Berlin is one the cheapest capital cities in Europe. As such it attracts a huge amount of immigrants. That low cost is reflected in the pay. An experienced full stack developer would be fortunate to get 90-95k euro annually. That is plenty of money if you intend to stay in Berlin, but is not something you can save up and build a future with or transfer to another country. Also, housing is a huge problem there and it can take 6 months to find even a basic flat. I am an American developer that lived there for many years and my co-workers were usually Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Iranian, Russian, Lebanese, and now Indian. It was rare to find an actual German coder.
I had a hard time with German work expectations and management style. Also, their engineering approach is thorough but incredibly slow and over-built. The environment is hierarchy and credential based with little room for individual initiative or creative problem solving. I was used to improvising, experimenting, and thinking outside the box. It was not a good fit.
People need to understand just how saturated San Francisco is with ads for AI companies right now. I know what these companies do, but I'm still amazed at how niche and bizarre the ads come across. They use an enormous amount of public space to advertise something only relevant to a few hundred people. Locals have a deep resentment of these companies.
I have seen company descriptions in job ads that list college achievements of founders. They are invariably young Asian men. I understand that it's a cultural signifier and don't judge them. But, I also understand that I will never hear back from them because I don't share that background. So, I never apply to any job listing that references college experience of either side, other than wanting a degree in general.
I have done festivals before, so I knew what to expect. One thing I had this time was accepting credit cards and apple pay through an NFC app on my phone. Most people paid with apple pay and were glad I accepted it. Being in a sales booth is awkward at times, but I made friends with the other exhibitors. I had some good conversations with people.
This is the first year I made more money selling art than I did freelancing web dev. I just incorporated and formalized my web dev business (https://lcdbmg.com). A couple of weeks later I got a booth at an art festival and ended up selling many prints (https://lucidbeaming.com). I think the universe is telling me something.
I bet most of these were German government property at some point. Considering the time period they were produced, they were probably under security protocols as well. That doesn't just expire. You are right to wonder what the provenance and legal standing of this transfer was.
I've said it before that Mistral is underrated. They are looking at real world use of LLMs and tooling. Bespoke models are very appealing to lots of non-tech centered companies and state agencies. Also, Mistral's actual platform is useful. While others are watching performance leaderboards like this is some eSports stream, they are building real world uses.
I was working on a site to mashup Spotify playlists. I can't stand the "weighted shuffle" Spotify uses. It is also useless for niche genres or experimental music. Last week, I got it all the way to launch and then had reports of login problems. It turns out that Spotify changed its developer terms last year and I can't accept public users unless I'm in their partner program. That has a requirement of 250k MAU. So, everyone was declined when the tried to login. I'm limited to just 5 users. That sucks, but I invited 5 friends to use it and we just bang out epic playlists.
This turned out to be a huge waste of time. I built this without knowing that Spotify changed their policy for independent projects last year. I can't get it out of dev mode unless I register as a Spotify partner as a company AND
maintain a minimum of at least 250k MAUs. So, I'm limited to 5 users that I have to enter their account info by hand. What a bummer. Still, I really like the background animations I came up with.
Location: San Francisco
Remote: Hybrid or Remote
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Full-stack web, but recently React Native, Svelte, and RabbitMQ
Résumé/CV: https://joshuacurry.dev
Email: (on dev portfolio above)
I offer high yield with low drama. 15+ years experience across the modern web stack. Looking for contract work.
Lots of creative software has custom scripting with it's own syntax, like Photoshop actions. I'm glad to point Claude at things like that. Inkscape has an extension API that would be interesting to vibe code with. This is not the real danger for creatives.
Right now we're seeing moves to record behaviour by operators of all kinds of software. That will eventually be distilled into sets of automations for agents to use. To me that's far more labor targeted and extractive than generative AI.
Most commercial websites, especially tech, run multiple A/B experiments in parallel to optimize signup funnels and tier conversions. Even so, there should always be a source of truth for people. We should have some way of verifying what we get for what we pay. There are laws about this as well.
This guy's casual and crass response is a sign of disrespect for customers. Unfortunately, that is pervasive in the industry. The bubbles these teams work in are corrosive to empathy and real world impact.
Thanks for the compliment. Linocuts and monotypes have been considered printmaking for hundreds of years. Those pen plots are also collaged and modified by hand, so not only mechanical. I see all that as traditional printmaking. As for having nothing to saw, there can be a lot of fulfillment in exploring basic themes, like geometric shapes or silhouettes of animals.
Not one actual app is mentioned. As with most articles that are about this, few if any public facing examples are described. Where are the lists of actual production software that was vibe coded and also successful?
Everything is fandom now. I grew up around people obsessed with Nascar and NFL. So much of the discourse sounds exactly the same. It beats listening to people talk about their dogs though.
Don't sleep on Mistral. Highly underrated as a general service LLM. Cheaper, too. Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off. There are all kinds of specialized datasets and restricted access stores that can benefit from their approach. Especially in highly regulated EU.
Not everyone is obsessed with code generation. There is a whole world out there.
I had a hard time with German work expectations and management style. Also, their engineering approach is thorough but incredibly slow and over-built. The environment is hierarchy and credential based with little room for individual initiative or creative problem solving. I was used to improvising, experimenting, and thinking outside the box. It was not a good fit.