So close... but no cigar.

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.

macOS has been doing this (using a video wallpaper) by default for a while, and I'm guessing that's what brought this idea to the fore (again).

And yes, it's basically just a pointless, silly distraction - why would anyone want this? Unfortunately (from the OS manufacturers' position) operating systems are pretty feature complete, and basically the only "new shiny" thing they can offer is adding pointless bloat. Oh, also they can actively break things I guess... which always seems to go hand in hand with adding pointless bloat.

If "general public thinking" is the metric... the naming seems unhelpful in that regard since, at least based on TFS, it's not orbiting the earth - it's orbiting the sun and just staying in earth's proximity.

I would think something like "near earth asteroid" would be a less confusing term for such objects.

Al Bundy.

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.

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.

He unintentionally used Signal? How drunk was he?

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.

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.

Oh, you are 100% right. This was basically my childhood experience. My dad was in the US Army; and, back then (1960s-1970s), he was getting moved a lot. In terms of my age, my family moved at: 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 7, 7 (yes three moves while I was in second grade), 9, 10. On top of that, at (my age) 8 he was shipped to Vietnam, then they wanted to ship him there again when I was 11... so he decided to get out.

Interestingly (and possibly ironically) when he left active duty, he moved into a mostly equivalent full-time position with the Army Reserve - doing personnel and logistics management in support of the frequent moves of active-duty personnel! But he never had to move again, thank goodness.

Eventually the army figured out this wasn't a good way to get people to re-up... but yeah, it totally sucks to keep leaving your friends. Doubly so if you're a shy kid, like I was.

We have only his word that this is actually what happened. And, this being Facebook / Meta, they are known for lying through their teeth.

I wouldn't put it past Zuck to demand his minions make up some explanation that didn't boil down to "our tech sucks".

Apparently, I really needed to say it...

PIRG, Other Groups Criticize Microsoft's Plan to Discontinue Support for Windows 11

Yeah, that does seem ridiculously quick for Windows 11 - they're only just now ending support for Windows 10, after all...

(do I really need to say it?)

I don't think that's a particularly defensible position when we're talking about World War II. As screwed up as things seem right now, the world would almost certainly have been a much worse place had the US stayed out of the war.

I'm assuming, of course, that "stayed out of the war" would have also included not manufacturing huge numbers of tanks, planes, and ships for the Russians nor the British.