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vtange

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Yes it's true it's larger than books and movies, but games in the end just compete with other forms of media for customers' entertainment dollars.

Unless we can come up with a use case for VR beyond gaming and fulfilling escapist fantasies. It will likely just be another contender for entertainment dollars.

Smartphones on the other hand essentially made it possible to do anything a general desktop pc could do for people on the go without having to be tethered to a chair infront of a desk. Phones can be used for payment, notetaking, etc. There are people who use smartphones and don't play games at all.

This sounds like it will fall into the same "echo-chamber" problem platforms like Youtube fell into. Note that with the social-credit system, you are docked points if you are friends with the "wrong" people. Thus, you naturally friend with people with similar interests. I don't think they designed it with "anti-viral" as a motive, but instead as a way to weed out and isolate people with contrarian thoughts.

There are many ways to rationalize a war though, sure you can't take over others' resources without outright destroying them, but if your goal was to simply wipe a competitor out and monopolize a scarce resource, the picture changes.

The U.S. did very much benefit from the balance of power change that resulted from WWII. War determines who's left, not who's right. Eventually someone might try to be the one who is left.

Learning a new language doesn't necessarily deepen the vertical bar if the language cannot really be used to improve productivity/innovation on top of an engineer's current toolset. Learning TypeScript on top of Javascript can be thought of as vertical, but learning say Lua or C# on top of JS is probably better described as horizontal unless you're already intending to do some really specific desktop application.

This is a good point, though for most people, valuable skills are often "dry" and undesirable like plumbing, so someone who was really passionate might've persevered on his own anyways. Even if academia has the merit of making you persevere through a class you wouldn't have on your own, it's not efficient; Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes.

Front-loading on dry subjects also has the downside of scaring away people who would've otherwise done well given a different path of learning.

The timing of when you learn some things is also important; it matters not if you learned software architecture in college only to have all the knowledge become obsolete by the time you really need that skill - you'd have to review or worse relearn it by yourself all over again.

But you could arguably get the same result working for a larger company, getting paid market rate for a 9-to-5, and putting in a few more hours at home working on open source or managing a solo side project from scratch.

You might even end up with a side project that earns you passive income in the end if you're lucky, but you had to be lucky to get a "break-even" payout from startup-life anyways as you have said.

Does their data remain though? If it does then your data would still be in danger of hackers if said business got attacked, etc. Aren't businesses supposed to treat customer data as liabilities now?

Some consumers would want complete removal of their data after deciding not to continue paying for service.

Wouldn't a breakup/decentralization of Google, or any American multinational for that matter, just hand Chinese tech giants a massive advantage since the Internet as it is now heavily favors large, centralized organizations? I don't see people arguing for the breakup of the tech giants across the Pacific even though they hardly have a better reputation when it comes to privacy, etc.

By the way, I highly anticipate that the above argument will be made by said multinationals to prevent said breakup/anti-monopoly moves.

Highly depends on the team. I've seen teams where most members are remote but most teams I've been on shun working-from-home regularly.

That and most companies pay based off "cost of living" and you cannot expect Bay Area pay outside of the Bay Area. Asking for work-anywhere-in-the-world remote work basically feels like shooting yourself in the foot if you value compensation.

It's insane how many really, really, good people we lose to tragedies like this... 9/11 took away one of the founders of Akamai(the CDN company). Even the recent 737 crash took away some really accomplished people from humanity. It's a constant reminder of the fragility of life and how easily one can lose a loved one or oneself these days.

It's a different framing but this frame hides a lot of crucial information like the fact this venture used venture capital (and probably VC connections too) and hired many employees. You can't really compare this to the solo-garage-weekend-project.

You can also often find unnatural hairs/wrinkles/pigmentation around the forehead/neck if you look closely.

This might be a poor PR move for Unity in relation to game developers. Many will read it as a cash grab with more monetization shenanigans lurking on the horizon and decide to switch to engines like Godot Engine. Unity might've actually hurt itself if it loses too many client developers.

It doesn't help that there have already been some recent stories of developers being given the cold corporate treatment,[0] and the recent issue with Improbable.[1]

[0] https://sipreadrepeat.com/2018/12/16/unity-email-controversy... [1] https://gamedaily.biz/article/507/improbable-disputes-unitys...

That line is taken out of context a lot - the Declaration of Independence does not try to assert that all humans are equal in ability, its main focus was to state that all humans have equal rights to their life, liberty and freedom to pursue happiness. That means that even if a human is weaker, or even disabled, he or she still has equal rights to a human who is in good health.

I'm a software engineer that went through architecture school and I think you're glorifying architects a bit here.

The only reason why architects have a more gradual path as you describe is because there is a LOT of gatekeeping and feedback on your work is a LOT slower.

To become an architect you have to ideally go through schooling at a specific set of schools and then after that you have years of internships where you are at the mercy of the architect who supervises you. If you end up with a not-so-friendly boss you could end up working years of your youth in an unpaid internship and end up NOT getting any credit. That's years of delay to licensure. After getting enough credit and hours you still to take multiple exams, paying out of your own pocket, to get licensed. And unlike software, aspiring architects cannot spend a weekend or two to build projects on their own to put on a portfolio of work, and problems from anything you design can take months or years to crop up.

And even after all that only a tiny minority of architects end up in firms like SOM (like Google but for architects) and get to work in glamourous projects. The vast majority of architects just work on run-of-the-mill housing (not unlike CRUD apps) where the combination of building codes, the client's budget, zoning and other requirements often prevents you from doing anything too flashy.

The great thing about software really is the fact you have the independence and ability to build and publicize your own stuff whereas in all the other formal professions you can't without oversight.

4 can also be sorta solved by a lot of 1-3. Outside things you can learn from a CS class there is a lot of stuff out there that is poorly documented where the only good way to do 4 is to run many small experiments to know what constitutes an improvement and what doesn't.

I'm not advocating a wholesale increase in defense budget. There definitely is corruption and waste in there.

The point is that NATO members agreed in 2006 to spending 2% of their GDP equally and then didn't meet it. They agreed again in 2014 and the ball still hasn't budged.

Pledges are pledges. Whether it's a pledge to cut carbon and stop global warming or a pledge to chip in for the collective defense of everyone. Imagine if everyone decided to cut carbon and then it turned out to be all just hot air. If you don't honor your pledges it will hurt the any sort of future international effort.