vtange

3rd possibility is that they are using a lazy implementation of a paywall/way to force you to register to read.

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.

Autofocus can be for anything - Phone cameras, Surveillance cameras, Drone missile targeting systems, etc.

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.

Would you have made the switch if it wasn't closer to family?

A lot can be learned working with average engineers. You shut yourself out of a lot of jobs by avoiding average and will be probably screwed if the "above-average" places consider you an average candidate.

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.

But not all customers need the new benefits and prefer Patreon for being quick, cheap and simple. It would actually be damaging to Patreon if they didn't grandfather and changed to a point they lost that audience.

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.