So I did my CS degree 25 years ago now.

Programming was always a means to an end. I had a couple programming courses, but almost all my classes were things like graph theory or compiler fundamentals or graphics or similar things. We learned algorithms and complexity and the history of computing that brought us to the point where we were at. I did a class on hardware where we used and/or/not/etc. gates with physical wires and solved simple logic problems. I learned the optimal rasterization of a line. I learned how lisp was designed and what left-hand recursion was. I've forgotten most of it and much of it was not useful to my career, but that's fine. When I left university, I had a deeper understanding of how computers and computing worked, the class of problems that were or weren't solvable and so many other things.

So if CS has been about teaching people how to program since I left university, it should stop being that. University is not a trade school (not that there's anything wrong with trade schools--we need more people doing those things).

Programming is a tool--a means to an end, and usually that end is learning computing science and understanding the problems that exist in the space. You're expected to learn how to use your tools almost entirely on your own time, you should not spend an entire semester on learning how your hammer works (unless you're also spending the entire semester designing a new hammer).

And look, the PROFESSORS don't need the correct answers that you hand in. Tests and assignments are also just a means to an end--you're not teaching the professor anything, you're merely demonstrating that you've been learning. Plugging things into a chatbot to get the right answer is fundamentally not the point of the class. If you don't want to learn, fine, go do something else.

Stop making university degrees mandatory for every garbage job out there, first of all. If there needs to be 4 more years of education to get a basic job, the state should make public school curricula last 4 years longer.

Second, only let people in that are interested in the topics they're studying. The ultimate goal of university should be to gain knowledge so you can CREATE knowledge yourself one day. Universities are not job training centres, they're institutions of higher learning. I get that capitalism has ruined everything, but this is what you get when it does.

I love this way of putting it. "I subscribed to the dev team."

Rand Paul isn't particularly conservative, like most Republicans. He's for small government except when he's not. But to be fair to him, he's for slightly smaller government than most of his colleagues, and he does actually vote that way. I think he's wrong about most things, but he's MOSTLY honest and up front about what he thinks.

But yeah, that's a pretty dismal headcount for a party that consistently runs on fiscal responsibility. But again, to be fair, they also consistently fail at it.

This isn't cheating. If a fucking journal is garbage enough to let AI review papers, then the whole thing is suspect and this is actually the best thing to happen.

The slop infects everything. Neither journals that allow AI reviews nor those papers should exist at all. One scammer was trying to play another and I don't feel bad for any of them.

That should say, "...so your real CC number is NEVER actually used"

1. The ApplePay system is more secure because you have to initiate the payment. Nobody can just walk up and press a payment terminal up to your card.
2. Additionally, the ApplePay system uses a rotating number in the background, so your real CC number is actually used (from what I understand)
3. In my own personal experience, the tap-to-pay system on my card is much less reliable than my phone or watch. I don't know why or how; it used to be better, but then I got a new card and now it's terrible.

I use my card when making large purchases that require a chip-and-pin. I would actually go so far as to say that NFC should be removed from cards because of point 1, and they should only be used for chip-and-pin transactions, while phones take over all tap-to-pay transactions.

I don't understand QR codes on smartphones, but apparently they're popular in other countries because they can be used by even extremely cheap dumbphones.

Saying fucking asshole things. They're tired of having to pay skilled labour what it's worth, and AI isn't going to actually take the jobs, so they have to make everyone scared by saying things like this and laying off hundreds of people at a time.

Funny how such easy to predict actions aren't being threatened with being replaced. As more than one other person has said here, CEOs are ripe for replacing; nobody would even notice the difference.

I mean, it sounds like you have bad neighbours. I live in a townhouse, and my neighbours (co-owners, really) are great. We help each other out. I can ride my bike for a few minutes in any direction and be out on a beautiful trail or out by the lake. Don't get me wrong, I've very deliberately selected a city to live in where access to nature is trivial. That was a priority. But I'd be happy enough to live in an apartment here if I needed to, the only thing that stopped me in the first place is the rules/laws surrounding pet ownership (I had 3 cats at the time, 4 now).

I'm much more in favour of being communally rich. Whole forests and lakes are available to me, not just a yard and a backyard pool or whatever. There are lots of ways to have peace and quiet and beauty, and only a few of them are living out in a field, isolated from everyone else. I'm a pretty introverted person, but when the park is big enough, you don't have to talk to anyone to enjoy it.

I think to be fair, it has both a problem with not enough taxes and bad priorities. Unless one of the priorities you're talking about is corporate welfare and low taxes on the rich. Certainly it is the case that they (and Canada) could raise enough money if they would actually just enforce their tax laws and implement wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

If your microphone is active, it should at least show an indicator light and a top-row icon, I'm pretty sure.

I don't know about your food banks, but here in Canada, they're not run by the government. They're charities. I'm ALREADY paying taxes to try to make sure our government takes care of less fortunate people, and they've failed by foisting that off onto food banks, which are run on shoestring budgets, charity, and luck. What happens when people can't afford to give to the food bank, like when there's a recession?

If it were a government agency that was guaranteed to have affordable/free food so that anyone could at least cover their basic dietary requirements, I'd definitely be agreeing with you here. But it's not. We need to understand that the government is failing us at the most basic level.

This is, remarkably, one of the worst takes I have ever seen.

Everything is politics. Especially art. Narrative and storytelling is always going to be political. There are games about war between actual countries on this earth and you think games aren't political? Maybe candy crush isn't and that's all you play. But there are political choices made throughout the development of a game, and they can and should be scrutinized through that lens.

Some games are more political than others, definitely. That's fine. But any game with more than a facile narrative better be something we can talk politics about or it's a huge waste of time.

Even this discussion of whether politics belongs/is possible to remove from games is a political topic. Polygon was a good site that often had interesting takes. Iâ(TM)ll be sad to see it turned to AI slop.

Cuba would be in a much different and likely better position if the USA wasn't embargoing them and doing whatever they can to make sure the country never succeeds.

Local ordinances? Lack of subsidies? I live in the Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada. Everyone here has a heat pump. It's getting less and less common to see furnaces of any kind. But the government has been working hard to switch people over where they can, providing subsidies and showing how much lower your bills tend to be.

I greatly suspect Norway has also done something like that, considering the penetration of EVs there as well.

My heating/cooling bills are slightly higher in the winter than in the summer, but not meaningfully so, and we get temperatures down to -20C here occasionally. The heat pump is much slower at heating the house below -20C, but it's not too bad. (In actual fact, the reason why the bills are higher in the winter is because the cats still want to go out onto the catio and that means the door is often left propped open for long stretches of time. They want to do that in the summer as well, but the delta between room temperature and the outside temperature is smaller in the summer than in the winter.)

IN PRACTICE, the reality is that a normal heat pump will be better for your heating and cooling and your bills almost all of the time. If you live even further north than me, like in my old home town of Edmonton, you might invest in a failover heating system. But if you're buying from a reputable local installer, they'll set you up properly.