I last touched LINQ in college in 2016 - isn't it basically an ORM for C#? Not super unique but I assume very relevant to use when working with C#.
1,127 karma · joined March 14, 2018
I agree. My point is that as a business the only moat they'd have is to not do client side requests, in order to hide the prompt.
If your app is largely just a wrapper around a neat prompt, it means I can just go and copy the prompt and use it myself and save the fees on your app.
Your app has to really be a valuable UX wrap over the calls in that case, or catering to a nontechnical audience.
Tuvalu isn't going to extradite you for not paying them their $5 VAT.
If you're frequently dealing with multiple jurisdictions (especially with EU) and the fees don't add up to 10% or higher (which MoRs can do if you're in a less popular jurisdiction), it can make sense to take care of admin headaches.
That might be many projects, but it's certainly not all. I've written about this from the "third world" perspective over here: https://nik.software/building-global-wealth-from-south-afric... (and the "Accepting Payments" section above it)
I prefer to also focus on not doing soul destroying work, working with good collaborators, and earning enough to enjoy the rest of my waking hours. That narrows the employment pool down a lot.
If you're skilled enough and have options and a network, it can even be more prudent to sit out the employment market and contract for a while until a good role comes along.
For many there's just a preference/productivity boost for working in-person. That's fine, remote is not for everyone. However my hunch is that if decision-making management is mostly comprised of older millenials and gen X, they're just habitually used to working in-person and refuse to change.
Then you can go into the darker reasons:
Ego around owning an office space and then having to use it, "fairness" (read: superiority complex) against workers getting the same perks as managers, inability to work in a remote (read: digital first) culture, easy way to get rid of people without paying layoff severance.
I run an event in Cape Town for what it's worth.
Used to use meetup for a few years before going with Luma this year. Sure discoverability is a bit less if Meetup is the go-to in your area, but you can still get a core group of attendees in other ways and then grow the group from there.
I think there's good points to be made about wisdom and decision making when you're older, but there is definitely still a sharp cognitive decline (which will include wisdom and decision making!) when you're hitting 75+, for most people.
Having these people in positions of power is not a good thing. As advisors sure, but not directly in power with high influence.
Probably answering my own question, but the main reason I can think of would be if your app doesn't have some kind of business admin panel capability.
I suppose my bias is also that in my sphere of web dev, we build these business panels pretty frequently, so feature flags and a UI for toggling them is something that makes sense to do within the app rather than add a third party service (and associated cost + potential latency) for it.
Of course, my experience has a 10+ year gap now, things have definitely grown in Greece as OP has highlighted in the post, but I remember still having 100+ ping while connecting to European servers. Nowadays from Cape Town I "only" hit 150.
The author of the post thoroughly covers the Greek startup & tech ecosystem.
It's growing, impressively so considering the last decade, but is going to be hitting limits like these internet speed issues if it's going to keep growing.
I think globally we've very quickly hit LLM limits because they were simply not trained on as much information as we think. Or at least, not nearly as much region-specific information in many countries.
I've hit the same issues trying to ask any LLM to give me tax advice for tax law in specific countries, and even beyond the "ask a professional" type restrictions eg OpenAI has, it's clear that it just does not have the information.
Sometimes that's just because of the US-centric view of these companies training the models, and sometimes it's also because information sources are tucked away on botched government Wordpress sites and random PDFs.
This is why you have to do things like RAG to make a "talk to your doc" kind of bot even if you're feeding it public info.
The stair stepping in this is from already having removed social media (and Youtube) from my phone. For me, if I got sucked into a feed, I'd be in it for hours and feel awful. There's no such thing as moderate usage for some.
It almost became a fun game to see how many apps I could get rid of! The biggest holdouts I haven't been able to get rid of have been around banking and insurance. Too many new age fintechs, even in South Africa, are convinced that actively ditching web is the best way to grow.
Tried to upgrade to a new machine last month. New-ish (and not name brand) hardware made Linux unusable on it (keyboard & BT wouldn't work), while Windows was passable. After some work I decided to try working on Windows again. Honestly the worst OS experience I've had in years, because at every step there's some default setting that basically equates to "Microsoft will do whatever they want on your machine" and it's hard to turn off permanently.
Then I tried to go back to Manjaro where I had a stable work experience from 2020-2022, and compared to macOS, it was just a pain getting the same dev environment back up. Ubuntu wouldn't have been much different.
I dislike Apple for a lot of things, and really don't like the absurd Apple Tax on having a usable amount of RAM, but it is still the best (and most stable) dev machine I've had in years.
Sure we already have repeatable infrastructure, containers, etc. but I also love the idea of just building and shipping a PHP app binary that includes the webserver. It makes server provisioning even less of a priority, especially if I have reasons to not use serverless or PaaS tools.
EU already has things like the OSS VAT scheme in the regard of making things easier for businesses across the union. More things like it to simplify admin for the rest of us is a good thing.
EU OSS VAT is a great example of a program that simplifies these sorts of operations. eu/acc is clearly asking for more like that.
Why is there a need to have specialists just to interface with one's local government (or regional governments) in the first place? This is what I see as eu/acc's focus: You shouldn't be doing proverbial song and dances as a small to mid size company to appease cushy government employees with Annexure B.5 page 12 section 3 subsection 25 form D every time you want to change the wifi password.
Running lifestyle or smal to mid scale businesses, especially with knowledge work, is increasingly hindered by inflexible government admin in the first world. And yes, you can be a startup without wanting to be a unicorn.
It is possible to want to make money AND not have your soul drained in the process.
Open source runs in a large amount of trust, and we're all complicit.
It's clearly an awful "patch" to outdated concepts on how commerce works compared to pre-internet, but it's what we have right now.