Oh that part is really easy: Stop giving billions to AI startups.

Right now, the whole AI bubble is heavily subsidized by investor cash. Once the AI companies have to charge users the actual cost plus a profit margin, we'll see AI usage drop considerably. Because that shit ain't cheap.

does that mean the profits from his last scam are over, he needs a new job and has decided that honest work still is something for peasants?

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.

There was a little of that, but I think they really wanted to be part of the industry and figured that their effectively unlimited bank account would make that relatively easy. Almost out of the gate, GFiber was complaining about the amounts of red tape that incumbents were imposing, ranging from high fees to use existing poles to to arguments over easements to lawsuits over trivial and even frivolous claims. They lobbied city, county, state, and federal governments to do everything they could to block Google, threatening to withdraw from markets even before Google started building out, potentially leaving people without any high-speed internet for years as a way to threaten government officials who wanted to keep their jobs with losing them due to angry constituents.

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".