Now, if we could get the anti-cheat companies on board all would be right in the universe and I could stop pretending that Win10 doesn't drive me insane. Seriously, it's ridiculous that you can play an entire game in Linux with no issue but the second you load into multiplayer for some titles you risk getting your entire account banned.
The two biggest anti-cheat providers (EasyAntiCheat and Battleye) are on board, both can run natively on Linux or in Proton. The problem is that neither solution is anywhere near as robust as they are on Windows, so Linux support is offered on an opt-in basis and not all developers have chosen to opt-in.
Apex Legends did opt-in to EACs Linux support and the effect has been that nearly every cheat for that game now targets Linux, because it is so much easier to avoid being detected on there. I would be fascinated to know the ratio of actual genuine Linux users playing Apex versus those who just dual boot into Linux to cheat with impunity.
> Apex Legends did opt-in to EACs Linux support and the effect has been that nearly every cheat for that game now targets Linux, because it is so much easier to avoid being detected on there.
Source for that?
It makes no sense.
1. Cheating in Apex has been rampant for many years, way before the game started to work on Linux.
2. I have not heard that cheating would increase lately, especially linked to Linux.
3. A lot of cheating is being done by Chinese players. It sounds incredible (I literally don't believe) that those pesky cheaters would bother and would even be able to start using Linux on their home computers and in game dungeons.
Paid/private cheats are hard to keep track of but the free/open-source cheats are nearly all for Linux at this point, aside from the crude macro-based "cheats" which use AutoHotkey or similar. Apex enabled Linux support over two years ago so I wouldn't expect it to cause a recent uptick in cheating, it's been table stakes for a while.
Apex was released in the beginning of 2019, 5.5 years ago. It started to work on Linux over 3 years later.
You can easily find articles/videos from those pre-Linux days that talk about rampant cheating. Since Linux got introduced I have not seen any drastic changes to the worse, if anything it subjectively became better.
There are different cultural/gaming/technological/behavioral reasons. I will only mention one: the culture of gaming cafes; and you won't be installing Linux on those paid machines all of the sudden.
I've seen a lot of stuff recently about how LangChain and other frameworks for AI/LLM are terrible and we shouldn't use them and I can't help but think that people are missing the point. If you need strong customization or flexibility frameworks of any kind are almost always the wrong choice, whether you're building a website or an AI agent. That's kind of the whole point of a framework. Opinionated workflows that enable a specific kind of application. Ideally the goal is to cover 80% of the cases and provide escape hatches to handle the other 20% until you can successfully cover those too.
As someone new to the space I have zero opinions of whether LangChain is better than writing it all yourself, but I can certainly say that, I at least, appreciate having a proscribed way of doing things, and I'm okay with the idea that I may get to a place where it no longer serves my needs. It's also worth noting that the benefit of LangChain is the ability to "chain" together these various AI links. Is there a better easier way to do that? Probably, but LangChain removes that overhead.
I think that yes, there is a better way. You have a function that calls the API, then take the output and call another function that calls the API, inserting the first output into the second one's prompt using an f-string or whatever. You can have a helper function that has defaults for model params or something.
You don't need an abstraction at all really. Inserting the previous output into the new prompt is one line of code, and calling the API is another line of code.
If you really feel like you need to abstract that then you can make an additional helper function. But often you want to do different things at each stage so that doesn't really help.
As the article points out, the difference between frameworks for building a website vs building an LLM agent is that we have decades more industrial experience behind our website-building opinions. I’ve used heavyweight frameworks before, and would understand your defense in the context of eg complaints about Spring Boot—but Langchain isn’t Spring; it really does kinda suck, for reasons that go beyond the inherent trade offs of using any framework.
Sr+ Full Stack Eng with 11 years XP. Spent the last 5 years in Eng Leadership. Currently interested in part time and contract work. Pretty flexible, and open to a wide range of opportunities.
No buying a house with a personal mortgage requires you to have that house as your primary residence only for 1 year. That's pretty much the core behind the concept of house hacking. Buy, live there for 1 year, move and rent it out, repeat.
I have no real problems being people wanting to work remotely now and forever but I do think this is going to require a new legal framework to support it.
For better or worse there are very real tax issues associated with employees working in states and countries different than what their employer and government believes. A lot of these folks are knowingly or unknowingly dodging taxes in a way that is going to have severe consequences for them and company.
Establishing a tax base in a new city or state can put a company on the hook for thousand if not millions of dollars worth of additional taxes. And for the worker if you’re company isn’t withholding the right amount of state federal and local taxes you can find yourself with a huge tax bill at the end of the year.
Yep. When I am hiring remote in US (out of state), we put a condition in the contract that you will notify us if you are planning to move from your home state because we may have to establish tax residency/nexus in that state as an employer. If an employee moves somewhere else and lies about it, it can put both the employee and employer at serious risk of violating compliance/HR/tax laws. For example, there is something called Workers Compensation that the employer has to buy. If an employee gets injured while working, workers comp. may matter based on the location of where they were at the time and can get denied if there are discrepancies. As an employer, we absolutely cannot risk having employees working from anywhere when they are supposed to work from specific locations only. No one likes these stupid laws but we have to follow it as an employer.
It is a little bit easier for international hires if they are just doing contract but even then things like W8-BEN etc come into play and dealing with IRS is always tricky and risky.
Honestly, if we are going fully remote (anywhere,anytime), we almost need a multi-national agreement/treaty so that employers are not left trying to deal with BS stuff. And no, services like Deel/remote.com are not enough.
In the US there are already many states with population centers that cross state boundaries; those states often have negotiated with each other to solve some or most of these issues.
So if you live in Wisconsin but drive to Minneapolis for work each day, they know how to handle it.
We need more of those and closer to pairings for all states to make true "work from anywhere in the US" possible. I doubt it'll happen, because the states won't agree on the baseline level.
globalization, cheap easy access to air travel, and the internet are breaking down the systems that were working fine for countless years.
It's not limited to employment, either. Create a SaaS or other internet-based business and try to serve customers outside your nation. Or even outside the border of your state/territory/province. Entire services such as Paddle exist just to deal with this. But I suspect most people are trying to fly under the radar here using regular Stripe, etc. and not dealing with any of it, just like digital nomads do.
It may but mostly likely won't unless you're a huge company.
I hired a bunch of people outside the US and it's not a problem. Use Deel and hire them as contractors. Make the contractors fill out W8BENs. Don't let the HR folks and lawyers scare you - they don't understand risk vs reward mentality of a startup founder.
Outside the US is a bit easier. How would you hire an out of state employee IN the US who moves to a different state ? You will need to register your business in that state then. Deal/remote.com don't help with that.
Already had that happen. Employee moved out of NY to FL. Did nothing except categorizing him as a FL resident in our HR system. Did not have to form a new business in FL or register as a foreign entity there. Employee lowered his taxes because he is no longer paying NY taxes. Great for everyone!
You may want to double check this. May be your HR System filed stuff on your company's behalf but you absolutely need to have a setup in the state where your employees work and that includes Florida.
Ouch, yeah. My team is losing a truly excellent engineer because he moved home to the UK during the pandemic, and corporate eventually noticed and said he could either 1. switch to our UK unit and work on their projects at their pay scale, or 2. leave the company.
He's leaving to work for a friend's startup and I hope he gets rich.
Is there a specific rule anywhere federally that any US state that says you must be aware at all times where your employees are when spending personal (non-work) travel time?
Moreover:
1) Can a state with no tax nexus to the firm (until the employee moved into it) have some kind of enforcement mechanism on the company ?
If (1) is no, and it comes down to a judge,
2) is there any case law that shows what is reasonable ? Does employer need to check every month ? every year?
3) Does a company have any responsibility if the employee lies ?
You must be aware of where your employees are working from because you have an obligation to follow the employment and tax laws of that location. If your employee isn't doing work, you aren't required to care (beyond any IP or personal security concerns you may have).
This is one reason among many we should eliminate employer-based tax enforcement. Your taxes should be between you and the government; the government should not force your employer to act as a tax nanny (e.g. with mandatory withholding).
That still wouldn't absolve companies of the obligation to know where employees are working from. Employment laws and worker protections vary from one state and city to another. To give one example, I had a friend that was fired from his Arizona job in ~2015 when his boss found out he was gay. If that friend had been working from California instead, he would have had legal protections.
First, the employee (not the company) is the willing participant with the state benefits and obligations.
If the employee was hired in AZ, and never changed his tax residency to say CA with employer, why would employee be able to claim protections given by CA? If employees are going to play the game, they should be OK with the consequences.
Second, company level agreements don't work this way. Why should tax nexus ?
For examples a company is based in CA, so it states its legal venue is in CA for contract disputes. Company then moves to FL....The tax residency change does not give the company the right to to update its legal venue to FL for convenience with its contractual counterparties.
So then, why can states break basic contract rules, which we hold sacrosant at the company-person level ? And what regulation exists to entitle states to pursue companies that do this unwillingly ?
There are laws that state you must pay taxes, not discriminate, etc.
What are the laws that mandate companies to know where your remote employee is working at all times ?
Should a company need to know the rules of 50 different states at all times, to know if they must check employees working offsite ? And how is a company subject to a jurisdiction's rules that it does not know it is party to ?
You're misunderstanding things. There's no law that companies have to know where their employees are working from. It's simply a consequence of the fact that governments have sovereign power to regulate things within their borders, including employment. Companies that pay to have work performed within state X generally [1] have to follow those regulations. If an employee moves to another jurisdiction and the employment agreement is not compatible with applicable local laws, then there are two main options: The relationship can be terminated or it can be brought into compliance.
If a company has employees in all 50 states, then yeah they need to have compatible employment practices with all of them (plus the respective cities those employees work from, for extra fun). In practice this doesn't come up much because most employment regulations are minor and most governments have similar rules.
[1] there are a million qualifications to this, speak to a lawyer if you want details about your particular case
The problem is that these laws are all written from the logical perspective that employment is mostly a thing where work occurs locally. What we need are new frameworks specifically for remote work and a way to manage this all internationally. Maybe something similar to that minimum corporate tax that has been proposed (on all companies internationally) but for individuals?
I understand your point but axing the entire tax portion of this problem is massive. Sure, your employer would probably still have to know to some degree, but it would be much easier and could end up with something like "you don't need to tell us unless you're working from $listOfPlaces".
Good luck getting that (potentially every changing) list from the hands of your HR and legal departments! Remember, that (at least in US) lot of protections and laws change quite frequently and not knowing where an employee is would put the company at huge risk. Companies, for most part, establish their bases where they find local laws are favorable to them (in addition to ability to find enough able warm bodies to fill the positions), they don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits, legal hassle, what-nots from state/city the laws of which they are not fully appraised of all the time! What happens when that @listOfPlaces change, say every year?
Not going to happen (would be complicated and makes tax revenue collection harder and reduce govt income while enabling widespread fraud). Also worth considering this is risky from an employer perspective
as having employees based in unexpected places also means unexpected, possibly large liabilities eg local sales tax, employee rights etc. Specifically for US firms, foreign employment rights differ greatly and are often stronger in ways US firms find surprising eg around annual and parental leave. For example, a someone working from, say, France for a US firm with EU retail customers could quite possibly trigger a EU tax enforcement action against the company if it’s not on top of things. Or they could quite reasonably avail themselves of their much better French leave and competition rights.
Ahh.. but you see. This way there is a cashflow for interim projects and government does not have to wait for you to voluntarily give what you think is fair:P
We have established that during onboarding a person enters their home address.
My question is different.
What sort of regulation or mandate forces an employer to keep checking over the employee's shoulder? And how does reasonable get defined in this context ?
In other words, what mandates exist for companies to force them to play big brother , and also define what tests must be done when playing big brother ?
And why does the employer come in defense of a state with which the company has no tax-nexus otherwise?
"Does a company have any responsibility if the employee lies "
May be, may be not but in practice, you are not going to be able to tell IRS or another compliance org. that sorry, my employee lied so it's not my problem. As the employer, you are still on the hook for any taxes and other compliance related issues regardless. You can sue your employee may be later but that is not going to save you from the wrath of Uncle Sam and others.
Why would an employer be unable to claim indemnity if their employee committed fraud? I agree that your position is the safe, conservative perspective, but I don't think it's quite so absolute.
I don't think the IRS agents will catch the guy in the article who allegedly lives and works in England, but actually lives in Thailand and works in England :)
To be perfectly fair, I don't think "It's $DATE, that should be automated by AI by now" is really a joking matter on this site, considering the audience. :)
Real question: Strictly speaking from a software engineering perspective, who cares? Why does a framework of taxes created by people who don't understand technology get to decide where I move around to?
I signed up for your job in a certain location and a certain date. That doesn't entitle you to keep track of where I am the rest of my life. As long as I'm able to be reached at the initially agreed upon location, regardless of how I maintain that communications channel, I never agreed to let you dictate where I live and move to and frankly nobody has that right.
Or is my body my choice just a convenient catchphrase for one topic only?
Serious answer: Wherever you choose to live, you benefit directly or indirectly from services paid through taxes. Maybe your employer doesn't care where you live, but the jurisdiction where YOU are does care about where you work because you are being paid but you are not paying what others around you are paying to live there. This is a 3-sided relationship between you, your employer, and the civil society you live in and WFH in a different country is unfair to one side of that triangle.
Countries have mechanisms to deal with this. VISA's, they can simply charge more for longer stay visa's. Would they capture all of potential value of those taxes? No. But they'd likely capture a decent amount of extra money which they otherwise wouldn't have got, while still restricting people from taking native jobs in their countries which is what the wider populace actually cares about.
Pretty sure some countries are doing this already.
There's quite a few now, something like 33 countries with these visas. The terms tend to vary. I took advantage of the first one, the Barbados digital nomad visa which they created to work around the loss of tourism due to COVID. Since most taxes in Barbados are sales taxes and they have a peg to the US dollar it has worked well for them in terms of foreign currency reserves and supporting the tourist industry during the pandemic.
Other countries like Costa Rica require visa holders to pay local income tax which is fair enough while others don't or have a reduced rate.
I'm unsure of the overall morality of it but it can be done legally through the correct pathways as I have been doing.
I don't like that people will just do it on tourist visas instead though which I'd guess is the bulk of the objection to it.
I think most tourist visa's in most countries which are likely to have this issue are at most 3 months. If a country chooses to allow back to back tourist visa's like that then they sort of know what's going on and have accepted it as a net benefit overall. If they don't permit back to back then after 3 months you've got to up and move somewhere else which many people do, but realistically they're not that much different from a tourist in practical terms.
serious question: how is this different if you live in the city making X amount and then move to the suburbs where X is now supposedly 2X.
In my head we all pay the dues somewhere in some form to begin with - property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes etc.
It’s one thing if you’re avoiding paying those.
but how is it different that Twitter gets a tax write off to move to the Tenderloin. and if Joe/Jill chooses to move to the suburbs or temporarily move to Mexico while still paying state and federal income tax. sure there maybe some property tax loss but isn’t housing crisis already an issue? don’t company incorporate in Ireland to pay less tax?
California has already started to try to tax people leaving, if I remember correctly. Something about the value of investments sold afterwards that appreciated during their time in California.
It's only going to get worse as the differentials increase.
In the US a majority of your taxes go to federal and state governments, whether you live in the city or the suburbs doesn't change where your taxes go and how much you're paying. The cost of living difference in that case is based on micro-economic supply and demand cost differences.
Companies moving to Ireland IMO are definitely exploiting tax loop holes and committing fraud. You and I and all of the countries devoid of tax revenue are hurt by companies benefiting from tax-avoidance loop holes.
> Real question: Strictly speaking from a software engineering perspective, who cares? Why does a framework of taxes created by people who don't understand technology get to decide where I move around to?
Real answer: The "software engineering perspective" you have here is irrelevant to tax/immigration law. Taxation is based on where you live and work (physically). And countries very much get their say on whether or not they'll allow you to live there, for how long, and for what purposes.
This isn't about an individual's right to free movement. It is about keeping employers honest about where their employees work and making sure they are paying their fair share of local taxes.
Groups of people put a strain on the local resources, we need those local taxes to fund those things.
If individuals were allowed to live somewhere and dodge the local taxes, every large company would use this to their advantage. Suddenly campuses of workers would all now be "remote" employees from their offices in some tax friendly area. This would put an undo strain on the local tax base who are now having to foot the tax bill for those not paying their share.
Well, you should care about it because laws apply to you whether you agree with them or not. So, at the end of the day both you and your employer will have to cover those costs. But nobody is preventing you from moving, you just might have to quit and look for a new job.
Picture me this. Imagine You are a foreigner that has software engineering skills but not good enough (emphasis) to compete with the cream of the crop that commands high salary. I.e you are the bottom of the barrel. You can’t afford a property where you live. You can’t afford shit where you live because your society is expensive.
Then you have this bright idea of “oh let me go to another cheaper country and get the benefit of their cheaper society but still command high salary”.
And you still don’t want to pay tax in that country.
Foreigners like these need to be ban 10000%. Losers that can’t compete in their home country and still don’t want to pay taxes everywhere they live.
I'm not really sure why this is taking on a political slant from commenters here aside from the fact that Obama as a politician is a polarizing figure. The content of what he said is completely accurate and just about any credible researcher in the field will tell you so. Misinformation and especially Disinformation is a very large problems that will have to be addressed in some way if we're to have an actual functioning democracy.
They certainly aren't the only issues we face, but calling for platforms to take greater accountability isn't and shouldn't somehow be viewed as political. It doesn't matter whether you're for red, blue, putin, Snoop or the Pope. If the places people go to consume information are allowed to become inundated with blatantly false information, that's a bad thing.
There is absolutely an argument that Twitter, FB, etc. should never have become peoples sources for information but the reality is that this is the world we live in and for better and worse and we need to craft policy based on people's actions not what they should do.
The problem isn't with who the speaker is. It could be Obama or anyone else. The problem is who gets to define misinformation. Should we have a government ministry of truth?
I hope posters here can appreciate how problematic that is, not just from an epistemological standpoint, but also the practical implications.
Yes obviously, that's a problem. But again it's one of policy. There are lots of hard problems. Generally, avoiding hard problems isn't a great solution. Maybe for some things but when the counter is the end of democracy then that's not really an option.
Anyone that set's out to solve this should go in with a really specific definition (something like verifiable false based on expert consensus), make it enforceable with stiff penalties, and appealable to the courts. It's not perfect, it requires constant monitoring and updating, and lot's of work to make sure it's not like every other regulatory body, and get's subverted or otherwise undermined by political activity. But none of that is impossible. Possibly improbable given current conditions, but regardless something we should be having conversations about.
A ministry of truth with a well defined scope isn't any more unreasonable than a ministry of food cleanliness (FDA).
The same way we regulate what technical exports a company can make when it affects our national security, it is completely reasonable to do the same with the telecommunication companies that can affect equally large impacts on our internal security.
The premises are undemocratic, yet censorship advocates attempt to appeal to democracy.
>...but when the counter is the end of democracy then that's not really an option.
I've said it elsewhere in this thread. If you do not trust the discernment of voters, how can you trust them to vote?
How is the state tabooing information not the same as the state manipulating the outcome of an election?
A simple and coherent response might be: Authoritarians do not trust the discernment of voters. They do not trust voters to vote "correctly". Propaganda is necessitated. The force of the state is applied to prohibit contrary information.
Democracy as it is used in this case is nothing more than a window dressing, a catch phrase.
>A ministry of truth with a well defined scope isn't any more unreasonable than a ministry of food cleanliness (FDA).
It is 2022 and we are actually having this conversation. We might observe the mission creep present in all gov. bureaus. Although I'm not sure I can connect here. We appear to have very different premises concerning the role of the state.
>Anyone that set's out to solve this should go in with a really specific definition (something like verifiable false based on expert consensus), make it enforceable with stiff penalties, and appealable to the courts.
Who should select and accredit the "experts"? Who's experts have sufficient expertise to claim an exclusive license on objective truth? From where I stand, I don't see this problem as solvable by fallible men. Omnipotence would be a prerequisite.
Humans have subjective opinions. We have a diversity of views. Yet those who would prohibit that diversity of opinion, a prerequisite to democracy as we understand it, claim to do so in the name of democracy.
This was an easy pivot away from being a runaway success. The founder couldn't figure out who the right customer was and ran out of cash. This is why so many companies are venture backed. It's not that people just want to give away pieces of their company because it's cool, but that extra cash prevents you from giving up while you go through the sometimes long process of finding product market fit.
Like honestly, this product could still reach that type of success. No idea if this guy still has the code base around, or is chilling in thread, but hit me up if so lol, I'll happily buy it off you. Or at least point you towards how to make this make money
The news, court rooms, congress floor, board rooms, hiring committees, college admissions, and yes on social media. But let's be honest here. We have two subsequent generations whose economic outlooks have been substantially harmed by the previous generation being blamed for not being successful and it's in more or less all corners of the world that imply power.
Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable. I may have more empathy in one case than another but if you refuse to accept responsibility for the harms you caused then yeah that empathy is likely going away. And this is what the author refers to near the beginning of the article:
"Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship".
No one is perfect. I still have a great relationship with my own parents despite their failings but not all my siblings do, and as I've told each of my parents, it's on them to work to make that relationship better. Some things my siblings may never forgive or forget and you can do with that what you will, but if you want this person in your life you have to work to make it happen.
> Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to.
It matters a lot! First of all, it matters legally. An entirely different set of laws and procedures will be invoked depending on which it was. But, second, it matters because it tells me something about what to expect from you in the future. It tells me something about how you feel towards me. It tells me something about your character, about your capacity for violence.
Yes, my first objection addresses that part directly. Of course you're still accountable, but you're accountable in totally different ways. It matters a lot even just in how one should be accountable. Even if the topic is limited to accountability, there's no possible way to say it doesn't matter. It informs every aspect of that discussion.
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