This is not the first time and it will not be the last time. You have to hold Sony accountable (as consumers), and you have to hold the license holders accountable because they are just as liable. This will keep happening on pretty much every platform that doesn’t allow a DRM free downloadable copy of the media. It will happen again.

As an adult I finish more games. I have more patience and there’s a lot of things that are better today than when I was a kid (level scaling/difficulty scaling is definitely one, and so is the art).

But I miss storytelling. I miss game mechanics that worked really well but we’re based on the limitations of the hardware and software available at the time. I miss having to explore because there were no walkthroughs or guides or anything.

So I think perhaps gaming has gotten better, but my experience with gaming isn’t as good now as it was when I was a kid because I have something to compare it to and it can’t beat my nostalgia.

I’ll do you one better. Our laws about lobbying need a significant overhaul, so that’s at least part of the problem. But also it can be more than one thing at a time.

I feel like the strictly enforced cell phone laws are also strictly enforced in America. I think it really is just down to how big vehicles are here and how bad the sight distance is in those larger vehicles, combined with municipalities not investing in infrastructure that prevents or mitigates crashes and pedestrian fatalities. There was recently an article about a town that did do this and hasn’t had a pedestrian fatality in like a decade here in the US and I think that’s proof of what I’m saying.

They are wrong but there is a grain of truth to this. NTSA regulations about fuel efficiency and emissions are part of the reason that car manufacturers made vehicles bigger and more expensive. It is significantly harder to meet emissions standards and fuel efficiency standards in the US in a sedan or small compact car and on top of that car manufacturers know that people aren’t generally buying compact cars for $80-150K so it’s a win win for them. It’s greed, and them gaming the system in order to use the fact that larger vehicles aren’t beholden to the same emissions standards or fuel efficiency standards. So car companies convinced consumers they don’t want small cars, that instead they want SUVs and trucks and perhaps crossovers. And they lobbied to game the system and to continue pocketing money doing it.

https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-loophole-that-made-cars-in-america

Not every government employee is a Trump stooge.

He can’t design himself out of a paper bag. He also can’t define either of those two words, so your point still stands.

So, we have to convince people not of the “morality” of whatever action we want them to take, but the strategic importance of the action. To do that you have to have an action in mind and I see these two things as the stumbling block most people trip over on a lot of the time on most issues.

Once you have an aim to achieve and you have convinced people of its strategic importance, you just need them to stay on the same page and working in the same direction.

Your car probably has an electronics module (ECM) and a power train module (PCM) at the very least. But there’s very few cars built in the last 3 decades that don’t have at least two computers in them of some kind.

Obviously that’s not a “data center on wheels” but I hope this headline is hyperbole.

A comment I saw on another thread says that they will be working with the parliament to rework current law to include this, rather than relying on the commission. So yes.

You don’t write things down anymore. I very much do not have the option not to write things down. I cannot remember my ass or my elbow without writing things down. Having ADHD just be like that sometimes.

But I’m gonna also say that a lot of it is about scrolling media that’s visual instead of written. If you watch tik Tok and post photos or scroll photos instead of content where things are written and require other people to read, you get stuff like this.

When I was a kid there was a poll about what kind of books kids liked to read. An overwhelming majority of those kids selected that they did not like to read (and this was before full fledged internet service in every home and cell phones in every pocket).

So you’re right that you don’t get better at what you don’t practice, but I think there’s more to it than “people don’t write things down anymore”.

Advertisements have changed a lot in my lifetime and I don’t keep good track of the why even though I recognize that there have been definite changes. Sorry for the confusion.

Yeah there is and you’re correct that I was mistaken to some extent but I’m not going to rehash it here. There’s a longer comment explaining that I made to the original user who responded to me that you can read if you’re interested but it’s… A lot.

So we sort of did but not for the reasons you’d think. Not for the reasons I thought at least.

Specifically there used to be a time when there was ad placement in movies and tv literally all the time. But more often than not now a days this doesn’t happen that way because companies that have trade marked logos or symbols don’t want to allow their products to be used without getting paid a licensing fee and companies that would use this kind of product placement don’t want to pay the licensing fee which is why in the late 80’s and early 90’s there was a rise in blurring logos and brand names in media. There’s also the risk of certain licensing agreements not being legitimate for certain markets which can lead to blurring of the same type or it’s newer counterpart which involves using stickers or off brand styling instead.

But also some other countries do ban it. China apparently instituted such a ban in 2011.

But anyway I got confused because around the same time there was a ban on certain products being allowed to advertise in movies and directly in tv shows (cigarettes/tabacco products, alcoholic beverage brands, guns etc). I was exhausted and wrong and that’s on me.

Didn’t we stop allowing overt advertising in movies and music videos for a reason?

lt feels like there’s two separate issues: whether children should be allowed on social media, and how age verification should be implemented.

Let’s take that at face value. There are portions of the internet that children absolutely shouldn’t have access to and that varies depending on age. But since this is about social media, let’s be realistic here. If it’s ‘bad’ for everyone regardless of age it should in theory just be banned outright? Or is this subjective. Is the fediverse better than Facebook and Instagram for the average teen?

How age verification should be implemented and how it is being "implemented’’ are two very different things and the main take away there is thus far it has been implemented by people with no technical knowledge of how such a thing should be implemented, and who have a vested interest in using any such framework for surveillance of the general population. Since we cannot trust them to do one without the other there should be a third option. What’s the third option? I have suggestions but people generally don’t like them.

It’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned about privacy, data collection, and mission creep. Those are legitimate concerns that any age-verification scheme should address. But it doesn’t follow that because some verification methods are bad, we should abandon the goal of keeping children off social media.

The fact is I would challenge the people of Lemmy to show me where this has been implemented thus far that they do address privacy concerns (lip service doesn’t count). I have yet to see a government entity the world over who has done this properly.

People here do try to address them and brainstorm them here all the time and there are many suggestions but the fact is none of those ideas are being used because the entities implementing them are not doing it for the reasons they say they are and the suggestions directly impact their ability to use such apparatus for their true purpose.

The fact that platforms already prohibit under-13s isn’t much of an argument when everyone knows those rules are routinely ignored. If a law is unenforced and ineffective, pointing to its existence doesn’t solve the problem.

Why is that law unenforceable and what makes this law particularly more enforceable?

You also seem to assume that age verification necessarily means handing social media companies copies of passports and driving licences. It doesn’t have to. There are privacy-preserving approaches where a third party verifies age and only returns a yes/no answer. Whether those systems are good enough is a fair debate, but it’s not accurate to suggest that the only option is mass identity collection by Facebook and similar companies.

I am aware that it doesn’t have to, but I am also aware that so far it has generally done that, either by providing that information to a third party for verification or by requiring the use of biometric data to do the same. For the same reason I don’t want my or my kids ID being uploaded to a cloud service for verification, I also don’t want my or my child’s face scans being sent to entities that will face no repercussions when they fail to safeguard that information. Doesn’t matter if that third party is a government service or not.

I also don’t think it’s fair to characterise supporters of these measures as advocating government overreach or surveillance. Many parents simply look at the evidence around addictive design, bullying, self-harm content, and compulsive usage among children and conclude that some form of restriction is justified. They may be wrong about the solution, but they’re not necessarily indifferent to privacy or civil liberties

They do though either because they are unaware of what such measures actually entail/how enforceable they are, and think that it sounds good so it must be good, or because they are willing to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of the children possibly because they believe there’s no other way. I didn’t make a statement in favor of such measures without looking into it but lots of people do.

Finally, if we accept that social media companies have failed to make their products safe for children, then regulation becomes the obvious next question. Saying that platforms should design better products doesn’t tell us what to do when they don’t.

I don’t think most social media companies failed so much as they did exactly what they set out to do. They want their products to be addictive and bad for you because they can keep you in that loop using their products if they do and that means they can profit off all the information they already collect about you. And they want to start their users as early and young as possible because that maximizes their ability to gather information and sell ad space.

But further, why is it that laws prohibiting access to social media for those 13 and under are routinely ignored? If they already can’t enforce the law they have, what makes this law more enforceable?

Why don’t they develope and enforce laws about parental control use? Why not limit the access parents are allowed to give their children to the internet?

Why not educate people as a whole on internet use, parental controls, and social media literacy/ social media data collection?

Why not use anonymized tokens instead of ID verification or facial recognition/biometric data collection?

Why not outlaw addictive algorithms in social media will stop?

This isn’t me saying that governments shouldn’t make laws to regulate social media or protect their people, including their children. It’s me noting that they are going about it the way they are because they have an ulterior motive that cannot be achieved without invasive data collection that violates privacy.

A ten year old was already barred from using this social media. Generally you have to be over the age of 13 to engage with these social media platforms.

But the big take away here is that instead of these platforms making their product not-addictive and generally safer, they will use this as an opportunity to force legislation that allows them more access to everyone’s personal information (and invades everyone’s privacy) because the law says they have to to enforce age verification to "protect children’. And since that data is their main product that they sell outright or sell access to for ad aggregation, and because they have proven to be incredibly bad as anonymizing and safeguarding that information, this is literally worse for everyone, especially children who’s data is valuable because they don’t have bad credit or other marks on their identities yet and that means their identities (if stolen and used for illegal activities) can detrimentally effect them for the rest of their lifetime.

That’s what you’re advocating for when you agree with this kind of government overreach. The companies have this worked out. When your identity is stolen they give you some credit monitoring and go on operating as if nothing happened. Maybe (and that maybe is doing Atlas levels of heavy lifting here) they end up in a class action lawsuit and the people affected get $12.

I have seen literally no ID verification law that combats this or addresses it in any way. And that’s before we get to governments using this to surveil the general populace.

Okay?

Ok. Palworld (a pocket monster style game like Digimon or Pokemon) released in 2024. Some people claimed it stole assets from Pokemon (or heavily plagiarized them). This has since been debunked but continues to be a bone of contention for some.

Nintendo decided to sue for patent infringement based on game mechanics (not monster design), and apply for new patents on game mechanics like mounts/creature riding mechanics, and the ability to catch creatures to enable the lawsuit against the developer of Palworld, Pocketpair.

This lawsuit has been ongoing for a couple of years now and in that time, Pocketpair have made changes to Palworld to further differentiate their game’s mechanics from Pokemon games in order to mitigate the damages from the lawsuit.

If you are so inclined you can read more about it here:

https://www.ip-brief.com/blogs/nintendo-is-wrong-on-one-patent-claim-against-palworld

I think they mean approximate chrome users. There’s about 3.8 billion of them.

Firefox has a user base of approximately 150 million users (and that’s down from 206 million in like 2024).