Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Massive Study Detects AI Fingerprints In Millions of Scientific Papers
  2. People Are Using AI Chatbots To Guide Their Psychedelic Trips
  3. Tennis Players Criticize AI Technology Used By Wimbledon
  4. Fubo Pays $3.4 Million To Settle Claims It Illegally Shared User Data With Advertisers
  5. Apple Just Added More Frost To Its Liquid Glass Design
  6. The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
  7. Waymo Starts Robotaxi Testing In Philadelphia and NYC
  8. Jack Dorsey Launches a WhatsApp Messaging Rival Built On Bluetooth
  9. Samsung and Epic Games Call a Truce In App Store Lawsuit
  10. Nintendo Wants To Keep ‘Traditional Approach’ To Development as Costs Skyrocket
  11. New Delhi Forced To Withdraw Plan To Scrap Old Cars After Public Backlash
  12. BRICS Demand Wealthy Nations Fund Global Climate Transition
  13. The Downside of a Digital Yes-Man
  14. Apple Links Directly To Web in Full-Screen TV App Ad, Ignoring Rules for Other Developers
  15. Netflix Says 50% of Global Users Now Watch Anime

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

Massive Study Detects AI Fingerprints In Millions of Scientific Papers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
A team of U.S. and German researchers analyzed over 15 million biomedical papers and found that AI-generated content has subtly infiltrated academic writing, with telltale stylistic shifts — such as a rise in flowery verbs and adjectives. “Their investigation revealed that since the emergence of LLMs there has been a corresponding increase in the frequency of certain stylist word choices within the academic literature,” reports Phys.Org. “These data suggest that at least 13.5% of the papers published in 2024 were written with some amount of LLM processing.” From the report:
The researchers modeled their investigation on prior COVID-19 public-health research, which was able to infer COVID-19’s impact on mortality by comparing excess deaths before and after the pandemic. By applying the same before-and-after approach, the new study analyzed patterns of excess word use prior to the emergence of LLMs and after. The researchers found that after the release of LLMs, there was a significant shift away from the excess use of “content words” to an excess use of “stylistic and flowery” word choices, such as “showcasing,” “pivotal,” and “grappling.”

By manually assigning parts of speech to each excess word, the authors determined that before 2024, 79.2% of excess word choices were nouns. During 2024 there was a clearly identifiable shift. 66% of excess word choices were verbs and 14% were adjectives. The team also identified notable differences in LLM usage between research fields, countries, and venues.
The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

I liked figure 5

By test321 • Score: 3 Thread

* Technical fields (Computation, Environment, Healthcare) are more affected than Humanities (Ethics, Rehabilitation, Ecology)
* Countries Taiwan, Iran, Thailand, most affected; English-speaking countries less affected, UK least affected.
* mid/low-range publishers (MDPI, Frontiers) more affected than more prestigious houses (Nature, Cell)

All this paints picture of entry-level authors who are not comfortable with the language (for being non-native, and for working in non-humanities fields). In this case, LLMs come to replace paid correction services that authors in certain countries in particular Asia had to use to get their works through.

questions about use

By pz • Score: 3 Thread

We use AI to help with paper writing in my lab, mostly because there are only two native English speakers, and it relieves me, the lab head (and one of the two native speakers), of having to do extensive copy-editing in order to make stilted English more readable. I still read every word that gets published from the lab, but using AI for copy-editing is no different from using a human-based writing service to fix poor language. It’s just cheaper and orders of magnitude faster.

So, for us, the response would be a big, “so what?” to this report.

But, if people are starting to use AI to write entire papers, that’s a different story. My experience is that current models hallucinate ideas and, especially, references, at far, far to high a rate to be seriously useful as anything other than a tool that requires full, manual verification. I half-jokingly say that if a paper is hallucinated, that means the AI was unable to find the right citation, and it represents a gap in the field’s knowledge that we could address. The amazing thing about the hallucinations is how convincingly real they sound: the right authors, the right titles, the right journals. These are publications that *should* exist, but don’t, at least in my experience.

As a most recent example, when writing a grant application, I tried to find citations using an LLM for an idea that is widely-held in the field. Everyone knows it to be true. It’s obvious that it should be true. And, yet, there have been no publications as of yet that have actually discussed the idea, so the LLM dutifully hallucinated a citation with exactly the author list you would expect to have studied the question, a title that hits the nail on the head, and a journal exactly where you might expect the paper to appear. I’ve told my staff that we need to get that paper written and submitted, immediately, to fill that obvious gap, before someone else does. It will likely be cited widely.

People Are Using AI Chatbots To Guide Their Psychedelic Trips

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired:
Trey had struggled with alcoholism for 15 years, eventually drinking heavily each night before quitting in December. But staying sober was a struggle for the 36-year-old first responder from Atlanta, who did not wish to use his real name due to professional concerns. Then he discovered Alterd, an AI-powered journaling app that invites users to “explore new dimensions” geared towards psychedelics and cannabis consumers, meditators, and alcohol drinkers. In April, using the app as a tripsitter — a term for someone who soberly watches over another while they trip on psychedelics to provide reassurance and support — he took a huge dose of 700 micrograms of LSD. (A typicalrecreational doseis considered to be 100 micrograms.) “I went from craving compulsions to feeling true freedom and not needing or wanting alcohol,” he says.

He recently asked the app’s “chat with your mind” function how he had become more wise through all his AI-assisted psychedelic trips. It responded: “I trust my own guidance now, not just external rules or what others think. I’m more creative, less trapped by fear, and I actually live by my values, not just talk about them. The way I see, reflect, and act in the world is clearer and more grounded every day.” “It’s almost like your own self that you’re communicating with,” says Trey, adding he’s tripped with his AI chatbot about a dozen times since April. “It’s like your best friend. It’s kind of crazy.”
The article mentions several different chatbot tools and AI systems that are being used for psychedelic therapy.
ChatGPT: “Already, many millions of people are using ChatGPT on a daily basis, and the developments may have helped democratize access to psychotherapy-style guidance, albeit in a dubious Silicon Valley style with advice that is often flush with untruths,” reports Wired. The general-purpose AI chatbot is being used for emotional support, intention-setting, and even real-time guidance during psychedelic trips. While not designed for therapy, it has been used informally as a trip companion, offering customized music playlists, safety reminders, and existential reflections. Experts caution that its lack of emotional nuance and clinical oversight poses significant risks during altered states.

Alterd: Alterd is a personalized AI journal app that serves as a reflective tool by analyzing a user’s entries, moods, and behavior patterns. Its “mind chat” function acts like a digital subconscious, offering supportive insights while gently confronting negative habits like substance use. Users credit it with deepening self-awareness and maintaining sobriety, particularly in the context of psychedelic-assisted growth.

Mindbloom’s AI Copilot: Integrated into Mindbloom’s at-home ketamine therapy program, the AI copilot helps clients set pretrip intentions, process post-trip emotions, and stay grounded between sessions. It generates custom reflections and visual art based on voice journals, aiming to enhance the therapeutic journey even outside of human-guided sessions. The company plans to evolve the tool into a real-time, intelligent assistant capable of interacting more dynamically with users.

Orb AI/Shaman Concepts (Speculative): Conceptual “orb” interfaces imagine an AI-powered, shaman-like robot facilitating various aspects of psychedelic therapy, from intake to trip navigation. While still speculative, such designs hint at a future where AI plays a central, embodied role in guiding altered states. These ideas raise provocative ethical and safety questions about replacing human presence with machines in deeply vulnerable psychological contexts.

AI in Virtual Reality and Brain Modulation Systems: Researchers are exploring how AI could coordinate immersive virtual reality environments and brain-modulating devices to enhance psychedelic therapy. These systems would respond to real-time emotional and physiological signals, using haptic suits and VR to deepen and personalize the psychedelic experience. Though still in the conceptual phase, this approach represents the fusion of biotech, immersive tech, and AI in pursuit of therapeutic transformation.

Subject Matter Experts!

By fuzzyfuzzyfungus • Score: 3 Thread
LLMs seem like a fairly appropriate pick if hallucinations are the point of the exercise.

Tennis Players Criticize AI Technology Used By Wimbledon

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Wimbledon’s use of AI-powered electronic line-calling has sparked backlash from players who say the system made several incorrect calls, affecting match outcomes and creating accessibility issues. “This is the first year the prestigious tennis tournament, which is still ongoing, replaced human line judges, who determine if a ball is in or out, with an electronic line calling system (ELC),” notes TechCrunch. From the report:
British tennis star Emma Raducanu called out the technology for missing a ball that her opponent hit out, but instead had to be played as if it were in. On a television replay, the ball indeed looked out, the Telegraph reported. Jack Draper, the British No. 1, also said he felt some line calls were wrong, saying he did not think the AI technology was “100 percent accurate.”

Player Ben Shelton had to speed up his match after being told that the new AI line system was about to stop working because of the dimming sunlight. Elsewhere, players said they couldn’t hear the new automated speaker system, with one deaf player saying that without the human hand signals from the line judges, she was unable to tell when she won a point or not.

The technology also met a blip at a key point during a match this weekend between British player Sonay Kartal and the Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, where a ball went out, but the technology failed to make the call. The umpire had to step in to stop the rally and told the players to replay the point because the ELC failed to track the point. Wimbledon later apologized, saying it was a “human error,” and that the technology was accidentally shut off during the match. It also adjusted the technology so that, ideally, the mistake could not be repeated.

Debbie Jevans, chair of the All England Club, the organization that hosts Wimbledon, hit back at Raducanu and Draper, saying, “When we did have linesmen, we were constantly asked why we didn’t have electronic line calling because it’s more accurate than the rest of the tour.”

AI for what?

By ByTor-2112 • Score: 3 Thread

Why wouldn’t you use a light curtain? “AI” for no reason.

It should be very, very simple…

By Excelcia • Score: 3 Thread

You have a line judge, you have the AI. They each make a call. If they match, the game goes on. If there is a discrepancy, or if asked by a player to review, then the footage is reviewed and an umpire makes a final call. If and when conditions are not suitable for the AI system (low light), then the game proceeds as normal.

This whole either or is just dumb. Wimbledon wants to save $$$, and is positing it as a stark either-or in order to justify their decision. All it demonstrates is a lack of professionalism.

Fubo Pays $3.4 Million To Settle Claims It Illegally Shared User Data With Advertisers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Fubo has agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit (PDF) accusing it of illegally sharing users’ personally identifiable information and video viewing history with advertisers without consent, allegedly violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Ars Technica reports:
As reported by Cord Cutters News this week, instead of going to trial, Fubo reached a settlement agreement [PDF] that allows people who used Fubo before May 29, which is when Fubo last updated its privacy policy, to receive part of a $3.4 million settlement. The settlement agreement received preliminary approval on May 29, and users recently started receiving notice of their potential entitlement to some of the settlement. They have until September 12 to submit claims.
Fubo said in a statement: “We deny the allegations in the putative class lawsuit and specifically deny that we have engaged in any wrongdoing whatsoever. Fubo has nonetheless chosen to pursue a settlement for this matter in order to avoid the uncertainty and expense of litigation. We look forward to putting this matter behind us.”

Apple Just Added More Frost To Its Liquid Glass Design

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Following a week of X and YouTube complaints, Apple has further reduced the transparency of its Liquid Glass design in the latest iOS 26 developer beta, making navigation bars, buttons, and tabs more opaque to improve readability. The Verge reports:
“iOS 26 beta 3 completely nerfs Liquid Glass,” AppleTrack developer Sam Kohl says in a post on X. “It looks so much cheaper now and feels like Apple is backtracking on their original vision.” Others ask Apple to “stop ruining” Liquid Glass and call the new design a “step backwards.” Some users in the beta found that the transparency level can vary depending on the app they’re using.

This is still just a developer beta, so it’s likely that Apple will continue to make tweaks before it releases iOS 26 to the public in September.

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media:
For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a “program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies,” has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. […]

“Anubis is an uncaptcha,” Iaso explains on her site. “It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server.” Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human.

Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we’ve repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she’s working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users’ CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn’t require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. “The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives,” she said. “And also making sure that the people running the bots can’t figure out what pattern they’re hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they’re hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that’s like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario.”

Everything old is new again

By OverlordQ • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Hashcash was thought up back in 1997 for combatting spam.

Re:The internet is officially dead to me now

By Aristos Mazer • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

The summary went on to say that the developer is working on a new mechanism that doesn’t use JavaScript to help such users. Work in progress.

More Web enshittification

By vbdasc • Score: 3 Thread

Bye-bye Wayback Machine… It was a honor knowing you.

Waymo Starts Robotaxi Testing In Philadelphia and NYC

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Waymo has launched new “road trips” to Philadelphia and New York City, “signaling the Alphabet-owned company’s interest in expanding into Northeastern cities,” reports TechCrunch. While these trips don’t guarantee commercial launches, they follow a pattern that previously led to deployments in cities like Los Angeles. Other road trips this year are planned for Houston, Orlando, Las Vegas, San Diego, and San Antonio. From the report:
Typically, the trips involve sending a small fleet of human-driven vehicles equipped with Waymo’s autonomous driving system to map out the new city. Then Waymo tests the vehicles autonomously, though still with a human behind the wheel, before taking any data and learnings back to its engineers to improve the AI driver’s performance. In some cases, these road trips have led to commercial launches. In 2023, the company made a road trip to Santa Monica, a city in Los Angeles County. The company now operates a commercial service in Los Angeles, including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood.

For its Philadelphia trip, Waymo plans to place vehicles in the most complex parts of the city, including downtown and freeways, according to a spokesperson. She noted folks will see Waymo vehicles driving “at all hours throughout various Philadelphia neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, University City, and as far east as the Delaware River.”

In NYC, Waymo will drive its cars manually in Manhattan just north of Central Park down to The Battery and parts of Downtown Brooklyn. The company will also map parts of Jersey City and Hoboken in New Jersey. Waymo applied last month for a permit to test its AVs in New York City with a human behind the wheel. The company has not yet received approval.

Jack Dorsey Launches a WhatsApp Messaging Rival Built On Bluetooth

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Jack Dorsey has launched Bitchat, a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that uses Bluetooth mesh networks for encrypted, ephemeral chats without requiring accounts, servers, or internet access. The beta version is live on TestFlight, with a full white paper available on GitHub. CNBC reports:
In a post on X Sunday, Dorsey called it a personal experiment in “bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things.”

Bitchat enables ephemeral, encrypted communication between nearby devices. As users move through physical space, their phones form local Bluetooth clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range — even without Wi-Fi or cell service. Certain “bridge” devices connect overlapping clusters, expanding the mesh across greater distances. Messages are stored only on device, disappear by default and never touch centralized infrastructure — echoing Dorsey’s long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication.

Like the Bluetooth-based apps used during Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, Bitchat is designed to keep working even when the internet is blocked, offering a censorship-resistant way to stay connected during outages, shutdowns or surveillance. The app also supports optional group chats, or “rooms,” which can be named with hashtags and protected by passwords. It includes store and forward functionality to deliver messages to users who are temporarily offline. A future update will add WiFi Direct to increase speed and range, pushing Dorsey’s vision for off-grid, user-owned communication even further.

Re:This Is A Nonstarter

By DrMrLordX • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

People at a protest/rally.

Link shorteners? WTF?

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 3 Thread

Why on earth would you have to use a link shortener here, BeauHD? Give us the real link, directly, so we can see where we’re going (or choosing not to go).

Briar

By snookiex • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Mmm, what about Briar?

Finally, an app I can use!

By RitchCraft • Score: 3 Thread

I’m always wanting to bitch at someone for something. Now I can use Bitchat!

Re:This Is A Nonstarter

By JamesTRexx • Score: 4, Funny Thread

People at a protest/rally.

Hence the name BitchAt. :-p

Samsung and Epic Games Call a Truce In App Store Lawsuit

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Epic Games, buoyed by the massive success of Fortnite, has spent the last few years throwing elbows in the mobile industry to get its app store on more phones. It scored an antitrust win against Google in late 2023, and the following year it went after Samsung for deploying “Auto Blocker” on its Android phones, which would make it harder for users to install the Epic Games Store. Now, the parties have settled the case just days before Samsung will unveil its latest phones.

The Epic Store drama began several years ago when the company defied Google and Apple rules about accepting outside payments in the mega-popular Fortnite. Both stores pulled the app, and Epic sued. Apple emerged victorious, with Fortnite only returning to the iPhone recently. Google, however, lost the case after Epic showed it worked behind the scenes to stymie the development of app stores like Epic’s. Google is still working to avoid penalties in that long-running case, but Epic thought it smelled a conspiracy last year. It filed a similar lawsuit against Samsung, accusing it of implementing a feature to block third-party app stores. The issue comes down to the addition of a feature to Samsung phones called Auto Blocker, which is similar to Google’s new Advanced Protection in Android 16. It protects against attacks over USB, disables link previews, and scans apps more often for malicious activity. Most importantly, it blocks app sideloading. Without sideloading, there’s no way to install the Epic Games Store or any of the content inside it.

Auto Blocker is enabled by default on Samsung phones, but users can opt out during setup. Epic claimed in its suit that the sudden inclusion of this feature was a sign that Google was working with Samsung to stand in the way of alternative app stores again. Epic has apparently gotten what it wanted from Samsung — CEO Tim Sweeney has announced that Epic is dropping the case in light of a new settlement.
Sweeney said Samsung “will address Epic’s concerns,” without elaborating on the details. Samsung may stop making Auto Blocker the default or create a whitelist of apps, like the Epic Games Store, that can bypass Auto Blocker. Another possibility is that Epic and select third-party stores are granted special access while Auto Blocker remains on for others, balancing security and openness.
A “more interesting outcome,” according to Ars, would be for Samsung to pre-install the Epic Games Store on its new phones.

Nintendo Wants To Keep ‘Traditional Approach’ To Development as Costs Skyrocket

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Nintendo plans to maintain its "traditional approach" to game development while managing rising costs during the Switch 2 transition, company president Shuntaro Furukawa said during a recent shareholders meeting.

“Recent game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, resulting in higher development costs,” he said, adding that “rising development costs are increasing that risk” in what has always been “a high-risk business.”

Nintendo’s development teams are “currently devising various ways to maintain our traditional approach to creating games amidst the increasing scale and length of development,” Furukawa said. The company believes, he said, “it is important to make the necessary investments for more efficient development.”

The early Switch 2 lineup reflects increased ambition, with Mario Kart World introducing open-world structure to the racing series and Donkey Kong Bananza adding destructive elements to 3D platforming. Mario Kart World sells for $79.99, $10 more than most Nintendo games, while the Switch 2 costs $449.99, a $100 increase over the Switch OLED.

Thank fuck for Asia

By locater16 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
The west has gone and fucked itself right up the jacksie by ensuring the salesmen are in charge rather than people actually making the products. Salesmen want the biggest numbers, and since money is the only language they speak they assume that by spending more they can earn more. Thus every western game studio is ordered to spend more more more until 9/10 studios fail and everyone is fired, but by god that 1/10 are going to make so much money maybe so gamble today!

Meanwhile Japan and now China of all places has let people that actually make products be in charge of making products and has proven more consistently successful than the wests all or nothing billionaire high. While Microsoft commits accounting fraud over Gamepass and fires half its gaming division Nintendo remains at a net 25% profit margin and Sony has fired its brief experiment with a western crackhead CEO schilling “live service” titles and gone back to trying to consistently make money by producing products people reliably want.

Re:You get to pick how much you invest in the game

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Not really. Modern video games required complex pixel shaders to achieve the look they want. Nintendo games especially have a tough time because they need to be bright and colorful and full of pizzazz. You can’t just use off the shelf pixel shaders like you can with a unreal engine game.

I mean you can but everything will look like fortnite. Which isn’t to say that fortnite is a ugly game, but it’s a very specific style and if you copy it by using those default pixel shaders your game is going to look cheap.

This is a problem Japanese game studios have had for a long time. Going all the way back to Sonic boom where Sega tried to use the Cysis engine on the Wii u to disastrous results.

It’s just plain hard to make games look like the kind of fun bright colorful Japanese games the Japanese game players expect and want. That means you’ve got a lot of people doing a lot of work a lot of which doesn’t directly pay off.

And make matters worse they have to write for a underpowered system relatives of the ps5. The switch 2 is roughly equivalent to a PS4 pro. Which is a amazing technical feat in that form factor but it means that you’re going to have to put a lot more work into your optimizations to make the games look like people expect.

If you want to see what happens when you don’t have the money for that work look at Mario tennis or Star Fox on the Wii u. Both complete disasters.

bs

By blackomegax • Score: 4, Informative Thread
The switch 2 can run, at best, PS4(base) level graphics. That means your development costs can be cheap/AA since your graphics target is 1-2 generations behind (mariokart world is basically a 360-era graphics title with slightly better textures and DLSS higher res.)

High dev costs are in the truly ps5 era graphics tier where you need 16 layer PBR textures and 100,000 polygon assets everywhere and raytracing. Switch 2 can run none of that nor does it need to. (yes it has “RT” cores but you’d get, maybe 10-12fps if you turned RT on with that tiny tiny ampere GPU that’s basically half as powerful as a 2050 mobile.)

Re:You get to pick how much you invest in the game

By locater16 • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
Pretty graphics don’t cost much, there’s two people indie dev teams getting praised for making great looking games.

What costs money in games is a lot of unique art, and scrapping your entire game to start it over a lot. A Call of Duty campaign costs a lot of money for 5 hours because every level is both unique and filled with a ton of unique assets and has detailed motion capture from professional actors and a professional orchestral soundtrack and every last gun has a unique sound design and etc. etc. And on top of it all it kinda looks like crap because it’s stuck still making games for consoles over a decade old now.

As for scrapping your game over and over and over, that’s a hilarious habit of modern western developers that all get fired eventually. Ubisoft spent a decade making a pirate live service game called Skull and Bones that flopped because the company is run like dogshit. “Concord” is another one that cost over a hundred million, and was so generic and unspecial it was killed in less than a month.

“Pretty” isn’t expensive in games. But tailor made mass market monopolies and “stupid” certainly are.

Re:Mario Kart…

By jacks smirking reven • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

This phenonemon has it’s own slang term, the “Nintendo Tax” since Nintendo has complete control over their store so sales are rarely more than 10-20% on any titles, not even just first-party Nintendo titles. Even on the switch since the digital copies rarely go down in price there’s no pressure on the used market for the physical carts either so they stay high in price and Nintendo titles are in high demand as well.

At this point since so many have aped the Switch form factor it really is those exclusives like Mario Kart and Zelda and such that keeps Nintendo in the game so in regards to this story they are rightfully conservative about changing their development process, it’s really the only thing left keeping that ship afloat, if the quality tanks I imagine Nintendo goes with it.

New Delhi Forced To Withdraw Plan To Scrap Old Cars After Public Backlash

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Delhi’s government has been forced to reverse a controversial plan to effectively ban older vehicles from city roads after public backlash and concerns over how the policy would be implemented.

The plan would have seen “end of life vehicles” — petrol cars over 15 years old and diesel vehicles over 10 — denied fuel at petrol stations using automatic number plate recognition cameras, or ANPR, and, potentially, impounded on the spot.

The policy was set to come into effect this week but state environment minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said last week the government would halt the plan following widespread complaints. Mr Sirsa said the administration would not allow vehicles to be seized and cited “technological integration challenges” and a lack of coordination with neighbouring states sharing traffic with the capital.

Ten years?!

By bryanandaimee • Score: 5, Informative Thread
I don’t generally even buy a car until it’s about ten years old. Still usually get about ten more years out of it without any major repairs. Average age of a car in the US is 12 years. This was a stupid plan from the beginning. Even if you are worried about the environment, keeping a car on the road is likely to be better for the environment than scrapping it and buying a new one. There is a lot of life left in them thar cars.

Wrong approach

By ukoda • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
While I’m generally ok with banning new sales of polluting vehicles, while thinking it it is not needed, I think forcing people to give up their existing vehicles is unreasonable. If you want people to scrap their polluting vehicles give them a positive incentive instead, such as buying up and scrapping the worst polluter first, giving people a leg up to move to cleaner vehicle.

Age is not condition

By markdavis • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

>“The plan would have seen “end of life vehicles” — petrol cars over 15 years old "

15 years?? That is a RIDICULOUS policy! I just traded in a perfect condition, higher-end, 16 year old car, with 42,000 miles on it. “Age” of a vehicle doesn’t say much about its condition. And there haven’t been many breakthroughs in 16 years for pollution controls or safety (if that was the motive).

To do such a policy correctly would require some mileage component and probably also actual screening of the vehicle with objective metrics applied.

Re: Wrong approach

By silentbozo • Score: 5, Informative Thread

It arguably accomplished its goals of bailing out the major auto makers by forcing people to buy new cars (the “cash” was actually just a trade in credit - you couldn’t get rid of an old car without buying a new one.)

https://www.investopedia.com/t…

“The formal name for the program was the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS). The CARS program gave people who qualified a credit of up to $4,500, depending on the vehicle purchased and its improvement in fuel economy over the traded-in vehicle.”

Yes it punished poor people by destroying the traded in cars (not to mention saddling them with the debt of buying a new one if they couldn’t otherwise afford it.) This robbed the market not only of used cars for resale, but the parts to keep cars that weren’t traded in working (since the traded in cars had to be crushed, and the engines destroyed by deliberately seizing the engines.)

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/…

Re:Simple economics

By Kotukunui • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Poor people need cheap cars. Cheap to insure, fix and run. Low-cost mobility is at the foundation economic mobility and lifting yourself from poverty.

New cars are anything but.

India tried this with the Tata Nano. Designed to be one step up from a motor scooter, it was simple and inexpensive to build, run, and maintain. They were deeply unpopular as they they became a symbol of shameful poverty. It turned out that people would struggle and scrimp and save to aspirationally buy a used older model of a more prestigious brand rather than buying a brand-new pauper-mobile for the same money. People are strange…Nothing is simple.

BRICS Demand Wealthy Nations Fund Global Climate Transition

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Leaders of the BRICS group of developing nations addressed the shared challenges of global warming on Monday, the final day of their summit in Rio de Janeiro, demanding that wealthy nations fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations. From a report:
In his opening remarks, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will host the United Nations climate summit in November, also blasted denialism of the climate emergency, indirectly criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull his country out of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“Today, denialism and unilateralism are eroding past achievements and harming our future,” he said. “The Global South is in a position to lead a new development paradigm without repeating the mistakes of the past.” Trump took issue on Sunday with veiled criticism from the BRICS group, accusing the bloc of having “anti-American policies” and threatening them with extra 10% tariffs.

Re:Go BRICS!

By Entrope • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Demanding “Bribe us, you fucks” is not acting like an adult.

Pot, Meet Kettle

By ironicsky • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

BRICS
  Brazil
  Russia
  India
  China
  South Africa

China is responsible for 35% of all global greenhouse gas emissions
Between these countries, they represent over 55% of total global greenhouse gases

Brazil, China and India are also 3 of the top environmental destruction countries globally.
China, India and Russia and Brazil, as 4 countries have the same GDP as the USA.

Pay for your own mistakes yourself.

Re:Go BRICS!

By AleRunner • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

While I sympathize with the BRICS position.

Do we really? Brazil, perhaps. Currently India is financing and China is actively aiding in an invasion by Russia. Perhaps when Russia is stopped and removed from Ukraine and China and India pay for the restoration of the country to at least as good a state as it was before their pet attacked it, perhaps then we should consider paying something towards their needs. As it is now, the best thing to do is to fund the Ukrainian destruction of Russian oil and gas assets.

Re:Go BRICS!

By dbialac • Score: 5, Informative Thread
China has the second largest economy in the world and yet they’re still a developing nation? Russia hasn’t been a developing nation since the end of WWII and neither has South Africa, though both are working valiantly at reverting to being such.

Re: Go BRICS!

By Zocalo • Score: 5, Informative Thread
It does, but there’s a slight issue with that. In terms of the world’s largest economies by GDP the BRICS countries rate as:

#2: China
#4: India
#10: Brazil
#11: Russia (sanctions not withstanding)
#17: Indonesia
#28: United Arab Emirates
#38 South Africa
#42: Egypt
#44: Iran (again, despite the sanctions)
#66: Ethiopia

Now it’s not like these countries are doing absolutely nothing to mitigate things, but it would be really interesting to see some numbers on exactly how much of a proportionate contribution they are making to “fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations” when even lowly Ethiopia still has over 130 poorer nations to choose from.

The Downside of a Digital Yes-Man

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
alternative_right writes:
A study by Anthropic researchers on how human feedback can encourage sycophantic behavior showed that AI assistants will sometimes modify accurate answers when questioned by the user — and ultimately give an inaccurate response.

Apple Links Directly To Web in Full-Screen TV App Ad, Ignoring Rules for Other Developers

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Apple displayed a full-screen ad for “F1 The Movie” in its TV app that linked directly to a web browser for ticket purchases without showing warning screens that the company requires other developers to include when directing users outside their apps.

The “Buy Tickets” button sent users to the F1 movie website in their default browser without confirmation dialogs or interstitial warnings. Apple mandates that third-party developers show scare sheets when linking out of apps to sell digital content, but considers movie tickets a “real-world experience” exempt from its In-App Purchase system.

Further reading: iPhone Customers Upset By Apple Wallet Ad Pushing F1 Movie.

We’re effing you

By Big Hairy Gorilla • Score: 3 Thread
And you’re going to love it!

You asked for it when you bought Apple. Yes. You did.

Ignored rules by not ignoring rules?

By EvilSS • Score: 3 Thread

but considers movie tickets a “real-world experience” exempt from its In-App Purchase system.

So they didn’t actually break their own rules? Not that it matters since it is their platform and they get to make the rules.

Also, it’s not the only app that does this. Justwatch doesn’t seem to need warnings to link you out to the web to buy digitial films from various vendors. Rotten Tomatoes app (yea they do have one, it’s awful) also does not seem to require them for linking you out via the web to buy tickets to films currently in theaters. The very same thing Apple did here. So, WTF is the complaint here exactly?

Netflix Says 50% of Global Users Now Watch Anime

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Netflix doubled down on its global anime strategy over the weekend, unveiling a slate of new titles and fresh footage during its showcase at Anime Expo in Los Angeles.

The company also shared updated viewership data highlighting just how far Japanese anime has come in expanding from its former niche into a powerhouse global content category. According to Netflix, more than 50 percent of its members — amounting to over 150 million households, or an estimated 300 million viewers — now watch anime. The company says anime viewership on the platform has tripled over the past five years, with 2024 marking a record-breaking year: 33 anime titles appeared in Netflix’s Global Top 10 (Non-English) rankings, more than double the number in 2021.

50% of users watch anime

By Drethon • Score: 3 Thread

Or 50% of the users that are left are anime fans?

I’m honestly curious, I left Netflix a while ago when their DVD library stopped having anything I cared about and I had pretty much watched everything I wanted on streaming. Are we talking that 50% of “global” users watch anime, or more like what is left of Netflix library has managed to keep more anime watchers around than people interested in other streaming TV?

Re:50% of users watch anime

By ShanghaiBill • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Your implied claim that Netflix subscribers are falling is false.

2019: 167.09 million
2020: 203.66 million
2021: 221.84 million
2022: 221.64 million
2023 (Q4): 260 million
2024 (Q4): 301.6 million

That’s pretty cool

By Z80a • Score: 3 Thread

It probably will lower the quality of the animes in attempts of “global reach”, but for now it’s still pretty good.

Re:That’s pretty cool

By bjoast • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Anime will turn into Americanized, politically correct Hollywood slop. I like my Japanese anime slop the way it is thank you.