That's one of the reasons why I opted for multiple citizenships. I was fortunate to have the option to rehash parts of my name, and I am using my birthplace country's passport as a throwaway for everything, and my other citizenships docs only the governments and legal system know about.
Plus, like others mentioned, I am preparing my future self to be in a total offline/unplugged world and be a semi-ghost digitally, and even now in 2026 I found a bunch opportunities already doing it in a semi-agorist way (e.g. second hand, cash on hand, offline remote physical work, hunting/fishing, farming/a little farm, etc).
Maybe marginally related, I used to listen to a lot of podcasts, especially when I had a severe issue in my eye and I couldn't read. I used to listen to nonfiction, lifestyle, health, tech and history (I do not follow politics in podcasting).
At least after the pandemic (ca. 2023) one thing that I noticed is that a lot of podcasts now has some rotation of the same guests, they are more tied with the world events (e.g., a "stoic" podcast talking about the POTUS that has 0% influence in my life and interest) and prominent figures that are specialized in... podcasting, or podcasts that, without any pushback, bringing outlandish guests for clicks (e.g. any of the Weinstein brothers, moon landing, etc).
I used to listen 20+ hours of podcasting per day and my feed was great, but now I cannot even listen 1 hour or even 99% of the guests are the same figures or super polarizing.
As a Brazilian, the whole improbable (and beautiful) history of Portugal raised by the "Navegações" and how badly they bottled the whole imperium (especially after the Brazilian independence, but one can argue that João VI opened the ports) and the sheer amount of lack of vision in not investing in production is something that will always amaze me.
One can say that it was one of the longest imperiums in history (ending in 1999 with Macau???), but every time that I spend some time in Portuguese cities, I feel just bad. The good thing is that Brazil will carry its tradition for posterity nevertheless.
> But everyone is out shopping, partying, drinking, eating out all the time. Onsens, arcades, karaokes, izakayas. Yes getting those services means someone has to work.
Spot on.
I really like Substack as media and I think has been a great complementary in terms of depth; but this article does not have any difference of any slop from mainstream media.
Pick one topic, place some term (like late-stage capitalism, social-democracy, democracy), pick-up 2 or 3 bad poins, and build a narrative, and sprinkle some ~hyperlinks~ references that sustain and voilà: now you have some in-depth analysis with a audience craving for it even when everyone knows that is super simplistic and reductionist, does not converge on what books and history says, and with a politically charged piece.
All those articles you will never see any kind point of positivity being conceived; it sounds always written by some hypercritical, rational, politically charged, and hyper-contemporaneous in a sense that is not space for nuance and understanding that no simple thing per se can explain a very complex phenomena.
For God sake, those guys received 2 nukes 80 years ago and they managed to raise again, and in the meanwhile my country during this time only have 55% of people with sewage.
> For example, I can tell you that if you are an immigrant in the USA from one of the (now many) targeted countries, even one with legal residency, news about ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
Exactly. There's a post from last week on how media/journalism became more entertainment than information, and I think the complete opposite of the first reply: If you have bandwidth and time to consume most of those "world news", then you're the privileged.
One example: In Germany if you watch/read the state regional public broadcast from Berlin[1] for 2 days you will learn more about the whereabouts of Donald Trump, the President of Ukraine, sports news, or some broad reporting about "cultural" aspect of the city (e.g. about Hildegard Knef, something about Karl Lagerfeld and so on), or general gossip.
The city itself has fewer private investments than 5 years, the schools lack basic infrastructure, educational ratings are dropping, delays in public transportation, the hospitals are lacking personnel, 10% unemployment, and an awful housing situation, squeezing the working people.
[1] - I'm totally in favor of public broadcasting that comes from the principle called "broadcast what you want to become or aspire to be" that is more focused on factual journalism (i.e., no commentary), educational programs (especially with Public Universities STEM lectures being broadcasted), educational cartoons, classic music and orchestras, and space/nature/technology documentaries.
I used to related with what the OP says and if he’s under 35 makes sense to jump to another adventure.
Anyways, a friend of mine told me the complete opposite than the OP after not being selected to a promotion 2x: He stayed competitive enough to the market in case of any issue, but at the same time he slightly moving to the “Dead Sea” existence where the tenure created a small co-dependence between himself and its employer.
His employer knows that he’s working at a discount in comparison to offshoring his job, but at the same time even being a L4 like can enjoy a lot of free time and agency to know when and where to throttle his productivity.
The only potential aspect that might be bad at least for me is that, even with Udemy having a bigger variance in terms of general quality Coursera will impose it course aesthetics, rigidness in the syllabus, and bring a lot of people not in the market to give the courses.
I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.
I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
It's some low-risk/consequence project/initiative that is designed to receive people that will be fired due to lack of compliance and/or collaboration with the new management.
Once we had a German colleague that was not so collaborative in sharing the knowledge about some specific parts of the application, and the Tech lead replaced her MacBook with a Windows 10, and she only can write PRs related with DocStrings.
> My take away from this is that you can't change the culture
I've seen the culture changing in some special circumstances a couple times in previous companies, and honestly all of them were ugly:
1) Demographic replacement (having more people saying yes and out-vote the legacy employees)
2) Hired guns from the top to the bottom to shake the system (we called in a company those managers "007" because they used to have licence to fire).
3) Non-compliance stable as a discipline method for the "legacy employees" (very adopted in Central Europe)
4) "Train-your-replacement" as a coercion method for collaboration
5) Some modified version of the "madogiwa-zoku" but instead of looking to the window, they push people to go for the "metawork," like organizing events, being a developer advocate in conferences, assuming roles as "community managers," or being used as a "donkey token" to be used in conferences or panels of "_______________ in tech."
I like the general idea, and I owe so much for the talks and bloposts. That said, I really miss the old deep boring technical talks with speakers with an attitude of "I do not care if you meet the tecnical (and probably cognitive in some several cases) requirements to be in this room".
I used to go in talks in the late 2000s and the difference with talks now in the mid-2020s is that the speakers now are so good and well-crafted, the slides way more professional, and the storytelling is so compelling, and... that's the issue(?) for me.
The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
There are so many aspects of topic accessibility and formatting that some of the open-ended parts of a technical argument or some not-said parts are not in the presentations anymore.
Beforehand I used to go to some talks and literally take notes on 90% of the things, and back home I started to do some research about it, and eventually I learned 70% of it, and I started to have at least 2% that made some difference in my daily work.
Now the talks are so well structured that I do not see most of the time the open-ended unsaid topic that could be an intellectual side quest, given how well the presenter placed it and made it uninteresting for me, or they do not talk about this open-ended aspect at all, and it never sparked my curiosity.
Maybe it's not such a sophisticated analogy, but the old format would be like reading a book and piecing together a lot of not-explicit points from the author, and the other one is like having the same book in a cinematic experience with a well-crafted screenplay, costumes, dialog, and so on.
> It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
This.
I spend 6 months to export 100K notes from Evernote mostly because they intentionally throttle the exports to a limit and you can extract it only in their proprietary format that truncates some data.
Last year after a thread around Obsidian and the downhill of Evernote I took almost 6 months to migrate more than 100K clippings and notes and it's so refreshing to have your own data in sync in your terms and not be in any proprietary format, that I do not image myself going to anywhere that I cannot push/retrieve my notes in my own terms in a portable format.
Notion is a great product for corporations, and I get why companies are jumping on this bandwagon so fast; however, as a consumer, I wouldn't consider it or any option based on seat (like Outcrop) or any that wouldn't give me a binary that I can use in whatever machine that I want.
Yes, it is. I've blogged since 2006, and after the content-oriented-to-SEO boom, I totally lost hope in writing online again. Part of me wants to write for the sake of sharing, but the other part thinks being a free content farm for AI is quite depressing.
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
> There’s no point in whining about the impulses endowed to them by several hundred thousand years of evolution. Don’t hate the player; hate the game. And if you really hate the game, make a better one.
I have contact with kids from 3 different places, 2 with high independent mobility and 1 with low independent mobility, and as much I like to agree that kids needs to be free, there's an important parental argument that needs to be talked about that is risk vs reward function if the kids get hurt.
In places with high mobility (at least 2 of them in the chart) there's some state support in terms of children's sick leave if something happens, plus work protections if you need to be absent for more than 6 weeks, and the education system has mechanisms to not let this kid be left behind (for example, if a kid breaks his/her legs).
In those places with low independence, I talk with some parents, and all of them are scared of the possibility of something permanent happens or something that can demand continuous support during working time; in those cases I can see why they play safe.
In the other hand, another second-order effect is that in those places with low independency, one thing that I noticed is that the motor coordination takes way more time to develop, and it cascades down for instance during sports activities (of the lack of), physical development and so on.
I had some different sort of issue but in the same lines: when you have distinct goals between upstream team X and the downstream team Y.
Most of my experience working in un-siloed team Y communicating only via interfaces (e.g., APIs or database views) was that most of the time we could move very fast, even in Big Co.
The problem started when we had a goal, e.g. saving _n_ amount in the Snowflake account, and at the same time the upstream team X started to push so much data that it not only offset our savings but also sometimes used to make things more expensive.
Since upstream X has all the upper management visibility, they could operate in a more loose way towards the downstream team, and we're basically at the whims of someone to be sensible and attend to some of our requests to ask them to stop duplicating data in our database.
We only had the problem solved when this upstream team X used to share the same goal (even as a partner) in terms of savings.
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python.
> That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!
For essays, honestly, I do not feel so bad, because I can see that other than some spaces like HN the quality of the average online writer has dropped so much that I prefer to have some machine-assisted text that can deliver the content.
However, my problem is with AI-generated code.
In most of the cases to create trivial apps, I think AI-generated code will be OK to good; however, the issue that I'm seeing as a code reviewer is that folks that you know their code design style are so heavily reliant on AI-generated code that you are sure that they did not write and do not understand the code.
One example: Working with some data scientists and researchers, most of them used to write things on Pandas, some trivial for loops, and some primitive imperative programming. Now, especially after Claude Code, most of the things are vectorized, with some sort of variable naming with way-compressed naming. Sometimes folks use Cython in some data pipeline tasks or even using functional programming to an extreme.
Good performance is great, and leveling up the quality of the codebase it's a net positive; however, I wonder in some scenario when things go south and/or Claude code is not available if those folks will be able to fix it.
Plus, like others mentioned, I am preparing my future self to be in a total offline/unplugged world and be a semi-ghost digitally, and even now in 2026 I found a bunch opportunities already doing it in a semi-agorist way (e.g. second hand, cash on hand, offline remote physical work, hunting/fishing, farming/a little farm, etc).