I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.

  • 5 Posts
  • 537 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 29th, 2023
  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English
    5·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English
    11·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•eating our own dogshitEnglish
    26·
    9 days ago

    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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English
    8·
    9 days ago

    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).

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English
    12·
    10 days ago

    can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P

    I’d certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn’t work for a big tech company that’s gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don’t want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.

    I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I’d be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don’t quit for complicated reasons. I’m not that far from the breaking point, but I’m going to try to hang in for a few more years.

    But yeah, I’m pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.