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Comment Re:Invert the process (Score 1) 131

That's how a lot of classes were in my high school (Montessori). We were told to read certain chapters of the syllabus ahead of the class, perhaps do a few exercises. In class, the teacher helped with difficult problems, walk the class through the tricky ones, and expand on the material that was studied. And the amount of homework we got was very reasonable.

Comment Re:Don't (Score 1) 54

Removing the swastikas is silly, but I can kinda understand why they didn't want to simulate giving meth to sailors to make them perform...
Then again, in Rimworld (space colony survival game) you can get your team messed up on all manner of stimulants, or even just wire an electrode into their brain's pleasure center. Maybe the difference is that a U-boat crew is a little too close to home.

Comment Nothing really compelling here. (Score 1) 45

A lot of these things are to access AI. And while I'd love smart glasses that let me tag people so I can always put a name to a face, such an application is a privacy nightmare. Same for AI assistants. Now I understand why companies are scrambling to bring AI into their ecosystem, so far I've not seen many compelling use cases for AI, not in the form of devices like these.

As for facial recognition in security cameras, I already have a solution for that, and it kinda works. Completely off-line and off-cloud.

Comment Re:Signal's fault (Score 1) 34

Many users prefer to get these notifications, either one that tells them a message arrived, or even one displaying the message itself. Up to the user to show or disable them. Only problem is that not many people understand how notifications work, or that they are stored outside of the app data store.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 41

If hypothetically targeted ads would be banned, there would be the same advertising budget as before

Not really. The 2x $1000 or so I spent on targeted ad campaigns have been worth it. If they weren't targeted, it would be far less effective; there's quite a few articles pointing out that targeted ads have a far higher click-through rate, and a higher conversion rate as well. Without targeting, my ad budget might still be $2000 but I wouldn't be spending it.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 41

That's not going to happen. The global advertising market is approaching a $1 trillion dollar value annually, and personalized ads have driven a lot of that growth. Personalized ads make it possible to zoom in on your target demographic more precisely, so you're not paying for impressions going to the wrong target group. It made advertising affordable to people who could not have justified the cost before. Hell I've ran a few global online ad campaigns for an app I wrote as a hobby project.

No, they'll not going to kill the goose that lays those particular golden eggs.

Comment This needs to die. (Score 2) 41

"applying the ban only to the use of personal data to set higher prices without establishing a baseline or standard price".
So you set very high baseline prices, then use personal data to offer varying discounts. That does look like a loophole.

How about "No dynamic prices or discounts based on personal or biometric data are allowed"? Put in an exemption to offer a discount to certain classes (student or vet discounts, discounts for seniors)
In the past dynamic prices (discounts) were used to increase turnover: get new customers in the door with offers, keep them coming back with loyalty programs, and have them buy more with volume discounts. Now, it is used to extract the maximum amount of cash from every customer. It seems that the MBAs who came up with this have fully embraced the first tenet of communism: from each according to their ability.
"How much is this item?"
- "How much do you have?"

Comment Re:What you don't know you don't know (Score 1) 141

I'm not so sure that those who have studied in those fields are much better. These notions sound no worse than some of the ideas being bandied about in places like the WEF. They sound like stoner friends sitting around in a bar, having beers and philosophizing about how they are going to fix the world, except these guys have the riches or/and the political clout to actually try and bring some of that about. Either way, it's people who think they know better, governing over people rather than for them.

Comment Re:EU (Score 2, Insightful) 111

If you're going to enforce age restrictions, this is the way to do it, preserving anonymity. It beats 3rd party age verification services like the ones that porn sites used to use. They needed your credit card, name and address, and the age verification provider could see which sites you were visiting.

Comment Re:A good problem (Score 1) 151

That seems pretty good. The renovation of the historical Dutch parliament building (Binnenhof) was started in 2021 and was to be finished this year. Now they are projecting 2031. Budgeted at €450 million, we're now looking at €2.7 billion. That's for a renovation, not a new building.

Comment Re:10 years of woke garbage (Score 1) 90

Not quite the same thing. Yes, movies have been selling us on a message or provide social commentary for ages. Sometimes with the message subtly embedded in the movie, sometimes the movie was the message. And they've done the race or gender swap thing before as well: tell a familiar story from a different perspective.

But in most cases, the old writers and directors stuck to their artistic integrity, putting the movie first rather than the message. That has changed. In "woke" productions (for lack of a better word), artistic integrity takes a back seat. Plot, dialogue, casting are affected in order to serve "the message", even when it detracts from the production's quality, as it often does. It's not every production, and there's certainly no reason to start foaming at the mouth whenever they cast a lady for a part originally written for a guy or whatever... but it does happen.

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