What? I had to get a H1B visa to spend 2 weeks in CA (a business trip essentially). Regardless of my reason to visit, I had to get a visa. I'm an EU citizen and I really doubt Chinese nationals would have an easier time. Especially if they are working directly for a US based branch of a company (my H1B wouldn't cover that). Could you cite where you got the notion that independent contractors don't need a visa, like an on embassy page?

What the hell is APK? You're not talking about android app packages, right?

And having the networks above ground and monitored did the victims a fat load of good, didn't it?

Yes, we do. I did a CS course at a decent university. We were taught ARM assembly, systems programming in C, algorithms, a bunch of networking modules of varying depth and scope, low level processor architecture (culminated in an assignment to make a CPU simple in VHDL, mine worked just barely). There were also modules that looked at OS functionality and scheduling, and yes we were taught about semaphores and mutexes and preemption. There was also a module on computer architecture where we explored cache coherence algorithms and implemented various mutex systems on x86 (turns out ticket locks are pretty good). We were taught nothing about libraries or frameworks - it was generally implied that it is something you can learn or build on your own.

At my job, we do tend to build stuff that is stable and maintainable over time (though the time span isn't quite decades and there is planned obsolescence). Formal documentation is a bit sparse, but code quality is good enough that with a bit of domain knowledge you can tell what's going on. It's not the same at all companies. Not-invented-here syndrome actually means that stuff will be re-implemented (or at least wrapped) better than the original.

And it is not a dying profession, not at all. It's just that the barrier to entry is high. It's certainly not for everyone.

To be fair sittingnut did say that "pay .. should be a secondary consideration", not that pay should not matter at all. Still, the notion that one should prefer a minimum wage job (over a higher paying one) because the job fulfills a more important need than monetary pay is still a valid conclusion from their argument.

Except that working remotely is nothing like being in the same office with your coworkers.

The company I work for has software engineering offices on either coast of USA, Ireland (where I work), and India. For one's the there's the time zone woes - we only get at most a few working hours in common with any other office, and there's no hours in common between all offices. Teleconferencing is not pleasant. Phones and video connections are still far from perfect, so it's much easier to make yourself understood if you're in the same room as the other people. You can draw stuff on a whiteboard, gesture, draw attention to a screen that can't be quickly shared to everyone else. Having a remote worker on a different time zone is very difficult if you wish to integrate them into the local office, because it requires much co-ordination, whereas in the same office you can just walk over to a coworkers desk and chat, or set up a meeting in minutes.

For another, you build real camaraderie with people in your office. Working full time, you spend more time (excluding sleep) with them most days than with a romantic partner. Some of my coworkers play football (the real kind) together, I practice archery with some a few evenings per week and talk about electronics or metal working most mornings with a few other like minded coworkers. Others organize a social event most Fridays. We do use instant messaging and email, but those interactions are nearly all perfunctory (though generally productive especially when the issue at hand is well understood). And then there's cultural and personal biases that are more likely to be shared if you're working with people living in the same society as you do - this makes communication a lot easier between people in the same office than remotely, because it's easier to relate to them.

I'm not saying that working remotely is necessarily bad. I can understand that it's probably good for business, but it's closer to contract work than a well running office.

It's probably been even longer since I've used it, but last I checked SketchUp was geared more towards CAD, whereas Blender, 3dMax, Maya and others are geared towards 3d animation (very high detail, non-real time rendering). While SketchUp does have intuitive additive and subtractive geometry deformation tools, they are higher level than Blender's straight up mesh topology editing. Blender naturally uses quads, hardly any higher level than the natural triangles that are native to real-time (GPU accelerated) rasterized computer graphics.

But this is all tangential to the edit/object mode discussion. SketchUp also has the notion of layers, which seem to be like the layers in GIMP or Photoshop and act like Blender's objects (strictly speaking, more like Blender's meshes that are associated to objects, since Blender also has non-mesh objects). Yeah I guess that reduces the number of operations involved in editing one component to editing another component to just a layer switch, but I don't see how that's an improvement. Though I also don't see how edit mode and object mode are bad design either.

Could you post some links or descriptions of how other programs do this? 3dMax for one seems to work exactly like Blender in this regard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0iUYrKx8z8).

I suppose you could remove the need for edit mode if you removed the strict object-mesh relation. Every mesh would simply be a connected set of vertices, and you could fluidly join or split meshes. You could isolate a single mesh for easier editing. Does any 3d editor do this?

(Also I'm the AC who posted the original comment, I created this account right after).

What you're describing is generally called "strong AI", which is something that, for the time being, is a pipe dread. Self driving cars do not require it. A self driving car controller merely needs some way of telling where the road and other vehicles and pedestrians are relative to it, have a decent physical model of how various inputs like throttle and turning or breaking have on the car, and how to control these while getting the occupants to their destination. It's little more than a glorified PID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller). It does not require human level cognition to achieve this, and it can in fact do a better job than humans as it can have much better reaction time, light independent vision in every direction via radar, no chance of ever getting lost provided adequate maps and GPS systems, etc. Alternatively, if you claim that this constitutes enslavement, you can say the same about your appliances and computer equipment. Have you ever asked your computer if it _wants_ to render slashdot for you, you monster?

How would you implement the functionality in edit mode, and somehow prevent it from clashing with object mode, in a modelees was?