Yep. What would more likely happen is that a small developer is selling their game for 3 months at $30, half price for 6 months, 75% off for 3 months, and then fail as a company and have to shut shop. They would then be responsible for refunding $30 to EVERYONE who paid ANYTHING.
That's just untenable.
There is no age verification requirement. It's an age declaration *with no validation* so that vendors know to exclude access or content based on that self-declaration. This was necessary to placate the part of the population that wants actual validation/verification.
I agree with your analysis.
It seems like this bill is a symptom of grievances that people have with federal IP protections, hoping that California might go out on a limb and carve out a weird, one-state exception that might "force" the rest of the nation to follow.
From the SENATE COMMITTEE ON BUSINESS, PROFESSIONS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billAnalysisClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1921):
The bill would create new obligations that are technically challenging, commercially impractical, and inconsistent with conclusions reached by policymakers in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Mandating patches, offline versions, community-server functionality, or refunds in all circumstances is unworkable. Requiring publishers to modify, reproduce, or distribute their games after support has ended interferes with rights protected under federal copyright law, while blanket refund requirements fail to account for the value consumers may already have received through months or years of gameplay.
That implies a bit more burden than the bill actually requires. From AB-1921 digest (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1921):
The bill would, beginning on the date an operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, require the operator to provide the purchaser with, among other things, an alternate version of, a patch or update to, or a refund for, the game, as provided, and prohibit the operator from selling, leasing, or otherwise distributing a version of the game that cannot be used by a purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator. The bill would authorize the Attorney General or a district attorney to bring a civil action for a violation of these provisions.
From the bill language:
(2) Beginning on the date a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall provide the purchaser with one or more of the following:
(A) A version of the digital game that can be used by the purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator.
(B) A patch or update to the purchaser’s version of the digital game that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator.
(C) A refund in an amount equal to the highest price of the digital game offered by the digital game operator within the 12 months before the digital game operator ceases providing services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game.
(D) All necessary documentation to allow the purchaser to host a private or community server with which the purchaser could make ordinary use of the game independent of services controlled by the operator.
(E)
(i) Subject to clause (ii), a version of server software that the game may connect to in order to make ordinary use of the game independent of other ongoing services.
(ii) If the server software contains additional hardware or software requirements than what was necessary for the original game, clause (i) shall apply only if the operator has communicated that fact to the purchaser and the additional hardware or software requirements are reasonably attainable at the time services by the digital operator cease.
The committee analysis greatly exaggerates the requirements, but the objections are still at least somewhat valid. If a company (imagine a developer-owner, one-man show) stops hosting the only live server for a game because he's taking care of an ill spouse, why should he be obligated to make significant software modifications, host those patches, or create documentation instructing how to create and host a the game via a private server. And if he doesn't do so, then he has to refund everyone at the HIGHEST PRICE for which the game has sold in the last 12 months?
This bill was written like it was intended to stick it to EA or Blizzard, so that didn't help.
Lastly, and certainly not least, the part authorizing the State Attorney General to take legal action on violating developers was just ill-advised in this legislative session. You see, the California Legislature has a rule that no bill that could cost the State more than $100,000 should move through the process without exceptional circumstance. The cost for the State Attorney General to take on dozens of "dead video game cases" would put the bill's price tag way over that threshold.
The bill was asking too much in today's modern financial contexts and might have been asking for too much to start with.
A BETTER bill would have been simple: "The IP-holder of a video game that ceases distribution/hosting ALSO relinquishes both liability and control over software replication and hosting." Basically, if you abandon something, it goes into a special licensing phase wherein other people can replicate it and re-distribute it, but they're not authorized to draw a profit from those actions.
1. Many major universities prohibited (and some continue to prohibit) the use of standardized testing in admissions starting in 2020. This removes the competency check and relies almost entirely on grades that are stunningly inflated nowadays because...
---a. Teachers are pressured not to "ruin the college prospects of their students".
---b. Not fail students because the districts aren't allowed to hold students back.
2. They're ALLOWED to enter the university because higher education funding has been so massively cut in certain administrations that the universities **need** to rely on student tuition to keep the lights on. If you need 25,000 enrolled students to survive to a better time and student quality has tanked... you just lower your standards.
It's not video games. Video games can definitely share some blame for the reduced physical activity of the millennial and Gen Alpha, but scholastic competencies are the result of K-12 schools & school boards being the battlegrounds of political causes for the last 30 years.
The kids are stupid because a generation of nutjobs intentionally screwed up their education.
1. No, the unique individual student of a UC college/university is not becoming less literate by the day. They're actually becoming MORE literate while enrolled.
2. Yes, the colleges and universities acknowledge that graduating 12th-graders are significantly less capable in math and reading than 10 years ago and are still admitting them to their freshman classes. Thus, the overall competencies of the enrolled student populations are lower than in the past.
Why is this happening?
1. Long-term strategic degradation of public education
-- Massive coordinated defunding of public education over the last 30 years (private school vouchers, funding reductions).
-- Coordinated invasion of the education management sphere by people with no educational background for the purpose of pushing political/social agendas.
-- Over-empowering parents to influence or pressure educators to give certain grades.
2. Continued devaluing/undervaluing of the teaching profession
3. Some **horribly misguided universities** prohibited the use of standardized tests in admissions (some temporarily, some ongoing). This allows students hyper-inflated high school grades and easily-cheated essays to be able to enter university without proving their competencies.
4. Massive defunding of colleges and universities via changes to research funding and direct funding force those campuses to accept less capable students to just keep the lights on.
So ya... this isn't new. It's not sudden. It doesn't come as a surprise. Anyone who's been embedded in higher education for the last decade or more has seen it all coming. And the faculty are so sick and tired of basically having to teach remedial high school courses to people who are supposed to be in the top 10% of students are starting to rebel.
There was a time when Anthropic had successfully convinced a LOT of people that they were the one and only trustworthy AI/LLM. They've pretty much blown that tentative good faith up and they should know that.
I find it odd that they're still carrying on as if they're the "good guy".
It's not as good as we want, but it's not as bad as you say.
The INTERNET has a ton of bullshit. It also is the single greatest source of fact in the history of human civilization. The challenge is separating fact from bullshit. Pre-evil Google figured out that if you rank websites' relevance according by references, the truth tends to float to the top.
Every pseudonymous/anonymous communication outlet has a ton of bullshit. What matters is the scoring structure, though, tends to float stuff to the top. That whats makes it useful. There's has been enough truth in Reddit posts and the scoring system had been sufficiently successful that after everyone learned how to game Google in search of clicks, people started adding "reddit" to their Google searches knowing that it genuinely increased their ability to solve a problem.
It just so happens that now its getting even worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
While typically used to advise against holding a person's job hostage based on KPIs, I see it's relevance here as well:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" or
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
ChatGPT and the Reddit management both assert that scraping Reddit for solutions and facts is good because it's full of real solutions from real humans, but once it became known that was happening, it became certain that people were going to exploit that by spamming Reddit.
AB-1856 (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1856) is titled "Age verification signals: software applications and online services", but that's primarily for show. The key part of the proposed law says:
There is no verification of age. It's self-report of age at OS setup. There is no verification required by this code. The OS then provides age bracket range upon request.
Do you know the difference between correlation and causation? Are you completely ignorant of history and lack the ability to search the internet for information? Here's a shortcut to finding some of the many forms of control asserted on the use of nuclear weapons--
- the Mutually Assured Destruction Doctrine
- Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
- Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
- Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
- Outer Space Treaty
- New START Treaty
- INF Treaty
- Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement
- Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
- the very existence of the International Atomic Energy Agency
- Nuclear Suppliers Group
- Missile Technology Control Regime
- Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones - Latin America & Caribbean, South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, Central Asia,
- Unwavering levels of diplomatic conversations and economic deal making
And on and on...
Good people have put in work and continue to put in work to prevent bad people from using nuclear weapons. The lack of nuclear holocaust is a direct result of these action.
You said that "the genie can be controlled", nothing about an actual nuclear attack or nuclear hellscape.
I'm wondering if we're having an exceedingly unlikely misunderstanding of the genie. I'm using "the use of nuclear weapons in war" as "the genie". No one has used nuclear weapons since 1945 because of the control efforts. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a threat of the genie being unleashed again, but control was maintained.
There will always be threats and concerns and fears. We actively fight them all so that the worst (the genie) doesn't kill millions.
If you think the world is going to come together to curtail AI development you are delusional
Literally the same thing was said about nuclear war. You're trying to predict the future. I'm saying that we should forget about prediction and put in the work to prevent disaster. Those are two completely different ways of thinking-- Doomer vs. Worker.
Are you seriously equating the potential of nuclear attack with actual nuclear attack?
That lack of nuclear weapons in use is evidence of the control. You can call that control "tenuous" or "scary", but we don't exist in a post-apocalyptic nuclear hellscape because of the many different controls put in place over the last 80 years.
Your awfulizing is not representative of reality.
Back to the topic at hand -- the genie cannot be put back in the bottle, but it can be controlled. You have to put in the effort to control it.
But the genie can be controlled.
Nuclear weapons are a "genie out of the bottle" and they threat of nuclear war is ever-present, but we've not yet obliterated each other with nuclear weapons because we acknowledged that it's probably best that we restrict the the proliferation and possession of nuclear weapons.
We need to do the same with AI.
Nothing makes a person more productive than the last minute.
