> I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government.
I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
The recent citations are definitely interesting, but none of this is really new. I met with some VCs in the early 10s, and some of them talked about "free enterprise zones" in various areas in the region. Frankly, I'm a little surprised this isn't discussed more. Maybe because the need for "liberty" is less in the realm of bits & bytes for these developments, it is less publicized.
Gay Texan here leaving the country next year. Maybe culturally in the cities you have a point, but the gerrymandered state government still very much affects you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_12
Thanks to SB12, it would be illegal for a teacher to answer when a student in my kids’ class asks why they have 2 dads. They would also be unable to join a support club like the Gay Straight Alliance which was (barely) tolerated when I grew up here in the 00s. This isn’t even mentioning performative BS like teachers having to hang the 10 commandments in schools, or the rabid anti-trans laws affecting adult treatment and identity documents. Discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity is also banned in higher education, as well.
This isn’t even covering the abortion ban or other issues. A friend’s sister almost died of an ectopic pregnancy because she couldn’t find a doctor to help terminate. She wanted the child, but nature had other plans.
I love Texas and agree with a lot of the positive points you raised. I wish I didn’t have to abandon my family and friends having lived here for over a decade as an adult and having grown up here, but I can’t raise my kids here.
EU citizens can freely live and work in Switzerland and vice-versa. It would be difficult to reliably cap immigration from other EU countries and stay in the Schengen Area.
When I was at CERN, it was before Schengen became a thing, so as Portuguese I had the same VISA issues as someone else coming out of the other side of the planet.
Worse, being at CERN wasn't a plus for the hiring process, I would need to apply to the position as if still living in Portugal, as my VISA was tied to CERN directly with a three month deadline to leave Switzerland after the contract duration.
It also did not help, that my fellow country folks do not have a positive image across the country, for various kind of reasons, which is another issue I experienced while living there, like being refused entry in clubs when showing a Portuguese ID card.
Eventually I moved back to another EU country, still I do visit Switzerland, from time to time.
Pity that right wing movements are taking off all over the place.
You're throwing a lot of words that you don't understand nor have much relevance to the topic.
Before bilateral agreements and the freedom of movement, not Schengen which was ratified much later and is completely irrelevant here, you needed a work permit, not a visa (lowercase), which anyway at CERN is the equivalent of a diplomatic permit given to all international and tax-exempt NGOs in Geneva/Switzerland. And of course you lose your CDL permit quickly after your contract expires.
Getting a B permit before FoM would specifically not have been as hard for you as for someone from another continent.
Getting a B permit in 2003 - 2004 was indeed hard enough experience that I ended up not staying there and refuse any job offer from Swiss companies to this day, regardless of the Swiss friendships I managed to make there.
My stay at CERN was temporary, and every single company where I had an interview clearly communicated to me that the paperwork to get a B permit instead of a Swiss national, or a foreigner with existing permit.
The need to switch permit status from the CERN diplomatic one into a B one, killed all conversations.
But lets be pedantic in the meaning of words instead, which I used for folks that never lived in Switzerland, that is what is relevant for the whole discussion about foreigners how experience Switzerland.
Bilateral agreements were signed in 1999 and freedom of movement enacted in 2002 so you must not have looked very hard. Also claiming that immigration from a country like Portugal was hard before FoM is extremely funny given the number of Portuguese immigrants in Romandie.
Words have a meaning and bringing diplomatic permits to the topic when they follow their own rules and are specifically outside any immigration quota is not particularly helpful.
1. When ChatGPT came to the masses, it trivially solved my standard phone interview problem for new SWE hires. It's not particularly complicated, but it screened out a lot of candidates pre-AI and was a good filter.
2. At one point, there was a bug in some client software we ship that was erroneously displaying a protocol-level disconnect message to clients when the server shut the connection unexpectedly.
In very few turns, ChatGPT gave me working code to intercept the error at the client level via a pseudo-server that intercepted the requests and implemented the proper teardown procedure. It essentially implemented a micro-server for the protocol we were working in as a bug workaround.
3. I'm working on a major rearchitecture (6+ month project of very senior engineers) of an internal system for scalability and maintainability with tight latency bounds where correctness with the old system is necessary.
I came back from an international vacation quite jet lagged and was having trouble doing actual coding work for a bit since my focus was shot. Taking additional days off wouldn't have helped recover from the sleep issue more quickly due to childcare responsibilities.
I tried instead building a pipeline where I'd run an integration test suite, throw a list of failing tests at Claude, and make a PR if it made more tests pass. I automated as much of the AI "loop" as possible in my state at the time.
Using this technique, a coworker and I fixed over 200 failing integration tests for parity with the old code in 1 week. We subdivided failing tests between engineers and re-sub-divided with each success.
I re-reviewed the code before we launched when I was more well-rested, but this was an extremely effective technique and makes me think that AI-enhanced test driven development (TDD) is the future.
Good luck to him. I get worried about people using AI for serious work in a field they aren't specialized in, but if it helps him achieve a good outcome, that would be interesting.
I have often felt that the legal system is divided between haves and have-nots: if you can afford to participate, you get "justice" tilted toward you. Easier participation for those without the resources for a lawyer would be good.
The second article I linked, from the MIT Technology Review, is quite interesting. It seems like judges are experiencing some version of what open source maintainers and seniors at companies are experiencing: a much larger review burden due to the cost of generating code or legal arguments dropping drastically.
I wonder what form this structural shift in output versus specialist review capacity will take in other professions. The frontier labs seem to be trying to automate more and more of the "specialist review" process. I am not sure that is feasible in the legal world, but we'll see....
You can ban the commercialization and mass scaling of the technology. Just because you can't prevent something at a small scale doesn't mean you can't prevent corporations and government agencies from doing it without exposing themselves to unacceptable legal risk.
I feel like trying to "trick" the RNG into providing stability is the wrong approach here given all the footguns that can occur with having a low entropy seed, but I am not sure what an alternative to IP stability would be short of doing session management, which may introduce too much state into the problem to be acceptable for a VPN service.
Maybe a clientside hint that gets rotated in some circumstances with options to toggle it off would be appropriate. That should be fine as long as you don't care about someone being able to control their exit IP reliably.
I don't read German well and don't care to run this through a translator, but this is fascinating. I wonder how this list was compiled, by whom, and when it is used (is the gold audited)? You could randomly sample bars from the list to check the status of the gold periodically. I'm curious if other countries maintain similar lists.
I don't think they regularly audit the gold bars. But according to an article I read, the German Bundesbank used these lists to check off each of the bars transferred between 2013 and 2017 (when they transferred ~ 300 tons each from Paris and New York¹).
Back then, they brought the gold bars to Germany, weighed them at multiple checkpoints, and melted them here. AFAIK, no discrepancies between list and actual weight/fineness were found.
I think this list is not only used for internal audits but also to assure the public and banks that Germany indeed knows in detail where its gold is stored.
I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
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