Coating would work, but it needs to be permanent, because you can't easily recoat it. Glass can be recoated on the other side. Dunno how anodising and etching would work, do you get the same color when you etch, or do you get raw aluminium?

I suppose if you scanned the plates in a flatbed scanner that might be even contrast, I was thinking of using a phone camera, and assumed it would be near impossible to get an even lighting across the QR code.

Etching aluminium might not photograph with enough contrast to pull out the QR code.

Laser etching glass might be worth a look. You can increase the contrast fairly dramatically with black paint, which can be cleaned and reapplied without damaging the glass.

Is it 1-2kB uncompressed? Because compression will help, the smaller you get the data the larger you can make the QR pixels. You can also split it into 20x100B chunks, and then as long as you number the slides you can rebuild later.

Also, ecc-h only gets you 30% recovery, duplicate or triplicate slides could increase that even further.

Once you learn and master one language, the main concepts will usually transfer across, and with minimal effort youll be able to pick up any other language.

So starting with JS is fine, but don't be afraid of switching later down the line. Choose the right tool for the job.

Driving is pretty boring, what else are you supposed to do behind the wheel?

Either that slides forward, or they are hung like a horse.

Solidarity? Really? The entire history of computers and technology has been disenfranchising labor... Its just our turn, we can pivot or we can die. Its not even new either, we have been progressively disenfranchising ourselves the entire time. From punch cards to editors, assembly to higher level languages, raw syscalls to libraries, every bit of progress we have made has obsoleted one of our own's skillsets.

As for the second point, we have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise the horse that shits in a field, that grows the food that feeds an artist is all part of the artistic endeavour.

I believe the Australian tax code already allows that to some degree, its never applied to me though. I think its meant for sports people, who will earn lots in 5-10 years, but then not earn anything after that.

Look, some code definitely falls into the realms of art. Fast inverse square fits that bill for me. But the vast majority of code simply isnt an artistic endeavour, its just code. And the vast majority of game coding isnt creating art, the game designers and artists create the art, the coders just make it a reality.

In a roundabout way, we may get more artistic indie games, as the artists can just get the robot to do the code to make their vision a reality, instead of needing to beg for coders. Flip side of that is that every half-baked hack can spin up their own derivative clone, and its near impossible to stand out from the sea of slop.

The top end high earners will just restructure their pay so that they get paid a big bonus once a decade or longer.

executives practice breathwork and put aside their electronic devices

Headspace for workers, retreats for executives. HR bullshit.

Its impossible to hand roll code at the same rate as an LLM. Which means that if you don't use them, you better have a good explanation for your manager as to why you're clearing far fewer features/tickets relative to your colleagues.

You can try the "But my quality is higher/defect rate is lower", but that gap is shrinking, and it doesnt seem like game studios even care about that anyway.

We all still have the skills to write code, its just that the people who pay us don't actually care about human written code, they care about getting the game/software written as fast as possible.

Yes, but:

Safety: for small stuff, really no safety concerns, and with the amount of recalls, not really any better.

Warrenty: when the price is half or less, easier to just buy 2.

So for larger more expensive items, local makes sense somewhat, but for small crap, better to just get from aliexpress.

Which is really annoying, because individually shipping every little trinket is crazy wasteful.