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Me too. It was my first Linux back in 2003 and I was immediately hooked. Back then codecs weren't as much of an issue as they were in the late 2000s to early 2010s so everything worked out of the box and the performance on Pentium 4 with 128 MB RAM was phenomenal compared to Windows XP.
I'm so glad the project is still around.
It depends on your goal. If you want to just work, pay taxes and save money and move back after retirement then maintain your home culture all you want. But don’t complain about PR then. Especially on the basis of how much money you make.
But if you want “permanent” residency then yes you have to be a bit of a “pretend-Frenchman” or however you want to put it. I just pointed out that tradeoff in the GP comment.
The biggest hypocrisy is that you will never be considered a real Chinese/Japanese/Indian/Vietnamese even if you learn their languages and adopt all their cultural traits. Western countries are very generous about this but you do have to meet them half way. B1 level proficiency is not even that high of a bar - compare that to living in China.
Then why are you complaining about the language requirement for permanent residency? You knew the tradeoffs and chose them willingly, enjoy your income, invest in your home country and move back once you retire.
Simply making higher-than-median income should not make you eligible for permanent residency. Cultural immersion and assimilation is important to maintain social stability and language is just the first step. From what I found (and as another commenter pointed out) the bar is not even that high.
Edit: For context I am not a right winger and am an immigrant myself. But I am seeing the social fabric of my host country (Canada) degrade because of immigrants' refusal to assimilate.
Its a market positioning thing. I will pay platforms that reduce my daily friction over those that don’t. You may not. The overall market sentiment will determine which companies win.
I’m saying this as someone who moved 100% off of public cloud storage recently and who has self hosted my own email from 2010 to 2017.
Phone numbers is one thing where I want less privacy. I personally can vet but it’s still super annoying. Non technical users fall for scams all the time. I literally want people’s IDs be linked to phone numbers. I’m literally TIRED of screening calls even though Apple made it easier recently.
Agree to disagree, sorry.
Edit: I want every phone number calling me to be linked with a physical ID and address (whether individual or legal entity) and accessible via a single button tap. In 2026 there is no reason for someone to call someone anonymously.
How is it eliminating market competition? Uber, etc don’t compete with google voice and similar services.
And its a valid reason for preventing scammers. I am literally tired of scammers on every single app. I still want an open internet but I think ALL phone numbers should be tied to real human identity and geolocation. Yes, it seems dystopian but it’s no different than the time when we only had landlines with verified callers. Democracy is as fine back then, maybe even better.
Some structure and verification around telecommunications will go a long way towards improving the experience for everyone even if it hurts the libertarian part of my brain.
As per their financials it’s roughly 50-50. I personally buy groceries and household consumables for the most part apart from the occasional electronics purchase.
IMO Costco’s food hits the sweet spot between high end grocery store quality and walmart level price.
I think the equivalent of various native tribes would be Romans, Etruscans, Samnites, Greeks etc. The core "Italian" Romans were themselves a mix of various Italian populations and they even fought the social wars to gain equal rights. And outside of that we have the Celt, Iberians, Berbers, Mainland Greeks, Anatolians, Illyrians, etc.
Broadly speaking you cannot draw an equivalence between Roman Empire and Americas because the dominant ethnicities in US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and other countries are from outside. But IMO this would be the closest analogy.
The equivalent would be if the Italian Greeks had become the dominant ethnicity in Italy and absorbed the Romans, Samnites, Etruscans, etc into their culture.
If your diffs are too large to review your project structure needs change. I go by the broad statement that EVERY line should be read, understood and explainable by the developer.
For critical files like package-lock.json I'd also expect developers to explain why a library was added or a version was changed and the impact of the version change. The lack of such basic hygiene is why supply chain attacks are so common these days.
What you are describing is not Google’s alturism but keeping competition in check. If Google didn’t “allow” GrapheneOS it opens up a new market segment for other smartphone manufacturers. Apple really cashed in on privacy for a few years so it’s not unfathomable that Xiaomi or someone else goes all in on “privacy focused android” in absence of pixel+graphene combo.
Edit: Apparently Motorola is doing just that.
Is the solution that global wages are normalized?
I’m not an economist but it seems that a lot of things boil down to “X is cheaper in country A” or “Y is more costly in country B” creating arbitrage opportunities for players operating in grey area.
Again, I’m not an economist and am just speculating as a layman who understands math, but without wage normalization it seems the other option would be to only have per-country regulated social media. So Canadian social platforms are only accessible to users with Canadian IDs, US to US ID holders, and Indian ID holders can only access Indian social networks. And so on and so forth.. but then we become China.
Please.. no more UI frameworks. Can we just agree to make react native to the browser, get rid of redux, and simplify things?
I hope you understand the concept of relative prosperity - The current equivalent would be a factory worker at Boeing. In 60s cars were innovative in US, now Nigeria can outcompete China in cars.
Times change, standards rise, competition increases. If America wants to remain competitive globally you need to work in the top 1% fields like you did back in 60s, not expecting $25 per hour for flipping burgers (which should have been automated with robots by now).
How were they supposed to predict things would change and agitate for something different without the hindsight you enjoy?
By comparing themselves to their counterparts in other countries. By 1955 there should have been alarm bells ringing as Europe re-industrialized. Same with 70s oil crisis but the best that US could do was to cripple Japan with Plaza Accords.
Americans even now have a mindset that nothing exists beyond their borders, one could assume it was worse back then.
Exactly why do you think it is it unnatural?
Because only two industrialized countries were left standing after WW2 and those two countries enjoyed unnatural growth until others caught up - first the historical powers in Europe then Asia.
Europe is quite innovative on per-capita basis. Not like US but the workers there have much happier lives and their societies don't have extreme inequality and resulting violence like the US.
China is arguably more innovative than all and has terrible work life balance, but their society is stable and you won't go from millionaire to homeless just because you had to get cancer treatment.
GCC = global consulting companies, the bane of innovation. Outsourcing of all kinds (even domestic C2C) should be banned.
A common maxim across all cultures is to "manage expectations" for happiness.
And while comparing societal standards expand the time horizon to 100 years, not nitpick one specific unnatural era of history.
An automotive engineer in Detroit in 1960 was a globally competitive worker because most of his counterparts in other countries were either dead, disabled or their companies bankrupt.
The equivalent in today's world would be aerospace engineers, AI researchers, quantum engineers, robotics engineers, etc who arguably have the same standard of living as the automotive engineer in 1960s Detroit.
Economic and technological standards evolve - societies should invest in human capital to evolve with them or risk stagnation.
Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?
Yes, but education system is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels. I work in edutech and our goal is to cut costs faster than revenue. Enrolments are down, students are over burdened with student loans, and new grads can't compete in the market.
Also, do you think kids going to K-12 in the US can compete with kids who go to international schools in China and India? High end schools in those countries combine the Asian grind mindset with western education standards.
Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.
This was a special period of post war prosperity that I mentioned. It was unnatural and the world has reset back to the norm where a nuclear family needs societal/governmental support to raise kids, or need to have two 6 figure jobs. "It takes a village to raise a child" is a common western idiom based on centuries of observations. Just because there was 20-30 years of unnatural economic growth doesn't make it the global or historical norm.
Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.
Things that let workers focus on innovation. IT workers in cheaper countries have it much easier while we have to juggle rising cost of living and cyclical layoffs here. And ever since companies started hiring workers directly and paying 30-50% (compared to 10-15% during the GCC era) the quality is almost at par with US.
Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America.
The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else. We can see the economic crisis' in the US first in the 70s/80s with Europe and Japan rebounding, then again in 90s/00s with China and East Asia growing, and now again with the rest of the world growing (esp Latin America, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Philippines, etc). Unless US physically invades and devastates China, India or Brazil the competition will keep getting exponentially higher. It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.
In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.
This could be because of developer fatigue and the trend of forcing backend devs to do fullstack.
Its very hard to keep up with the frequent changes to programming models, new frameworks, CSS libraries (why the heck are they soo many?!) when you also have to design O(Log n) backends, IaC, Observability, LLMOps, etc.
I have come to a compromise and have started advocating for React/Redux/TS/NextJS as the default CRUD application stack so that I can focus on solving real CS problems in the backend that I’m passionate about.
Agree with mid level talent part, not the middle class part. H1B holders by large don't hold typical "middle class" jobs like accountants, office admins, marketing, sales, teachers, etc: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/11/jobs-with-the-largest-shares...
Can you please share your reading material that links H1B software engineers with decline in middle class jobs from this list?
CS grads everywhere are finding it tough, including India - and it wont improve until the AI hype is over.
Google does - Google search and maps have gotten objectively worse over the past 2 years. At least in Canada.
I have 38 locations in my (huge) city saved in Google maps and it breaks when I ask it to find a way from point A to point B. Works fine when logged out.
Maps also put traffic signals where there are none, and while finding shortest path it stopped putting weights to traffic signals. So you could have it route you via a city's main street instead of the freeway because it's 2km shorter but it ignores the 9 traffic signals that wastes 15 mins. Apple maps works fine.
Google search on web has adopted bad UX, and clicking a map or a shopping item has a noticeable delay between. Also right click "Open in new tab" options are gone.
Are you saying all these "enshittification" changes are deliberate?
It IS unreasonable to trust individual humans across the globe in 100+ different jurisdictions pushing code that gets bundled into my application.
How can you guarantee a long trusted developer doesn't have a gun pointed to their head by their authoritarian govt?
In our B2B shop we recently implemented a process where developers cannot add packages from third party sources - only first party like meta, google, spring, etc are allowed. All other boilerplate must be written by developers, and on the rare occasion that a third party dependency is needed it's copied in source form, audited and re-hosted on our internal infrastructure with an internal name.
To justify it to business folks, we presented a simple math where I added the man-hours required to plug the vulnerabilities with the recurring cost of devsecops consultants and found that it's cheaper to reduce development velocity by 20-25%.
Also devsecops should never be offshored due to the scenario I presented in my second statement.
I like this idea. Do you have any middleware in your current setup that added the contents of this directory to the agent prompt?
I meant the “grind”, short term profit mentality of SWE market has become similar to professionals in those fields, not that any of these fields are similar.
I used to love getting to know the interviewer and doing things like that but IMO the market has shifted fundamentally on both ends for this to be effective anymore for most SaaS roles. This is anecdotal for US/Canada tech market over the past 10 years so YMMV.
Developers Side: Since developers don't have job security anymore (at least for those who work on common languages like Go, Python, Java and Typescript) they are better off learning and keeping in touch with leetcode and system design questions, looking for new opportunities and interviewing in "batch mode" when looking for a job. The idea is to clear as many interviews as possible using the same concepts, get in and make money asap before you get laid off. No incentive for collaboration or for fulfilling but esoteric stuff like Haskell and Scala. Career security > Job security.
Companies Side: On the other end software companies have less trust in developers staying long term so they want to make the interview process as quick and risk free as possible. In essence they are betting that by perusing 100s of resumes and hiring someone who seemingly knows CS concepts they can get some value out of them before they leave. Standardized tests/vetting > team fit.
TLDR; The art is gone from this job, its become akin to management consulting or investment banking. Quality and UX seems to be regressing across the board as a result.
All the while there are numerous issues with Firefox on M1. They simply ignore or close them as “works for me” [1] while I personally have encountered at least half of these issues as of last month.
IMO they should first focus on being a good cross platform browser that works well on desktop arm before doing anything else.
IMO for many people a laptop means highly portable, wire free 'desktop' computing experience that you can't get on a tablet. Therefore the comparison for mobility is with a tablet and not a powerful Windows laptop.
Plus many people working in tech have specific systems for specific tasks; I use a spec'ed up Windows laptop for heavy lifting and games, and an M1 Air as my main computer.
Thanks for highlighting that! I think in the new economic cycle we should judge companies in a holistic manner, including the CEO’s personality and character because such things often affect how they provide value or screw over customers.
I don’t see the advent of generative art any different than when we moved from paper to photoshop.
For those unaware the vast majority of graphic artists start their projects with assets and base images that they themselves don’t create. With generative ai you’re simply going one step further and have another new tool create a more polished version that you can edit to remove extra fingers, etc. It’s simply moving the baseline from 20% done to 60% done, which will result in artists producing even higher fidelity and more detailed art.
For example an artist could generate a bunch of scenes using Sora and create a collage of them for a larger piece of art, something that is prohibitively time consuming right now.