A subtle counterpoint from paragraph seven (7)

This is unlikely. Like, the current generation of European leaders can't imagine a world without the US. The next generation will feel very differently.

Personally, I find this depressing but I don't see the US polity as being a reliable partner for at least a generation. Definite Britain after Suez vibes right now.

That's most likely Ireland for UK customers, which has a similar small claims court system.

It was a pretty widely shared one in 2016, if I remember correctly.

I mean, that plan was basically never going to work long term, given climate change.

This function exists in every publicly traded public company, and is called internal audit.

It has the potential to be incredibly impactful, but often devolves into box ticking (like many compliance functions).

And it's really hard to find technical people to do the work, as it's generally perceived as a cost centre so tends not to get budget.

Nobody really tries to get technical people to do the work.

Like cool, it's a great idea and would potentially produce positive results if done well, but the roles pay half the engineering roles, and the interviews are stacked towards compliance frameworks.

There's very little ability to fix a large public company when HR is involved

Maybe it should be treated like on-call duty and have the load spread between existing engineers on some kind of schedule, maybe with some extra comp as incentive because it's boring and will take more effort/time in the "easy case" compared to pager duty.

I think 12-24 month rotations would work really well, but given how the profession is currently setup, that would be difficult to do.

Speaking as a technical (data) person currently working in internal audit for a not quite public company, it's not entirely uncommon.

I do agree that the pay isn't great, but it's the fact that it's considered a cost centre that's been the issue for me.

Everything except for sales tends to be seen as a cost centre. It's ridiculous.

He's a useful idiot rather than a collaborator, tbh. He definitely loves the idea of being a dictator and so he sucks up to real ones.

To be fair, I've been here for like 15 years and have had show dead on for most of it, and although the quality of them has certainly gotten lower, I'm not convinced that they are more frequent.

I believe that the massive splitting of data roles over the past decade is both a product of ZIRP and premature optimisation.

> Neither is particularly interested in playing first person shooters or epic CRPGs, unless it's done with my involvement.

This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity. That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.

She absolutely adores the simulation games (Avatar World, Toca Boca World etc) which leads me to believe that she'd love the Sims. I wonder if I can get them on Switch?

She has Animal Crossing, but there's a lot of text there which she isn't yet comfortable with.

> This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity.

Funnily enough, PoE is the game I've been needling my eldest to try for _years_ now. The PoE games are fabulous CRPGs that I've played through twice each, myself; I expected that she would love the mix of puzzle solving, narrative, and strategy. But it just didn't hook, for whatever reason.

> That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.

Oh, well, yes. My kids love watching me play whatever game I'm playing. That's different: they are choosing to show interest in my interests in order to spend time with me.

Toca Boca World is a game my daughters (8 and 10) love, and i completely don't understand. It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls (which they do also...)

Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a *game* there...

> It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls

> Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a game there...

A large part of the problem here is that folks believe that "game" necessarily implies goals and mechanics.

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/game

> 1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other

vs

> 2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement

Lots of folks see it as definition 1 (cooperative is still a contest against some non-player), whereas your girls seem to be operating under definition 2.

The equivalent to your statement from the other side of the fence would be women that deride male competition.

At the end of the day, we likes what we likes. Doing fun things is the fullest definition of a game. So the application of the priciple looks different depending on what the people enjoy.

I touched on it in my way-too-long post elsewhere on here, but I think this is exactly it: there's a (fuzzy at some boundary, sure, but useful) distinction to be drawn on something like where the game happens. Does "the game" (the software) supply most or all of "the game"? Or is "the game" (the software) a toy in service of a game that the player brings and gives shape?

Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).

We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)