death toll is now at least 15 plus one of the shooters; it appears the duo were father and son and it is the son that is in custody

As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.

The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork’s parent company, Monotype – doesn’t even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan’s bigger studios.

The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.

the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:

Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. (emphasis mine) How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.

Serious question: don’t the artists have the ability to remove their music from Spotify if the deal is so bad?

yes, and more than a few prominent ones have such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Xiu Xiu, but for most artists it requires negotiation with your label (annoying, not ideal, you don’t have much leverage) and the willingness to take a potentially permanent revenue and recognition hit (Spotify has an estimated 700 million users) in an already difficult business

Children can still protest, fundraise, and engage in other forms of direct action. Children are not helpless or incapable.

you are shadowboxing with things i didn’t say and are the only person inserting the terms “helpless” or “incapable” here, but also once again: this is a game marketed at literal children. i stopped playing Roblox at 14 and doing some research i’m led to believe that would be quite old for a Roblox player. probably half or more of the player-base is 13 or younger. do you honestly expect the average 13-year-old (or younger) to be capable of anything other than performative activism relating to the genocide in Palestine?

Holding a pro-Palestine candlelight vigil in Roblox, for example, whilst there are still Palestinian civilians being murdered is a woefully inadequate use of time and effort if you actually want to help.

the people holding a vigil like this are probably literal children, because Roblox is a game for and overwhelmingly played by children, so i don’t understand the criticism here–it’s unlikely they can help in any material way you could as an adult, but they can be politicized into understanding who deserves their sympathy and who is perpetrating harm that must be ended, which such a rally helps affirm

please continue to “device hoard” folks

its founder, Georgiy Gongadze, was a late-90s crusader for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and anti-corruption initiatives in Ukraine and was likely murdered at the behest of the state for his reporting. i think the name is fairly straightforward

Ukrainska Pravda has no relation at all to pravda.ru as far as i’m aware

now that it’s clear a universal basic income would empower workers (and therefore make it less necessary for people to work to live), it’s very funny to look back on the time period where its biggest boosters were technolibertarian, technocratic Silicon Valley types

yes, it’s not legally contingent on anything that happens in Texas

given that OpenAI has a vested interest in downplaying the severity of this problem (especially relative to its total number of users) i’d treat this as a lower bound of the scale of this exists at–pretty bad!

there’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:

How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?

People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]

of note, CUPE leadership was willing to go to jail over the strike. for a sense of what they struck over, see these two articles from Spring Magazine, and CUPE’s “Unpaid Work Won’t Fly” page

this is significant because it initially looked like Harrell, the more centrist option, would breeze through this race; now, though, it seems like a very real possibility that Seattle will also elect a progressive mayor this November in Katie Wilson. (her platform is, though not socialist like Zohran Mamdani’s, still pretty good and deserves your support)

also in this edition: Democrats have started to introduce bills to bar federal agents from concealing their identity; there are pushes to also do this in California and New York

Duncan is an interesting guy these days. he is one of a number of Republicans who was basically run out of the party for refusing to be fascist and autocratic enough, and he was formally expelled from the party last year after endorsing Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. i doubt he has sufficient distance or credibility to make it through a Democratic primary, but you never know. the Republican-to-Never Trumper-to-Democrat pipeline has been a pretty successful move for other people

the study: Majority support for global redistributive and climate policies

We study a key factor for implementing global policies: the support of citizens. The first piece of evidence is a global survey on 40,680 respondents from 20 high- and middle-income countries. It reveals substantial support for global climate policies and, in addition, for a global tax on the wealthiest aimed at financing low-income countries’ development. Surprisingly, even in wealthy nations that would bear the burden of such globally redistributive policies, majorities of citizens express support for them. To better understand public support for global policies in high-income countries, the main analysis of this Article is conducted with surveys among 8,000 respondents from France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the USA. The focus of the Western surveys is to study how respondents react to the key trade-off between the benefits and costs of globally redistributive climate policies. In our survey, respondents are made aware of the cost that the GCS [a global carbon price funding equal cash transfers] entails for their country’s people, that is, average Westerners would incur a net loss from the policy. Our main result is that the GCS is supported by three quarters of Europeans and more than half of Americans.

Overall, our results point to strong and genuine support for global climate and redistributive policies, as our experiments confirm the stated support found in direct questions. They contribute to a body of literature on attitudes towards climate policy, which confirms that climate policy is preferred at a global level17,18,19,20, where it is more effective and fair. While 3,354 economists supported a national carbon tax financing equal cash transfers in the Wall Street Journal21, numerous surveys have shown that public support for such policy is mixed22,23,24,25,26,27. Meanwhile, the GCS— the global version of this policy—is largely supported, despite higher costs in high-income countries. In the Discussion, we offer potential explanations that could reconcile the strong support for global policies with their lack of prominence in the public debate.

the study: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task