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And most employers will have some sort of transit benefit. $84.50 falls well within a lot of the wage works style benefits people get!

> there really aren't that many good investment opportunities over the long term

What’s wrong with the market as a long (emphasis) term investment vehicle? ~7% average yearly returns for the past 150 years is pretty solid. Yea you have to insulate yourself from market fluctuations, but that’s also true of the housing market (see the collapse of the US housing market 10 years ago). Barring a complete collapse of the US economic system, in which case Americans will have other things to worry about, how is housing superior than some boring-old Vanguard market tracking ETFs/Mutual Funds? Better returns?

> USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast (especially in Southern California). > it's still very much an exclusive brand

I would say weirdly exclusively in Southern California. I can’t think of a school with more regional status and less national status than USC. Maybe some of the bespoke NYC schools? Hell, I’ve worked with folks in Oregon and Washington who have thrown out resumes because they went to USC.

When I was living in Portland it was super common for people to bring their own mugs (usually those metal camping style cups with closable tops, but I'd see plastic cups too) to coffee shops. The baristas would usually blast them with some steam to clean them out then fill 'em up! Easy as pie.

Oakland isn't in San Francisco, the Town is it's own city! (Although, funny enough, part of Alameda island is in San Francisco.)

> The government should be more actively monitoring these industrial activities and protecting its citizens from their negligence.

Local and state politicians don’t want to be seen as killing industrial jobs. The Federal government really needs to take action here, but this is obviously a non starter in the current administration.

Pittsburgh’s air (while still f’ed up) is infinitely better than it was 30 or 40 years ago, largely because of EPA regulations.

Not op, but outside of C++, C# is probably the widest deployed language (on the CPU) in the game industry by virtue of the Unity engine.

> 1) It's unusual. Historically, C# is more of a businessy thing, with a bit of game stuff on the side, mainly in the form of scripting. Extremely high performance C# code is even stranger.

Unity is C#, no? I remember reading that they are moving most of the traditionally C++ 'backend' engine code to C# now, too.

Edit: Found the article: https://lucasmeijer.com/posts/cpp_unity/

I've considered it! Our local community college offers classes like this for pretty cheap, maybe when I'm done with the current place.

I look for smaller places that I can handle on my own (2 bedroom max), no major structural/foundational issues that would require bringing an engineer in, no demolition that would require an engineer, that kind of thing. Finding an inspector that you trust and that knows their stuff is really key here. Basically the same kind of things you would look for when investing in house flips (which is really all I'm doing, just for fun on my own).

I would then have to deal with finding tenants, property maintenance issues, etc (or pay someone to do this), which is more than I really want to do right now. At that point I would be closer to a full time landlord, not a full-time software engineer who enjoys working on houses on the side!

For the past few years I've been buying, renovating, and selling small-ish houses. My dad was a contractor growing up so I picked up most of the necessary skills helping him out during middle and high school. I mostly work on weekends and holidays which makes it a bit slow going, but I've made a reasonable amount of money. Even if the money was worse I would still probably do it, I really enjoy both the physical aspects of the work and seeing a house go from a beat up old husk to a shiny new place! I have to contract out some of the work (electrical mostly) because I'm not a certified electrician, but otherwise it is a one man show.

> NNs are good for approximation / interpolation / extrapolation

Extrapolation? I was under the impression that generalizability of NNs beyond the training data was one of the major problems faced by NNs.

What's the major complaint(s) of people who oppose large towers? Shade? Skyline (which you aren't going to be seeing anyway unless you live out in Brooklyn or Queens)? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the big deal is here. If a billionaire wants to live up in the clouds, great, more vacant spaces in the rest of Manhattan for everyone else.

I mainly see GLFW used as a modern, if somewhat more bare bones (no font rendering, no event loop, etc), variant of GLUT.

> and that's to say nothing of Secret of Mana or a half-dozen other incredible JRPG soundtracks.

Secret of Mana had one of the weirdest soundtracks from the SNES era! So many interesting southeastern Asian influences. The sequels definitely took the music in a more generic direction, unfortunately :(

> After starting college I soon learned of the trials and tribulations of software engineers in the gaming industry.

Graphics is used well beyond the games industry! Anecdotally (talking to friends, getting recruiter emails, etc) Apple, Facebook, NVidia, and Google have been hiring like crazy for non-games graphics-related positions.

Base salary at the bigs starts around 150 +/- 10%. Total comp packages take your actual W2 income way higher, though (50% signing bonuses, regular old bonuses, RSU grants around 75% of base salary a year).

> It's pretty typical to see people bring their own bags to the store which hardly anyone did in Pennsylvania where I grew up.

I moved from CA to Pittsburgh, and people look at me like an alien when I take out reusable bags at the local grocery store. It’s pretty bizzare.

> A toilet that monitored urine and stool samples

The nation of Germany?

When I was living in Oakland Uber Pool rides would often be cheaper than taking BART...

None of the ML people I’ve worked with (mostly at FB and Google, ymmv) have seriously believed we are anywhere close to human-like AI. The shortcomings of current ML systems are well understood — given metric tons of data, they are really great nonlinear regressors and data interpolators. They are absolutely terrible at generalizing, with no obvious solutions to this on the horizon.

Can you get second order with only the gradient? Even fancy accelerated gradient descents are still first order. I suppose there are BFGS-like quasi Newton methods, but those are still building up estimates of the second order info over multiple iterations.

I know families in NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and even Pittsburgh that do great car free! It is 100% doable, even in the US.

> The notion would be laughed out of any city budget here.

I could see it happening. Portland, Oregon has an art tax that goes towards things like large scale murals in public spaces. An extra 5-10% on the cost of a man hole cover would fit within this, easily.

Funny enough you mention Discharge... most contemporary DM bands dress (and have a few songs) that sounds like crust bands ~1982

It’s all about that delicious Hetch Hetchy

No one has cared about that TRVE nonsense in almost two decades, gatekeeping genres is trite.

The plugin/extension ecosystem is way more active in VS Code than than Sublime, I’ve found. There is a VSC extension for just about anything you could imagine, at this point.

With that said the latency in typing with VSC drives me a little bit crazy every day...

> However, the current crop of big companies will still be the big tech companies in 2030 and 2040.

What’s the reasoning here? Rewinding to 1999, Microsoft is the only (then) big tech company still doing interesting things. Apple was mostly irrelevant and on the brink of collapse, Google was an academic curiousoty, and Facebook wouldn’t exist for another half decade. A lot will change in 20 years. I suppose Yahoo, Oracle, and IBM are still kicking and probably will for a long while, but they are hardly forerunners at this point.