I think there could be reasons a government/people would want loot boxes to be not allowed that don’t relate to gambling and/or kids. I know there were some people that said “think of the kids!” when the discussion was going on, but my point is that there may not be direct overlap because the implementation and its effects are greater than simply disabling the ability to buy loot boxes in a particular region.

The loot box issue is more like telling a vape company that they can sell oils as long as they don’t contain THC. This issue is more like saying, “You can sell the THC oils in any market or store, but every market and store in the country must check every item every user wants to buy for the presence of THC by to sending an image of that product to an AI that will tell you whether or not the user needs an age check to buy the item. If they do, the user cannot buy the item unless you take a photo of the user’s ID and send it to some random company that will use the photo to verify the user is allowed to use THC.”

It’s an entirely higher level of complication and risk, so I’d excuse the “think of the kids” people that went after loot boxes in this particular case. But I’d also be curious about how much “think of the kids” overlap there is anyway.

I didn’t mention any other cases because I didn’t know which specific issues you were referencing other than loot boxes. I wasn’t sure which social media content you were referring to, but you can imagine how I’d view it if it’s something like chat control or any other system relying on AI or age verification to control access.

Also, the lower the taboo of the item being accessed, the more generous I am with these things. I still don’t like it, but no one is going to be ashamed if their love of loot boxes is leaked, for instance.

That’s when you take a break and let someone else deal with it until you’re ready again. Or focus on a different fight and let that one go. You’re irreplaceable, but your participation in that specific fight is not essential.

I hope you can find a break. I get tired of it, too. Sometimes just not reading the news or social media for a while is enough to recharge. The news and online commentary makes it impossible to even get small breaks that would’ve been common two decades ago and the consumption of it all can be exhausting enough to prevent us from taking any other actions.

I wonder how much it has to do with the success and subsequent loss of this operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield

Because it seems like a lot of countries in the west are pushing this kind of thing rover the last several years and there’s a heavy push right now. https://www.privacyguides.org/videos/2025/12/16/taylor-lorenz-on-kosa-the-screen-act-and-repealing-section-230/

I did not downvote but you’re asserting several things that you can’t possibly know. 1. War with China is coming. 2. It will inevitably be nuclear. 3. This is being done to prevent people from protesting when #1 & 2 occur.

None of those other things should require any sort of identity or age verification, though. In the case of loot boxes, government should be able to tell companies, “hey, you can’t sell that here”. In the case of age verification and nudity scanning there’s a whole host of issues from the fact that people don’t find loot boxes to be taboo or embarrassing to the fact that people do find nudity and porn embarrassing, to the fact that any scanning systems will false flag, to questions about who has access to the data that is submitted and how long it is stored, to how easy it could be to misuse the systems to go after disadvantaged groups (we all know LGBT content will intentionally be covered by this, whether they’re open about it or not, right?), to whether or not the system will be used for other purposes that either aren’t being said aloud or won’t be realized until after it’s implemented.

Every person against this sort of thing that checks out is just giving them less resistance. It sucks to have to deal with it, and it’s a constant fight, but you’re not just fighting for yourself.

Your Pokémon comparison reminds me of something I’ve noticed with gaming. Sometimes the game just has to hit me at the right time, regardless of nostalgia. I’ve had games that I bounced off of multiple times, then years later I decide to give it a go and get sucked in. I’m fairly sure this sometimes happens due to other factors in my life at the time (situations I’m currently experiencing, things I haven’t experienced, etc.).

For me, personally, these games are the closest thing on a computer to a nearly endless sandbox tabletop rpg experience. I don’t like having to do some grand “save the world” narrative that RPGs push you into, and in Skyrim I can avoid it after the intro or mod it out. Then I create characters like a tabletop RPG (I develop a backstory and where I choose to go and what I choose to do is based on the character’s personality in my mind) and essentially play it like it is a solo tabletop game where the engine takes care of a lot of the work.

I haven’t played in years, though, because I can’t get the same level of immersion as I did when playing for 5 hours straight before having kids.

Some just want money.

I think this article: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17043978/uk-porn-age-verification-law-mindgeek

Is about pornhub’s parent company trying to lobby in favor of this because it thought it could make money by selling age verification. I read an article saying something to that effect quite some time ago, and I think this is the article, but can’t be sure because it’s requiring a login and the archive site isn’t loading for me at the moment.

Mine died during Covid lockdown while I was in another country on lockdown. I don’t do well with those sorts of interactions either. We didn’t have the relationship you seem to have had with yours, but I do wish I had been able to be present for just a little time, if nothing else. It takes me a long time to process things anyway and I think it’s probably taken me until this year to feel like I understand him better. I suspect he had the same issue with interactions as me and would’ve wanted me there, but wouldn’t have been able to say it (doubly so, since he had lost the ability to speak by the time I knew he was going to die).

If they work anything like the far right in the U.S., they’ll raise hell about it til they get elected then implement it themselves.

Scrolling to the right is also slow as hell with this. It used to scroll across several videos at once but now it scrolls one per swipe.

I stopped using the main page and started using the subscriptions page, which still has the smaller icons. I’m using YouTube a lot less, though.

The more data they have, the more accurate the picture. You may be underestimating how much we all change over the years. At 24 you know what your parents taught you and maybe have a degree. You probably aren’t married. You probably don’t have kids. You probably don’t have any diseases (that you know of).

At 30, maybe you’re married and they’re collecting information about that. At 35 you’ve changed careers and gained or lost a religion. Maybe you have children (now they’re adding info on your children). Maybe you’ve found out that you are diabetic or bipolar. Maybe you’ve had two car accidents. At 40 you’ve cast off a lot of the demands of your parents. Maybe you get divorced. Maybe you realize you’re gay or trans. Maybe you become invested in a different type of politics. Maybe you change careers again. Maybe the bipolar diagnosis gets removed as a misdiagnosis. Maybe now you’ve had cancer.

Imagine how much less they’d have on you (and your children) at 45 if you had cut them off at 24.

I made a habit of getting drunk before trying new foods. I’m not sure I’m healthier as a result. I eat a larger variety of healthier foods now (mostly vegetables), but I’m still anxious about eating with people I don’t know really well because I don’t like a lot of common foods that aren’t particularly healthy.

The other upside is that trying different things gave me ideas for how to cook and season vegetables that I didn’t like in ways that I would like them, which opened up that whole arena a lot more. My mom usually served canned vegetables with pepper and it gave me a bad idea of what vegetables could be. Then again, maybe having those bad experiences early on made it easier for the good ones to take later.

I love the idea of GoG, but it’s also the only client that forces me to pay in local currency with local taxes when I travel too. Have to use a VPN and change my time zone in settings to get it to let me pay in USD. Steam does it based on billing address and card.

I avoided signing up for years because I thought it would lead to us only owning a revokable digital license to every new game. Oh how the turn tables.

Some of those mean the more people that use anti facial recognition tools, the more effective they will be for everyone. So we should probably just encourage everyone to use it.

Next up: give the government the power to activate any internet-connected camera to have an AI scan for child abuse. It’s not invasive because humans only review it if the AI thinks it’s found something!

I’ve read that the encryption keys are stored on Google servers. If so, they could decrypt them if they wanted.

A while back I tried to create an account with vpn and got notice that said something about how I couldn’t use it to validate other accounts without validating that account because other companies had threatened to label them as untrustworthy or spam.