sailor_sega_saturn

The extension I ended up using for Firefox was Straight to the Web. Auditing the source code I saw that it looked for certain Google URL patterns being navigated to and re-wrote them.

I just tested with DuckDuckGo's "!g" feature and it seemed to work, but I don't use DDG so I don't know if there's anything I'm missing.

Yeah I'll probably have a big tax bill if I ever renounce citizenship. I haven't thought about it too much yet since it's still my only citizenship, and I have a lot of friends and family in the USA. Like being a visitor might be fine in normal times, but I wouldn't want to rely on it in an emergency today given how visitors are being treated lately.

'Till now I was always able to just do financial planning myself, but I really should hire a professional.

An internal transfer at my job actually. At least for now they need me so helped set that up, though I'm pretty worried on if that will last long enough for permanent residency or not.

I'd be a little nervous on a job seeker's visa before knowing the language. It is really hard to find a job as a programmer in Europe without living there or being a citizen; because of language barriers, the labor market test, and the difficulty in getting a company to sponsor your visa. I didn't send out that many job applications but so far my response rate is zero.

Probably if I couldn't do a transfer I'd have ended up on an investment visa or study visa somewhere; though maybe I could have found a job in Japan since I can read intermediate Japanese.

I expect learning German to the B1 level will open up a lot of doors, so that's my main goal for the next few years.

Nah it's not too bad the IRS guide is only 40 pages! ^somebody^ ^save^ ^me^

• All US citizens get to file US taxes every year regardless of if they have any US sourced income
• Foreign income is also taxed (but see next two points)
• The first 126k of foreign income earned while living abroad is excluded from taxation (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion)
• Income that went to paying foreign taxes is also not taxed (Foreign Tax Credit)
• Banks hate opening accounts for US citizens since we're subject to FATCA filing requirements and thus generate extra paperwork
• Also certain foreign mutual funds are taxed heavily (PFICs), requiring care in planning investments.
• There are a bunch of tax treaties with different countries, which may influence the exact details.
• If you do have deferred compensation that was granted in a state but that was vested or exercised while a non-resident of that state you may also have to file state taxes (e.g. FTB Publication 1004 for California)

I haven't run through this in practice yet and I will probably give up and hire a professional.

OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I'm heckin' moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.

Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I'm linking to this because it's exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en

I uh... I don't think it's going to change anyone's minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:

EVERYONE LISTEN UP!!!! 🚨 - starting from today, we are gonna start ignoring duolingo. We will not like the video it posts, or view it. - BASICALLY WE WILL IGNORE DUO!!💔 💔 ON EVERYBODY SOUL WE IGNORING DUO!! 💔 (copy this and share this to every duo related video)

I had been using a CSS rule to hide the AI overviews on Google.

Because of this news I just installed a Firefox extension to force Google search results to use the "web" tab (which presumably skips generating them entirely).

[4:00] ... whose products [I] actively think are at best valueless and at worst harmful

Wow what a scathing critique of worldcoin! Calling it possibly harmless. Clearly even when making the apology he didn't really get why we all hate it.

Here's a video of a Tesla vehicle taking the saying "move fast and break things" to heart.

Ah yes the typical workflow for LLM generated changes:

1. LLM produces nonsense at the behest of employee A.
2. Employee B leaves a bunch of edits and suggestions to hammer it into something that's sloppy but almost kind of makes sense. A soul-sucking error prone process that takes twice as long as just writing the dang code.
3. Code submitted!
4. Employee A gets promoted.

Also the fact that this isn't integrated with tests shows how rushed the implementation was. Not even LLM optimists should want code changes that don't compile or that break tests.

Also oh god is this company is probably patenting their genes so what happens when people have babies do they have to pay a licensing fee?

I thought I was reading writing from a real reporter visiting real weirdos for a bit longer than I'd like to admit; so the tone is def. on point. It started out like something right out of sneerclub.

The blending of eugenics with silicon valley style corporate "ethics" and excess gives an interesting setting; and sprinkling in so many quotes / product names / etc. was nice for worldbuilding and setting the scene.

I was left with lots of unanswered questions (I assume deliberately); this leaves a lot to the imagination including some threads that would be too openly dark for this sort of gilded setting. Or with the setting being so transitional it's possible that even this company hasn't thought through of what will happen 10, 20 years in the future as they move fast and break things to chase after the next quarters earnings.

Sorry I suck at giving criticism so this is just all stuff I liked. The following is my best shot at actual criticism:

The ending did confuse me a bit and felt a little out of place: I had to go back and re-read it a second time to get the mood I feel it was trying to invoke. Citrus being mentioned 5 times made me wonder if I was missing a deeper meaning. But on re-reading citrus definitely makes sense as a theme: having both a lovely natural scent from oranges and lemons and a sterile artifical sent from cleaning products or air fresheners.

Similarly I thought I might be missing something with the woman being surprised by headlights at dusk; though looking back natural dusk and sudden artificial headlights does pair well with the transitional setting of the story.

Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.

Yeah that jumped out to me. Like human teaching has scaled fine to billions of people. It certainly has a better track record than Duolingo which provides meh study material and leads to ahem mixed learning outcomes despite being around for over a decade.

Of course there's the subtext of "but also we'll be able to put all those obsolete teachers out of business and make tons of money!"

Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.

Being in tech I definitely see misuse of A/B testing sometimes. Sometimes a team will ignore common sense entirely but come up with metrics that measure something irrelevant. The metrics are, intentionally or not, gamed to tell them what they want to hear. They then run the (useless) numbers and use that to justify why their change was good, even in the face of intense user backlash.

One particular example that just came to mind: someone made a bad change, and lots of people complained. Eventually the complaints started to peter out. Then they claimed "see! people just had to get used to it!" (versus the rather more obvious possibility that nobody bothered to complain more than once).