908B64B197

> Second, salaries are garbage, especially for migrants. There is a term for this situation called "Canadian Experience": employers claim that because one does not have experience working in Canada, they deserve a crappy salary while they acquire it. This is of course bullshit.

When issuing visas, the Canadian government uses a point system (age, degree...) that never actually checks for employability.

That's how you get people claiming they were "Senior Engineers" in their home country that can't pass a fizzbuzz test. With a signal to noise ratio this low, a lot of employers simply won't bother unless someone can demonstrate that someone else is willing to employ them at Canadian wages for the position they claim they can perform.

> This means that foreign-trained doctors (as an example) can easily get a federal visa to enter the country, but the province will refuse to recognize their medical training, forcing these skilled immigrants to work low-skill jobs instead. It is not rare to find foreign-trained engineers working as taxi-drivers or for PhD-holders to be slinging coffee.

That's not the whole picture... Friend of mine is a doctor here in the Bay Area, originally trained in Ontario. There are agreements with some countries to transfer licenses (how he was able to practice here in America). Quebec, for instance, has agreements with France and Switzerland. When someone comes in with medical credentials from a jurisdiction where there's no special agreements, they simply have the candidate take the same exams as the medical students (which, should they be as qualified as they claim, shouldn't be hard). He told me the pass rate was abysmal for foreign trained candidates.

Apparently, it's the same for engineers (and is one of the reasons a lot of them end up trying to break into software since it's unregulated).

> People are increasingly getting into the field for the pay rather than for a love of programming,

> the quality of the software being produced is decreasing

I feel these two are related. I mean, one could say the same looking at companies like Boeing post McDonald Douglas merger.

> It tells me I need to get out because it represents a shift to a higher level of abstraction in programming. In the ideal I hear expressed, instead of programming you'd be just describing the code you want and letting someone/thing else do it for you.

To me, LLMs are just "advanced" (read: statistical) codegen, unlike compilers and interpreters that are deterministic (should generate functionally equivalent code). But there's as much novelty there as there was when the C compiler or LISP repl was introduced.

> Likewise, I find it absurd that anyone running a startup outside of the US would ever incorporate in Delaware.

What if I told you it's sometimes easier for a foreinger to setup a corporation and sell in the US than it is to do so from their home country? A frenchman told me once that the US immigration system was easier to navigate than the regulations around a new business in his home country...

As for why Delaware instead of Dubai, I'm confident Delaware will still be a functioning democracy inside a strong economic union in a hundred year, with a stable, global currency and predictable laws and regulations. I'm not confident the UAE will qualify as "stable" in as little as 10 years. Other than oil, there's nothing of value there.

> My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files.

Wait until she discovers git!

As an aside, I wish there was an alternative like Time Machine on Windows.

With shrinking recess time and PE disappearing from some schools, boys with normal needs for physical activities are increasingly labelled as "sick" and medicalized for completely normal behavior by the taxpayer funded school system. Energy has to go somewhere so it ends up manifesting itself in behaviors that are deemed "disruptive" (really, not sitting still and being unable to concentrate on tasks). That's the beginning of the slippery slope toward "toxic" masculinity traits (such as healthy competition).

Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers fail to understand. Or rather, willfully ignore trying to push a certain (extremely liberal) agenda on captive boys.

It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.

> many countries have their own laws and policies regarding air quality exposure. Often times these regulations use metrics about time-average exposure (e.g. the annual average 8-hr maximum ozone concentration) and can't trivially be converted between agencies. It causes very negative user experiences when your air quality summary disagrees with what a regulatory agency is putting out to the public due to a measurement technicality

Ultimately, why not simply compute it and give the user a warning that the local measurement isn't compatible with proper AQI measurement?

Also, does my body magically changes the way it reacts to air pollution as soon as I take my first step abroad?

It means you'll be getting a "This phone isn't available in your country" pop-up when shopping online and all SKUs sold in Europe by the maker's subsidiary will have different model numbers. Of course, because of the need to support the phone for longer on patched kernels and the impossibility of charging for updates, the phones will be more expensive. The removable battery will also mean that the phone isn't waterproof.

> tend to take up the less dangerous, more comfortable low-wage jobs. Think teachers, nurses, secretaries against soldiers, police officers, construction workers.

> less dangerous, more comfortable

I don't think a modern school or hospital is more comfortable or safe than a squad car. To be completely fair the difference between a police officer and a nurse and teacher is that the former can defend himself and claim he "was afraid for his life" while the latter can't.

> what my local government/news says about air quality

That's assuming the local government is giving the truth regarding air quality and that their "official scale" is made to reflect reality and not obscure some measurements.

> Are they just extremely rare cases or am I just not aware of the valley and their customs?

Not aware. That's not unusual compensation for key contributors. Especially in AI or other niche fields. Even outside the valley.

We acquired something a while back in Montreal, Canada and it sure wasn't cheap. Salaries were in the same ballpark as our positions in the valley. We actually got most of the team to relocate to California on O-1s but still have some guys over there.

A lot of what Turing did was kept classified or not publicized too much by the British government. They seem to have done a complete 180 on this relatively recently (now that tech and SV are all over the news) and seem to want to brand anything computing related with his name.

Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.

Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of the British government. She could have simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to do so. But she and the crown chose not to.

The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.

If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.