Everything is political. If you don't think that merely existing is political, you've a) got your head buried...somewhere; and b) you're probably some affluent dude that doesn't have to consider other people.

Either way, fuck all the way off.

Like, it's deeply obnoxious to me as a game developer that you can sit and say that huge sovereign wealth funds buying up studios isn't political. That allowing huge anti-competitive mergers isn't political. That workers and their rights aren't political. That the work and art that goes into games isn't political. Even trying to stay APOLITICAL is a huge political choice and is frankly, very difficult to do. Who's allowed to play them, what we consider appropriate for kids, whether or not they cause violence (they don't, demonstrably, but it's still a political football)--these are all political questions.

Games are culture, and culture interacts with politics. Go look up something on why and when zombie movies come into vogue. The movies reflect back to us what our worries are. So too with games.

The games industry has been bigger than Hollywood for years now and you have the gall--or simplemindedness, you pick--to sit and tell me that this stuff isn't political? Man, gtfo and read a book or something. Stop wandering through life so ignorant.

I keep hearing it's great for boilerplate stuff. Okay, fair enough. But how much boilerplate code do I have to write before it becomes worth my time? I really don't spend much time bootstrapping files, and 95% of the time I'd rather just use a previous thing that *I* wrote that I know works.

Ah yes, let's ignore a huge part of the last half-century's history and pretend that prior conflicts don't translate into current detente. The ongoing size and strength of the US military contributes to the relative stability in the region because it is well understood that disruption could lead to intervention.

Oil prices are low and stable because of constant, unending, ever-threatened intervention by the USA.

Sure, just as soon as the taxpayers stop subsidizing petroleum companies. I'm okay with that solution. Let's see what the market decides when the government isn't gifting free land in protected wildlife areas and cleaning up abandoned wells and waging wars to protect oil interests in the middle east. Let's go.

100%, glad we agree on that. :)

I wonder what will happen with their other BEV. By most accounts, it's a competent vehicle, and from my research, it's currently the most affordable used non-Tesla BEV. You can pick one up for around $25k Canadian. Not cheap, but half price? Will they keep it just to keep their toe in the water?

Sure, but if we're going to gatekeep employment and advancement behind a system that rigidly demands that you work well under time pressure, a lot of people never get to find something suited to their abilities.

I myself barely made it through university because I'm terrible at taking tests. I've been successful in my industry for almost 30 years now. But I was gated by the same tests as everyone else.

Some parts of the working world are a lot more forgiving than you're giving them credit for, especially now that remote work is a thing. Over the last few years I've watched companies drop the programming test from their hiring process—including Epic—because it didn't get them the results they wanted. They accidentally selected for people who worked well under stress, but 99% of our jobs aren't like that. They got better results with interviews that involve a lot of talking to reveal the things that you know.

In Canada, someone did a study of how much it cost to administer NSERC grants (a very prestigious, large grant for doing science research) vs. how much it would cost to just give every applicant what they asked for, and it was CHEAPER to give out the money than scrutinize each grant for its worthiness. Where's the value in withholding the money? There's good science that doesn't get funded and instead bureaucrats shuffling papers eat it all up trying to understand grant applications that they're not qualified to inspect.

You will definitely get people working the system in these cases, but there's an argument to be made that more accommodation will just give better results overall. Just give EVERYONE more time on the test. 100% of people get 6 hours to write the test. The people that are now trying to 'take advantage' of the system are returned to a level playing field. The people that need that time because they're neurodivergent don't have to ask for it. You get to see if people actually learned the material. There's little practical downside.

I'm a lead programmer in the games industry, and I did not show up to meetings with low value. But that said, 50% of my time was spent on meetings and managerial duties.

Critically, I consider it my job to go to meetings so the other programmers on my team DON'T. We need to talk about the state of the game. We need to discuss mechanics and timelines and all sorts of things. But I don't want other programmers in more than a few hours of meetings a week, and most of those meeting hours should be just in our team giving and getting updates.

We were aggressive about cutting meetings that people felt had little or diminishing value. Sometimes meetings are useful for a time and then they're not. I never went to a meeting that I was invited to where I didn't feel like I needed to hear the information or present something useful. Guard your own time, no matter what level of worker you are.

But yeah, useless meetings feel terrible. I didn't feel bad about the meetings I went to because we often accomplished a lot.

Nah, the deals on used EVs are great right now; I think more people are going to start buying them up. They have low maintenance and running costs, and for around town, they're great.

There are so many goddamn F-150s on the road belonging to people that never tow a single thing or load the bed up. They're commuter cars for accountants with masculinity issues. Don't tell me that we shouldn't get these dipshits into normal cars or EVs both for the sake of the environment and road safety.

Autism is a much broader category than it used to be.

There's actually some evidence now that ADHD and Autism are on the SAME SPECTRUM, they're just different manifestations of slightly different brain wiring. For some people, it's more of an impediment, but fundamentally, the impediment is that we don't allow those people to be themselves. They might stim by flapping their hands a bit or moving around (I have ADHD, and I ALWAYS have to have something in my hands during meetings; I also 'pain stim', where I might press the tip of a paperclip against my finger. It doesn't HURT hurt and I don't break the skin, but the stimulation is something that I do basically unconciously).

Anyway, when we talk about neurodivergence, some people need little to no accommodation and some people need lots. I actually don't think having tight time limits on tests makes any sense. In my work, I get lots of time to research and figure out answers, and if I do it enough, the answers become easier to come up with. Are we trying to test whether people know things, or whether they deal with time pressure the way we think is necessary (again, for no good reason).

You gotta pay people to monitor the exams anyway, just let people have the time they need. If they get 100%, great, they know their stuff. What's the issue?

This is the sound of the other shoe dropping.

It's long past time we had a real debate about the law, too. Just because something has been the law for a long time, that doesn't necessarily mean it should remain the law as times change. Clearly there is a difference between the implications of casually observing someone as you pass them in a public street, when you probably forget them again a moment later, and the implications of recording someone with a device that will upload the footage to a system run by a global corporation where it can be permanently stored, shared with other parties, analysed including through image and voice recognition that can potentially identify anyone in the footage, where they were, what they were doing, who they were doing it with, and maybe what they were saying and what they had with them, and then combined with other data sources using any or all of those criteria as search keys in order to build a database at the scale of the entire global population over their entire lifetimes to be used by parties unknown for purposes unknown, all without the consent or maybe even the knowledge of the observed people who might be affected as a result.

I don't claim to know a good answer to the question of what we should allow. Privacy is a serious and deep moral issue with far-reaching implications and it needs more than some random guy on Slashdot posting a comment to explore it properly. But I don't think the answer is to say anything goes anywhere in public either just because it's what the law currently says (laws should evolve to follow moral standards, not the other way around) or because someone likes being able to do that to other people and claims their freedoms would be infringed if they couldn't record whatever they wanted and then do whatever they wanted with the footage. With freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to respect the rights and freedoms of others, which some might feel should include more of a right to privacy than the law in some places currently protects.

That all said, people who think it's cool to film other human beings in clear distress or possibly even at the end of their lives just for kicks deserve to spend a long time in a special circle of hell. Losing a friend or family member who was, for example, killed in a car crash is bad enough. Having to relive their final moments over and over because people keep "helpfully" posting the footage they recorded as they drove past is worse. If you're not going to help, just be on your way and let those who are trying to protect a victim or treat a patient get on with it.

The question was literally, "What happens when all car manufacturers are displaying ads?"

In the UK, most medical information will be classified as sensitive personal data, which means it has significant extra protections under our regular data protection law, in addition to the medical ethics implications of breaching patient confidentiality. Letting it escape is a big deal and potentially a serious threat to the business/career of any medical professional who does it. Fortunately the days of people sending that kind of data around over insecure email are finally giving way to more appropriate methods of communication as the technology improves. It's usually governments seeing pound signs and/or businesses who aren't providing direct care to the patients that are pushing for wider distribution (and also those organisations who act as if impossible claims about sanitising the data effectively before releasing it are true).

Good for you! Unfortunately, for a lot of people, having no car isn't really an option, so the answer to what happens next with your strategy is really that all of those people get an inferior product because there's no effective competition or regulation in the market to prevent that, while people like you don't get any product at all.

What should happen is that governments recognise a failure of the market to maintain adequate standards for customers and introduce regulation to enforce minimum acceptable standards accordingly. Whether that actually happens obviously depends on whether your government is more interested in looking out for the people or the businesses.