Not really. Gambling (legal or otherwise) has been around for a long time.

What's changed is the ease of access. Today making a bet is a few taps away on a phone, whereas in the past you had to go to a bookie at the very least.

I'm not sure to what extent this can be fixed. I have a sneaking suspicion that even if all of these students were made to take a course that shows them how badly a casino, etc. will screw them out of their money that a few would just want to gamble even more because they think they can spot the tricks now.

Making it illegal won't really work either. Organized crime will just fill in for legal businesses. The internet makes it virtually impossible to stop unless a country is willing to implement levels of control similar to China and most people will not put up with that even if it would stop the gambling problem.

I don't think it's possible to make a less nuanced and less coherent argument than this. At best, you're telling on yourself.

Really there's nothing outside of the ISA being open and freely extensible for anyone who wants to do so. The ISA itself is similar to ARM, MIPS, or other RISC ISAs. If you wanted to build a custom microcontroller for some purpose it would be cheaper to use RISC-V since it doesn't have licensing costs. Most companies aren't doing this though and just by OTS components that work with their codebase. If you wanted to create some dedicated hardware paths for computationally expensive operations, the RISC-V ISA lets you add those in. You'd need your own compilers to generate those instructions or to write the assembly code yourself, but it gives users that flexibility.

Otherwise there's nothing inherently magical about RISC-V that would make it better than ARM in some performance metrics.

I don't follow the NFL that much, but don't they have some kind of subscription service where you can watch all of the games without having cable or satellite? MLB has had that for a while and if you just want to watch one team it may not be the best value, but it's great for anyone that wants to watch a variety of games on demand.

If there's a football game I really want to watch I can just go to a friend's place or a sports bar. Both are arguably better viewing experiences as well.

That's nice Adobe, but why do I need any of your products at all if I can just use a LLM to generate the image I want or make the requested modifications to my existing image directly?

If AI manages to kill this shitty company and their shitty business model, I wouldn't shed a tear. GIMP has gotten surprisingly good over the years while Photoshop has tread water or regressed for completely bullshit reasons.

As opposed to the open corruption on display with the President personally involving himself in making sure the deal resolves in favor of a major financial backer.

I suppose you have nothing to say about that.

If they're being honest (fat chance of that) about it being random then the only input is repeated refreshing until you get a lower price.

If it's tied to anything external all you can do is try to hide your identity or pretend to be whatever gets the lowest prices. Really good tracking or detailed profiles might be hard to get around, but I suspect most approaches are still rather naive. This isn't anything new. Some years ago there was a big story about airfare prices being different depending on what browser someone was using and even before that I recall reading about how customers using a iPhone were charged more than Android users on some website under the presumption that they were more wealthy on average because they had bought a more expensive phone.

I doubt that the companies doing this would allow you to identify as Filipino for the purpose of getting eggs for $.07 cheaper. That rather defeats the point of what they're trying to do. Even if companies could implement this perfectly it's still pointless as any significant price disparity just creates room for a middleman to engage in arbitrage. The store will only sell bread to the blind Cuban woman with gout who gets the best price and then resells all of the bread she buys to everyone else at a rate lower than what the store would have charged those other customers. So even if there were money to be made using this kind of technology, the store won't be the ones making any of the money once other people catch on to what they're doing.

Just rip the bandage off and move the family to LibreOffice. My mom has been using it for over a decade now and it's honestly one of the things that requires the least amount of tech support. I don't think LibreOffice has any bullshit AI crap to worry about either. Most people don't need MS Office for what they're doing.

That's even worse for them. None of the studios that they bought are making games that anyone really loves or will fondly remember twenty years from now. They paid a shit ton of money for studios cashing in on past successes are the ones who will be left holding the bag. Some might still manage to sell titles in the millions, but they really on exist until something better comes along and disrupts the market. Halo, GoW, or other Xbox mainstays haven't been relevant in years and none of the studios they bought have done anything on the level of their historical achievements in the last several years either.

Infinite money machines are trivially easy. There's nothing stopping an issuing agency from printing even more money. Zimbabwe's 100 Trillion dollar note is but one such example. Of course that bill wasn't worth the paper used to print it shortly after it was printed due to the well over billion-percent monthly inflation, but infinite money machines do exist. Incidentally they seem to themselves be infinite pain machines judging by the historical effects of running the printing press or infinite money machine.

What doesn't exist is an infinite wealth machine. Well that sort of exists, but it only gets there by a few percent per year on average and no cajoling will make it get there faster. Most of the time that just slows it down or even causes it to work backwards. It's a funny machine like that. It's reliable enough for your retirement account at least.

No one is going to balk at $7 a month when the Excel monkey using the product costs five times as much as that per hour. Th A just shows how badly all of the AI efforts at Microsoft must be failing though. The money has to come from somewhere at the end of the day. I'm surprised they aren't squeezing harder. Even though there are alternatives to Office, many of which are good, the amount of time lost to switching or retraining easily exceeds years worth of subscription fees.

Still beats the alternatives. The people remaining in Venezuela are fighting over what scraps of food remain. The rest of your comment is just stupid. This is people operating in a free market and acting in their own self-interest. If they can make more money doing this than some other job they could have instead, why shouldn't they do this? Maybe they even like doing this more than working retail, cleaning carpets, or whatever job they might do if this weren't available. If I could earn as much buying and reselling cards to wealthy collectors as I could doing hard labor, guess what I'd be doing. People spontaneously acting for their own self-benefit by engaging in labor that didn't previously exist is the free market in action. Just because you don't like it doesn't change reality. I wish no one were involved in the illegal drug trade, but that's not going to stop it from existing. Collectors don't want to go stand in line at stores to buy packs of cards themselves so they hire someone else to do it for them. It's fundamentally no different than any other job. It doesn't matter if you think it's useless if other people are willing to pay for it with their own money. No one is making them do it.

Really this is just indicative of a supply problem and Nintendo could fix it overnight if they wanted to. Presumably they don't make any additional money from this market beyond the first sale, so there's no reason for them not to just print cards on demand. That would immediately kill the scalper market designed to capitalize on the excess demand for the cards. There's no reason for Pokémon cards to be artificially scarce as they're just cardboard with graphics printed on them. They could still sell packs with a different design if they're worried about losing the collector market, but for someone who just wants to play the card game it ensures that they can get the cards that they want. Nintendo even stands to make more money with this approach as they're cutting out a middleman.

This is a self-correcting problem for any detrimental behavior in the long term. I know it tears some people up inside, but let others make their own decisions freely and allow them to deal with the consequences of them. You can't reason someone out of a position that they did not use reason to arrive at in the first place. Sure, some people will never learn to quit touching the stove, but many other people can learn from their misfortune.

What's your point. Once upon a time the wealthy were installing indoor plumbing and fancy water closets while everyone else was still using outhouses or chamber pots. They subsidized the capital expenses necessary to for various businesses to offer their goods and services and refine the invention to make it better, less expensive, and more widely available. It was the same for automobiles, computers, and just about anything else you might care to name. Why would you expect it to be any different here?

I think that's just a symptom of the user base growing smaller. Decades ago articles had far more comments. There were always troll posts but there was a lot more discussion to make those seem more inconsequential. Even if posters disagreed politically (I'm sure 2000 election threads are just as bad as any of the recent ones) there was a shared for in Microsoft that everyone could unite behind. Since then open source has won in a lot of ways. It generally rules servers and mobile phones. Even if the Year of the Linux Desktop never really arrived, every year makes it less and less relevant. Without that, the user base will find something else to squabble over.

There's also the vicious cycle that's created where this sort of behavior drives away others and leaves a larger proportion of users that engage in that behavior. It's not so much different from a neighborhood that doesn't solve its crime problems or other issues facing it. The good people slowly leave for greener pastures, but the problem causers stick around or grow worse. If it goes on for long enough you get the dilapidated ghetto or gutted trailer park that no one wants to come to and who the bitter denizens are often resentful to have visit. It's somewhat worse with internet communities because one person can use bots or sock puppet accounts to have an oversized impact.

There's also a tendency for any internet community to become a hive mind. Slashdot, for example, was never going to become a forum where Microsoft was well regarded. Anyone who really liked Microsoft quit posting here shortly after joining to find something else other community that was more open. Any community that slants towards anything will tend to continue heading in that direction as it slowly drives away whatever outgroup is has identified. This can happen along political lines as well, with Reddit and Something Awful before it being examples of this. Slashdot seems more immune to this to some degree. It's not really designed to be as much of a social media site as most other internet communities and was built at a time when no one cared about trying to generate engagement so much as fostering discussion. I don't think that prevents the problem, but it does slow it down considerably.

The user base here is likely much, much older than the average internet community. I don't think previous generations were any better than the current or upcoming generations, but they are all different in their own ways. A lot of us grew up before the smartphones, the internet, or perhaps even ubiquitous personal computing. I think that does have some impact on how we engage with others socially. However it also means that we're a lot closer to the grave than other communities. I've often wondered about some posters who have disappeared over the years. Even people I might normally have disagreed with vehemently on some topics often had insightful or interesting things to say about other topics. Over the years many have dropped off and while it's always possible that they got fed up and got the hell out of town as it were, I think the more simple explanation is that they got old and died. The internet hasn't been around long enough yet for most communities to go through this process where the people who started it all pass away. Slashdot is old enough where that's starting to happen. Anyone who was in their mid-20s when the site was started will be approaching 60 by the end of the decade. A lot of the early users were older than that.

TLDR: Slashdot is dying. Netcraft confirms it!