t particularly needed.

That's if and maybe. I would assume neither, but will keep an open mind in case evidence appear.

Let's assume Loot Boxes are on the wane. Do we actually know they were on the wane BEFORE regulation passed (which started happening several years ago), or whether regulation caused them to wane? Do we know that self-regulation is efficient for loot boxes? Results of industry self regulation vary a lot, and is often ineffective, so I'm skeptical.

On the other hand, there is evince linking paying for loot boxes to gambling addiction, and plausibility since loot box exploit human's tendency to look for rewards to extract money from players. There's clearly a problem, and I wouldn't bet on the companies that created it solving the problem.

The link above is the primary source, they mention "OUR recent study". The article publication date is February 2025, but they don't give the exact date on their study.

Even if that figure already decreased since the study, or was overestimated, would it change the point of the regulation?

If less mobiles games integrated loot boxes, let's say 50%, or even 30%, would that change whether loot boxes is gambling or not? Or worth regulating?

Who is still doing loot boxes

A majority of Android and IOS games, and 36% of PC games according to a recent study.

If you haven't encountered loot boxes recently that's great. It means you already managed to avoid games with loot boxes, and shouldn't be negatively affected by this regulation.

Good point, it's a bit late, and may hit hard on some games that already implemented loot boxes. But it's never too late, assuming it's indeed a kind of gambling.

Hopefully it'll lead to less games integrating loot boxes, so that going forward people of all ages can play games with neither loot boxes, nor the age verification that comes with it.

Update: I just remembered, most games can get updates nowadays, both on PC and console. Game editors can chose to remove loot boxes even for existing games if the regulation is too heavy for them.

I'm happy with loot boxes being categorized as gambling when money is involved, and regulated as gambling.

By "cool with this" are you refering to age verification? That wasn't a comment on age verification. You're putting words in my mouth, or I was ambiguous in the above comment, or both.

Let's talk about this. Online age verification is not trivial to do right, ie balance effectiveness and privacy. That's true of any age restriction, whether it's for loot booxes, other kind of gamblings. Existing age verification has bad effectiveness, bad privacy, or both. That not a reason to give up on regulating gambling, or give up on improving age verification.

Good move. Loot box is gambling. Most have learned gambling is dangerous, especially for minors.

Kudos to Microsoft workers who risked and lost their job to protest the company providing services to the israelly military.

Drink water

The list of "restrictions" for refusing to verify your age include privacy-friendly tweaks that I would consider as perks. Those would make great defaults for everyone.

Ads are no longer personalized

Digital wellbeing tools (such as “take a break”) are enabled by default

Reminders about privacy are shown when uploading a video or commenting

Video uploads are set to private by default

LOL

Given the duration of the outage, I guess the company has both a complex computer system that's all networked, and doesn't have a solid disaster recovery plan.

God forbid YouTube becomes biased toward factual information.

“The pressure in Europe is enormous,” he said.

War crime and genocide tends to create this kind of pressure. Not applying pressure would be a moral failure, doing business as usual is wrong under the circumstances.

He warned that cutting off dialogue could have long-term geopolitical consequences.

Netanyahu and its government have ignored multiple calls from multiple sources to allow more aid, minimize civilian casualities. It has damaged an EU building in Gaza.

They've demonstrated they're not listening to those calls. It's well past time to impose sanction, put real economic and diplomatic pressure.

One doesn't cancel the other.

“In Europe, the demand for electric cars is significantly below industry forecasts,” it said. The plant, which makes an electric version of the Explorer SUV, would move to one shift per day instead of two beginning in January, the company said in a statement.

Hopefully they'll consider making smaller and cheaper EVs, instead of the more expensive SUVs. Europe is not the USA.

Trump and his lackeys were quick to adopt cancel culture.