I absolutely agree that Farmville had a bigger impact, especially as it was geared towards a more casual market. Showing that people who would not describe themselves as gamers would spend a lot of money on games was a huge thing that a lot of people set out to copy.

WoW is a stepping stone, it’s used as a frequent example in Reality is Broken, which is good place to start if you want to understand where all this comes from, as well as the rather utopian hope psychologists had at the time.

The thing with coin-ops, and arcades in general, is that you still had to physically go somewhere, and have the coins to keep playing. If you walked away, someone would take the machine. Worst case scenario, the machine stopped working when it ran out of coin/token space.

I’m not denying that there are similarities, and that ultimately every game ever has been built on a fundamental mechanic of risk/reward, but it was rudimentary and broadly speaking deterministic and visible to the user (you knew how to get a free ball in most pinball games, for example).

The combination of easy payments, of very high amounts, and online competitive play where the high rollers can be multi-millionaires from anywhere in the world, and a pay-to-win mechanic makes certain modern games not just addictive, but financially crippling, if played by someone susceptible to addiction.

I don’t want to be all old man yells at cloud, but back in my day popular games were played a lot because they were primarily enjoyable for the story, the achievement of completing a particular level or boss, playing against friends, etc. And sure, you’d have the odd bad parent trying to claim their kid was addicted to Counterstrike 1.6, but it was broadly speaking nonsense. The vast majority of games were offline, or had very limited online modes built around direct competition with other players (FPS, sports games, etc), and publishers would get all their money from the initial sale, with only a few games having expansion packs, most notable The Sims.

But in the early 2010s a few things changed:

• broadband internet became ubiquitous in markets with high levels of existing gamers
• distribution of games swapped from physical media to downloads
• ‘everyone’ had a pretty powerful computer in their pocket making it much more accessible
• a bunch of people in the industry started reading about positive psychology - the idea that you can create habits through rewards - and apply them to video games to increase playtime
• those mechanics turned out to be very powerful in driving particular user behaviours, and started to be targeted at monetisation models - and so we got loot boxes, etc

So we went from a situation where video games were fun for the same reasons traditional games, or sports, are fun, to one where many video games include a lot of gambling mechanics in their core gameplay loops - loot boxes being the obvious one, but any lottery-based mechanic where you spend real money counts - in an industry with no relevant regulation, nor age limitation.

It is definitely possible for people to get addicted to these mechanics, the same way people can get addicted to casino games, or betting on horse racing, especially when for some games that is literally what the developer wants.

Literally not how it works at all. Generations are defined on the year you were born, not who you were born to.

Mick Jagger was born in 1943, making him part of the Silent Generation. When his wife had their latest kid, in 2016, Jagger was 73. That child is not a baby boomer.

You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation#List_of_named_generations

To be Gen Alpha you must be the child of Gen Z who had to be the child of Millennials.

This is not true. I’m a millennial (1989) but my parents are boomers (1950s), not Gen X, as are the vast majority of my friends. Not everyone has kids in their early 20s, infact the average age to have your first kid in the UK is 29.

I don’t recall the last time a human was able to create something that could not be expressed in previously existing words at all.

It’s called outsider art.

Even if AI only trained on non-copyrighted art, this would still be true. It might set the AI companies back a year or two

If this is true then they have no excuse to continue to consume copywritten content. Given the extreme pushback from the companies involved, I think is clear that this isn’t true.

Since all people mix together ideas they’ve learned from their own input to create new things, just like AI does, then all people-produced content should also be inherently uncopyrightable, unless produced by a person who has never been exposed to copyrighted content.

While copyright and IP law at present is massively broken, this is a very poor interpretation of the core argument at play.

Let me break it down:

• Yes, all human created art takes significant influence - purposefully, and accidently - from work which has come before it
• To have been influenced by that piece, legally, the human will have had to pay the copyright holder to; go to the cinema, buy the bluray, see the performance, go to the gallery, etc. Works out of copyright obviously don’t apply here.
• To be trained in a discipline, the human likely pays for teaching by others, and those others have also paid copyright holders to view the media that influenced them aswell
• Even thought the vast majority of art is influenced by all other art, humans are capable of novel invention- ie things which have not come before - but GenAI fundamentally isn’t.

Separately, but related, see the arguments the Pirate Parties used to make about personal piracy being OK, which were fundamentally down to an argument of scale:

• A teenager pirating some films to watch cos they are interested in cinema, and being inspired to go to film school is very limited in scope. Even if they pirate hundreds of films, it can’t be argued that it’s 100 lost sales because the person may have never bought them anyway.
• A GenAI company consuming literally all artistic output of humanity, with no payment to the artists what so ever, “learning” to create “new” art, without paying for teaching, and spitting out whatever is asked of it, is massive copyright infringement on the consumption side, and an existential threat to the arts on the generation side

That’s the reason people are complaining, cos they aren’t being paid today, and they won’t be paid tomorrow.

As is covered in the article, explaining the environmental impact of SUVs to SUV owners does not change their mind or encourage them to get a different car; it is effectively ignored.

So that is where ideas like the deflators come in, you make it more inconvenient, maybe that will work where polite discussion did not.

Offsetting aside, the claimed carbon emissions of 7-12kg CO2e feels super low for a smart watch.

For comparison, this recipe of Tomatoes and Chickpeas on toast, when eaten in season from local produce, claims to reduce the carbon emission of the single meal by ~2.5kg, and this article would suggest that a single serloin steak is 5-10kg of CO2e.

I know eating beef is high impact, but basically the same as a smart watch which requires mining of precious metals and numerous transcontinental shipments? Not a chance.

Just imagine all the ads you can watch, while looking out at the sea with a morning coffee! Bliss!

Exactly - and it’s that which makes Leia the only disney princess which matters.

That’s like saying professional porn got rid of amateur / “real” sex porn. It didn’t.

There will always be a demand for real humans actually doing the thing depicted. While I’m sure there will be very popular AI production houses, similar to hentai, etc, if you think AI generated porn will completely remove the desire for humans from performing, then you do not understand why people watch porn.

Close? Pull the other one.

And that’s long before we get the ethical quandary of sourcing training data, and implicit biases.

It’s not magic.

I agree that pornhub, et al, should be liable for abuse their platform distributes, but how on earth is AI meant to help in sex trafficking?

I get that, and I don’t want to use cars as a good example because they aren’t, but even car manufacturers have less restrictive policies than Apple is pushing here.

It would still be wrong to invalidate the warranty for the reasons you give, but it’s still better than this.

Completely understandable.

The way I often describe it is if I was wanting to buy a mid-range phone with the technical specs of a fairphone, I’d buy something cheaper with the same specs.

But if I’m happy to spend over £600 on a phone - which imo is absolutely at the luxury end of pricing - then I’m looking more at overal quality, and the combination of repairability, fair(er) sourced materials, etc, makes it better.

However why anyone would spend a grand plus on a phone is absolutely beyond me.

I can understand Apple refusing to do repairs under warranty, or even invalidating a warranty, if someone has broken their phone after digging around inside without knowing what they are doing, but bricking a phone the person owns through a software lock is absolutely insane and stinks of attempts at service capture and fighting right to repair laws.

Yet another reason I’ll never give them a penny.

Fairphone gang rise up!

I’m guessing they don’t feel the time to do a fair re-review is worth it on older devices with less, but higher than 0, new users.

Most people who are interested in those devices already have them, so a change in score doesn’t really make a difference.