> I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years
Good for you, but this is not the counter example to the wager that the parent proposed. It would be "I worked for a no-name company in a developing country and still turned down interviews from Meta".
> You can easily put stablecoins in a Lulo savings account and get 5% interest instead of 0.1% or whatever your bank provides. Yes Lulo has insurance.
From Lulo's site[1]: "Lulo’s yield comes from interest paid by traders and borrowers in integrated DeFi protocols. These loans are over-collateralized with assets like SOL, ETH, and BTC, reducing lender risk."
SOL, ETH and BTC as collateral? What if their value goes down? We know what happened when the banks made bad housing loans (2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis). At least the houses had some tangible value - bricks and mortars. Crypto seems like a fiat currency minus the "full faith and credit of the United States government".
> 1234.56 in PyUSD means you get 1234.56 in Chase or Wells Fargo or whatever. In future your bank will hold these assets directly without need to off-ramp at all.
If the appeal of PyUSD is that you can convert it into equivalent USD anytime, why do we need PyUSD at all? What's the value-add, apart from low transfer fees?
>The much needed immigration should rather come from countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans, rather than India.
The mass emigration from India is a direct consequence of India's poor wages and living standards. If that was not the case, most people I know (and I myself) wouldn't have emigrated. From what I see[1], the average South American is much better off than the average Indian. Maybe that (and India's huge population) explains why South Americans do not emigrate as much[2] as Indians?
In other words, people from "countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans" may not want to move to Europe. It's all supply and demand at the end of the day
> Video games are far too derivative to be taken seriously as art
Even something like Europa Universalis IV? How is that derivative? I know of no other art form that will feed my fantasy of turning a no-name island in the Indian Ocean into a globe-spanning trading empire.
> Realistically, moving abroad is tough but I want to! I applied to a lot of startups but not getting any positive response.
I was in a similar situation. After being bored doing CRUD, I applied for a masters program and moved to Germany in 2019 (I was 26 at the time). One of the better decisions I’ve made.
There is no tuition fee (!!) in Germany for international students, and it is not that hard to get admitted to _some_ university (though actually graduating is hard). Computer science masters programs are usually in English. It is a fairly risk-free way to try out your hand at some research, and if you don’t like it, you can always find some software engineering job.
It’s not going to be easy - university applications are a pain in the ass, you will still have to learn some German e.t.c. But it’s a good way to “reset” your life.
> I hate leetcode and that keeps me away from most of the job opportunities.
One way out of this is to interview deliberately at smaller companies.
If I don’t like my coworkers, I’m out. I like people who give a shit about the work I do (a.k.a “collaboration”). “Whatever, you own it” is just lazy for “I can’t be bothered to understand what you are working on”.
The problem is not the collaboration, it’s the ineffective collaboration. Maybe the author should fix that instead of pitching magic anti-collaboration click-bait pills.
Also, the problems you solve must be pretty straightforward and unambiguous (or you have a small codebase) if you have the luxury of being able to just make a pull request for it.
I moved from Germany (Cologne) to London recently and I am surprised to read that UK has safer roads than Germany. I have not yet driven in London - but I have driven in Germany and I have bicycled in both countries. London is hands down terrifying to me. Certain kinds of drivers (eg: vans) seem deliberately hostile to cyclists, and plenty of people park in a cycling lane. Never seen that happen in Germany with such frequency. Also, roads are bumpier - what’s with that?!
Now, cyclists in London are a driver’s nightmare. I’ve seen people barrel down a junction at full speed and jump a red light. This lack of desire for self-preservation is startingly common.
Between the hostile vans and the daredevil red-light-jumping cyclists, I am baffled at this report. Perhaps mortality rates are low, but injury rates are much higher than say, Germany?
I wrote tweetscreenr.com to fetch articles from my twitter feed, and convert it into an RSS feed. The initial use case was to follow AI researchers on twitter and get notified whenever they post a link to an arxiv.org paper. Works well for me - I get all the news from Twitter, minus all the politicized/opinionated crap.
When I worked at a startup we copied the Spotify model as well. We called it "functional teams" and so on but the idea was the same - we watched the spotify videos as well. To be honest it helped. I think this is a point in IBM's favor because they saw something better, and adopted it even though "it was not invented here".
I am a student graduating with an MS in CS around March 2021 from Saarland University. I worked for 3+ years as an engineer before enrolling in a masters program, and I've managed to do a couple of research internships around Information Retrieval/NLP. If you are looking for a product-minded engineer with better-than-average machine-learning/research chops, I think I'm your guy :)
And I can assure you that the trains are much much better than in other parts of the world (eg: India). In India, trains running on time are an exception, not the rule. At least all the German trains that I've been on were on time to the very minute.
I recently moved to Germany. I used to work as a software dev in India before this. I was horrified to learn that (urban) India has way better internet than Germany. When it comes to mobile data it's even more depressing - back in India I used to get 1.5GB _daily_ 4G mobile data for 200 rupees (around 2.5 euros) a _month_. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, 2.5 euros a month for virtually unlimited mobile data is super cheap. In comparison, I pay 10 euros a month for a _monthly_ quota of 1.5 GB with O2 here in Germany. Not to mention that it's slower, and yes, there are a lot of patches with no data reception.
Considering that Germany has otherwise superb infrastructure, the internet was a let down.
Good for you, but this is not the counter example to the wager that the parent proposed. It would be "I worked for a no-name company in a developing country and still turned down interviews from Meta".