Online games will now be banned from giving players rewards if they log in every day, if they spend on the game for the first time or if they spend several times on the game consecutively. All are common incentive mechanisms in online games.
Besides banning reward features, games are also required to set limits on how much players can top up their digital wallets for in-game spending.
Games are also banned from offering probability-based lucky draw features to minors, and from enabling the speculation and auction of virtual gaming items.
Tencent, the world's biggest gaming company, tumbled as much as 16% at one point, while NetEase plunged as much as 25%.
"It's not necessarily the regulation itself - it's the policy risk that's too high," said Steven Leung, executive director of institutional sales at broker UOB Kay Hian in Hong Kong. "People had thought this kind of risk should have been over and had started to look at fundamentals again. It hurts confidence a lot."
Tencent Games' vice president Vigo Zhang said Tencent will not need to fundamentally change "its reasonable business model or operations" for games, adding that the company has been strictly implementing regulatory requirements.
Zhang added that minors had been spending a historically low level of money and time on Tencent's games since 2021 when minor protection became a focus for Beijing. In 2021, China set strict playtime limits for under 18s and suspended approvals of new video games for about eight months, citing gaming addiction concerns.
But the new rules included a proposal that is widely expected to be welcomed by the industry, requiring regulators to process game approvals within 60 days. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators announced on the same day licences for 40 new imported games for domestic releases, seen as a signal of Beijing's willingness to allow more games in the country, despite the draft rules on game spending.
Yeah, of what I could follow, that was the most interesting part. In addition to the history lesson of the beef between scientists!
I rolled my eyes until I saw where this was published. Huh, that's interesting. I'm way too uneducated to know what this means, but maybe the science peeps I follow will post some vids in the coming weeks.
Umm. I’m not gonna be paranoid here. But cmon Jack. Don’t do shit like this. 
How’s the deal? Did the union get what it wanted?
This is freaking hilarious. I might buy this book just to read more of this:
"Imagine you're stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers," Seedhouse, a professor at Daytona Beach's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University wrote. "You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do?... One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you."
... the biggest of the Mars explorers should sacrifice themselves first because they "both consume and provide the most food." He went on to provide a "weirdly detailed look" at how to cut up one's fellow humans if necessary.
"We don't know where Seedhouse would fall in the buffet line because we couldn't find his height and weight online," the authors wrote, "and honestly we're scared to ask."
In "Survival and Sacrifice"... readers will also find... a photo of ten astronauts smiling in space alongside the caption: "In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation. Is it wrong to waste such a neatly packaged meal?"
Great marketing.
98 people - cut from its Canadian business administrative services and IT departments, along with the Montreal-based VFX studio Hybride. The numbers represent around 2% of its total Canadian team.
Hybride is predominantly focused on providing visual effects for TV shows and movies, with credits on multiple Star Wars shows and films - including The Mandalorian, Ahsoka and Andor - Disney’s live-action Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast remakes, and sci-fi movie Arrival. The studio’s video game credits include prehistoric FPS spin-off Far Cry Primal.
The latest layoffs follow 60 job losses at Ubisoft’s UK and US customer service teams in May, as well as the planned closure of its London mobile studio - made up of over 50 devs - reported in September.
There has been continued unrest at the publisher this year, which kicked off with their first staff strike in January in response to employees' unhappiness over pay and working conditions. That’s accompanied the controversial unveiling of plans to use an AI dialogue-writing tool and Ubisoft’s ongoing dabbling in NFTs, which have been met with widely negative responses by both developers and players.
So TLDR: Workers strike for better pay/conditions, Board responds with lay offs and AI. As a result, a lot of employees get laid off and replaced with AI, and the remaining have to work harder. Gamers get worse games too (AI, NFTs) and customer service, but its Ubisoft, so that was expected. As long as short-term profits go up, the Shareholders are happy and the Board gets bonuses.
death toll has risen to at least 10,022 Palestinians, including 4,104 children, with many victims still trapped beneath the rubble and an Israeli siege drying up access to vital goods like fuel, food and electricity.
“The number [death toll] is expected to go up as at least 2,000 people remain under the rubble. The problem is, with lack of heavy equipment and machinery, the rescue teams on the ground are unable to remove and pull out these bodies from under the rubble,”
The number of those wounded since the October 7 start of the bombardment has risen to 25,408… a result of Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of civilian homes, hospitals, refugee camps, and schools, said Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), a United Kingdom-based organisation
Running low on fuel supplies, 16 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals have been forced to suspend operations as the number of people wounded increases and the United Nations said that more than 1.5 million people, which is more than half of Gaza’s population, have been displaced.
That is disappointing to hear, but good to know. I think I've heard about Joplin's sync being not-very-good earlier too. On the other hand, I've heard similar things (and you mentioned it too) with regards to Obsidian, but I personally haven't encountered any yet.
On organization, is there a limit to sorting files into folders (is that what is meant by notebooks)? I prefer that over tags in any case. On features, if the options were between Notesnook and Obsidian, it does have upsides. Obsidian has the community plugins, but I only use a handful and it seems a few of them are built-in already in Notesnook. And it is cheaper, of course. The downside is it is a much smaller company (with two main devs as far as I can see?) which means if something happens, future updates would depend on the community.
And Cryptee also offers a lot of features for a lower price (its github is very scarce tbh). Notesnook still looks like a good choice, though.
I’m currently on Obsidian, but looking to change to an open-source alternative. I am a heavy note-taker but have no need for Obsidian’s “knowledge base” like features.
Glad to see you recommend Notesnook! The free tier looks very good by itself. Sync, unlimited notes, offline, rich text. Do you mind answering what “limited organisation” means? What are the other downsides of the free tier? The paid plan is definitely cheaper than Obsidian, but there are cheaper open-source alternatives I’m also looking at (each with downsides of course).
One I know is Joplin which, similar to Obsidian, requires payment of Syncing. It’s Basic plan (all I would need) is a third cheaper than Notesnook, while the Pro is more expensive. Then there is Cryptee which I could also use for free for a long time, or pay similar to Joplin. Notesnook is cheaper than Standard Notes though!
That is very useful information. Thanks!
I use iPhone. And I like downloading videos way way way too much. UBlock origin is goated tho.
And I don’t want ads when I cast to my tv.
Huh. I…don’t know if this is a good abbreviation. FF makes the most sense? Fx seems weird, I’ll be honest. I’ll try though.
On October 3, 2023, the day after MK Gandhi’s birthday, over five hundred officers of the Delhi Police fanned out across India to detain either at their Special Cell station or at their homes over a hundred journalists and researchers. They held them for interrogation for the entire day – an average...
So this account was made an hour ago by someone who claims to be an “Anonymous hate researcher that has worked with top academic researchers worldwide on combating hate on social media! Here to document hesitant and bad faith nazi instances!”
Say what you will about Hexbear, we are not Nazis. CTH was banned by Reddit for advocating the k*lling of the precursors of nazis ie slave-owners.
Also, while the majority of our users might identify as “Tankies”, from the very beginning, we have always been a non-sectarian platform that does not tolerate leftist infighting and welcomes all manner of leftists from MLs to anarchists. Yes, we have more MLs but we do have some anarchists and as soon as any shitslinging is pointed out, mods immediately ban it.
Framing us a tankie instance, like some of the others that actually declare so in their rules and ban other forms of leftists is an outright lie if not just a very bad indication of your research skills.
On Russia and China, you can have disagreements with the majority opinion on hexbear itself, as long as you don’t just parrot the US state department line. Is it as good as it can be? No, I myself would like more diversity of opinion on a lot of topics. But we are literally all leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. That means any criticism of Russia or China or any of these other “enemy” nations has to be from those perspectives i.e. they cannot be bad faith accusations from Biden or Trump stooges.
From our perspective, which is a leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist one, there is no argument that the Western states like the US and its various puppets/allies are obviously terrible and, what did you you say, are “genocidal” and carry out “rampant human rights abuses”. Does this mean other states aren’t? No, not at all.
But because most of us live in these states, which we call the “imperial Core”, these are the states we want to focus on and change, rather than empowering them more unlike the Libs and the Cons who think their own states are somehow better and more civilised than the others.
Again, you can disagree, but it has be well-reasoned and anti-capitalist at the very least.
Also, I was against federation from the start. I’ve always hated the idea. And posts like this do nothing to disprove me. I’ve also noticed you calling people commenting on this post as “brigading”. Pal, this literally showing up on our feed. What do you want us to do?
For the email, you can use an email alias service like Addy or SimpleLogin. They're both open-source and offer free tiers. I never give out my real email to anyone now except actual contacts.
After that, I think a VPN would probably still work to disguise what you're doing from Walmart, but I'm not a 100% certain on that so I won't link any.
But yeah, definitely use email alias wherever you can.
Yay! Been waiting for this for so long. Time to binge-watch all the previous videos in the series... again.
I’m vegan, but when push comes to shove, I can make a temporary exception for rich folk.
Great thread by Jason Hickle about his new research paper arguing against the neoliberal narrative.
TLDR: Socialist China (Pre Reforms) was assumed to have 80% poverty rate by neoliberal agencies, and since the reforms, its rate has declined and declined and now extreme poverty is eliminated. The truth is different. When looking at things like the basket of goods, Socialist China (Pre Reforms) had just 5% of people unable to afford to live. This increased up to 60% after capitalist reforms, a trend seen worldwide.
Unlike the rest of the world, China slowed, halted and reversed this trend, bringing it down to around 5% in 2018, after which there is no clear data yet. This Hickel attributes purely to the measures by the CPC and Xi, which no one else bothers to put in place because of the neoliberal narrative created and funded by places like the World Bank, IMF etc.
In the end:
> Thankfully, China has gradually recovered from this crisis. Real data only goes to 2008, but Moatsos credibly indicates the poverty rate was down to 5% by 2018, as the labour movement gains strength and as Xi's anti-poverty programmes deliver progress.
> What can we learn from all this? Well, public provisioning systems (and price controls) can be very effective at preventing poverty and improving social outcomes. Especially in developing countries. This enabled China to outperform much richer nations.
> But note that the poverty line here is focused on basic needs. Clearly China of the 1980s needed to increase industrial production to deliver higher-order living standards! We argue this could have been done without the capitalist reforms, thus preventing quite a lot of misery.
I’ll read the full paper later. And while I won’t go quite as far as Jason in saying they could have done entirely without the capitalist reforms, especially with the collapse of the USSR (!ussr-cry, I’m sure with hindsight there are many things they would’ve done differently.
