That's correct! You've correctly interpreted the document -- they had 324.5 B yen total sales. FF14 is on page 11, made 55.5B yen sales. and grew 8B yen yoy.
What are the best ways of finding such devices? Almost all the time when I look into some product it ends up being connected to some random cloud service with its own login.
HomeAssistant supports a bunch of home automation systems, including local-only ones like ZWave and Zigbee*. A search for "zwave thermostat" comes up with a lot of results, though I couldn't say how difficult it might be to configure them (I'm only using simpler devices like switches and sensors).
* There are internet-connected controllers and local controllers so you'd also want a local controller. I've used an Aeotec Z-Stick for ZWave devices for around a decade, it plugs into USB, HomeAssistant accesses it directly, and the ZWave network itself is connections between the Z-Stick and the devices without the internet.
One way is to look for devices that have unofficial firmware available, so you can just overwrite the included software for something more under your control. For example, check out Tasmota, "an open source firmware for Espressif ESP8266, ESP32, ESP32-S or ESP32-C3 chipset based devices": https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
Roblox has a seemingly impossible to solve problem with child predators. Kids have the oddest talent of being able to stumble into the most unknown, niche games where these people lurk. Roblox now has voice chat as well and you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention.
Roblox currently has a massive event going on that was hit with a huge controversy. They picked over 1000 games to be advertised and someone accidentally (or not) picked a child romance themed game to put on the list. Without explicitly having sex, people have figured out how to game the system by letting players use emotes to do normal things but really they are intended to role play sexual activities (pushup emote while over another player laying flat on a bed for example). There's a specific term for these games but I can't recall it at the moment. It was called something like "condo games", the genre that refers to these romance games. The people who make these games do it intentionally, some of them make literally dozens/hundreds of these games, all aimed at children. Some of the game developers absolutely need to be investigated by law enforcement. Look up the video on youtube called "How One Developer RUINED Roblox's Biggest Event Overnight" and skip to around 2 minutes and he explains this in detail. This developer made children themed romance games that gained a quarter BILLION plays.
As an adult that does occasionally enjoy some Roblox experiences, there's no problem for me. Stick to the front page, featured stuff and you're fine. The problem is solely with kids/teens going where adults don't realize and getting caught up with this predators.
> you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention
Sounds like the problem is the lack of parental attention, and like many things, that isn't a problem with a technological solution, but requires parents to actually pay attention to what their children is doing.
If tens of million of people are using a service, statistically at least a few of them are going to be bad actors. The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s. People were "cybering" in World of Warcraft. 4chan was raiding habbo hotel and club penguin with Nazi memes. Kids were chatting with strangers on AIM and ventrilo. If anything, these services probably had considerably worse moderation given the language processing rooms we have today.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
IIuc, the original point/implication of this thread of conversation was more like "there's an unusally high concentration of child predation on Roblox", which, while not invalidating it, is a considerably different problem than "there is more child predation than there ought to be on Roblox".
The former implies that rblx has some attributes that are conducive to child predation, which would be worth teasing apart out of scientific interest, while the latter is a very general problem, as (I dare take this as self-evident) any place that has greater than 0 child predators has more than there ought to be.
> The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s
I think there is a big difference to some of the examples they gave, because of the uniquely young age demographics on Roblox. The only example that seems comparable was Club Penguin.
Now, I agree that there is interest in teasing out whether there are problems with Roblox specifically, or if it is just a problem with having an online space with such a high concentration of kids in general. But that high concentration of kids does make it much more of a concern either way.
In those games its more difficult to create a private hangout space or "GTA for kids". Haven't heard of the weird romance thing, but seen my nephew playing a roblox game where the goal is kill as many people wheelchairs as you can. I saw I guess the humor in it because I played San Andreas when I was his age but him mom might have been shocked. Those other games are much more restricted in the possibilities, moderation seems impossible
Roblox has a very young playerbase, even when compared to Minecraft and Fortnite. Roblox is also unique in the sheer quantity of offences that happen on their platform, and that is why they are often singled out.
But this can be a problem wherever kids are online. Discord also has huge problems with child predators. And any platform that caters to children should be held to very high standards of child safety.
The games that I think shouldn't be held to such a high standard are games like World of Warcraft. That game is not targeted at children, has far fewer children players, and therefore it is unreasonable to hold them to as high of a standard as Roblox. (Although they do still have some responsibility to make sure their platform is safe.)
Because the company knows that there are child predators on their site, and not only do they not care, but that is basically their tacit business model.
edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees -
“You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”
“You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
I think it’s easy for people to contact each other in game and this to get kids to move over to a discord away from moderation. That’s the basic MO the instructor said how “grooming” in Roblox works.
IIRC that video is about how young content creators get exploited, which is indeed a bad thing but not exactly what GP is asking about (young players getting predated upon)
I once overheard our nine year old explaining to a friend how to lie about their birthdate to create a YouTube account. Age checks are not meaningfully a working thing.
In terms of a threat-risk analysis, the need of a physical microphone nearby i imagine more than makes up for the risk of an adversary knowing your water quality and electrical consumption as measured by your washer in almost everyones lives atleast..
It also indicates when you are home or out, and likely an estimate of how many people live there. It could collect more data.
Those pieces of data are combined with others, to form a full picture. This device doesn't need to collect it all itself.
Survellance of private citizens is arguably the foundation of the very dangerous problems in societies around the world, taking away freedom, health, peace, and for most, prosperity. When do you stop it?
Yeah, being able to record sounds that the washer makes would probably also enable you to analyze things people say and extract much more information than 'how many people live there' and 'are they home or not'.
But fortunately for us, you need to actually press a physical button to make the machine sing the diagnostics..
the use of customer-central water usage data piques my interest. there's a huge market for selling water and waste data to advertisers and other companies interested in consumer data. This is one of my friend's startups, smartpipes, which is a type of smart sewage pipe - these smart washers remind me of smartpipe (which supports dishwasher waste!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
Sure, but I’m curious if it would serve to provide some self-regulation.
E.g., all of this “thinking” trend that’s happening. It would be interesting if the model does a first pass, scored its individual outputs, then reviews its scores and censors/flags scores that are low.
I know it’s all “made up”, but generally I have a lot of success asking the model to give 0-1 ratings on confidence for its answers, especially for new niche questions that are likely out of the training set.
It doesn’t. Asking for confidence doesn’t prompt it to make multiple passes, and there’s no real concept of “passes” when you’re talking about non-reasoning models. The model takes in text and image tokens and spits out the text tokens that logically follow them. You can try asking it to think step by step, or you can use a reasoning model that essentially bakes that behavior into the training data, but I haven’t found that to be very useful for OCR tasks. If the encoded version of your image doesn’t resolve to text in the model’s latent space, it never will, no matter how much the model “reasons” (spits out intermediate text tokens) before giving a final answer.
Damn it's been 20 years since the PSP.... loved that thing growing up.... So much Monster Hunter Freedom Unite... grabbed mine off the shelf after all this time just to feel it again and the battery is almost 1 inch thick.... Guess it's time to go through some of the old electronics and recycle the batteries before they either off gas, or catch something on fire...
Same. Mine had expanded so much it almost popped the battery panel off. Thankfully replacements are quite cheap! I went through and replaced old ones on my PSPs, DSs, etc and now keep em all charged (with a mess of cables) to hopefully keep em semi healthy and not cause a bonfire in my closet.
unless you train directly against solving those problems... in which case how could you theoretically design a test that could stand against training directly against the answer sheet?
