It’s fairly trivial to have a virtual camera source and point Zoom to that as it’s input. It has nothing to do with integrating deeply with Zoom or getting “into” your Zoom. Check out Snap Camera[0] for an example.
One way to solve that issue is to agree on the design pattern ahead of time before writing the code. Learning to think about the abstraction ahead of time is a powerful skill, but can be very uncomfortable to some people. There's a thing where we just allow people to say "I need to get my hands dirty, I can't effectively plan it ahead of time because I'll just end up changing my mind anyway," and nobody questions that reasoning or pushes back. The concept of "learning styles" has mostly been disproven. It's just a muscle you have to work, thinking about abstractions ahead of time without writing code. Writing helps a lot here.
Anyway, if you're able to iterate on the design pattern before writing code, it can often only take a day or two, and then you don't have to spend another sprint re-writing the whole thing or whatever. Code reviews become a lot quicker/easier now as well, because you don't have to think about other design patterns while reviewing code, just the pattern already agreed on.
Jealousy is a deep, natural instinct. There are tons of studies that show how various kinds of monkeys/apes will happily eat a piece of fruit or whatever, but if you give the monkey next to them a piece of candy instead, the first monkey will go ape shit and never eat the fruit again.
Many, many people think like this. I remember talking to a software engineer from MIT a while back, I don't even remember what we were talking about. But, I distinctly remember him expressing an attitude where someone else received something that he felt that he deserved, regardless of whether the other person deserved it also or not, and to him, this was just about the gravest injustice that he could imagine. He was like visibly angry clenching his teeth while talking about it. And it had nothing to do with whatever the thing was, hence why I can't remember it. To him it was a very deeply rooted idea of "fairness" defined in this sort of simple-minded, inflexible way. And he was ALL ABOUT removing the thing from the other person as opposed to trying to get compensated equally himself.
FYI - This type of workflow automation and connecting to Saas product APIs and moving data around can also be easily built using a no-code RPA tool like PixieBrix[0].
Here's the thing I wonder though. If you sat each one down and explained that the whole thing was basically a ponzi scheme, or like a lottery where everyone loses except one person who wins big, I'm not certain you wouldn't see a majority of them say "Yeah, I know," or just keep "playing" after hearing the explanation. To borrow the cliche, you can't really use logic to change someone's mind when they didn't use logic to make up their mind in the first place. Also, gambling is powerfully addictive to a lot of people.
There are infinite ways to "spin" inaction as cautious analysis or being conservative. It's much more difficult to spin an intentional decision that you are accountable for that went wrong. The higher up you go, the higher the cost of a bad decision becomes, while the value of a correct decision doesn't really increase that much compared to someone lower down making the same call successfully. Basically, you're expected to make the right call more often than not when you are higher up. Amazon literally has a thing in their leadership principles about how good leaders are just "right" more often than bad leaders. All of these incentives lead to many, many situations where it is not in any one executive's best interest to make a decision to move forward on something. So they all just sit on it.
I've never been convinced that physical immersion will ever be as compelling to the human brain as mental immersion through good story-telling. Having my real-life body and physical attributes thrust directly into a story/game just seems like the most non-immersive thing possible to me unless the game is entirely designed around moving the body, like DDR or Beat Saber or whatever.
I can confirm from talking to people who know him, and watching him speak about it at length in a small group, private setting, Ashton cares deeply about fighting child exploitation. His life outside of acting and family seems to basically consist of helping run his VC fund and working at Thorn, his company that works with governments to fight child exploitation online. He got emotional talking about Thorn and the work they've done. It's some of the most serious shit imaginable to fight against and deal with. I also wouldn't be surprised if he's had technical experts explain to him at least some of the problems with government oversight like this, and probably figures it's a valid tradeoff if it helps reduce child exploitation to any meaningful degree. He's honestly not a dumb guy at all.
I think the problem is that, at least in this area, the only people asking for more nuance are bitcoin supporters, and they aren’t open to nuanced reasoning for why people hate bitcoin. “Nuance,” to them, just means letting them win some of the arguments or admitting that some of what they say is not entirely bad. That’s not “nuance,” that’s appeasement.
>For the people in this thread worried about violence against the reporter, I think it much more likely that drivers will simply get the message and turn off their damn engines.
You obviously haven't tried to ask a delivery driver in NYC why their truck is running... I have done it several times in the east village, and got nasty looks and angry responses every time. I wasn't even recording or anything, just walked out of my door and said "hey man, any reason you have to run your truck right now?" And I'm also a 6 foot, not-skinny, guy.
The thing that is kind of baffling to me about so many people in this comment section is that they think their personal opinion about the ethics of what he did has any bearing on anything. That's not how the legal system works at all.
To quote Tom Scott, a youtuber, "I'm not telling you how it should be, I'm just telling you how it is."
I mean, it’s par for the course with someone who thinks it’s just a no-big-deal, “personal interest,” to MITM a bank’s mobile app in order to start poking around in their production servers, without prior consent from the bank.
If this (not infosec) person was doing this type of security probing during work hours using work equipment, I could see them being fired even if they are hacking on the company’s own product.
You’re not paid as a competitive intelligence analyst and security researcher, regardless of your “personal interests,” you’re paid to work on a product to make the company more money.
Furthermore, if you start unpacking the mobile app of a bank and doing actual pen testing analysis in the wild hitting their prod servers, even accidentally, you seriously need to understand the situation you are putting yourself in, regardless of where you work.
I think the key point from the OP you're missing here is mentorship/training to avoid all of the issues you described. I don't think the OP was advocating for hiring the best generalist you can find and then just throwing them to the wolves and expecting senior-level productivity.
Congrats on your perceived success! I tried to use softer words like "might," and I explicitly said "maybe this is just me," in order to not assume anything. It appears you took my language in a different tone than I intended, and are now turning this into more of an argument than any sort of discussion, so I'm going to take my leave and move on.
Heaven forbid anyone asks you to do any explicit emotional labor in addition to technical labor! The horror!
"I get paid to write code, not to be a human!!!!"
It's pretty obvious the bias here if you flip things. We all know that both emotional labor and physical/technical labor are required to get the job done. If you said everyone would only be rated on hard metrics around their social abilities, and the programming would be left up to whatever each person feels like, it would lead to technical chaos. I doubt anyone would say, "That's so infantilizing. We're professional programmers we don't need these hand holdy forced "engineering architecture" meetings. Just let us code together and I promise we'll build the product the right way, and on time."
In the same way, if you don't explicitly plan and architect the culture at your company, it can lead to similar chaotic situations. People only associate organically based on similar background, similar interests, similar personality, etc. This leads to basically every single bias that everyone not a white/asian straight man has been screaming about for decades in tech.
You do you man, but this idea of "I get paid to code, and I only do enough emotional labor to get my code merged and not get dinged on perf reviews," leads to a lot of the issues I have with working in big tech, personally. Maybe that's just me though.
If you have a condition like Asperger's or Autism then I apologize, I don't mean to be insensitive. But, if you have run-of-the-mill social anxiety and/or shyness, then I think time-boxed, scheduled, regular conversations with your co-workers can be just about the best format for practicing your conversation skills that I could think of. I think if you tried to put effort in, you might be able to make more progress than you think you can. Think of it like any other skill you need to practice and develop for work. This isn't a purely social situation, you don't need to be best friends with these people. It's just about practicing your ability to pretend to be a socially confident person in business settings when called for. And to learn about your co-workers personalities so that you can be a more effective and empathetic teammate.
I've worked at multiple places that implemented weekly "Donut Buddies" (https://www.donut.com/) and I think it's amazing. It never felt forced, let alone "infantilizing." The truly socially anxious people could just opt out by leaving the Slack channel for it so they wouldn't be assigned a buddy anymore. I found it amazing for building relationships around the company.
I'm at a tiny startup right now as an engineer, not mgr, and I have weekly 1:1s with every other member of our team. Especially now during remote work, it's a godsend for getting to know teammates.
There's a 2003 movie version of Paycheck with Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti, and like 4 other people you'll probably recognize. I watched it when it popped up on Amazon Prime last year. Seems like it's not reviewed very highly but I enjoyed it going in with no expectations and not really knowing what it was about.
For anyone else who isn't familiar, type 1 fun is where it's a fun experience and you have fun memories of it. Type 2 is a not-fun experience where you look back on the accomplishment fondly. Type 3 "fun" is a tongue-in-cheek description of something where you didn't have fun doing it, and also don't have fond memories of it.
I would guess the best answer here is to write down everything. Keep a journal. Write down events as soon after they happen as possible, write down your thoughts about the event, write down your emotions and connect them to the events that generate them.
I think a somewhat decent mental model here is to think of our brains as write-only memory. Every time you remember something, your brain rewrites the memory. You, on some level, are experiencing the event/thought/feeling again. When you think about what you felt during a past event, you are mostly feeling your current reaction to the memory, and not as much tapping into past feelings as you might think.
One broad example of this is what people call "type 2 fun." This describes events that may not produce positive emotions in the moment, usually some kind of hard physical tasks/achievements. But, looking back, these events produce positive emotions when remembering the event and the accomplishment.
I remember having a babysitter when I was little who was doing her high school algebra homework. I was curious, so she tried to explain the concept of x/y variables to me and it made no sense to me at the time, kind of broke my brain briefly. Then, as an adult, I had a Math-PhD friend attempt to explain some advanced number theory concept to me and I had the exact same feeling of just completely not getting it and feeling like my brain was broken. Math has been the only subject that could consistently produce that feeling, I've always had sort of a sense of wonder and awe about it.