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?

They could say no. No-one is stopping them.

You're right. Also a professional baseball player *could* put their bats down and just stand at the plate, but pointing out that it's physically possible is stupid, especially if your argument supporting that "They Can Just Do That" is that baseball players *should put their bats down*.

This is why such people shouldn't be in positions of power.

Again with the should. It's dumb saying "they can do something, but they won't, but they should" because it's a moot point. Yes, they could also write a press release that is an 80 page Star Trek fanfic set in the narrative universe of Mr Rogers. Nothing is stopping them. But what is the value of pointing out something they are physically capable of when even you seem to understand why they won't? It's just a completely meaningless observation, particularly since you couch it in phrasing that suggests it's just a simple easy thing to do? You're trying to have your argument both ways - it makes you sound simple.

This is why such people should never be in positions of power.

What you're trying to do here is deal with the world the way you think it should be, not the way it actually is. So saying, "You can just do this" if the world was the way you think is should isn't a particularly well supported assertion.

"The whole point of this is because Waymo isn't supposed to make those mistakes,"

There is no whole point in such a complex issue, but I would like to tell this person that the idea is part of the argument for automated vehicles is they may make less mistakes. Perfection shouldn't be a condition for improvement.

Sure, I get that, but iPad? Laptop? PC?

Is your phone the thing you're going to be doing it on? And if it is, I guess it's nice that they're making $2500 morning news devices, but it still seems a bit crazy for the price.

I like a nice big screen as much as anyone, but after years and years of owning an iPad I'm using it less and less. And I honestly can't figure out why you'd want to tote around something that big all the time. Flights, I guess? A lot of traveling? I don't begrudge anyone buying one if they want it or they actually do have a day to day use for it, but I want my phone to get SMALLER.

The only folding phone I'll consider is the flip style, to reduce the carrying size. That would be handy to me, even if the folded dimensions are much thicker than my current phone. It'll still fit in a lot more pockets than the current form factor.

Look, it's not just that iOS 26 has bugs. Bugs are fine. All software has bugs.

But iOS 26 is incoherent. It makes the system less intuitive and harder to use. It reneges on design principles laid down in Apple's Human Interface guidelines. I don't even mind how flashy it is--the glass effect really IS cool sometimes. But touch targets are worse, information bleed-through is confusing, and it does the EXACT OPPOSITE of the claimed design intention to show you more of your content. The UI is bigger and more in your way at every turn. You can see less of what you want to see at any given time in a measurable way. (Seriously, people have measured it.)

Try this out: take a screenshot. Go into the screenshot interface. The control to delete the screenshot is under the checkmark, not the X. The X dismisses the screenshot but also deletes it, though it doesn't give any indication that it's going to delete the screenshot. Now if you take a screenshot of THAT screenshot, it adds a second one, fine. But if you go into the checkmark, your option is to delete BOTH. If you tap the X, NOW there's a control to delete just one.

Apple's stuff really did used to be simpler and more usable, based on tested and measurable design principles. Design wasn't just a look, it was also a science that included usability and interaction.

Alan Dye has ruined every interface he's come into contact with. I was on board with the iOS 7 flat-design revolution even with all its flaws, but we're in a whole different, unusable space now. Bring Scott Forestall back.

Microsoft is not a person. It is a massive company capable of pursuing many mandates, some of which can either appear or can actually be entirely at odds with each other.

Anonymous Cowards, always stupiding up the comments.

We KNOW from survey data that people with trucks in North America rarely or never use the truck bed, and 70% never tow anything with it.

If that's true, they're not buying a truck because it's good at truck stuff, they're buying it for reasons that are superficial, because a truck is worse at literally everything to do with driving on roads than cars UNLESS they're towing or hauling something.

You can look it up yourself.

I don't think the US actually enforces anything approaching the spirit of robust anti-trust law now. The goalposts have been moved back so many times, they're on another field now.

No, you can't.

It is nearly impossible to do the things you said unless you don't want to have a job, or eat, or participate in society in any way. I buy food at the farmer's market (when I can, which is to say, in the summer), I buy shampoo bars and get refills of various things in my resealable (plastic) containers. But my medication comes in a plastic pill bottle. I'm a programmer, so my computer has a certain amount of plastic in it. Even my bikes have a certain amount of plastic in them that I have absolutely no control over (or if not plastic, carbon fibre). (I have bikes because I haven't owned a car for 15 years now.)

There is no way out. The problem isn't us. We've been given no choice in so many of these matters. Particularly in North America, where train coverage is abysmal and the cities are built for cars. We KNOW who the 100 biggest polluters in the world are. We KNOW that carbon footprint is a scam concocted by the oil and gas industry to shift the blame from corporations to consumers, so people like you will do their propaganda for them. I want to keep living, so I buy things made out of plastic because I'm simply not offered a single other choice. I'll wager that my 'carbon footprint' is in the bottom quartile, and it doesn't matter, I still have to buy this shit and prop up the 'demand'.

In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom". :D