Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

That’s…exactly why you would get involved?

TikTok might lose out on revenue. Why not sell your US arm for lots of money?

This is literally one of the most widely talked-about options regarding the ban of TikTok…

Everything is for sale when you are a $1T+ company. That’s why Amazon has the likes of Blink, Ring, Alexa, Anthropic, etc.

I don’t know why Amazon hasn’t bought TikTok yet.

Lots of data, access to the Chinese market, a social media app under their wing, and an aligned work culture. Alongside the gains for ads, moving their shit to AWS, and retail gains, it seems like a better idea than throwing money into the AI fire.

I mean, I feel absolutely horrible after hearing some of the stories from the aftermath of that show, but fucking hell they knew how to get that look…

Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it’s definitely something that most big tech companies will do.

I’m fine with that, but let’s put some rules against this.

• Any AI models should be able to determine the source of their data to a defined level of accuracy.
• There should be a well-defined way to block data from being used by AI. If one of these ways (e.g. robots.txt) has been breached, the model has to be rebuilt without the data, and reparations made to the content owners.

I’m almost positive that David Beckham isn’t a citizen of the US. That’s almost definitely by choice, given that he’d meet the criteria for investment several times over.

While I appreciate the offer, I think my wife would probably not be too happy with me taking another lover. 😂

That’s absolute nonsense. Most countries have similar paths to entry. They also have paths that support specific jobs that are required by the country - something the US does not. Finally, many of them have easy and clear paths to naturalisation - again something the US doesn’t have.

Just because unskilled nationals make it into your country, it doesn’t mean that immigration in your country is easier than other countries. Every right-winger moans about the same thing in every country you’ve listed…

Haha, what do you base that on?!

My experience is the exact opposite. I’m a software engineer at a big tech company, and in this climate even they are unable to sponsor a visa to the US from the UK. Literally anywhere else? Sure, no problem at all, whether it be Europe, Singapore, China, Japan, Egypt, Australia, anywhere we have an office - except America.

Americans, welcome anywhere! We’ve got two in my team alone this year, and in 5 years they can get permanent residency. I know managers that want me on their team because I built tooling for them, but they’re not allowed to hire me because it would require a visa…

To be fair, outside of London you’ll find that the starting salary for many degree-level jobs is around that, including jobs like software developer. I’m in Bristol, and the pay disparity is hilariously bad - a senior designer will earn less than a manager at Burger King…

I think the “underpaid teacher” thing isn’t necessarily rooted in reality,. especially outside of the US. My wife is a teacher in the UK, and she’s a head of her subject. For many years her pay was similar to mine as a software engineer, but everyone often treated her as if she was poor and that I was rich.

When I was at school, Sunny D and Vodka was a recommended mix to make you ill enough to throw up and miss school the next day. I can’t believe people willingly drink this shit…

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

Yep!

I’m in the UK, and First basically hold the monopoly in my city. There are so few buses that they often skip stops at rush hour because they’re already full, or because they’ve decided in the moment that your stop doesn’t matter.

Nothing wakes you up during your commute like listening to a woman get fired over the phone because she’s going to be late for work, despite still being 60 mins early for what should be a 20 min journey.

My dream is an “internet archive” for all video games, modded to run offline. If the game becomes unavailable for purchase, the archive opens that game and makes it available for all.

The next step is for this kind of release to become law, and supported by manufacturers.

I think most fandoms are pretty bad. Here are a few I’ve interacted with in the past and their “outbursts”.

• WWE fans being tribalistic as fuck when it comes to any other type of pro wrestling existing. Honestly, go look at social media for AEW and it’s mostly idiots slating everything they ever put out - while simultaneously being the best advert for the product.

• Wrestling fans in general. Some woman managed to get leaked pictures of a pro wrestler with his baby in a private setting, and she got angry when people told her on Twitter to stop sharing them, because “they were her pictures”. Alongside this, you’d be shocked at how many people camp out at hotels or airports to bother pro wrestlers that just want to go about their day, often to sign shit that’s 100% going on eBay.

• I’ve told this story before, but I was briefly a mod on /r/soccer, and some fans were unhinged. One mod was stalked in real life by a 16 year old fan of a rival team, to the point where the police got involved and Reddit admins had to reach out.

• One Punch Man fans being toxic regarding the animators for seasons two and three, while also drawing risque pictures of a main character that looks like a child in provocative poses.

• Taylor Swift fans. Need I say more?

• Hajime No Ippo fans believing that watching a boxing anime makes you an expert in combat sports. This came up hilariously when some guy on Reddit challenged me to a fight in a boxing ring to prove him right on the intricacies of the Japanese national boxing rankings…something that I genuinely wish would have happened.

Even small fandoms can be pretty toxic places, like most places in public. I don’t know what it is about bringing like-minded people together, but it usually ends up in small pockets of them attacking others that share something in common with them…