Many of us don't want to work from home.

Can't stand it myself. Even when I was flying solo as a contactor I hired a desk in a co working space because I liked having someone else to work with other people around. I gained useful info there too.

Plus WFH doesn't work well for R&D jobs other than maybe a very rarified few. Nothing quite like a real whiteboard. Plus I now have constraints of physical equipment that preclude remote work.

IME quite a few (though not all) remote workers just want to be left alone to quietly do their thing. That only works if their thing aligns with the company and there's enough lone work. I've encountered too many software engineers who end up just fiddling with peripherally related stuff that kind of looks like real work but is actually mostly useless. Frankly once you are a big enough company (I'm not thank the gods) you can't rely on hiring above average so you need to deal with those people somehow and get work out of them.

Ok ok ok yeah sometimes I fuck around on the lathe a bit in lieu of doing actual work. One of the perks of being in work I suppose.

Anyhoo where was I?

Oh yeah life choices. What fuel costs? I ride an acoustic bike into work. I live somewhere where I'm not constrained to drive to live my life.

Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK.

Kinda, I mean he did well, but it went under. Acorn did somewhat better and parts of Acorn are alive and well to this day.

Furber and Wilson lacked that marketing muscle. Were they a unique talent? I mean... no one else did that. Their CPU worked first time, outperformed their contemporaries, ran at a fraction of the power cost a fraction of the amount and went on to become massively popular.

Maybe Woz couldn't have done that, but it doesn't mean Jobs was the one required to help him, any competenant marketing type could have done the same. Vew few people could have designed the hardware and software that Woz did at the time.

I'd argue that Jobs was unusually good at marketing. Maybe as rare as Woz. I mean, look at the cult of personality that's developed around him where people think Apple (or really Jobs himself) invented all sorts of things which were actually popularized by Apple, but invented by someone else.

His schtick works.

Wait what?

Are you also dating that love does not in fact transcend the fifth dimension and interstellar was also bullshit?

Come on man.

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit,

Suit? The guy who famously wore a black turtleneck all the time?

Anyhoo. I think people outside tech overestimate the importance of CEOs and people in tech underestimate it. Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all. He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company.

Steve Jobs also had a functioning reality distortion field, something not all that many people have and that's really important for building a company...

Age verification is an outgrowth of the christian nationalism, it is a core part of Republican identity politics.

It may be many things but it ain't that.

Slavery was once legal because there were not laws AGAINST it. Laws don't make things legal, they make them illegal.

What utter bullshit.

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, -- Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield

And you know that general line of reasoning was why slavery had to be actually recognised in the constitution because if you have a nation of any laws at all you need to pass a law to not have them apply to some people.

Tencent?

They are on the steering committee.

no matter how "open source" they claim the process to be, and subject to American export laws.

What? A process isn't open source, code is. There are open source implementations of AV1 (or 2) and H.265 (and 6). Anything can be subject to American export laws, whether or not it makes sense, but America can't enforce that outside America (or even inside some of the time).

You can get porn for free you know, there's no need to wait 5 years for your fridge to show it to you.

Then, considering that this is at the Swizz and German border,

A swiz is a swindle as any fule kno.

and AAC is better than Ogg for the same bandwidth

Is it? When I followed such things that was the case for a while, but the encoders started getting better. Heck the MP3 encoders got so good they were surprisingly close. I thought all of the codecs of that later gen ended up basically on a par.

Anyway didn't Opus wipe the floor with all of them being better in every combo of bitrate and latency than the competition?

Yep.

But also I'm guessing they are suing Snap because they consider them to be a much softer target than, say, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Samsung or Tencent (like they'd care lol) who would likely kerb stomp them into the next millennium without even noticing.

Big enough to matter, not big or experienced enough to put up a good fight. And also holy shit they've been having a terrible time of it on the NYSE! Halved in value this year (and 1/10 from the covid peak). I expect they are perceived as not likely to want a protracted and expensive legal battle, and Dolby have identified the weakest zebra worth eating in the herd.

Patent troll fuckers.

General Protection Fault outranks Colonel Panic and says drop and give me 20 reboots.

Yeah that happened to me! Turns out the stuck was just a bit loose. After thoroughly cleaning it and reseating, the crashes vanished. Fortunately because DDR5 is stupid expensive now.

Crashes you say?

Can't remember the last time I had one of those.

As opposed to your anecdote of zero (you are obviously lying).