Deel is one of the reasons why my policy for working for foreign companies is "B2B or I'm fucking off". Everyone I know (employees/contractors using it, not the other side) who went for it hated and regretted it.
Singling out Deel because you brought it up (and I ragequit after reading their "deel" and consulting it with a local lawyer), but I have the exact same story for every employer of record I've been involved with here in EU, and I don't know a single person who's been happy with them either (again, all employees/contractors).
I understand that it's comfortable and convenient for the employer (presumably, or at least the perspective of outsourcing this and reducing liability outweighs everything else), but these companies absolutely do not know what they're doing wrt local laws.
Curious. I opened it in chromium to see what it looks like without the adblocker, I declined all the tracking it asked for (violating the GDPR by the way), and I see no ads of any sort.
Still way easier to have an adblock/consent-o-matic disable it for you, but it seems like it only shows you ads if you actually agreed to them.
That only gives you the client component though, which isn't very useful when the game servers shut down.
Most games these days don't have a self-hostable dedicated server.
In case of Steam/Valve specifically it happened a while ago with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Valve replaced it with Counter-Strike 2, and while GO's client is still usable, some of its online components are not.
It can be used effectively as a "private spotify". Labeling is a solved problem thanks to https://picard.musicbrainz.org/, and the fact that a lot of the music you buy these days comes pre-labeled already.
You then have a web-app (and/or a mobile app, if that's your thing) where you can stream music as you would with Spotify.
You can even build yourself a little music-sharing commune with friends, where you all upload the albums you buy and accumulate a nice collection of diverse tunes.
You still need to buy, upload and – the horror! – choose what you want to listen to each time, but perhaps it fills your other convenience needs.
Yep. I recently serviced a Tissot from the late 1930s – it was running fine, it was just a reasonable thing to do after all these years to prolong its lifespan. You wouldn't be able to tell that it needs a service without looking at timegrapher readings.
I couldn't help myself while reading the other comments, so I asked ChatGPT the following prompt, in an attempt to fit in:
> write a reply to the following comment, in a style of a stuck up hacker news commenter. Ridicule the idea that photography is easier than creating AI art. Point out how much effort a photographer needs to put in: (your comment)
Result:
Oh dear, it seems like we have another individual who's completely missed the point. Let me break it down for you, dear commenter. Photography isn't simply about "spending milliseconds taking photos." It requires years of practice and honing one's skills to capture the perfect shot, understanding of lighting, composition, and an eye for detail that can only be developed over time.
Meanwhile, creating AI-generated art with Midjourney or any other software is just a matter of feeding the right data and parameters to the machine. It may require some technical knowledge, but it certainly doesn't require the same level of artistic skill and intuition that photographers need to possess.
So, if you really think that copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord is the equivalent of the amount of effort and artistic vision that photographers put into their work, then I'm afraid you've got another thing coming. Perhaps it's time to put down your keyboard and pick up a camera, so you can truly appreciate the art and effort that goes into photography.
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I can't wait for the top story next week where one of us comes clean as not actually being an expert programmer and a successful entrepreneur!
It took me 3 tries to "engineer" a prompt that'd produce a sensible reply to this, so one could argue that it is indeed harder than, say, understanding sarcasm on the first try.
> Imagine spending your whole afternoon trying to dig what "($fc) = /^(.)/" does; a maintainer's nightmare
Why are you maintaining Perl code without knowing any Perl though? This syntax is obvious to anyone who went through the trouble of following the basic tutorial.
It's a language you need to learn before using it. It's unfamiliar, but not unreadable.
> It's an active struggle to make Perl code readable and it not turning into a mess
Are you speaking from experience? I don't find that to be the case.
I don't understand Haskell, but that's because I never bothered to learn it. Should I say it's a crap language just because I do not understand the basic bits right off the bat?
There are good reasons to dislike Perl (I have my own good reasons, having worked with Perl professionally for close to 10 years), but the syntax is really not one of its real problems.
Oh, I absolutely agree – there is an overhead to hiring remotely (especially if you need to operate another business there, like Google does in Warsaw), so if you have to pay someone the same and cover that overhead then it's a bad business decision to do this at all. Timezone/cultural issues also come into this.
So yeah, I'm not surprised that businesses (try to) do this – but in the current situation it's worthwhile (and possible) for the hires (especially contractors) to try to go against that and argue for higher pay. Even if the actual SV salary is not within reach, you can at least try to stay within the same order of magnitude – and more often than not, especially at the end of the interview process, it'd be cheaper for the company to hire you anyway than to start over with someone else.
That's all in my narrow experience of working with smaller companies – in megacorps with strict levels/salary rules like Google it's probably another story. And that's also why Google is not (any longer?) the holy grail for Polish workers.
If you're struggling to find talent anywhere, why not hire in Poland?
As a Polish engineer, we all know that companies are struggling to hire anyone. If you think you can hire a local instead of me for the same money, good luck. From my perspective, if I'm delivering the same value as someone from another country I should not be paid less. My cost of living is my own business, whether it's the lease on a car, the number of kids I have or, in this case, the country I choose to live in.
Part of the hiring in cheaper countries is the possibility to exploit the wealth disparity and cut costs, sure. But in case of remote IT jobs, IME it's more of a fact that companies can't find anyone so they'll hire from anywhere, including cheaper countries. Doesn't mean that the employees should let themselves be played though, it's a seller's market after all (for now).
Better than it used to be is not a very high bar to clear.
As a reader, I actively seek the threadreaderapp posters and follow these links to improve the reading experience. Or just go to nitter since I discovered that it's a thing.
> but as a reader I have no idea if it's going to render correctly on mobile (...). At minimum there'll be a braindead cookie banner taking up 1/3 of the screen
This is the reality of reading twitter on mobile if you aren't logged in/using their app though.
No, not everyone I like passes my purity test, you're right. I try not to judge them too much for it, they have their reasons (largely economical), and it's their call. I wouldn't do it, but I don't condemn them for it either – and I never said that I would. I merely stated my own stance on this, which is, as you say, cheap to have since I'm in a stable situation and the IT job market is abundant of well-paying jobs.
I see the point that you're getting at, and there's surely the line to be drawn here, and I think it's a question of scale – and the line is placed differently for each individual. I don't have absolutist views on this, and I probably wouldn't feel bad either, as a public defender in the example you bring up. I'd say public defenders are in the clear even if their state-employer also does bad things – since at least some of the things that they do are good and need to be done, like keeping people safe. I wouldn't say the same about Norton since they're one of many and if they went down tomorrow nothing much would really happen.
I don't think it's comparable to the IT industry though. Companies hugely care about their image, and poking holes in that image is an effective – or at least available – way to put pressure on them. Consider how much effort they're making to recruit people, and how heavily they rely on friends recommending their friends. "Your employees will leave and they'll discourage their friends from working with you" will work much better on a tech company than it would on a state that doesn't really compete with anyone else when it comes to public defense.
One's own conscience work similarly in this case. There's a long way to go from "I directly boost profits of a ruthless, replacable corporation" to the "I criticize the society and yet I participate in it" meme.
Talk is cheap, but so is switching jobs. The broader you go on this the harder it is to avoid, I still pay my taxes even though my government does terrible things with the money, but I don't have much of a choice. I have refused job offers from companies that do things I don't like though because it's not really that much of a loss.
And I don't know what kind of standards public defenders in the US have, but over here it's common than an abuse of power by the police force is followed by a wave of resignations.
Singling out Deel because you brought it up (and I ragequit after reading their "deel" and consulting it with a local lawyer), but I have the exact same story for every employer of record I've been involved with here in EU, and I don't know a single person who's been happy with them either (again, all employees/contractors).
I understand that it's comfortable and convenient for the employer (presumably, or at least the perspective of outsourcing this and reducing liability outweighs everything else), but these companies absolutely do not know what they're doing wrt local laws.