I have serious doubts about any voters, anywhere in the world, repealing any laws like this:

• Most people like laws that let them avoid responsibility
• Most people are, or have been, parents at some point
• Most parents will offload the responsibility onto “the government” instead of admitting to poor parenting

This kind of act of insubordination, the way it is framed, I’m afraid is likely to meet the opposition of most people.

In whose eyes? They have lobbyists backing them, and a general public who doesn’t know any better, or care to know.

Exposing the stupidity is a great goal, running headfirst into the “Who will think of the children!1!!” wall… not so much.

AB 1043 passed the California Assembly 76–0 and the Senate 38–0. Not a single legislator voted against it.

1798.503. (a) A person that violates this title shall be subject to an injunction and liable for a civil penalty of not more than two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) per affected child for each negligent violation or not more than seven thousand five hundred dollars ($7,500) per affected child for each intentional violation

This device does not collect, store, or transmit the age of its user. This is intentional.

Is there any reason to believe they won’t want to make an example out of intentional violators?

Yes, I get that they may want verification with government ID… but unless they do it at a firmware level, anything above a FOSS Linux kernel on my own unlocked hardware, is fully under my control.

So far, it sounds to me like “age verif theatre” as applied to single user “jailbroken” systems. If they added this on a locked down Android system, as a requirement for network access (note: this is an actual proposal being floated around) then that would be of some concern… but systemd? 🤨

QUESTION: if I run my own system with local accounts, full root access, and no remote accounts… why should I care about whether systemd “MAY BE ABLE” to store someone’s date of birth?

Sounds to me like, for all I care, they could add fields for ethnicity, religion, d size, political orientation, colonic maps, or whatever else they want.

If it’s to build systems shared with underage family members, schools, or other public system… I personally DGAF.

What are those dream cycle and memory consolidation it’s using?

AGI sounds like BS (by definition)… but what’s behind the buzzword? This guy is supposed to be smart, might as well have built some stuff around an LLM that makes it leap forward.

Don’t like Fortnite? Think Roblox is bad? …and all the remaining points?

Wait until you see the future of gaming, coming to Xbox:

Muse, a Generative AI Model for Gameplay Ideation

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2025/02/19/muse-ai-xbox-empowering-creators-and-players/

Not a matter of “dignity”, but for me it depends:

• If I’m really interested in a game, and the difficulty proves to be too high from the beginning, or can be changed at any time… then I would try a lower setting.
• If I had already invested some time into playing it, and the difficulty proved to be too high… then I would rather abandon the game rather than start from scratch with a lower setting.

Chances are though, that changing the difficulty after some time playing, would feel like a total nerf, and I would abandon it anyways.

Same way I feel about non-cosmetic purchases. I made the mistake of falling for some back in the day, and shortly after abandoned the games… because they felt much less like a challenge, and too much like a pointless money grab. My current limit on micro-transactions is either fewer than 3, or $1.

What if inflation goes down?

Price × 1.05 × 1.03 × 1.01… is still larger than the initial price.

Unless there is deflation, prices always go up.

Next campaign:

“Save the games, save the CHILDREN!”

• Let your children have a better childhood
• Play your favorite childhood games with them
• Don’t let publishers decide what’s best for your children
• Make sure your children can play the games with their children
• Childhood is the time to play, think of the children!

…wonder how successful that would be.

In their email, Jagex management also told staff: “[…] Our job is not to use the game as an outlet for our own views, but to craft worlds that serve our players, offering immersion, escape and meaning.

Well, isn’t that some of the best BS contortionist corpospeak I’ve seen in some time…

Fun fact: you can get a machine to do that, for about the price of 3 games. It will even last longer than the games.

Let me know when stuff is no longer locked behind a “Battle Pass”.

I got pretty much all the cosmetics in OW1 without paying for a single lootbox, and definitely refuse to pay for the privilege of FOMO.

what do people use discord for exactly?

Too much.

It’s a chat platform geared towards gamers, with voice chat, screen sharing, and streaming options… that’s been coopted by vloggers… but most unsettlingly, it’s being used for customer support and documentation.

A lot of knowledge bases are buried in the walled garden of servers, and a labyrinth of chat rooms.

what is gone, exactly?

By adding support for alternate stores, the monopoly argument is gone: everyone can build their own store now. Meaning, everyone with a store can kick out anyone else, and tell them to just build their own.

comply with their own ToS

…which they can change at any moment, but don’t really need to; most ToS include clauses about refusing service without having to explain why. If you ever agree to a ToS, better make sure they’re even supposed to notify you if they ever decide to cut you off.

Read the case, the whole thing started because Google banned Epic from the Play store, and the only reason for it to become a case, was the monopolistic position. That’s gone now, they’re free to refuse service to whoever they want, whenever they want, for no reason at all… and if you don’t agree, go sue them, they’ll show you the precedent followed by the door.

I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can’t even do because I don’t run Google Play Services

Spoiler: you can use the LÖVE loader to run the “PC version” of Balatro on Android, since it’s all written in Lua.

They don’t ban the entire company from distributing any software.

They can do whatever, it’s their store.

Keep in mind that Epic Games v. Google has made Google add features to allow alternative app stores on Android… which automatically removes the monopoly argument and lets Google ban anyone they want from the Google Play store.

game without [being exhausted of the] screen

There is your answer: if screens exhaust you, do something without screens.

Games are supposed to give you a good time, reinvigorate you, and prepare for your “real life”. If you’re sick of screens, then pick up pottery, or squash, or hiking, or skydiving, or cooking, or… thousands of activities out there to have a good time without a screen.

having a huge backlog

That’s work. Just don’t. Do stuff that makes you feel better, not just tick a box in a backlog so you feel slightly less bad.

“Right of withdrawal” is quite easy: allow cancelling the transaction before the in-game content has actually been used.

It only takes a “has been used” flag, and maybe a log entry to prove when.