Ya, this is just awfulizing repeating an online mantra. To be fair, it CAN be like that in a non-union, private company *especially*, if you're not a particularly valued worker. But if you work in the public sphere (for a city, county, state, federal government, or public school), it's much, much better because those orgs are MUCH more risk averse.
Ya, I came to say something like this. I remember when the whole concern about AI taking jobs was resulting in daily articles on Slashdot and people were talking about how even the AI of that time could replace accountants... which is so very evident that people don't actually understand the work of an accountant.
It's not just a person managing a simple spreadsheet and putting out a report once per quarter. Accountants are the translators between, law (federal, state, county, city), local policy, past practice, banks, merchants, paper, PDF, Word Docs, good software, crappy software, the lack of software, skilled workers, people masquerading as skilled workers, horrifically understaffed workers, etc. When everything is under control, a seasoned accountant can manage multiple small non-profits and meet all their needs. But when something breaks (such as when the in-house budget analyst of 30 years retired 4 months ago and the position hasn't been filled yet "for the sake of salary savings because we're in a budget crisis"), the contracted accountant has to come in and clean everything up.
AI cannot do that. It may be able to in the future and some of the major firms are acting like they're implementing mandatory AI-usage to get to that point, but no one's screaming EUREKA! yet because they're finding out that AI is expensive, in need of constant oversight, and are trying to hide financial recession layoffs behind the veil of "AI Efficiencies" like everyone else.
I wonder if it can "reason" out the number of Rs in strawberry or whatever other trivial reasoning task it hasn't been trained on an exact example of.
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.
Well I can tell you're not in the GTA where it's been in the 20s for a while, and last year most of the summer felt like one big heat wave, where it was technically 6 back-to-back.
It's not even a good joke, it's a Gutfeld-grade groaner.
One downside of a laterally centered driving position is much worse visibility when overtaking. A centered driving position is good for a track car where the chances of overtaking on the left or right are roughly 50/50, but on the street where the odds are heavily biased one way or the other depending on whether it's a LHD/RHD country, having your driver's seat on the correct side makes it much easier.
Also I would point out that there's nothing socialist about modern American fascism, considering that there's very little flirtation with collective ownership of the means of production going on (other than Sam Altman getting Trump to consider having the US government buy the gigantic economic black-hole-bomb he's built), but they do enact deals that look a good bit like socialism for corporations the regime favors...
The vast majority of voters in any party want the opposite of that but are told to vote for "the lesser of two evils" which admits to an inherently evil system.
This is only possible because the US has first-past-the-post elections, a clunky and primitive voting method that can enable this situation. Moving to more advanced voting methods like ranked choice or STAR voting prevents a two-party stranglehold from forming.
Agreed, in fact I think that's a major reason to avoid use of non-hybrid PQC.
I'm a little surprised no one has tried to bring Manifest v2 back in a Chromium fork. It's supposedly open source after all. If it's too complicated to do practically, then really what's the point in Chromium being open source at all.
See also: Android and the ever-increasing difficulty, impracticality, and necessity of getting root access.
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.
In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
