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SideFX | http://sidefx.com/careers/ | 3D software developer; Technical writer | US or Canada (Remote) | Full-time

SideFX makes Houdini, one of the most popular and widely-used 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and effect packages in games, film, and commercials.


Facebook is the new tobacco industry.


I'd say more generally that the online advertising (or attention, if you like) industry has massive negative externalities that they are trying to downplay and not take responsibility for.


Imho advertising is a meme that is at odds with humanity (meme as in the original definition).

People worry about ai operating in software, this is an ai that has been running in the collective wetware of humans for some time that is significantly hindering us.


________ is the new tobacco industry.

If researchers can produce a result that convinces the powers that be that facebook is a mental health issue they can produce a result that gaming or violent movies or maybe something you indulge is a mental health issue.


The new tobacco industry...of decades ago. A long time ago we banned advertising smoking to children (or at least, tried to) but the beforetimes of that decision were rough. Kids commercials for smoking, toy cigarettes, etc. Facebook is actively marketing to youth today just like tobacco did decades ago, indeed.

It's a great analogy because it also works well for adults: we're free to use the product/service, we have our freedom! Even if it slowly (or quickly) kills us.


When I was a kid in the sixties I got chock-like candy cigarettes in my Christmas stocking, and for Halloween. I remember some were a bit powdery and you could blow on them and simulate smoke.


Those were the best! Chalky just like Tums

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_cigarette


With one one millionth as much death


Seems a bit early to call that. 10 years of social media not enough for real death results, especially when comparing to tobacco.


You mean social media giants are the new tobacco industry, or just Facebook specifically?


Facebook seems to really have become the whipping boy, despite their falling relevance. Imagine what these depression studies would look like if you did Reddit or 4chan. They get it no matter what they do too. Fail to stop the spread of misinformation in 2016? Come before Congress. Do too much censoring in 2020? Time to break up big tech.


I would have said splurge for a Ubiquiti Dream Machine, but it's not quite the automatic recommend it was before they started taking a "go fast break things" attitude toward their software. Still better than any consumer-level gear though.


I was on the Ubiquiti train, but then I found out the owner started cutting costs and outsourced development and now there's headlines about ads in the dashboard. I assume it's only a matter of time before they start cutting corners in manufacturing and quality of components.


The ads complaints are a little overblown IMO. It's not like they're selling your data and ad space on your dashboard to other companies. They're just showing you their newer product lines from their older product lines, it seems more like a deprecation warning than advertising to me.

Edit: Ok I immediately regret defending Ubiquiti after the new top story about the covered up data breach. I agree it seems like there is some crazy mismanagement going there based on this and other leaks/rumors over the past year or two.


Which is fine if there is an option for me to turn it off. But from the settings I couldn't fine one (I might have missed it as I don't login that often and it doesn't bother me too much).


“Not quite”? We’re talking about the Ubiquiti discussed in https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-b..., are we?

If so, and if that whistleblower is right, “attacker(s) had access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the LastPass account of a Ubiquiti IT employee, and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts, including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on (SSO) cookies.”


They recently started putting ads in the management console. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628198


I spent some really frustrated hours with the non-Pro Dream Machine before I sent it back. Instead, I‘m using a Unifi USG and two APs, and am really happy with this setup.


Not sure exactly when you had the UDM, but the earlier firmware for both the UDM and UDMP was awful and filled with bugs. It has since gotten a lot better. I haven't had any issues with my UDMP since the newer firmware and my home internet experience is much smoother than with my consumer routers (which would randomly drop connections or refuse new connections until a reboot... full NAT table maybe?)


Maybe it's a weird sex thing involving Jonathan Frakes.


It’s a sci-fi thing to get around censors. Famously used in BSG


That would explain how to create the next generation.


I love this proposal. I think I would use it too much at first, and the pull it back to using it a reasonable amount :)

I've wished that Python had something similar to C#'s LINQ, where a user could express a query using familiar list comprehension syntax, but instead of the comprehension actually evaluating, my search library could somehow receive the AST and use it to build an optimized query. ORM libraries often play tricks with dunder methods to achieve a similar DSL feel. This could give me something very close to that.

I'm also drooling over the parser example, as someone who maintains a parsing library. I support building a parser from a a grammar file currently because doing it in code is a bit clumsy, but the example makes it look pretty.

There's also countless times people have had a great idea for "with" blocks, but it turns out it's not really possible because it would require the with statement to analyze/capture the child statements inside. This proposal gives you exactly that.

The syntax isn't spectacular, but for the most part I can't think of anything much better. I do think the "sibling statement" syntax will be hard to understand visually. I would make it start with a @ since it's like a decorator for the next statement:

@log! print("Hello")


> I love this proposal. I think I would use it too much at first, and the pull it back to using it a reasonable amount :)

I can think of a bunch of things over the years where I did exactly that on first discovering it.

A small warning though: I write a lot of perl, and while I care a lot about readability for the next developer, plenty of people fail at the "pull it back" phase so it's definitely a trade-off.


That video is great, it was linked on HN a while ago and I watched the whole thing even though it's not my area at all. Really interesting :)


The argument that browsers should stop trying to become an OS on top of the OS (e.g. webUSB) deserves better than this overly emotional rant.

The browser that has been holding the line in this respect, Safari, is dismissed without explanation.


Mobile safari has intimate links into the OS, intercepting links and sending them to apps, and no real ability to filter content.

(content blockers are opt-out - and you have no ability to even know what is loading)


Browsers should be linked to the OS. The problem is that Google is trying to replace your OS with Chrome so they can track everything you do. Apple has resisted implementing a lot of bad stuff Google is trying to push, and made serious, if insufficient, attempts to stop tracking.


I am a Canadian technical writer who is also a programmer and a graphic designer. Is it easier for me to work in the states through a TN visa (which specifically mentions technical writers)? I've never tried looking in the US but I've always wondered if that would help ease some of the visa issues.


The TN is a good option and all occupations are good TN options (depending on your education because there needs to be a nexus between your education and the job): technical writer, (software) engineer, and graphic designer.


You should choose the TN occupational category that will fit your job description and experience/education best.


That's correct and the occupations that I/you listed are all solid TN occupations - meaning generally there's no issue getting them if you also have the appropriate corresponding education.


The TN visa does not have a lottery, unlike the H1-B. It also comes out much faster.


I want to echo this, it's disappointing, but I'm thankful to Raph and the team for all the work they put into it. I had dreams of being able to write an editor where I could concentrate on making a cool UI in a different language/framework and have Xi do all the hard stuff.

I think LSP will end up being the "good enough" solution for niche languages, while popular languages get dedicated IDEs/mega-plugins, a la the various language flavours of IDEA, XCode, etc.


I wrote a Python library that was pretty popular at one time. I gave a talk on it at PyCon, at one point it was in the top 200 most downloaded packages on PyPI.

Since my employer told me I was no longer allowed to work on it at work, I have felt quite a lot of guilt about all but abandoning fixing bugs and reading the mailing list. I've been working on a "next generation" version, almost a rewrite, but I don't see a clear path for releasing it in a way that helps people still using the current version.

It may be self-serving, but I am really going to try to take this essay to heart, and not beat myself up everytime a weekend goes by that I don't spend working on my project.


Have you put some disclaimer about your situation and said that this repo won't be maintained and feel free to fork? I think it'll be the best resolution for your situation.


Luckily there is a "community" fork on GitHub, and I've offered to help them with questions :)


Why would your employer decide what you do on your spare time?


Not everyone wants to (or is able to) to work on projects in their spare time.


Oh yes I didn't read well, my bad.


Because unfortunately the law permits them to do this in many cases so they take advantage of this ability.


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