The change

SO are going to let any registered user vote on content. Until now that "privilege" has required 100 points, a near-impossible task for a new user these days because no one ever upvotes questions and powerusers rush to answer all easy questions before anyone else can get to them (and will flag/close any other question as being off-topic).

The reasoning behind this change makes sense:

It's been a while since we last talked about the one-reputation voting change. We are still pursuing this because stagnating participation on the network is a concern for all of us, and we want to think about ways to grow the active community on the network. We have, by design, utilized rep as a threshold to award privileges and prevent bad behavior. While this has been effective in creating the current status quo, it has made participating on the network in some of the most basic ways difficult.

The response

But the post is on -143. Let's see what SO's (unpaid) jannies have to say.

Zoe (before you ask, yes she is):

The company has already been made aware of the many ways this can be abused, and the significant workload increase this will lead to when people notice, and that the tooling we have is nowhere close to capable of dealing with the kinds and volume of abuse this will cause. They have not responded to our concerns, and many mods (including multiple SO mods) have objected to the change from allowing sites to volunteer for the test to shoving it on SO. They did not care about the objections.

This response is ridiculous because:

• Jannies are always welcome to not do it for free and let SO pay someone to do it. No one is giving you more work - you're unpaid, you don't have to do anything.

• Oh and did I mention that Zoe's username is "Zoe is on strike"? That's right, a striking janny is still actually doing it for free and even giving feedback on new features. Good strike!

Someone else (who used to work for SO, left and yet still comments says:

Fraud: your approach is "disable association bonus and hope for the best?" Seriously? Im an r-slur but you've never done fraud before. Go out and sin, and come back when you know how to recognize it.

And a current non-striking mod says:

We did not volunteer for this experiment. It has been opposed by the SO moderators and other sites did step up to volunteer.

You're literally all volunteers lmao

Tooling does not scale for the concerns we have. It's mentioned that this is launching with new tooling, but they aren't being shared "at this junction". For moderators, that means the tooling does not exist at this point then.

Maybe if you were a paid employee then you'd be able to see this tooling.

CM [community manager] time is limited, and with focus split on new initiatives, AI content, and now this, the time they have to allocate to investigate vote fraud will decrease.

Maybe leave fraud investigations up to paid employees, like every other company.

By the way the three users who I've quoted here - all powerusers - haven't answered a single SO question between them in three years.

Stuff like this infuriates me because SO's powerusers and jannies are completely detached from the core purpose of the site yet they spend all their time stinking the place up and squabbling about meta shit. Stack Overflow is almost entirely self-moderating, these people aren't needed. If I worked for SO and had to interact with these idiots every day then I'd . SO needs to start just doing things and stop cucking themselves to the jannies.

Let's end with an r-slurred Jeff Atwood tweet:

Nope, the goal of SO is to answer my question.

As part of its latest attempt to combat scalpers, a popular Japanese retail store is now requiring ID from customers to prove that they're NOT of legal age.

Usually, when a retail store or any kind of establishment asks you for a form of identification, it's to help prove that you're a consenting adult. But, in this particular and rare case, a Japanese Pokemon card seller is doing the same exact opposite - asking customers to prove that they're not adults to get a chance to buy one of the latest and hottest-selling sets.

As pointed out by Kotaku, the self-proclaimed biggest Pokemon TCG specialty store in the world, is selling the Clay Burst and Snow Hazard sets to children who are still attending junior high school or younger.

The Loot Drop

A Japanese Pokemon card seller is requiring customers to prove they're not adults to prevent scalping and hoarding.

The reverse age check procedure means a customer has to be young enough to buy the packs displayed in its dedication section. The store has also barred parents and guardians from buying the said packs on behalf of the kids. Finally, to further prevent scalping and hoarding, the store is limiting the boosters to 10 packs a day. It's only after these packs have sold out that they'll sell any pack that remains to other customers.

Hareruya 2's new scheme is part of a larger TCG industry problem of scalping and hoarding. Most recently, thousands of people around the world queued outside retailers to get a chance to grab Clay Burst and Snow Hazard ahead of everyone else. Some do it genuinely because they want to be one of the first to own the cards. But, most have more capitalistic and less ethical reasons, namely selling the booster boxes for a quick profit.

Case in point, The Pokemon Company in Japan announced just days after its launch that the fervent demand meant that they'd run out of packs already. A quick search online will tell you that most of the packs had fallen in the hands of scalpers who sold the booster boxes for thousands of dollars.

As more and more rare cards sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auctions, these instances will continue to happen.

Having said that, Hareruya 2's policy actually makes a ton of sense. It guarantees that the younger generation, who are into Pokemon because they enjoy it, have a shot at buying booster packs without worrying about making money off of it or not. Of course, this isn't 100% effective. Adults can always work their way around it by asking younger kids to buy the packs for them. It's kind of like how some kids ask adults to buy beer and cigarettes for them, except, it's the adults asking kids to buy Pokemon cards.

On a more positive note, scalpers and resellers are a sign that an industry is profitable enough to attract such individuals.

It remains to be seen if this will work to help combat the issue with resellers and scalpers in the Pokemon TCG scene.

Scalpers and resellers are a nuisance in any industry. In video games, for example, Sony struggled with getting enough PS5 consoles on store shelves as scalpers almost always got their hands on them first. It wasn't until recently Sony said it had solved the stock shortage. In the TCG scene's case, manufacturers just can't simply flood the market with cards, lest they risk devaluing them. In a sense, the TCG and sneaker industry can learn from each other.

Informal announcement on their chat community that was locked by jannies

RedditAlternatives discussion

@Redactor0

Summary for those just joining us:

Advent of Code is an annual Christmas themed coding challenge that runs from December 1st until christmas. Each day the coding problems get progressively harder. We have a leaderboard and pretty good turnout, so feel free to hop in at any time and show your stuff!

Whether you have a single line monstrosity or a beautiful phone book sized stack of OOP code, you can export it in a nice little image for sharing at https://carbon.vercel.app

What did you think about today's problem?

https://adventofcode.com/2023

Our Code is 2416137-393b284c (No need to share your profile, you have the option to join anonymously if you don't want us to see your github)

But what is hate, anyway?

Btw andril industries is such a meme. Their salary bands for software developers is 84k (lmao) -150k (junior-tier) and senior salary is 150 (junior tier) -192 (2 yo experience tier). Absolute garbage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pokepim

• Most NFTs may now be worthless, less than two years after a bull run in the digital collectibles.

• A study examining more than 73,000 NFT collections found that 95% had a market cap of 0 ETH.

• Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$100.

RIP NFTbros!

Bros I’m I still gonna be able to use vancedtube?

Alright so I have a cheap laptop that I loaded debian / plasma onto.

Keyboard cover is wonky and sometimes when I hold left or right arrow it self-inserts a '4', which is fixed with turning off the num pad.

So any time I switch to another window, any time I try to upload something and the popup comes up for me to select a file, the left or up arrow is automatically pressed. Right now it's doing it with the up arrow.

You'd think "you just said your keyboard is messed up why is this shocking" well to that I say here's the weird part.

It doesn't happen randomly, it happens specifically when I change to another window, or a window is popped up like when saving or uploading a file. As soon as I press any arrow key it stops.

For example I'm on my browser now.. if I click to groomercord it will try to edit my last message (up arrow is held), and will keep scrolling up unless I press a random arrow key. When I click back to the browser where I'm writing this post, it begins to scroll up (up arrow held) and again I have to press a random arrow key to stop it.

WTF is going on? Why is me clicking another window triggering an arrow key?!!?! It won't ever happen randomly either. It will never do it again until the window is changed.

To add a weird cherry on top, if I click my terminal (Konsole) it won't scroll up my command history. It won't trigger this weird shit, but as soon as I click to another window it'll trigger the up arrow. First half of today was the left arrow, abot an hr ago it started doing the up arrow.

Pls help solve.