I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.

Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.

They’ve been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they’re not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can “hold” hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you’re still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.

Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.

I didn’t know you could buy insurance for fucking

I saw a rock on the ground, picked it up, and yelled “YahHaHa”

I won’t necessarily dispute that.

If Blockchain tech really did solve a gaming problem in a unique way, it would be done under the hood, in such a way that developers and modders could use it to add value, but casual gamers wouldn’t even realize it was being used. However, it’s harder to get funding based on buzzwords that way.

A decentralized venmo/paypal.

This was in fact the original purpose of cryptocurrency. The seminal Bitcoin white paper is titled “Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system”.

One reason to include blockchain tech in games is to enable trading of in-game assets without needing to build a trading engine from scratch. It also offers the chance to tie in-game assets directly to real-world values, and have certain assets be useful across games in a franchise. Basically everything Magic The Gathering or Pokémon does, except that you don’t have to worry about the cards deteriorating as you use them.

Once you realize that Magic and Pokémon were just cardstock NFTs all along, the whole idea of NFTs in gaming start to make more sense. Not every application that the the Crypto Bros propose to solve with NFTs are really appropriate, but some are.

I actually lost weight, because all the kids’usual activities that I shuttled them around to were canceled, and we had the time to take daily walks. I’m trying to get back to that habit, but it’s really hard now.

The Reddit AMA as we know it is dead

FTFY

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar…