ido

Have you worked in academia? I have and I have never seen anyone coast to becoming a tenured mathematics professor.

I understand your frustration, but it's not literally nothing - just less than it should be. The US still has Medicaid/Medicare, public schools, welfare services, emergency services, etc (even if you don't use them yourself you benefit from a reduction in the number of desparate people around you if they were cut back even further than they already have).

If you are completely broke and go/are brought to a hospital in the US with an immediate life threatening medical issue, they will still try to save your life.

DS wouldn't be 10x cheaper than the subsidized subscription plans from openai/anthropic. Although it is of course much cheaper than the enterprier/API pricing- I think if you're on the subscription plans, you can't beat that on performance per price.

How do they compare to OpenAI’s equivalently priced plans?

WW2 was over more than 80 years ago. Neither Japan nor China still have the same regime they had when this happened.

I live in Berlin and there's a ton of homeless people on the streets. As bad as most major US cities (SF is worse, or at least was - I haven't visited in a few years).

software engineering was one of the best ways for working- and middle-class kids to make a good living. I suspect it held a fairly large % of "good jobs available to kids without rich parents" (far larger than its % of overall jobs).

The feelings are definitely influences by hormones. Doesn't make them any less real.

I’d be ok reading AI-written stories if it’s only “AI assisted” (I.e. there’s a skilled human driving it). If it’s just a prompt and then the AI does all the writing, I know there’s just no intention behind it as LLMs don’t actually “think”- they just (in a very sophisticated way) pattern-match against an existing corpus.

I’ve experimented using AI to prototype game ideas and inevitably once I succumb to the temptation of handing the AI the game design reigns it starts devolving to meaningless slop with a silhouette of a meaningful design. The only way to get something meaningful (that ive found) is for the human to stay in the driver’s seat.

> stopping most people in poverty is lack of access to a kitchen. No oven, no stove, no pantry, etc... A hot plate and a microwave if they are lucky.

How poor are we talking here? The most nominally poor people I know live in depressed post-industrial towns in Slovakia and I don’t think I ever saw a kitchen without a stove and an oven.

It’s this way in the EU as well and it wouldn’t surprise me if this is EU regulation from pre-brexit that hasn't been repelled by uk govs post-brexit.

Yes, there are good rule and bad rules (and rules that were once reasonable but changes in technology or society rendered them suboptimal).

As an immigrant to Germany, I wish the authorities would think more about the chilling effect every new rule has on activity (add another item to your to-do checklist, and less people are likely to even start). A prime example is trying to open a company in Germany vs some other countries (not even going as far as the US, it's enough to compare with Finland or the UK).

salary cost to the company is a lot higher than gross salary (which itself is a lot higher than net salary). you can guestimate total salary cost to be about 1.5x gross salary, so for the lower bound: 100k / 1.5 = $66,666.67 = €57,813.34.

€57-114k p.a. is well within the order of magnitude of yearly gross developer salaries in Western Europe (e.g. Germany).

I disagree with both your points. As an individual you have a very limited ability to change a whole country, and I see his saying as flowery exaggeration to make a point and not racist (he's not saying he's more deserving to be in Germany than Germans, but that he integrated into German society - isn't that what the AfD and their ilk say they want from us immigrants, that we "integrate"?).

It's usually a company owned by the city or the state, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Verkehrsbetriebe

My opinion (immigrant for the 2nd time, currently in Germany since 2013- so I've lived in 3 countries when counting my native one):

Basically, all rich/"western" countries are pretty decent. Some better than other, but they're all 'ok' or rather they all have plenty of 'ok' options for people able to work at somewhat in-demands fields (despite the financial situation of the last couple years a career in tech or tech adjacent generally still fits that category).

If you go somewhere where there's "real" problems, countries like Egypt, India, Ethiopia (altho of course there are nice areas in these countries too) you realize most of the time you'd rather live in any rich country than in a poor country. And there are more people worldwide living in countries ± like India than in countries ± like Germany.

To be pedantic “BSD” is the name of the original distribution that FreeBSD is based on, and the license is also named after it (rather than FreeBSD being named after the license).

The following anecdote doesn’t contradict what you wrote but maybe you’ll find it interesting- I worked for a daughter company of Phillips in the 00s (as an embedded programmer). I was working on mp3 players and set-top boxes but my boss has been with Phillips for decades at the time. He told me how the CD players (the ones you’d connect to speakers at home, not the portable ones) had a variety of brands, from budget to premium. But the only differences were in the external materials & the quality of the disc tray - as those are differences people notice. But everything else (and thus the audio quality) was identical.

To be clear I don't think the government of China is as bad as the Nazis were. I'm just saying "the average Chinese in China thinks it's fine" doesn't mean it's fine.

The average German in Nazi Germany probably didnt think the Nazis were too bad either (of course the average citizen wasn't Jewish, gay, communist or other undesirables). That the average Chinese think things are “just fine” doesn’t mean they are.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet and the coworker did you a favor.

Some places don't get much rain (and these are the places that tend to get even more dust - e.g. deserts).

Would be helpful if they'd define what a "mag" is. I'm assuming it's short of "magnitude"?

Now? It's just a plain wordpress theme.

In the 70s it was offshoring to Japan. China’s market opened to the west in the late 80s/90s.

The best parody tends to converge with reality (see The Onion).

I was super into vim in college (20 years ago now, jeez). I started off like that but then transitioned to basically using “default vim” (plus support for a few external tools like ctags or cscope). For basically this reason!

Neat idea, very distracting with the incessant meme clips constantly inserted into the youtube video.

    That isn't worth the effort 

Maybe I'm too unambitious as a small indie, but "porting" my game to mac merely requires building that target (I use unity & have both mac and windows automated building scripts - I press a button and it builds and uploads both to steam). There's nowhere in my codebase where I had to specifically adapt to one or the other.

Thank you for the through answer! I hope I remember what to ask if/when the time ever comes.