Weird then that FIRE regularly complains about students doing things beyond "public disturbance, heckling, and intimidation."

Do you genuinely believe that if Columbia University had an official policy that deadnaming a trans person was an expellable offense and that the official position of the university was that the Israeli occupation of Gaza was a crime and that advocating for Zionist policies was against the rules that Lukianoff would consider this acceptable and that FIRE would take it off their list of criticized universities, as they have done for Liberty?

Lukianoff wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, in which he complains about student speech.

FIRE is indeed not as hypocritical as most "free speech absolutists." But boy howdy do they have different bars for different groups.

Also, it should be really clear from the past decade or so that the games industry is not especially gatekept. Not only are there bazillions of indie games on itch or steam, many of the most loved games of the past decade are tiny indie games!

I agree that this is an impressive feat. I also don't see why an equivalent for rust would be adopted.

Yes, it was always possible for a PM to get a VP excited about a project and then lead to some mandate. But at least then I got to do a time estimate and they believed me. Today they can create a prototype to show to the VP so that both of them conclude that the project isn't actually very hard and my estimate of two engineers and four months gets rejected because "the prototype is 80% of the way there and it only took two days" even though the prototype is running locally on my PM's machine and is using fake data when we don't have easy access to the real data.

This is not the case at all. There have been ample people complaining about this stuff for years. While there are some people who are upset at various policies for other reasons there really is a battery of people who just genuinely don't want to see minority representation in the workplace. Oftentimes these people dress up their true complaints in softer ones but you really can see people like Chris Rufo pushing for a world where minorities are not in positions of power or authority.

I have personally observed people at my workplace (Google) complaining about any funded attendance at Grace Hopper as discrimination against men.