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iamEAP

298 karma · joined August 12, 2019

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iamEAP··on Doing a Machine Learning PhD While Working in Japan
Though the author enumerated the some of the subjective things that rolled up into “QoL” and SV suburbs objectively don’t meet them (eg walkability).
iamEAP··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
I’m not sure I would consider $2k a month in predictable wages “basic,” as you say. If you live outside of the big cities, it’s quite an unnecessarily high bar to meet. If you work in industries where time-bounded contracts are the norm over “tills vidare” employment, it’s also basically impossible to satisfy.

Beyond naturalization reforms, you also have the issue of minimum salary hikes for work permits (with no transitional rules), resulting in regular, integrated workers getting deported. 18 year old kids (of regular, integrated workers) getting deported, as well as regular, integrated workers being deported because they happened to come in on an asylum visa and then changed to a work permit (under a law that was revoked, again, with no transitional rules).

Every time the lack of predictability and legal certainty for these people was an explicit choice.

Swedes barely understand the cruelty that’s happening, let alone the damage it’s doing to Sweden’s reputation among globally mobile workers.

iamEAP··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
I moved from the USA to Sweden about 6 years ago. Sweden has also been tightening its immigration laws, in ways I believe have been and will be detrimental to its future.

Countries have a right to change their laws, but I believe it’s in everyone’s interest for those laws to be changed while respecting principles of predictability and legal certainty.

People planned and rearranged their entire lives around immigration law in force at one point, perhaps 5 years ago, and now a new law is going into force that slams the door shut to having a basic sense of stability, with only a 6 month transition period. It’s cruel. And it sends a bad sign to anyone looking to move.

The USA can afford to be cruel because people will deal with it for high wages. Japan can maybe afford to be cruel because their cultural exports keep the top of their “talent attraction” funnel large. It’s economic suicide for any other small-to-medium sized nation dependent on foreign labor.

iamEAP··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Not sure if I’m just in my own national security bubble, but I find it troubling to see the perspective that most of the conversation in this thread is coming from.

The US government took a legal designation explicitly crafted to protect against foreign adversaries and deployed it against a private, domestic entity, to their immediate and great detriment.

iamEAP··on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric
Had found this in the 2nd generation Nissan Leaf. It would have been perfect but for the slow and non-standard charger.

Looking forward to the Volkswagen ID Polo hitting the used market in a couple of years. Physical buttons, decent range and charge times, and it’s rated to pull reasonable loads.

iamEAP··on Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing
My over-simplified explanation: the graphql server will map a field on a request to a resolver. The resolver can execute whatever code it needs to return the value, up to and including calls into libgit.

So asking for the title of a PR might just be an extra column selected on a DB query. But calculating mergability status of that PR might be something else entirely.

iamEAP··on Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing
I work closely with the team responsible for a large, self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance. This is good advice for clients/consumers of GH data, but it can very easily lead to a lot of strain on the server-side. It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.

You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.

iamEAP··on No constitutional right to clean water, federal court finds
It is unfortunately not that straightforward in the case of the US. For example, the ICCPR was ratified by the US, but declared “not self-executing.” The ICESCR was never ratified.
iamEAP··on No constitutional right to clean water, federal court finds
Access to clean water may not be enshrined in the US constitution, but it’s not accurate to say it’s not “any sort of basic right.”

It’s enshrined explicitly as such in a variety of UN documents and EU laws and instruments.

I wish more of my fellow Americans had a better idea of what fundamental rights the US has chosen not integrate into domestic law over the past 8 or so decades.

iamEAP··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Surprised not to really see any comments on the financial incentives of this move, especially in the context of the “supply chain risk” classification earlier this year.

Is there no one in government who would stand to gain from a financially handicapped Anthropic in the context of an OpenAI IPO?

iamEAP··on Should You Move to Sweden?
I moved to Sweden a little over 5 years ago for work after literally making a spreadsheet comparing potential countries.

Sweden wasn't at the top of the list (not even close), but I landed on it because the tech ecosystem seemed unusually strong and because I could secure my (and my family's) place in society (via citizenship) reasonably quickly and predictably, especially compared to other European countries.

Fast forward to today: my partner no longer qualifies. I have an application in, but the government is pushing forward reforms that will see it rejected, just because they plan to apply new rules on all existing applicants (and because I'm stuck in a 3+ year queue).

Turns out I forgot to account for policy stability in my modeling.

How'd you make your decision to move abroad, and has it worked out the way you thought?

iamEAP··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
I left the US, not because I was worried about healthcare for myself or my family, but because of how I felt it reflected on me that I was fine choosing to stay and cash a large check every month while others around me had to worry about healthcare.
iamEAP··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
There were always issues with Nordstream, but the project rapidly imploded only after the war made it all untenable.

Tariffs + coercion via-vis EU tech regulation + Greenland are rapidly making the transatlantic tech status quo untenable.

iamEAP··on “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
My father never dissuaded me from the computer science degree I went for (starting in 2007), but later on in life, he told me that, at the time, he was worried about my choice because outsourcing was all the rage and everyone was saying there’d be no programming work in the states-that it was all going to be done in India.

That reality in fact never materialized.

iamEAP··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
I had not heard of any real level of anger toward the USA from the average Canadian (the exception being as a response to the now-delayed 25% tariffs). Same applies here. Your average Swede is not angry at the USA for what it’s doing right now. The closest sentiment that’s broken through the mainstream is maybe “unease.”

I wonder if the “have your cake and eat it too” dissonant thinking you’re hitting on is actually maybe easier found in the USA, and sort of on the other side of the spectrum. Plenty of folks voted explicitly for Trump because of his inward-focused, isolationist agenda. What they don’t realize is the extent to which the prosperity that they’ve seen up this point was dependent upon the rules-based order that their chosen leader is actively dismantling.

iamEAP··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
Never heard of any of that.

In this context, “new Yalta” is more in reference to the carving up of “spheres of influence” by the big players, without the little players (the ones being carved up) having a seat at the table.

iamEAP··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
Here in Sweden, following news of “peace talks” where both Ukraine and Europe were sidelined, the prime minister referenced a “new Yalta” as a troubling scenario, especially for small nations like ours.

Whether intentionally or not, the USA is relinquishing its role as global hegemon, and at least the baltics and nordics are contemplating the ramifications.

iamEAP··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
Think a lot of people here are missing the forest for the trees. We are witnessing the collapse of the unipolar world order that has brought relative freedom and prosperity to most of the world for the last three and a half decades.

I don’t know what comes next. No one does. But Europe needs a deep-rethink of a lot more than just defense if it wants to have any say in what the next world order is going to look like. Otherwise, we’re looking at four decades of less peace and less prosperity.

iamEAP··on 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says
Unless you’re a member of congress or a civil servant in the executive branch, paying any attention to this is wasted energy.

We already saw this play out in his last term. Directing how laws are enforced is a function of the executive branch. Nothing will be done.

Your energy is better spent identifying and articulating the values you hold that these actions are an affront to and shouting that out.

iamEAP··on TikTok goes dark in the US
My (limited) understanding of this law is that it works by barring US companies from doing business with ByteDance, primarily hitting App Store providers and cloud service providers.

There’s a world in which they could have migrated services to an off-shore cloud and continued to serve the existing users who already had the app installed (with the disadvantage that they would be unable to evolve the app itself, since no updates). It would have bought them time to figure out a long-term, legal fix.

…But instead they chose to just block all users with US-based accounts.

Someone made the calculation that failing the app loudly for US users was the better strategy.

iamEAP··on Optimizing your career for happiness
This is a great perspective.

I believe that great leaders facilitate this, whether by setting a meaningful mission in the first place, or by aligning company needs with the personal beliefs and needs of individuals in a team.

That being said! I think the likelihood that you land at a company with a mission that truly aligns with your own is approximately the same as the likelihood your equity ends up being worth a damn at the end of the day.

Cherish it id you’ve got it.

iamEAP··on Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years
My understanding is that many of the oldest companies have lasted so long because they were/are family operations. Countries where “son takes over the business” is the norm will have more older businesses.

Japan is one such country and also happens to have been around a long time too.

iamEAP··on Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'
> But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere.

Reminds me of Act 2 from this “This American Life” episode. Sub “Toska” for “depression” and maybe you’ll see things in a different light.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/822/transcript

iamEAP··on Google Voice goes US only
I’m in the same situation. Calling and receiving calls worked for a year or so via the app, but at some point this year, it asked me to verify that my (former) US number was still valid (which I obviously couldn’t do). Probably what OP is referring to.

Guessing I’ll have to find another alternative soon.

iamEAP··on Ask HN: How many people on Hacker News live in rural areas?
I live in a village of about ~1300 in West Sweden (couple hours outside of Gothenburg), surrounded by lakes and forests.

There are two art/craft/design schools in town, one of which has been here for nearly a century, resulting in a regular influx of young people with creativity and energy (of which a handful stay in the area) as well as a populace that’s become accustomed to new ideas and new ways of doing things through generations.

I’m a member of a non-profit association (consisting primarily of former students who stayed) that operates a co-working space, which is where I work most days. Working alongside primarily non-tech folks is wonderful—no need to talk tech during lunch or breaks.

It’s not all roses. It’s a poor region with declining population (and therefore worsening quality of municipal services). I think remote work could play an important role in revitalizing the area, but I’m naturally a bit biased about that.

iamEAP··on How to build trust as a new engineering manager
Most replies missing the forest for the trees in this anecdote by focusing on a lack of mutual trust.

Management is fundamentally the art of aligning your team’s motivations toward the company’s benefit. Inevitably, those things will be irreconcilable and as a manager, it’s your obligation to do what’s in the company’s interest.

If you can’t stomach that, you will be happier avoiding the manager track.

iamEAP··on Historic strike called off after Klarna agrees collective bargaining agreement
Would love to hear more from you on this.

Why Klarna but not Spotify? If CBAs only put in place a salary floor, how are they keeping salaries low?

iamEAP··on Sweden (Not Switzerland)
Strangest I've experienced of this is one level deeper: someone I was with had the context that I’d moved to Sweden. They asked me how my French was coming along. Took me awhile to make the connection.

I wouldn’t have thought that someone who would know what languages were spoken in Switzerland would be the kind of person to confuse it with Sweden.

iamEAP··on A New Heatwave is Forecast for Western Europe as we head into October 2023
I find basically all of their content unreadable end-to-end, though. The articles seem to lack structure and often it feels as though they were just spat out via LLM.
iamEAP··on By 2028 there must be fast chargers every 60 km on the EU’s key motorways
Love to see it. I wish it addressed reliability, though. In my neck of the woods in Sweden, coverage is pretty decent, but on more than one occasion, I've had to bounce between 7+ fast chargers before finding one that actually worked.
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