j245

I’m not arguing that everyone must be WFH.

I’m saying if you choose to WFH or remote you can still enjoy social activities.

The “you’ll always be worse off socially if you WFH” argument isn’t valid.

If your personal situation dictates that it’s impossible for you to social outside a work/office environment and that would hurt your quality of life, you should absolutely WFO.

Just understand that it doesn’t apply universally and WFH and having plenty of social interaction is entirely plausible and within reach for many many people.

My problem was lack of time and energy. The commute and the effort of commuting just killed any desire to seek out social activities after work. Work was not getting in the way of any specific hobby I already had.

Once that constraint was removed, I could actually start figuring out what stuff I was interested in and perusing it.

I was surprised how much stuff is out there once I started looking for things to do.

> since you’re basically always on call.

It sounds like this is the actual problem you need to address.

> extra-curricular activities

There is no curriculum at work. Socialising isn’t exclusive to the work place. There are ample opportunities to meet people outside of the office.

It requires a small shift in our thinking because WFO is soo ingrained in us, we get confused once it’s not mandated. That doesn’t mean social contact is not easily within reach.

Hopefully it’s clear that running is just an example that can be replaced with any other social activities you enjoy.

My point is you’re not stripped of every opportunity to socialise if you choose to go remote, and it’s entirely feasible to replace the loss of office based social interaction with some other social interaction.

I’m the same as you, I’ve made good relationships in office and remote.

I think the social contact aspect is only an issue if you don’t understand or avail the new opportunities you have.

We’ve been WFO for so long, some folks are struggling to adjust to this new reality. That’s understandable !

On the point of meeting people and socialising..

Have you considered that it might be a self correcting problem ?

The 2 hours you save by not commuting can be used to join a local running club. Suddenly you’re meeting a lot of new people you would have never met before.

Tech workers DO understand what they are losing.

They have done the cost/benefit analysis and it’s significantly better to WFH in many scenarios.

One clear example is people that commute and have children they would otherwise miss seeing during weekdays.

Should social interaction with Bob at the office really be prioritised over being there for your child ?

I view one of the purposes of technology as saving us from having to make these terrible choices. I.e. Being able to provide for your family vs. Seeing your children for more than 2 days in a week.

There are just too many valid use-cases for Remote/WFH.

Framing it as “you’re not smart enough to realise what you’ve lost” is naive and misguided.

There is nothing novel in the article, I would argue most people already understand these points well.

Let me guess, the solution to ending world hunger is..

It’s just hunger, use your wallet, just go buy some food and eat it.

The funny thing is you’re talking about a huge restructuring of everything and that process will require a lot of excess energy.

Don’t forget about the energy required to modify all our current systems. To fight against the current system and overcome the inertia to change it.

Also - that’s your vision of Utopia. Maybe others want to colonise the solar system ? Which is not possible by reducing our energy consumption.

Why are you so motivated to make sacrifices that don’t need to be made ?

The article talks about someone generating more electricity from solar panels, than they can use. What does it matter if they increase consumption of energy with respect to harming the climate by burning fossil fuels ??

You’ve missed the point. Energy use by itself does not lead to global warming.

Energy sourced by burning fossil fuels does.

Deprecating harmful sources of energy is what we care about, not total consumption.

There is no compelling argument against increasing energy consumption if it’s from clean sources.

Can’t imagine a significant number of users ever accepting this solution, there’s too much hassle involved.

Users who are not attempting world record attempts or playing tournaments where money or fame is on the line.. in other words.. 99.99% of the user base will have no incentive to bother with webcam hand recording anti-cheat systems.

They will just move onto another less bothersome game that doesn’t require it, and that game will eat the webcam-required always recording game's market share.

So many problems with this idea..

Can you imagine your child saying “Mom / Dad I need to buy a webcam to play this game”. Alarm bells will be going off immediately.

Financially speaking, every player needs to buy a webcam to play even a free to play game ?

Do you need a camera of a specific quality ? What if the light in your room is off and the object detection can’t work out where your hand is ?

Do you get kicked from the game because the sun went down and you didn’t turn on the light ?

Can’t imagine the compute resources required to pull this off. The skins in the game will probably have to cost 10x more.

This is just what comes to mind after thinking about this for 2 mins.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that specific groups will survive no matter what.

The discussion is around whether the human race will survive and continue to grow.

As you may have noticed, population numbers have increased since the days of the Aztecs.

Yet here we are.. having a discussion about whether too many humans are surviving for too long.

We need to re-work the economic system. Currently the incentives are greater for the “first world” to divide and exploit the “third world”.

Once you start increasing quality of life and education, birth rates will plummet.

It would only be “over population” because our current in-effecient systems can’t keep up and they need to evolve.

We will come up with a way to “fix” that (if it’s even a problem), as we have done in the past.

Why ignore human ingenuity ?

Disagree - for many people, rolling the dice is too risky.

If you have something nice to fall back on (rich family, nest egg) or no dependents, then sure.

“Absolutely hilarious” that you’re forgetting there is usually a system design round that tests things like “setting up infrastructure on an enterprise-level”.

The coding round is supposed to test that.. you can code.

For the record I’m also not a fan of the Leet Code style rounds, even though I actually find completing them (outside of an interview) quite fun.

The point is, a couple of anecdotes don’t prove the rule. You might not find GPS useful, but a lot of people find it immensely useful and revolutionary.

If your use case is travelling to a new place once or twice and never again, there is no point memorising the route / area.

Memorising a route doesn’t help you figure out there is an accident on the route, or unusually heavy traffic.

I don’t disagree with you about memorising common routes and learning about your local area, it’s a good thing to do imo. It’s just no longer required because technology is good enough to let you get by without having to do that.

And the distance between love and glove is only 1.. who cares ?

Science can’t explain everything. It can’t tell you why the Empire State Building looks the way it does. There are other factors involved.

I’m not sure what the scientific model is based on, but it’s borderline impossible to quantify how societal views (one of the biggest factors) will evolve over time, and to account for that in the prediction.

I also “feel” the chance of overshooting is higher than 48%.

PS5 is another notable example of selling at a loss (at least initially)

Agree with all the benefits you listed about in-person sport. Main issue is the time commitment with team sports.

VR is in and out in 30-40 mins and the sports venue is your living room or garage (no travelling required)

IME - VR can be more fun than the gym.

VR can be social and competitive. Many online e-sports are.

Horses for courses etc..

My point is the comparison is meaningless.

If they get this to work, they will just build something with 100x or 1000x the output.

The number isn’t really important here, some indication of how the development of the technology is coming along is what we care about. Compare this energy to the last best output.

If this works and we productionize it, we will suddenly go from 1/4 Tesla battery to 10,000 Tesla batteries.

> So they made about 1/4 of the full Tesla Model 3 battery.

Focusing on absolute numbers is pretty irrelevant, wouldn’t you say ?

We know once we get a working prototype it can be scaled up relatively easily.

Strange to see a storage mechanism (battery) compared to a generation mechanism (fusion plant)

Oxford is also a geographical location. So it could be interpreted as, Research lab in town of Oxford.

okay - so you’re concerned there is a high chance of collisions in this case as apposed to companies like Stripe, Amazon and Oracle where there is less scope for confusion.

> Meta’s usage of it is relevant to its meaning.

Is it though ? - I thought Meta the name is just a shorthand for Metaverse, so the confusion is bounded to discussions on that topic.

Maybe I’m unable to see the issue. Can you give an example where this overloaded word will cause confusion ?

We definitely need to have a conversation about the pro’s and con’s of various things associated with Meta and the metaverse. This name collision thing just feels like a non issue to me.

Interesting question - What replaced the word Apple ?

Depends on the company no ?

For FAANG type places sure, but not everyone runs their interview process with that content.

Anecdata: I interviewed at a bank once and they wanted to know how specific library functions were implemented in a specific programming language.

> I find it as a reminder of my fungibility as an engineer: I get paid absurd sums because of supply and demand, not because of my skills; anybody who can game the leetcode exam (and the architectural diagram quiz and the personality quiz) can walk in and take the same 300k income I have. If enough people do so, wages could be pushed down by employers.

Entry is one part of the puzzle. The actual skill bit hopefully comes into play after you get in, at which point your skill(s) improve your chances to survive / thrive at these companies.

It will be interesting to see how things evolve.

From anecdotal experience one big reason was always:

‘You can get the same specs in a Windows PC for 1/2 the price !!’

Now with M1 - you can’t get comparable specs/performance in a Windows PC.

Also - in the past few months I’ve seen M1 MacBook Airs at very competitive price points. There are actually cases where you get better performance at a lower price point compared to a Windows PC.

I do think the M1 / ARM pivot has been a game changer. Market share in the last 12 months seems to be on the up.