I tend to avoid time related information on my website. I try my best to write evergreen content, showing the date almost always brings negative consequences such as people bouncing off your website before reading.
269 karma · joined December 2, 2014
What always surprises me the most is the orchestration. When someone get wiped out of the internet, it comes from everywhere almost at the same time. Under normal conditions we would expect different social networks to react differently based on how favorable they are to free speech but somehow they now all have the same rules.
And everybody keep repeating the same mantra to justify it
1. X is not an opinion it’s a crime
2. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences
All in all, I will say it, I am enjoying more freedom when I am living in China or Thailand than when I am living in France.
Plenty of people say things I disagree with, but constant censorship prevent me from being able to approach other peoples ideas from a different viewpoint.
As a libertarian I can’t live in Europe anymore, it’s impossible to think there, ideas, truth, lies, wrong all disappeared to account for « feeling »
I am now working 7 days a week (freelancing), but then I try to stick to roughly 4 hours a day.
Except for when I want to take vacation with friends or family, I realized that I did not really need 2-3 days off every week.
Waking up around 8am and working until 1pm gives me a lot more joy.
Sure you can go wild with git. But the basic workflow is, well... basic.
For the people who have a hard time with the basics, they can use the ton of GUI solutions. Git Tower comes to mind or the integrated git stuff inside VS Code.
2. If you don't want to hand your phone to a stranger, don't. If they hand their phone to you, it means they are ok with it.
3. Most of the time, when I am handling my phone to a stranger it's because I am in a foreign country, I don't know how to write something. There is a context behind it. I am not handing my phone and then moving away, so I can clearly see they are using my phone in the context.
1. From the employers point of view: If your company is not 100% remote, then you need to pay for one (or more) offices + all the associated costs.
2. From the employees point of view: If your company is 100% remote, you get complete freedom, you can choose to live cheaply. You can choose to live peacefully in the countryside. You can more easily manage your time. You get rid of commuting. Knowing you will get 100% WFH you can invest in a nice setup, start planning for it. If you company allows it, you can even travel, possibly to different timezones. None of that is easily possible with semi WFH.
I clearly have met enough black people who would define themselves by their race and did not take part in any organization that just promote racial adversity.
I have even done a fair share of charity work in Benin in 2019 and so I have seen a fair share of people who clearly did not get any geographical benefit. For some of them, life was hard.
To these days I have yet to meet someone who got anything positive off the anti white rhetoric. It’s like a self help book, it might feel good, but it does not put any food on the table.
And so, since I have the freedom to do, I decide to vote with my feet and avoid any places that promotes this kind of ideologies.
I need calm to be able to think and all of this nonsense is impeding my capacity to think.
Plus, I prefer to pay taxes in a place that does not favor gender or racial quotas.
But in my home country, it was becoming too much.
It's now in school, work, TV, movies, anti white rhetoric all the time.
To the point I would not be comfortable schooling my future children there.
So I decided to move on, and find a new place better aligned on my values. It does not need to be perfect, I can work with flaws and learn to embrace it. But I need a minimum of common ground, so far I found it in Asia (I lived long term in China and almost one year in Thailand). I can see myself settling down here and try to be a useful contributing member of society.
You can check it out on their website it's really nice. But South-East Asia is really full of condo with nice environments.
The thing I truly enjoy with Homa though, is that they have a 80m pool on the roof top. I am trying to get back in shapes. I love swimming, not so much running. And it's hard to find a pool where you can really swim.
Having all of this inside one place, is really a nice way to stay motivated and hit the gym/pool 4-5 times a week.
It's also one of the first condo I have seen where they try pretty hard to create a sense of community.
- Soccer games every Wednesday - Movies nights on the rooftop every Tuesday - Live music every Friday/Saturday - Muay Thai / Yoga classes - Once a month you have some nice entrepreneurial meetings.
But yeah, overall it's pretty nice not to care about those things. You quickly realize, caring or not caring make very little difference (if any). And you also realize you can be a lot more useful by not embracing divisive rhetorics.
But Thailand is going to introduce a nomad digital visa (Indonesia already done it). The idea is that if your income comes from abroad you don't need to pay taxes (or very little). Because you are effectively not competing with the locals.
I did not bother with all of this during Covid, I just wanted to explore the world and find a nice place where I could project myself for many years. I am now in the process of fixing my current situation, open a company and pay taxes.
And it was every where in my past company as well.
I am not trying to fight against it, I just voted with my feet. People can continue this circus if they want, I am just living elsewhere. It definitely help me thinking more clearly without all this distraction, my quality of life greatly improved.
I just want to work with good engineers. I don't consider having or lacking a vagina to be a useful metric. And I take no pleasure working in an environment where black people are being shown around as "see, we are so inclusive, we even have black people in our company".
We have pride month, had LGBT/BLM events on the streets, talks about how women are being paid 20% less than men, the white privilege rhetoric is everywhere.
It's impossible to avoid, and all of this circus is impeding my capacity to think clearly. The easiest solution I found is to vote with my feet and move. I enjoy living in developing countries, there are more concrete problems to solve, it's intellectually refreshing.
I am currently living in a nice duplex in a condo in Thailand. We have a big coworking with soundproof rooms for meetings, a 80m infinity pool on the rooftop, a good gym, surrounded by nice and cheap restaurants. Beaches almost everywhere and nice small islands to do diving.
I am paying 600$/month for the apartment. 250$ for the food. I haven't cooked anything for the past 6 months.
I am currently making roughly 50 times the local monthly salary.
Mostly working with my clients, doing some small charity works on the weekend and using all the facilities to get back in shape.
And more importantly, I am living with peace of mine. Nobody is annoying me with insane politics. I don't care about BLM, don't care about feminism, don't care about MGTOW, don't care about gender theory, don't care about white privilege, don't care about whether men can get pregnant or not.
I just try to be useful for the society around me, I feel a little bit bad about not paying taxes here, so I do my best to do some charity and helped a few local businesses with tech.
But overall, I am doing it 30% for economic reasons and 70% for political reasons. It feels good to meet with normal hardworking people.
Oh, and Thai people are really the nicest people as long as you respect them and try to make the effort of understanding their way of life.
Yes, we all live in cities (otherwise it’s not possible) but I still notice the trend. Compared to previous generations, having a card is not even considered in the first place
I live in a West European country where we abandoned
- Religion - Strong family values/structures - Nationalism/Patriotism
I think you can probably give up on 2 out of 3. And some people might not care about any of the 3.
But for most people, once your society reaches a point where these values are not really protected.
Then asking them to make sacrifices for outcomes that will comes after their death is not viable (yes I know some consequences will come during our lifetime, but I think it will be somewhat negligible for many.
- Religion (the Earth was created by God, thus we need to protect the Earth to keep it as it was)
- Family (I recognized that my ancestors worked hard for hundred of years to write books, build infrastructure, produce science, I need to at least keep the status quo for the next generation)
- Nationalism/Patriotism (I need to protect my land, and make it better than X or Y)
These three values, no matter if we agree or not (I am personally not a believer) helped humans transcend their own existence throughout history.
But now, our modern values are too weak.
And the fact that the messengers are ill chosen does not help (who want to be lectured on ecology by an influencer who uses the plane 50 times a year)? It does not matter if the message is correct or not, it's full of hypocrisy and if you want to have billions of people onboard, you can't allow yourself such hypocrisy.
If you tasked me right now to come up with enough reasons to
- Give up on meat - Stop traveling - Walk or use public transportation everywhere - Take less showers - etc
I don't think I would find enough of them to truly care and radically change the way I want to live.
And I don't think that the survival of Belugas or the fact that Yemen and Somalia are going to be unbearable is enough for me to change my life for the next 40-50 years.
So yeah, at some point we need to ask ourselves the hard questions
- Should we go back to having stronger values? - Should we go into light dictatorship to force these changes?
I think we already reached a point where the number of people thinking climate change is a hoax is negligible. You won't convinced more people with logical arguments.
We know.
You can either try to remove your picture and reapply through a different channel, or move on and apply elsewhere.
This company seems to have different values.
Ramanujan had none (and it was visible in the way he was writing proofs) so what?
Either you produce something of interest in the field or you don’t.
And Wolfram did.
If you want to hear people have vision statement, you need to listen to speeches made by leaders who know they will likely stay in power (Xi Jinping, Putin, etc). Whether you like the vision or not, their speeches are often based on history and long term vision.
You can also have regular politicians who offer something radically different, they usually resort to vision statements as well.
Bernie Sanders uses some in the US.
You also have Mikheil “Misha” Saakashvili in Georgia who introduced liberalism to Georgia not too late ago.
I am part of the crowd of people that don't want anything. I already make plenty of money, enough to buy anything I might want, yet I live in a mid sized space with the bare minimum (maybe a little bit more than the bare minimum).
I still sleep on a futon.
And having many useless stuff around creates unnecessary annoyance, because I think about those things and worry when I don't use them.
1. Many of them tend to speak loudly and it was quite annoying. I don't know if it's because of the language or culturally.
2. Nobody seemed to care about what was happening in Russia. I am a French guy in Thailand, I have nothing to do with what the French government is doing, if some Russians are in Thailand, I don't see why I would assume they have anything to do with what's happening in Russia. These guys were just engineers or designers working and living in Thailand.
But yeah, if you are among the ones that speak loudly for whatever reasons, just try to act normal in public spaces, I would assume only crazy people spending their whole life being "purist" would ressent you for your nationality.
It's a drug given to people with ADHD, so I can't recommend it to everyone. But my productivity tripled since I start using it.
I loved every seconds of it. I loved China, I came to like Chinese. The student life was incredible, every time I met people, they were trying to solve interesting problems. They had curious mind and spent their free time exploring some more.
Then I had to start research. And I quickly realized what I already knew. I love learning, I am pretty good at quickly grasping what is important (generally useful) in a specific domain. I like to draw analogies between unrelated concepts.
But I am not good/resilient to relentlessly attack a single problem from every possible angles.
So I dropped out.
I wish I could live in China now. But I am happy I am not doing research anymore.
It's not really because I like to keep track of everything, but I found out that the 250 list is actually solid, I watched some movies as far 1920s and enjoyed it. So I am going through them all, broadening my tastes.
It takes 5 minutes, I do it every night in bed, and it helps me reflect, I use the time to write down some quotes, ideas, books notes or just anything pleasant that came to mind.
But if someone marketed it as "a way to practice programming and move from high beginner to low intermediate skill on real world projects" it could work.