saguntum
Joined 13 years ago
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Comment · 25 days ago
Comment · 26 days ago
you may find this article interesting: https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2026-04-29/es-un-error-pensar-...
archive: https://archive.is/Ggfma
the españa vaciada continues due to wage stagnation :(
i hope salaries improve, but i'm not optimistic for new grads short term. i'm hoping big companies will learn their lesson that not hiring newer engineers is a mistake. no one will be around to supervise the ai agents if a talent pipeline is not built. there's too much short term thinking in today's gold rush
Comment · 2 months ago
Yes. It's a little sad to see other comments assume that people have something to hide for doing something as basic as wanting to send money back to family.
Banking services with hidden fees can be inherently less predictable than working with cash and fee-based financial services for folks who have low income or irregular pay.
Comment · 4 months ago
I'm moving there.
Climate change is going to affect everywhere, and yes, a lot of Spain will experience desertification over the course of my lifetime. I am moving from Texas to Spain, though, so I am used to heat from a pure personal comfort perspective.
One interesting point is that Spain is well-situated in terms of its energy mix: it's a leader of renewables in Europe. It was also able to negotiate a carve-out from collective energy pricing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_exception), so Iberian energy markets are generally cheaper than broader European markets. This will have downstream economic effects for the country and makes it easier to afford using AC. I will always install AC wherever I live. There are far too many avoidable heat deaths in Europe in particular given their level of economic development. I don't blame them at all given the need is relatively new, but it's really a sad phenomenon.
If you are a true climate doomer (realist?), also, Spain is going to fare as well as one can in Europe should the AMOC collapse. It's not the best place to be globally in a scenario like that, though, to say the least.
For me, with everything going on in terms of world events, life choices are basically just placing bets about the future. There is no truly safe or best choice in a lot of scenarios.
Comment · 4 months ago
Bogleheads forum is great: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php
There's a Spain equivalent forum also if you poke around
Comment · 4 months ago
> I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government.
I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
Comment · 4 months ago
The recent citations are definitely interesting, but none of this is really new. I met with some VCs in the early 10s, and some of them talked about "free enterprise zones" in various areas in the region. Frankly, I'm a little surprised this isn't discussed more. Maybe because the need for "liberty" is less in the realm of bits & bytes for these developments, it is less publicized.
Comment · 4 months ago
Gay Texan here leaving the country next year. Maybe culturally in the cities you have a point, but the gerrymandered state government still very much affects you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_12
Thanks to SB12, it would be illegal for a teacher to answer when a student in my kids’ class asks why they have 2 dads. They would also be unable to join a support club like the Gay Straight Alliance which was (barely) tolerated when I grew up here in the 00s. This isn’t even mentioning performative BS like teachers having to hang the 10 commandments in schools, or the rabid anti-trans laws affecting adult treatment and identity documents. Discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity is also banned in higher education, as well.
This isn’t even covering the abortion ban or other issues. A friend’s sister almost died of an ectopic pregnancy because she couldn’t find a doctor to help terminate. She wanted the child, but nature had other plans.
I love Texas and agree with a lot of the positive points you raised. I wish I didn’t have to abandon my family and friends having lived here for over a decade as an adult and having grown up here, but I can’t raise my kids here.
Comment · 4 months ago
Switzerland is, however, a member of the Schengen Area, which is very relevant to this discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
EU citizens can freely live and work in Switzerland and vice-versa. It would be difficult to reliably cap immigration from other EU countries and stay in the Schengen Area.
Comment · 4 months ago
Three moments:
1. When ChatGPT came to the masses, it trivially solved my standard phone interview problem for new SWE hires. It's not particularly complicated, but it screened out a lot of candidates pre-AI and was a good filter.
2. At one point, there was a bug in some client software we ship that was erroneously displaying a protocol-level disconnect message to clients when the server shut the connection unexpectedly.
In very few turns, ChatGPT gave me working code to intercept the error at the client level via a pseudo-server that intercepted the requests and implemented the proper teardown procedure. It essentially implemented a micro-server for the protocol we were working in as a bug workaround.
3. I'm working on a major rearchitecture (6+ month project of very senior engineers) of an internal system for scalability and maintainability with tight latency bounds where correctness with the old system is necessary.
I came back from an international vacation quite jet lagged and was having trouble doing actual coding work for a bit since my focus was shot. Taking additional days off wouldn't have helped recover from the sleep issue more quickly due to childcare responsibilities.
I tried instead building a pipeline where I'd run an integration test suite, throw a list of failing tests at Claude, and make a PR if it made more tests pass. I automated as much of the AI "loop" as possible in my state at the time.
Using this technique, a coworker and I fixed over 200 failing integration tests for parity with the old code in 1 week. We subdivided failing tests between engineers and re-sub-divided with each success.
I re-reviewed the code before we launched when I was more well-rested, but this was an extremely effective technique and makes me think that AI-enhanced test driven development (TDD) is the future.
Comment · 4 months ago
Your son is not alone:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/no-lawyer-no-money-...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
Good luck to him. I get worried about people using AI for serious work in a field they aren't specialized in, but if it helps him achieve a good outcome, that would be interesting.
I have often felt that the legal system is divided between haves and have-nots: if you can afford to participate, you get "justice" tilted toward you. Easier participation for those without the resources for a lawyer would be good.
The second article I linked, from the MIT Technology Review, is quite interesting. It seems like judges are experiencing some version of what open source maintainers and seniors at companies are experiencing: a much larger review burden due to the cost of generating code or legal arguments dropping drastically.
I wonder what form this structural shift in output versus specialist review capacity will take in other professions. The frontier labs seem to be trying to automate more and more of the "specialist review" process. I am not sure that is feasible in the legal world, but we'll see....
Comment · 5 months ago
I know you are asking rhetorically, but this occurs routinely under the current US immigration regime.
There have been over 100,000 children separated from their parents in the United States due to immigration enforcement since 2025.
The feature story in the linked article is about a now 2 year old whose parents were not there for them beginning to walk or talk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/us/brookings-institution-...
Comment · 5 months ago
You can ban the commercialization and mass scaling of the technology. Just because you can't prevent something at a small scale doesn't mean you can't prevent corporations and government agencies from doing it without exposing themselves to unacceptable legal risk.
Comment · 5 months ago
I feel like trying to "trick" the RNG into providing stability is the wrong approach here given all the footguns that can occur with having a low entropy seed, but I am not sure what an alternative to IP stability would be short of doing session management, which may introduce too much state into the problem to be acceptable for a VPN service.
Maybe a clientside hint that gets rotated in some circumstances with options to toggle it off would be appropriate. That should be fine as long as you don't care about someone being able to control their exit IP reliably.
I have learned recently that I don't inherently hate JIRA, I hate our JIRA and byzantine process flows.
I think because other task trackers like Trello are simpler and have less config options (per my last use, long ago, pre-Atlassian-acquisition), it's impossible knock on wood to get into the antipatterns I've seen in those tools.
Ironically I think one of the main goals of management I have seen consistently over time - ensuring tickets are accurate, up to date, and reflect reality - would end up much more true if the task tracking tools were just much simpler, with fewer fancy features.