Next week in these news: Companies who went to $random_startup_of_the_month found out that they now bought into being at the START of a five-year crusade to eliminate bugs, performance issues and usability problems.

That is the problem. "Right to read" was visionary and will really soon be reality.

Given how much capitalism insists on copyright and prosecution when it comes to THEIR works, how they get custom-made laws like the DMCA passed just to protect their rights... well, let's just say that if the big AI models weren't from the corporate sector but had been created by nerds on github, the copyright police would already have broken down our doors to arrest us all for copyright infringement.

So please, please, pretty please, let them have a dose of their own medicine. Heck, let the courts classify LLMs as "software" and find just one instance of the training data containing GPL3 content. Whoopsie, all your code belongs to us.

If you want to stay anonymous, who am I to uncover you to the public, for a few clicks and a pat on the shoulders?

If anything, we need to fight for our rights to remain anonymous. Online, offline, anywhere. The most massive clue that we need anonymity should be the zeal with which politicians and powerful corporations try again and again and again to force us into using real names online, make everything trackable, and pierce any pseudonymity or privacy layers. These fuckers never, ever, have our interest in mind, and constantly lie to us about what their real reasons are (seriously, in countries where laws can be made by public vote, we should pass laws that any politician saying "because of the children" is put into jail for a year).

Don't just let Banksy remain anonymous - let us all be anonymous whenever we want.

Really soon now, we'll figure out that the entire purpose of Earth was always to calculate Pi. Douglas Adams was right, he just lied about the actual number. :-)

Someone get this one a soft chair to drop into and explain how many real studies are based on surveys.

Susceptible people are exactly who need protection.

We don't make scams legal because people could just be more careful, do we?

If the math is correct, that means we can calculate the circumference of the known universe to a precision much, much smaller than the Plank length.

So in other words: No, there isn't any practical application for this, not now, not in the forseable future, and probably not before the heat death of the universe.

recent studies beg to differ.

These and others show a strong correlation between lootboxes and problematic gambling i.e. gambling addiction.

obviously. It was clear as day to me decade and a half ago.

The West is really really really shortsighted. Like seriously shortsighted, arrogant, incapable of learning or making any smart strategic choices. This is in regards to everything, wars, weapons, power generation, allowing Islam to penetrate its borders, now even cheering FOR Islam and against Israel, not taking out putin and all of his little helpers all around the world judiciously, printing money like it's out of style, getting rid of manufacturing and declaring that now its economy is something else, but not manufacturing and production. In fact declaring that its economy is 'consumption based'. Getting off the gold standard. There are many stupid things the 'collective West' engaged in, will it be able to correct course? I don't see it, not yet.

Right, got it. So the argument is basically: "Sure it's gambling and addictive as shit, we intentionally made it that way. It's just not that specific type of gambling that the law makes illegal."

a couple seconds with Google would have given you answers. Here's a meta study that is pretty clear: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

So yes, consensus among people doing research into this area is that it's problematic and it's gambling.

I don't go to McDonalds so I don't have enough information to answer to the 2nd.

On the first two, IMHO: The "blind bags" are not gambling because at least the ones I know contain a given value of items (+/- a bit) you just don't know which ones. And in no case would you get an empty bad.

For CCG I wouldn't even claim that they aren't gambling. It's somewhere on the edge because what you get has a utility value - you can play a game with the cards. And rare cards are often better cards for the game as well. So while I'm sure some people buy the cards purely to trade them, there are a lot of people who buy them to play with them.

You can say the same thing about loot boxes. However, the people selling you the loot boxes and the people running the marketplace for them and the people running the game they can be used in are all the same people. That means your entire process is at the mercy of the party running the game. Which is basically the same thing for casinos, so I don't see why the virtual casino should be different.

How do you define gambling then?

I would argue that the payout does not have to be cash. If you and me play russian roulette, I'd argue that we gamble. We risk something and the outcome is determined by chance.

It's interesting to see people DEFEND loot boxes. What are you? Retarded?

Loot boxes are pure exploitation and are intentionally designed to your disadvantage and the advantage of the company. The only honest defense of them is to reveal what most of us suspect already: That they aren't really random, but run by carefully engineered algorithms to maximize the company profits, in which case they might dodge the label "gambling" and exchange it for "scam".

You can't make this up. People who came to the land a few generations ago and took it by force deport those who have been there since written history began for being "illegal immigrants".

In other words: "Your job here is done, bye bye." - so basically, you had a temp job without knowing it.