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Comment Re:Spreading misinformation (Score 1, Troll) 130

Quite a few times things which were deemed misinformation back during the COVID times turned out to be different than official sources said (at first or later).

If the best available evidence indicates X, but you believe Y based on gut feel, then later solid evidence of Y is developed, were you right? Further, should this experience convince you to trust your gut over the best available evidence in the future?

Comment Re:Return to office (Score 2) 120

Fairly obviously, this almost certainly won't result in many thousands of H1-Bs each paying $100k to the US government each year; it'll result in many thousands of jobs that would have been paying US taxes on their wages, and then paying for accommodation, a car, for leisure, and whatever else into the US economy paying their taxes and spending their wages in wherever the new (or expanded overseas) office is instead.

Yep. Google, at least, started this transition during Trump1.

The company has long had engineering sites in various other countries, but until Trump1, the primary focus was always on cities where Google thought the global talent would want to live. Low cost was clearly not the driving factor in the selection of London, Zurich, Munich, Tokyo and Sydney, to name a few of the ones I visited. US sites were similarly not located in low-rent areas. The workforce was definitely global, because Google wanted to hire the smartest people and while the US does have its share of brilliant minds, the US has only 4% of the world's population, so most teams -- even in the US -- ended up being minority American.

During COVID, Trump leveraged the health crisis to essentially halt H-1B approvals and renewals. This caused significant problems for Google. My own team lost a few people because they couldn't get their visas renewed and had to go back home. Some chose to move to other Google sites overseas where Google could get them a work visa, others simply went back to their home countries. One trans woman on my team was in a particularly tough spot because her home country (India) refused to renew her passport because it didn't recognize her new gender. She couldn't get her visa renewed, couldn't go home to India, and also couldn't move to any other country with an expired passport. Luckily, she had a lot of nVidia and Google stock she'd been saving up to buy a house, and by cashing that out had enough free cash to get an EB-5 "investor" visa. It's good to be rich, of course.

Anyway, Google saw what was going on and, anticipating future troubles of the sort, refocused its overseas office plans on building up teams and infrastructure, especially in India which provided so much of Google's engineering talent anyway, with the intention of shifting whole projects and workstreams there. The company had long required a significant percentage of all staffing growth to be in the US (and especially in the bay area), but that policy was scrapped and replaced by its opposite: A certain percentage of all new roles must be based overseas.

It's still the case that the center-of-mass of Google is in the bay area, but the company is actively working to change that, to build up overseas capacity, and not just groups of junior engineers under a manager whose role is to pass them detailed requirements for implementation, but instead full teams with highly-skilled and experienced senior engineers and managers able to take full ownership of major product areas and move them forward.

Trump's latest moves will just accelerate this transition. The result will eventually be a hollowing out of the company's US capacity, and therefore a reduction in the need to hire American engineers. Lucky for me, I'm leaving Google for a startup and anyway am not far from retirement. Between this stuff and AI being poised to replace junior engineering staff it's a good time to be getting out.

Also, I think it will soon be time to start shifting investments out of the US.

Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 1) 86

Cppcheck apparently knows "hundreds of other rules covering a multitude of language aspects" so you don't "have to mentally apply against every single line of code you write."

Cppcheck doesn't flag anything in Waffle Iron's example.

It also doesn't find anything wrong with:

std::vector<int> vec = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
auto it = vec.begin();
vec.push_back(6);
std::cout << *it << std::endl;

Which is another common example of how you can write memory errors without using C++ pointers.

Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 2) 86

In the sort of places where MISRA and similar coding guides apply, yes, never allocating memory is expected, because once dynamic allocation exists you can't guarantee that you won't die with an out-of-memory error and similarly can't guarantee any time bounds on how long an alloc and dealloc will take.

Sure, so C++ is safe as long as it's used in a way that makes it incredibly painful. Sounds good. Let's just require all C++ code everywhere to be written that way. Rust usage will skyrocket overnight.

Comment Re: Is there anyone here that voted for Trump (Score 1) 263

It is hard to have fair democracy with winners take it all.

For a really rigorous definition of "fair", it's impossible to have fair democracy at all. Arrow's Theorem demonstrates this to a large degree, although many have argued that some of his fairness axioms are excessive. More recent research has concluded that fairness is the wrong standard, because there's no way for an electorate's "will" to really be fairly represented by any electoral system, not in all cases. Some systems can do better most of the time (and "winner take all" is particularly bad), but all systems fail in some cases.

What we need to aim for instead of fairness is "legitimacy", which is more about building broad acceptance of the system than about fixing the system itself, though it's easier to build acceptance for better-designed systems.

Having the country's top politicians continually claiming the system is unfair and rigged is, of course, the worst possible thing to do if you want to build support for the legitimacy of the system.

Comment Re:Jokes on you (Score 2) 263

Precisely none of those books were ever banned.

I decided to check :-)

According to the Book Censorship Database from the Every Library Institute, both "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been challenged, but only "Of Mice and Men" was removed, though "restricted" is more accurate. The Birdville Independent School District in Texas removed the book from general access, allowing access only to the AP English class, and the Indian River County Schools in Florida restricted it to high school students.

No Doctor Suess books were banned, although Suess Enterprises voluntarily ceased publication of six books.

Comment Re:Probably! (Score 1) 18

Reform copyright, allow derivative works, abolish moral rights. What's the worst that could happen? Solves the problem of AI being "inspired" by existing works. Well, perhaps someone will write a crappy HP-inspired story about Tanya Grotter, a machine-gun wielding lady wizard who goes after bad Chechens (that is a real book, BTW). So what? The goal of copyright is cultural abundance, and that will (eventually) include AI generated works.

Look at Nosferatu, considered to be one of the great vampire movies. The movie was called that because they did not secure the copyright to the Dracula story, and after a lost lawsuit they had to destroy all copies and negatives. Luckily a few survived, and we can still enjoy it.

Comment Re:Hitler and Trump get rid of the comedians first (Score 2) 263

Exactly what background and/or career does prepare one well for the presidency? A law degree? Founding a successful business? A career in politics? An MBA? Perhaps being a comedian. Or perhaps the job (like many high level managerial jobs) is such a complex multi-faceted one that no career is going to prepare you for it, and no background is a great predictor for success. Perhaps it is more about personality than experience, but even that is not a great predictor. I've seen plenty of politicians who looked great for the job, only to turn out complete rubbish, or the other way around. Or a brilliant mayor who turned out to be a shit minister. And it depends on circumstances as well... one of our MPs is remembered as lackluster and ineffectual, but I think he would have been great if times had been different. Likewise I think that Zelensky would have been a so-so president in peacetime conditions... but he stepped up brilliantly after his country got invaded. Kind of how people look back on Churchill... before the war, people didn't think he was all that either.

Comment Re:Teachers (Score 1) 111

Sadly the teacher is correct unless you plan to give your son a great inheritence he will need to purchase cars, rent places, and even buy a home some day.

Lenders need to know who they are doing business with before they lend out the money and take a risk.

Yes, this country has terrible credit problems with tiktokkers saying they are planning to get pregant so they can qualify for the payment for a car and other stupid stuff (yes this was on facebook for a girl entitled for a Mercedes making 30k a year at probably Walmanrt). They are addicting too as a simple swipe and bam instant free stuff etc.

But responsibly they are life saver and a bank has no idea with a character underwrite these days if they are going to get paid back? 70 years ago when people lived in the same town and knew the banker personally it was a different story and time.

Comment Re:Credit scores are not what you think they are (Score 1) 111

No. Its more likely you will be late paying them so they use that as an excuse not to do business with you.

Case in point I switched cards with a different number and forget. My auto insurance thanks to one late payment went from $250 to $475 a month!! At the time my score was 735 too. I was so pissed and it was greed obviously as they viewed me as broke.

Comment Re:Credit scores are not what you think they are (Score 1) 111

I would mod you up if I had points.

Credit systems are a scam as Dave Ramsey says he has a score of 0 and would be denied renting a 1 bedroom apartment ... but could buy the whole complex in cash :-D. Read my last paragraph below to show how stupid this it with correlation = causation arguements to rig it? ... reality is very very few people can buy homes, emergency medical expensives and cars in cash.

Credit score = The % you are likely to pay someone back or your bills on time. No more no less. It is has nothing to do with wealth or success.

But in 2025 it is an evil necessity unless you are a millionaire. My Dave Ramsey example for those who do no tknow teaches financial literacy on youtube and is famous and hates all debt, but he is worth $160 million so can buy homes, boats, and cars in cash and his business. You and I reading this cannot.

Your credit score went down because you closed an account. Not because it was paid off. Broke people close accounts so therefore you are less likely to pay back with the whole correlation vs causation. It also impacts your debt/assets ratio. With less available credit available your other debt %/total available debt% ratio went thru the roof as it looked like you were borrowing too much, therefore you are going to default then those that don't. Again the causation = correlation arguement.

Go do some simple credit research on youtube. The proper way is get those ratios, account lenghts, and percentages in high, Keep ancient cards for lengthening credit history and keeping %total available debt% as big as possible so it looks like you aren't in over your head and over extended. Pay fees in interest for 3% to 5% of balances carried over to show you love debt and willing to have history and you will be good. If you rent be careful of broke neigherhoods as you are statsitically less likely to pay back if you live in X thanks to other broke people.

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