HN user
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Moved to Sweden from the US ~3 years ago. The most stable path is with an employer-sponsored work visa. Best bet is to interview at a multinational with a presence in Sweden (big companies are more likely to operate in English).
Next best option is to be in a stable relationship with a Swede.
It’s possible to get a visa running your own business, but the wait times for this are long and you need solid documentation that you’ll actually make enough to support yourself/your dependents.
Visas are also available for students and they’re experimenting with a visa for highly skilled job seekers, but these are a bit more limiting in terms of length and what you get access to.
When I was at University of Denver, this was exactly the kind of thing covered in a course called “Unix Tools” and it was hands-down the most valuable quarter I spent there. I had assumed it was a standard thing across CS programs.
Check out Backstage, and in particular, TechDocs: https://backstage.io/docs/features/techdocs/techdocs-overvie...
Was hoping the actual linked interview would clarify this, but it too didn’t seem crisp: would it be the cost of buying the car new + $8.50 per hour? Or is the idea that I never have to buy the thing outright, but I could get access to a self-driving car for $8.50 per hour?
The former seems absurd for many of the reasons found in the comments here. The latter would be appealing to me.
I participated in February Album Writing month for the first time in over a decade, and successfully wrote 14 songs in 28 days! A variety of genres, but mostly lower key (bossa nova, ballads, etc)
This kind of thing might never hit mass-market (read Facebook-level) appeal, but I think if one branded it as an open-web network for creators (as opposed to Facebook, which is for mere “consumers”) you might reasonably avoid the hosting problem.
A “creator” will figure out how to host, be it a Wordpress.com site on the casual end, or something more specialized for the savvier creator.
This would require a level of coordination and leadership at CBP that we just haven’t seen, at least under the current administration.
More speculation on my part: I wonder if rather than a fail-open decision, it’s just how they designed local dev to work and the failure of the provider caused the app to behave as if in local dev mode.
Not applicable to the author’s reasons for building, but I wonder if “I built my own SSG” is the equivalent of “I built my own CMS” for this generation.