gregjor

Japan faces the same problems with too many tourists, and too many of those who don’t respect the culture and people. I see that every day in Bangkok too. The difference is the Japanese and the Thais can identify foreigners on sight, whereas in San Francisco locals places had to use other techniques to discriminate.

Edit: Japan (like many other countries) requires everyone to carry official ID at all times. Japanese have government ID cards. For foreigners that means your passport. Americans find that requirement off-putting because we don’t (yet) have to “show our papers” to police on demand.

I travel a lot. Only had immigration or customs ask anything in the USA (my native country), Canada (had my young son with me so understandable), UK multiple times. Never anywhere in Asia, and I live in SE Asia. It mainly comes down to appearance and attitude and the mood of the officer at the moment, hard to extrapolate to a national or ethnic tendency from a few anecdotes.

I’ve never had Thai immigration hassle me but I’ve seen them take young people who look rough aside, maybe to check for drugs, probably to make sure they had sufficient funds and an onward/return ticket. Asian cultures tend to more formality and higher expectations of appearance in public, so foreigners may call negative attention to themselves with their clothes or tattoos, and their entitled attitude.

Japan may feel closed off and xenophobic. On the other hand they don’t have foreigners marginalized into ghettos or rounded up by ICE. The USA and Canada have no ethnic identity, whereas Japan and other Asian countries do. Unfamiliar perhaps but I don’t interpret that as racist or hostile.

Rather than rampant surveillance I would support confiscating the car and cancelling the license of reckless drivers on the second offense, and DUIs on the first offense.

I think you refer to China, or maybe Japan or Singapore. Not every country in Asia has advanced surveillance. The UK, Canada, and America have advanced the same technology but use it in other ways, which is why American police can’t make the subways or roads safe like the Japanese have, but monitor your social media posts and emails for signs of terrorism and political dissent.

Every country has separate immigration lines for citizens and foreigners. Immigration officials have access to national databases but not those of other countries. Like the USA and most other countries Japan has biometric data associated with passports, but only has direct access to match that for Japanese passports. Perhaps you have never experienced the “dystopian” foreigner entry process in the USA or your own country.

Don Quijote has no such signs and does not demand your passport to enter or shop. If you want to get the VAT refunded — a privilege many countries extend to foreign tourists — you can do that by showing you have a tourist visa. Essentially duty-free shopping extended out of the airport. The USA does not have a national VAT so no American store needs a passport to refund taxes.

Japanese businesses do sometimes exclude foreigners, mainly because they don’t have multilingual staff, but also because they want to reserve some places for Japanese and not have tourists overrun every locals restaurant and bar.

Customs and immigration officials everywhere ask probing questions to catch smugglers and criminals. Annoying perhaps but hardly a Japanese thing. Part of the job description. You have no right to enter a foreign country, the immigration officers get to determine that.

Look at people who make that much now — the people already at the front of the line ahead of you. That might give you some ideas.

If you don’t have family money and connections and don’t want to break the law or defraud people you will probably need years at a name-brand university, quite a few more years climbing the ladder, good connections, and lots of luck.

This kind of thing tells your customer very clearly how little your company cares about them. Calling a chatbot an “agent” doesn’t make the experience better for the customer.

An AI can’t fall backwards into tremendous wealth and then imagine it earned it from smarts and hard work, then pretend to know more than everyone else.

Every day we get new affirmation of the incompetence and malice of the Trump administration. The people in charge of the futures and lives of millions, such as RFK, don’t have public welfare or health in the front of their minds. Nor can they admit their own ignorance or acknowledge mistakes.

Asking one side to have an honest intent to understand and consider positions that have no basis in fact or reality or scientific method amounts to asking scientists to have an open mind about astrology, Ouija boards, and repeatedly discredited junk science. Of the two possibilities — RFK et al. know something the rest of us don’t about disease and vaccines, or he knows nothing and suffers from egomania — I think the evidence speaks for itself.

Dr. Fauci and others may have made mistakes, but they can admit to their mistakes in the face of enormous pressure to act and save lives. They didn’t make mistakes out of colossal stupidity, ignorance, and drug abuse.

Abysmal compared to what? In hindsight? Millions of lives saved in the face of a novel pathogen and public panic. The only people who lost confidence sit in the White house, pretending they know better than people who learned to read.

Also chimps cannot “speak human.” I think you misunderstand and exaggerate the attempts to teach human language to chimps.

Humans cannot “speak chimp” because chimps have no language for us to learn, at least not a language comparable to human language. People have learned to understand the vocalizations, facial expressions, and body language of chimps. Humans can grunt and scream and grimace just like chimps and we understand each other at that level.

The stories illustrate an experience and maybe thought process and challenges overcome. Whether that qualifies as "active learning" I can't say. I don't know of any other kind of learning, and I experience learning as a constant lifetime process.

I have found telling stories of challenges overcome useful in interviews. Told the right way such stories can give some insight into the candidate's character, curiosity, tenacity, and skill. I try to frame my experience in terms of business value rather than technical challenge, because companies hire and pay for solutions to business problems and want people who can solve those problems. Generally they don't need someone who once balanced a binary tree in a bash script.

Had lunch today with a freelancer friend who uses AI, he’s trying to “vibe code” a simple web site so I got to hear how much time he wasted trying to make that work.

  alias lg='lazygit'

Someone could "vibe bake" cakes by trial and error with the help of AI, then try to sell them and get feedback. That might work, or they might poison someone. Alternately they could learn how to bake and study baking to develop actual skills and understand what they're doing.

I have seen the same thing — fake and misleading listings on Agoda for Hanoi and HCMC, then the trick of taking you to an inferior “partner” hotel. I have also experienced aggressive requests to post good reviews.

Vietnam tourism booming right now and enforcement weak. I suggest double-checking with Google hotels and even visiting the hotel before booking, ask to see a room. If you can’t do that consider staying one or two nights at a reputable brand name hotel while you look for a cheaper place.

Currently in Da Nang and have not seen this problem on Agoda here.

I have never heard of “I need more time to prepare” as a reason for postponing, but even if a recruiter or employer believed that it seems weak. If you need to prepare that much for an interview what does that say about your skills and ability to produce right away?

Limiting choices to “pick one” seems contrived. Beginners should learn to program and think like programmers, which means learning multiple languages and tools. Programming languages have far more in common with each other than not and the sooner a beginner thinks of themselves as a problem solver rather than a Python programmer the better.

> Of course, you can come up with some contrived scenarios where the beginner would be better served with Cobol.

I don’t think looking at job opportunities and pay qualify as “contrived scenarios.” PHP has a huge footprint in web applications and every beginner steered away from PHP to the saturated Python world forgoes a lot of opportunity. And again nothing prevents learning both. COBOL as usual gets trotted out as the dinosaur, but right now in the current tech job apocalypse knowing COBOL would get a lot more job offers than knowing Python.

The main advantage one can get as a freelancer comes down to adding business value. That comes from listening to the customer, then identifying and solving their problems. It doesn’t come from telling customers what they should do or using them to practice with your own preferred languages and tools.

For example a majority of my customers came to me because other consultants refused to (or couldn’t) work with and debug an existing code base and infrastructure. They proposed an expensive and risky full rewrite, which rightly scares customers away. Once I can demonstrate some real value and understand the business I can propose replacing things, and by then I have no competitive bidders to worry about.

For the last ten years I have worked through an agency that connects me with customers. That particular agency represents people who already have a customer base and reputation.

As I understand it vibe coding and “vibe check” refer merely to “a looks good to me” feeling with no deep understanding, not knowing what you don’t know, which ignores security holes and edge cases.

If my kids “vibe code” a fort with cardboard boxes and blankets they have a different intuition about stability, security, longevity, and the purpose of a fort than I do.

Look at the API for your payment processor. I know they can identify debit and prepaid cards. Beyond that I don’t think they can reveal much about the card.

I specialize in small/medium-size businesses. My background centers around enterprise logistics, accounting, relational databases, and system administration. Almost every company needs one or more of those things. I see more compliance-related work now -- companies forced by changing laws and regulations, or international expansion, to improve infrastructure and processes. I see lots of cloud infrastructure work, that niche always seems to have a lot more demand than supply.

In previous downturns (2000 and 2008/9) I fell back on logistics, because no matter how bad the economy and job market gets businesses still need to keep their supply chain moving and get products to customers. That work involves some of the least sexy tech imaginable: Oracle or DB/2, COBOL, BASIC, stuff like that. Every company with even moderate logistics needs uses a lot of software, that industry got "computerized" back in the '60s and '70s.

I do web app development now, have done that since the late '90s, but still keep on top of cloud infrastructure, networking, security, and my soft spot for logistics.

Good luck to you waiting out the downturn.

If someone wants a logo or a brochure-ware site they can probably put that together with LLM assistance today. If they want to do e-commerce or offer an actual service to paying users maybe they can stumble through prompting an LLM to get something to work. When they get hit with a PCI compliance audit, a hacked server, a huge hosting bill, a corrupt database, they can call me because Copilot and Claude probably won't help them, even if they understood the underlying problem in the first place.

I broadly agree that for people who think Upwork represents the freelancing market, they will have even more trouble competing with LLMs than they did with $4/day programmers in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Some people will leave the business, some will complain about it online until they learn the universe doesn't care about fairness, and a few will upgrade to skills they can apply and sell. As of today the so-called AIs can't do much that a serious business will trust. That might change but I think humans still have a long runway to stay ahead of them.

When spreadsheets came out early in my career we got lots of talk about how that technology would make entire occupations obsolete -- almost as much as we get today about AI. What actually happened: people who learned how make Excel jump through hoops and add business value became almost layoff-proof, and even today knowing how to work with Excel describes a very valuable job skill.

I have survived in the software business for almost five decades, seen the no-code/low-code apocalypse touted multiple times, from way back when "managers" would supposedly use COBOL and SQL to write their own code and query databases. Never happened, not because the tools don't work and add a lot of value, but because very few people can translate vague requirements into something resembling a spec, or a series of prompts, and then also evaluate the result. AI just creates opportunities for people like me, I can mop up the messes until I retire.

At the same time I get small/medium businesses asking for help with cloud infrastructure, security, compliance. Experienced cloud infra people don't grow on trees and the big providers snatch them up. I could probably coast into retirement just tuning relational databases left behind by the "move fast, break things" cohort. Today, in this market, experienced Salesforce and Oracle consultants (freelancers and agencies) can't find enough time or people to meet demand.

The software business follows trends and fad and fashion, and developers follow along. I wouldn't call that a cycle, it looks more like the constantly-changing fashion of teenagers. Look back a few decades and see what has lasted a long time (Unix/Linux, relational databases, system administration, networking, C-family languages, security) and make some of those the foundation, rather than whatever has buzz on Hacker News this week.

Anecdotally when I talk to or read posts from young developers, sometimes recently laid off, about how they can't get a job or break into freelancing, a few things stand out:

- Few or no professional contacts.

- Limited tech skills, often just one language and framework.

- No business domain expertise.

- Thinking in terms of what they want/need rather than what their potential employers or customers might want/need.

That's what happens when you follow fads to the exclusion of everything else, and just want to get left alone to code and ignore the business that writes your paycheck, and make fun of the people in management and marketing and other departments for calling too many meetings or socializing around the proverbial water cooler.