This kind of failure-to-enforce is endemic to government. Oversight and enforcement are implicitly expected of well-regulated governments, and that costs money that nobody wants to pay. Laws get enacted with little thought to how much it will cost to administer them, and they either get underfunded or added to the list of government bloat.
There is no easy way out. The oversight to ensure that governments do what they're expected to without corruption costs real money. We haven't yet figured out how to balance good government with fiscal efficiency; but it would at least be an improvement if people could be educated on the actual cost of properly implementing a law before it gets voted on.
As usual for cases like this, the only chance for a person to force compliance is to have enough money/resources, putting it out of reach for the general population.
We have figured out how to get money to enforce paying taxes and GDPR compliance: Pay them with the taxes and fines. USA's IRS has a famously high ROI, and I'm willing to bet a single GDPR fine for Google/Facebook/Microsoft pays for a whole lot of GDPR enforcement.
In general, when it comes to enforcing laws on normal, individual people, governments seem to have no problem finding and cracking down on you. When it comes to enforcing laws on the rich, or corporations, suddenly the kid gloves go on and the "but we're simply not funded for enforcement!" excuses emerge...
While enforcement and the cost of enforcement is an important consideration, I would say that there is still value in unenforced law and regs. They set an expectation and a norm.
This is one problem, but in the GPDR's case it's worse: the law is designed for governments. The only people who can actually take action based on the GPDR ... are NOT the courts (same with the AI act btw).
Which governments have immediately used to:
1) exempt themselves from GPDR (e.g. allowing the use of medical data in divorce cases, and then refusing deletion of medical data from public institutions "for that reason". Then of course this was extended to tax enforcement (some of you European bastards DARE to try to get dental treatment when owing back taxes! Some things CANNOT be allowed)
2) they used it to attack certain firms for entirely reasonable reasons. One example, one of the very first cases, before the law was even in force was against Google. You see there are some online articles about José Manuel Barroso, the communist non-executive chairman and senior adviser of London-based Goldman Sachs International (yes, really, communist, not a joke), ex-socialist, then EU commission president ... that according to him violate the "right to be forgotten" (which technically doesn't apply to public figures, but apparently EU commission presidents aren't public figures)
There were some articles he wanted deleted about how technically he is (was?) a murder suspect (he organized and participated demonstrations where some people were killed by a mob that he was part of, and probably the leader of), and how there were complaints against him by his students that allege he beat them up (as in physically), apparently in arguments about financial systems (yes, even when he was a pretty extreme communist he was a professor). He couldn't get the articles deleted ... and so he wanted them hidden. He got what he wanted, without court involvement.
I have this setup, and the Firestick UI is horribly slow. Sometimes it takes 30 seconds or more for it to give any response to a button press. It's worst when I'm trying to watch something on Amazon Prime, to the point that I hardly watch that anymore because the UI is so annoying.
This sounds like either your FireTV stick is too old or your TV is.
My LG TV is more than a decade old (non-smart LED TV), the FireTV stick is around 6 years old.
But apart from the FireTV stick (whose remote controls the TV too) taking 15 seconds for a cold start (the TV tends to go to deep sleep mode after idle for long time or when switched off via remote), or 5 seconds for a warm start, the FireTV GUI is quite snappy thereafter (I can briskly move the cursor/selection across icons/thumbnails, menus and apps), till I switch it off again. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Discovery+, Apple TV - they all work well on this old setup.
You may want to uninstall some apps on the FireTV stick to give it some breathing space when it runs.
Try the FireTV stick on a PC monitor having HDMI input. If you face same issues there, then it may be time to buy a new FireTV stick or Chromecast, or splurge for a new smart TV.
> requiring my team to review their own PRs before they expect a senior developer to review them
I'm having a hard time imagining the alternative. Do junior developers not take any pride in their work? I want to be sure my code works before I submit it for review. It's embarrassing to me if it fails basic requirements. And as a reviewer, what I want to see more than anything is how the developer assessed that their code works. I don't want to dig into the code unless I need to -- show me the validation and results, and convince me why I should approve it.
I've seen plenty of examples of developers who don't know how to effectively validate their work, or document the validation. But that's different than no validation effort at all.
> Do junior developers not take any pride in their work?
Yes. I have lost count of the number of PRs that have come to me where the developer added random blank lines and deleted others from code that was not even in the file they were supposed to be working in.
I'm with you -- I review my own PRs just to make sure I didn't inadvertently include something that would make me look sloppy. I smoke test it, I write comments explaining the rationale, etc. But one of my core personality traits (mostly causing me pain, but useful in this instance) is how much I loathe being wrong, especially for silly reasons. Some people are very comfortable with just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it'll stick.
That is my charitable interpretation, but it's always one or two changes across a module that has hundreds, maybe thousands of lines of code. I'd expect an auto-formatter to be more obvious.
In any case, just looking over your own PR briefly before submitting it catches these quickly. The lack of attention to detail is the part I find more frustrating than the actual unnecessary format changes.
Why would you are about blank lines? Sounds like aborted attempts at a change to me. Then realizing you don’t need them. Seeing them in your PR, and figuring they don’t actually do anything to me.
> Yes. I have lost count of the number of PRs that have come to me where the developer added random blank lines and deleted others from code that was not even in the file they were supposed to be working in.
That’s not a great example of lack of care, of you use code formatters then this can happen very easily and be overlooked in a big change. It’s also really low stakes, I’m frankly concerned that you care so much about this that you’d label a dev careless over it. I’d label someone careless who didn’t test every branch of their code and left a nil pointer error or something, but missing formatter changes seems like a very human mistake for someone who was still careful about the actual code they wrote.
I think the point is that a necessary part of being careful is reviewing the diff yourself end-to-end right before sending it out for review. That catches mistakes like these.
> I want to be sure my code works before I submit it for review.
No kidding. I mean, "it works" is table stakes, to the point I can't even imagine going to review without having tested things locally at least to be confident in my changes. The self-review for me is to force me to digest my whole patch and make sure I haven't left a bunch of TODO comments or sloppy POC code in the branch. I'd be embarrassed to get caught leaving commented code in my branch - I'd be mortified if somehow I submitted a PR that just straight up didn't work.
It’s cultural. It always seemed natural to me, until I joined a team that treated review as some compliance checkbox that had nothing to do with the real work.
Things like real review as an important part of the work requires a culture that values it.
> We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers.
When the services that a company provides gets to this level, it starts becoming like a public utility. If it's not possible to participate in society without using such a service, then the services should be governed like utilities are.
I wouldn't be opposed to having actual government-provided services for things like e-mail, text message, and discussion forums at a very basic level. Then (in the US anyway) we could apply the government restrictions on privacy and freedom of speech, with laws governing the oversight and implementation. Of course there would be major details to work out to prevent misuse, corruption, etc.; but it could solve the problem of losing your essential on-line identity -- as long as the government has any interest in you at all for something like expecting you to be able to send/receive an e-mail in order to pay your taxes, then they wouldn't ever cancel your account. 3rd-party services would still be possible, but then they could do whatever their business model supports, and caveat emptor. How people can expect businesses services like Facebook to comply with their personal expectation of free speech is beyond me.
I apply my own meaning to the 5-star rating, and find it to work really well:
1 = The movie was so bad I didn't/couldn't finish watching it.
2 = I watched it all, but didn't enjoy it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
3 = The movie was worth watching once, but I have no interest in watching it again.
4 = I enjoyed it, and would enjoy watching it again if it came up. I'd recommend it.
5 = a great movie -- I could enjoy watching it many times, and highly recommend it.
This claim always seemed bizarre to me. What kind of drugs do you think a layman would think you were on if you showed them a typical Perl program and asserted how "human-like" it was? Even if you tried to follow-up and explain it: "No, no, see this bit means open whatever file stream is specified in the command line, as long as it starts with a letter between 'A' and 'F' that can be either upper or lower case, and is followed after any random characters by at least 3 digits in a row. Then this next character means.... See? It's just like I'm describing it to you!"
There is no easy way out. The oversight to ensure that governments do what they're expected to without corruption costs real money. We haven't yet figured out how to balance good government with fiscal efficiency; but it would at least be an improvement if people could be educated on the actual cost of properly implementing a law before it gets voted on.
As usual for cases like this, the only chance for a person to force compliance is to have enough money/resources, putting it out of reach for the general population.
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