learc83

We don’t understand the biological processes behind depression, and there is no lab test used to diagnose depression. It is just as the passage says, a categorization of symptoms.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t biological processes at work, but we don’t understand them enough to diagnose depression at that level. We aren’t even really sure why most depression treatments work.

Contrast that to diabetes. You don’t get diagnosed with diabetes because you have increased thirst and urination. You are diagnosed with diabetes because your fasting blood sugar level was too high.

And the treatments are any number of relatively well understood methods of regulating your blood sugar.

The “local government” are my neighbors the Sheriff and the County Commissioner.

Then there are freedom of information requests, journalist, whistleblowers working for local government, and whistleblowers working for hotels.

If the Sheriff knew who you were and had probable cause he could get a warrant to get your credit card transactions from your bank and from that see you were in a hotel.

But that’s pretty far away from “hotels register you with the local government.”

There was actually a hotel owner who took it on himself to report suspected undocumented immigrants to ICE a few years ago. We know about it because it quickly made its way to the papers, and caused an enormous uproar.

Where did you get this from? US hotels most definitely do not “register (resident or non-resident) guests with the local government”.

A few states require hotel guests to present an ID at checkin.

I’d be very careful how much you read into this because it’s begging for confirmation bias.

There’s also a difference between working remotely and being thrown into working remotely at the last minute during a pandemic with no prior experience. I’ve been remote for the last 10 years and the vast majority of problems you mentioned get better over time if you work at it.

Very true. I have a 2 month old and I’m tall enough that the bassinet we bought was uncomfortably low. I ended up building a platform to raise it.

If I had my way, I’d get rid of the PM title and call them Customer Advocates.

It’s fine for non technical customer liaisons to have input, but putting non technical people in charge of a product doesn’t tend to work well in my experience.

Yeah piss off Joe Manchin so he goes independent and caucuses with the Republicans. That will definitely allow the Democrats to pass a pro abortion bill.

With a 50/50 Senate, Democrats need Manchin more than he needs them.

He’s also the only Democrat who can possibly win in WV where trump won by 40 points.

> but he’s not the only centrist in the party

Legalized abortion isn’t an issue that centrists oppose.

They don’t have a 60 vote majority in the Senate, and legalizing abortion isn’t likely something they can pass through reconciliation.

They also can’t end the filibuster without Joe Manchin.

The Senate is split 50/50 so the have the slimmest possible majority, and abortion is a hill nearly all Republicans are willing to die on.

I’m not sure this has anything to do with the current distinction unless by the current distinction you mean the nearly equal split.

> I probably was more of a “temporary employee” than a contractor. But what’s the difference at that point?

If you’re a temporary employee, the employer is responsible for payroll taxes, and has additional obligations to you (depending on the state). You’re obligations— both to your employer and to the IRS—are different as well.

I’m addition to unlawfully skirting regulations, misclassifying an employee as a contractor is essentially stealing from the employee by reducing the company’s tax burden and increasing the employee’s.

One of the legal guidelines for whether or not someone is a contractor (vs an employee) is whether they provide their own tools.

It’s not a hard rule. It’s just one of a number of tests. But contractors are generally expected to provide their own tools.

SOC2 isn’t prescriptive. SOC2 is just a certification that you are following your own internal policies.

If the company made the mistake of creating a policy that they use this software as one of their controls, then the auditor will ding them if they don’t use it.

It’s an absurd system.

In the case where an ER doctor isn’t employed by the hospital, they are likely employed by a physicians’s group. These used to be ran by physicians, but now many of them have been bought up and consolidated by private equity.

The doctors likely have very little say in the pricing.

We have contractors in the US as well. But we also have labor laws that govern who can be considered a contractor, as do other countries. It’s more complex than this, but in general treating someone like an employee and paying them as a contractor isn’t legal. If this arrangement gets popular enough to disrupt the labor market, you can expect more enforcement actions.

Regardless of any actual enforcement, most US companies don’t want to deal with the potential issues of getting tangled up in foreign labor disputes, or getting tangled up in foreign courts over IP disputes.

>They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select right people.

Hiring directly in other countries is difficult for all but the biggest companies (who probably already have offices in those countries and have been hiring in those countries for years).

It's more a question about degree. I don't mind an app having a few well vetted external dependencies. When it becomes common and accepted for a small application to contain thousands of 3rd party dependencies, I think we've gone way too far.

I've worked in languages that had large standard libraries where it was common to only include a few large commercial external dependencies, and I've worked with javascript and ruby on the other end of the spectrum.

I don't think one style has a clear productivity advantage over the other. Other than maybe at the very lowest levels of beginning software engineers (even then I'm unsure because of the decision paralysis common for beginners in these ecosystems).

As to the original point, however, Unity and other engines already have package managers and asset/code stores. What you're essentially asking for is for Unity to remove many of the features they already include and pull them out into packages. Now you're running up against many of the organizational issues I've already talked about. Not saying it's impossible, in my experience it's just not likely to work out long term.

An npm like ecosystem sounds absolutely horrible. It’s also not what I thought you were talking about.

Many (most?) software engineers (most?) cringe at the state of the npm ecosystem—even if they hold their nose and participate in it. I definitely wouldn’t consider that an improvement to the state of game dev software engineering practices.

You can have almost all of those benefits without using network calls as your boundary. Nearly every benefit you listed is a consequence of having enforced boundaries, not of microservices specifically.

Microservices do provide technical benefits for a small monitory of companies, but for the rest of us it’s almost entirely a solution to organizational/human problems.

I think you could, but I just don’t know how long it would last. The real benefit of microservices in most cases is that the network acts as an externally enforced boundary layer.

There’s no reason the vast majority of time that you need to pay the overhead of using network calls to enforce your boundaries. Yet time an again you see companies willing to pay the microservices tax because it’s just so hard organizationally to enforce modular boundaries over time.

> I also think you're over-estimating how much of a "beast" you need as a minimal structure for building a game around. I have built a lot of hobby games, and if you're not trying to make an AAA game, you can get really far with a simple game loop

It’s an organization/people problem. Eventually if your tiny hobby game engine gets big enough people start trying to use it to make the equivalent of AAA games. Then either those users (or your investors if you’ve gone that route like Unity did), start pushing you to support those edge cases.

Eventually your elegant modular code is dwarfed by the all the edge case handling that got crammed into the framework—either because it was so performance critical that it had to live there or (the more likely case) because it was much faster to hamjam it in than spend time thinking about how best to architect it.

The bachelors is the whole pink part not just the bump. It looks like more volume overall than the masters. It’s meant to represent the additional breadth.

But yeah masters programs do vary widely. When I was in undergrad there were students doing a CS masters coming from other disciplines. They mostly took classes with us and had to write maybe an extra paper to “make it a 6000 level class” (granted I did take more of the theory heavy CS classes than was required).

In that case their masters was basically equivalent to just the bump from the bachelors.

When my wife and I were picking names for our son earlier this year, I pulled down a list of the top 1,000 names from the social security office. I removed the top 20, and then we kept making passes removing more names until we were down to the winner.

I called it name whittling. It was surprisingly easy to whittle the list down to 50 names or so.

Company property is a completely different issue. Whether you do it during business hours or not is irrelevant.

If you’re salaried, you’re always on company time, so whether the company owns it or not is up to the laws of the state and the agreements you signed when hired.

If you’re salaried, there’s no such thing as company time, so that’s not a meaningful distinction.

In the US, it’s common to refer to university as school.

I don't pay any federal income tax on the first x dollars of income I earn either. This is nothing but a recognition that money has diminishing marginal utility.

The issue is that there are too many people earning less than x.

In most of the rest of the country we manage to build new roads and new transmission lines without the extreme issues you're describing. Over the last few years, I can think of hundreds of homes and businesses near me that were moved to widen existing roads or build new ones. A few people/businesses tried to fight it, they all lost quickly.

You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.

Unlike your examples, HVDC lines have no real negative impact on anyone but the immediately impacted property owners. If you're building HVDC transmission lines between countries, you can also very likely reuse existing utility corridors for much of it, and build through lower density areas for most of the rest. The actual number of property owners directly impacted won't be high enough to make an impact on elections.

It happens very regularly. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. Eminent domain doesn't generally directly impact enough people to make a serious election issue, unless we are talking about either very local elections, or when the thing being built is something people feel strongly about like an oil pipeline.

There's only so much a landowner can. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. It's a fairly common occurrence.

Oil pipelines are bit different because there are tons of people and organizations outside of those directly impacted who are willing to join the fight.

Not to say that what you’re saying isn’t a problem, but that’s what eminent domain is for.

Someone needs to pay for the storage and additional generation—both the direct costs and the externalities. Why not let the market figure out who pays for it?

If factories can’t afford to pay those prices, they’ll have to rework their business model, or maybe relocate to areas with cheaper power.