I really don’t think the article makes a good case for why they are using “withdrawal symptoms” (which clearly evokes drugs) beyond being a nice quote. Could the behavioural issues be, say, kids figuring out what to do (or what they can get away with) now that what they used to do is no longer available? The article certainly doesn’t say so.

The other thing is that these are things that are taking years to play out, which suggests to me that there may be more than just cellphones in the classroom. There is certainly a point to be made that if the smartphone is still used at home, you may up in a wash anyway. A reductive scenario I could think of, for example, might be that a student may say they are more attentive, and they may look more attentive, but if they aren’t really engaging with because they will just go home and ask an LLM for the answers to the homework.

Experience (see Facebook, in general, and the real name experiment) says that no, your last point does not hold. As it turns out, people are more than happy to be assholes with their names attached, never mind the many others who don’t want to make drama and are more than happy to keep hanging out with them.

If you roam around the internet for long enough, in the right public areas, you are bound to find plenty of tales of families choosing to keep hanging out with abusers over the victims, never mind people who are just “being mean on the internet”.

People keep saying that they verify your age at the super market and I keep trying to remember the last time that happened to me and I just cannot. Nor, for that matter, at bars or coffee shops (for after lunch chat chilling before returning for the afternoon stint).

It may just be my corner of the European Union being much more lax than others.

That is silly, though, since that’s something that each developer should be arranging for as part of obtaining the rights to use the music. Either the developer has the rights to use the music as part of the game (and thus sell the game with the music), and by extension Valve can be granted the limited right by the developer to transmit and/or perform the music (in trailers), or the developer does not have such rights and they should not be selling the game in the first place.

There is much to critique Steam for… This? This is nothing but a cash-grab, in my opinion.

I am not sure Spain is the right country to make considering the laws they have and how they have been used (spanish wikipedia).

We have had similar reactions to things like tracking by websites and other such cases. And to a certain extent, I get it: sometimes you just want your tools to work and move on with your life. And if that means that something you don’t particularly use or immediately care about is worse, then that’s just the cost of doing business.

Specially around “NSFW”, a lot of people just don’t engage with it in “public”. They leave “NSFW” stuff to one on one conversations with people they are close with, if at all.

The thing is, I say “NSFW” in quotes because we have seen, repeatedly, that what might be NSFW is not just porn. It has been extended to things around identify, sexual health and so on. Never mind that “you don’t care about privacy” until you realize that you were in a data breach and you now have to worry about malicious people getting you into financial peril by abusing your identity. Or worse.

I’m not sure how you get people to care, though, before things get bad enough.

While I understand it is non-standard, I am currently stuck with having a two person server, so this would certainly impact me.

And why do I have a two person server? Because we like to share things about a variety of subjects, and you don’t really want to get a face full of porn in public transit, all because you got a notification about the noodles I had for dinner. It’s something that has not been solved elsewhere (unless you want to deal with group chats as a workaround, but that’s more of a hack than using a server for 1:1), so Discord was the better option here in that regard.