sometimes_all

Becoming? They were always unliveable. The difference is that the dysfunction is a lot more visible than before, and even then it was a disaster. The problem is that in India things tend to get very visibly worse before they get _much_ better, and then there are other things that pop up which are also visibly bad; the cycle goes on. It is highly likely of our current problems will get solved in the next 20 years, only to be replaced with other problems of a similar magnitude, and thus the country will keep getting tagged as unlivable even though efforts do get made.

This is primarily because most of the problems have their roots in the very flexible mindset Indians tend to adopt; it's basically the antithesis of the "Deutsche Bahn" issue pointed out in another HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419970.

I get exactly what the author says, but Linkedin is my only social network (no, HN is not a social network IMO) specifically because I am able to block out all of it's bad parts and focus only on the good parts:

- Blocking the Linkedin feed is as easy as setting a few rules up on uBlock Origin. I don't see any posts, comments, etc, neither do I get to create posts or comments. There are settings available to not get unneeded notifications, and I disallow people mentioning me, so I do not get stupid "happy birthday" comments. This makes Linkedin very peaceful and manageable for me.

- I connect only with people I want and ignore everyone else. I explicitly unfollow everyone I am connected with. Connections sometimes end up being valuable because some recruiters know them and sometimes my profile is pushed higher up their list.

- I live in a location that is a backwater for software roles; there aren't enough good roles or consulting opportunities in my local physical network, so I have to leverage online ones. Linkedin is, while not the best avenue, it is good enough.

For me, leaving Linkedin unfortunately is not an option, but I've been able to tame it exactly to my liking.

I have in the past refused and started looking for a new job the moment my employer asked me to use my personal accounts for company work. That was a major breach of personal boundaries which I did not find acceptable. But clearly, it doesn't seem that the author had the liberty to say no:

> Part of me was concerned about my future, my visa, I just moved, The lease.

This is one of the major reasons why I left the US after a few years of my own accord; green card / citizenship wait times for Indians are nonsensical if you are not provably extraordinary or haven't married a US citizen. I could be wrong, but it seems that the author is still young, doesn't have many dependents or responsibilities. Their mental state would've been a lot worse, and they'd have been a lot more vulnerable to workplace manipulation if they had children and a mortgage to think about. Even if they had a good manager today, there's no guarantee they'd keep having a good manager a few years from now before their green card arrives.

I found it a cruel joke that a country that prides itself on "freedom" and "liberty" is perfectly happy keeping people, directly or indirectly, in circumstances where they do not actually have freedom and liberty for decades. The crueler joke is that a lot of said people find this arrangement perfectly acceptable even when they have other options.

For Indian companies, a Zoho One yearly subscription is USD 13 a month if you use it for all your employees. That's USD 8000 a year if I have 50 employees, which I can straightaway claim as expenses and get a tax benefit out of it. And this includes CRM, Mail, chat, invoicing, accounting, marketing, advertising, etc. etc. So not just building the app, but also support, interoperatibility and offloading of all work which is not core of my business.

I doubt you'll get all this for $8K/year (India) or $22K (USA) even after you vibe-code once (not counting the ridiculous costs of developing with AI - you still need your engineers to do that even before you start running the token counter).

Garry somehow gave free publicity to Zoho with this post. Maybe that was his intention?

I agree with you 100%. We do syncs to another non-google storage account anyway, plus the google accounts are primarily for Android phone usage because photos and videos take up quite a big chunk of space now; they do not have any legitimately important files stored outside of photos sync and phone backups, so there is no deep loss if the account gets banned outside of some inconveniences.

> With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality

Take a look at the comments in the thread and tell me whether there is a consensus on which AI has the best "quality". Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT are all stochastic machines; they'll give me a different output at different times for the very same query, with differences in quality each time within themselves, let alone other products.

I did my own checks; newer Gemini's output is consistently "good enough" for me and my family now, we individually do not use the full extent of the Pro plan (collectively, we do), and NotebookLM is something which more than one of us uses everyday; Image generation is something we use once a week or so. Given all this, the feature breadth within Gemini covers all bases for us, with a significant catch-up in quality compared to earlier to a point that we don't really need to look elsewhere for now.

Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month. So price is definitely an important point of consideration.

Yeah it was an absolute nightmare trying to figure out the difference, and I still do not know the correct answer to this, and by the looks of it, neither does Google support, because they were as clueless as I was when I asked them about it.

One thing I read on a reddit thread [1] was that the AI pro 2 TB plan explicitly allows sharing the AI and storage benefits when you enable family sharing on them, while the 5 TB plan doesn't.

However, when I went to sign up, the 5 TB plan wasn't available at all! It's only their lite and basic plans (the one with 30 and 100 GB of storage); the 5TB one only showed up after I signed up for the pro plan, and judging by how the UX looked, you pay an extra amount on top of your AI pro plan.

Now I definitely need family sharing, but I don't need the full 2 TB, let alone 5 TB, so I didn't bother checking further about the 5TB plan.

Also, I am in India, maybe things are different in your region?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleOne/comments/1nib21a/solved_g...

For regular consumers, Gemini's AI pro plan is a tough one to beat. The chat quality has gotten much better, I am able to share my plan with a couple more people in my family leading to proper individual chat histories, I get 2 TB of extra storage (which is also sharable), plus some really nice stuff like NotebookLM, which has been amazing for doing research. Veo/Nanobanana are nice bonuses.

It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect.

Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.

Yes. It's not just the money; you'll be at the center of Google's power base. Spend a few years there, and it'll be much easier to move to anywhere in the world you want (within Google or otherwise).

Being at headquarters always makes it easier to move elsewhere. Being outside of headquarters makes it more difficult, because the main decision-makers are usually at HQ and you need fewer hops to reach them in order to get what you want.

Unless you're planning to stay in the valley permanently, I would not think too much about sprawl/car stuff. IMO there should always be painful disadvantages so that you have motivation to move towards where you really want to go :D

Your parent comment is probably satire, but given current situations, one can never be sure.

LOL in the name of security, HDFC is trying to move their OTP verification to be almost entirely app-only, (not open-source TOTP which can be generated by authenticator/any other auth app; you can only use HDFC's app for that even if you want to log in via desktop).

Regulators sleeping at the wheel on this one.

You are thinking in the right direction; a lot of experienced developers are also thinking the same way.

The goal is not to become specifically a buggy-whip manufacturer or a specialist mill-worker; the goal is to have enough mental faculties and critical-thinking skills to adapt to any situation and be able to use any tool at hand to achieve your own goals and that of the employer.

Being a software architect means you actually need to gain depth in certain aspects of software development and computer science/engineering, and understand how an LLM works, what its weak points are, and to stop it from making mistakes. The point of double-majors is to expand your breath, not your depth.

You need both, depth and breadth, and thankfully LLM tools can help you in gaining both a lot quicker.

For some reason, I had the opposite effect due to AI - previously I enjoyed building things but hated the actual writing of code part. Now that AI can do that for me, I can keep my focus on the more important problems, and let AI deal with the lower-level stuff.

Your focus should be on gaining enough competence to solve hard problems by yourself, and in teams; and to learn how to learn. I would not worry too much about semantics of job roles - roles might change, but work (whatever that might be) will always be there, and you need to know how to do difficult types of work well.

You might be interested to know your comment caused Gemini 3 to go meta on this question. This is what I found in its thinking:

``` Evaluating Date Discrepancies

I've just uncovered a significant discrepancy: a "Hacker News" result flags a date error originating from the very format of parenthetical dates. The system appears to be misinterpreting these, leading to demonstrably false information. This warrants further investigation to understand the root cause and ensure data integrity.

Analyzing Date Ambiguity

I'm now grappling with the user's date. The Hacker News comment suggests the user's prompt might be flawed, as it contradicts the actual date of an event I've indexed. Specifically, the conference referenced occurred in October 2024, not September 2025 as the prompt implies. This leads me to question the user's understanding of the timeline or if the prompt refers to an unrelated event in September 2025. This inconsistency demands further clarification.

...

Investigating User Prompt Intent

I've just realized that the Hacker News snippet reveals this might be a specific problematic test prompt. My strategy is to focus on the October 2024 forum, a strong match, organized by Kattia Cambronero and CCT. I'll verify if there was a 2025 event, but the 2024 event fits the described "crisis" and "NGO coordination". If the user says "approx Sept 2025," they likely mean a recent event. ```

I tried both these prompts (along with the SINAC one as per GP) in Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3, and they both answered correctly for all three. Both also provided context on the chess question as well.

Thanks for the detailed answer, I think that'll be a relief for many. However, would you say this still is a volatile situation for people who are facing this issue? Are the rulings _final_ on this? Or is there chance of people getting stuck in limbo?

Wow, you weren't wrong...

Hasn't the president signed an executive order that says birthright citizenship is not for children of non-citizens? I see that it's being challenged in court, but the order is currently valid, right?

> having domestic staff and such

You need to realize that it's far more than this.

Current status of transport is... quite good. Metros have been built, more are incoming. Sea Link and Atal Setu mean that it's a lot easier to get to the office areas. Taxis, Rickshaws, Buses, Uber/Rapido solve last-mile issues. Populace has genuinely started to fight for cleaner air and better quality of life (Gen Z is publicly calling out companies with a bad work culture). Almost every new home >= 2 bedrooms will have a washer, dryer and a Roomba (some will also have a dishwasher) - significantly reducing the need for most of domestic help (who are increasingly demanding higher wages to offset cost of living). RERA making things at least a bit more transparent when it comes to real-estate activities, RBI in general doing good regulation for at least consumer-oriented finance. The biggest laggard in moving things online (the government) is moving many operations bit-by-bit to online/mobile. There's an explosion of entertainment, food and shopping options. I see a lot more luxury cars on the road than before. Online shopping and payment options are way better than anything in the US. There are enough career options to lead a good life if you're talented - no need to leave the country for that [1]. And I'm talking only about what's already happened, not some imagined future.

> working in tech probably live better in Mumbai

For tech maybe not - you need to go to Bangalore/Hyderabad/NCR for that. Mumbai is better for business and finance-related stuff.

> Attempting to walk in Mumbai lol.

Well, at least one can walk, and can find options to see/shop/do within walking distance. The times I visited the US, outside of NYC, Boston, Chicago and a few college towns, everything else required a car to reach anything important. There were many roads with no sidewalks.

> to the point where i think it would be fun to visit (as opposed to our visits growing up which I dreaded).

I hear you. Not being from this environment for a few years can be a bit overwhelming for people's senses. But locals are used to it.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-15/india-s-i...

> Why is this even up for debate

There was a time when this wasn't. The thing is that it _is_ now, especially for people in the upper-middle class and above, who can and do live a WAY better life in Mumbai, however much you try to deny it. There are people who've told me they wouldn't bother living in the Bay Area had it not been for the money, weather and inertia. I am now also seeing a lot of NRIs who are grasping at straws to justify their living in California, something which they didn't even need to bother with 20 years ago.

> The crosswalks in SF and San Jose exist

I find it funny that you have to reach all the way to crosswalks to make a point. The places where you cross the road? What makes you think they don't exist in Mumbai? What about so many places in the US where you cannot even walk on the road if you don't have a car?

You can try and convince people who haven't been to Mumbai at all, or don't live there regularly. People who are well-off, have lived in both places, and especially those who might _now_ consider starting a life in the States: you'll pretty much need to provide a utopia or an extremely high-paying job to convince them to move there. Mumbai is hell, there is no denying that, and even locals will not fight you on it; I personally would not try to convince a non-local to consider Mumbai as a place to live. The problem is that the Bay Area is not the heaven, perceived or real, it used to be any more.

I live in Mumbai City. I've walked inside Dharavi and Matunga Labour Camp many times.

I've visited the Bay Area. The only time I've been scared for my life is when I wandered the streets of San Francisco.

I agree with you that Mumbai has many problems, and you may call me deranged all you want, but trying to diminish the very obvious problems the Bay Area has (some much worse than Mumbai) is not going to do you any favors.

> You be taking payment by credit card, which doesn't require you to have any local presence.

But you're offering an online product, plus you are taking money from people from all over the world, whose governments have different regulations and points of view, your own business charges differently for different countries, and credit card providers are bound to different fees and/or extra charges for international transactions.

It's not a simple solution.

Whenever someone says, "oh Steve Jobs would have done / would never have done X", I always remember the scene in Silicon Valley where Laurie says "Monica, Peter Gregory is dead"[1].

Steve Jobs has been gone for a long time. Other people have taken his place, and Apple has been very successful since. While Jobs might have been very successful in his vision, a lot of things have changed since then, and it's very reasonable that the current apple execs might not align with what his philosophy was at the time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2-rGVw44A

Not sure where you're coming from - my original email address is not being shown in headers, so those seem fairly opaque. Probably depends on your email provider?

As someone who uses both, I much rather prefer aliases to hide-my-email for the more important stuff. For one, I can choose the email address "username", which I cannot with Apple's solution. Plus, what happens when I move on from Apple to something else?

I also use per-account emails, but not sieve filtering. Catch-all is helpful for throw-aways, aliases for the more important stuff.

It's super-easy to figure out who leaks my emails to whom, so I can easily disable both the leaker and the people who leaked.

Much more user-friendly than Apple's hide-my-email.

If someone, especially one who pretty much worked for free for 20+ years to make YOUR PRODUCT BETTER and you just burned off all their hard work in front of them, just publicly quits with a proper explanation given as to why, and then you ask them to come to a quiet corner to "discuss things", maybe as damage control or whatever, without returning the favor and explaining your point of you as publicly as they did, or even preferring up the chance to give them some sort of agency and an opportunity for yourself to rectify things, I cannot see anything except condescending and disrespectful behavior.

This doesn't need any low-context/high-context nonsense to figure it out, given when the complainer's post was plaintive enough for someone from the Netherlands to appreciate.

Exactly. Also, the same push for profit made cohort sizes for many courses extremely large, simultaneously making the more interesting/required (or if you a slacker, easy) classes extremely difficult to get in (first-come-first-serve basis, you need to ensure you are the first in the online line to get your seat) and the class sizes are too large to make learning interactive.

Funnily enough, as a full-fee paying international student, I had an easier time learning in India than in the US a decade or so ago; the only thing that made my masters education worthwhile was the research opportunities, the general quality of students, and an easier job market (at that time). Given that all three are in decline right now, I would not advise anyone to pursue masters abroad.

I find it so charming that people from the first world just assume that unplanned trips are the norm, and coming back as per expectation is can sometimes be surprising (even if it's a very long trip).

Do take a look at what people from developing countries go through - sometimes you cannot even get a visa without all your lodging booked and a confirmed return flight ticket.

This gives me Johnny Quest theme song vibes.

It's usually down about at least once a day for me anyway. Previously it used to be down during beginning and end of US work times. Now that they've geographically spread out their servers, it's down at random times instead.

TBH I'm not so irritated by this. It keeps me grounded, and saves me from being unconsciously outsourcing all the hard work of thought process to AI.