Thanks to compound interest, you can live off anything more than $4M for infinity years

I don’t have first-hand experience in Chinese factories, but I have a friend who works in a US factory. The quality of the items I get from Temu seem about on par with the factory rejects I’ve gotten from him.

I usually see higher quality stuff when buying from Alibaba directly, so I assumed AliExpress and Temu are their version of an outlet store. 🤷

I should mention that many of the factories selling on Temu have profiles you can view that show their factory address. You can search this on maps to see if it’s legit, and if it’s coming from a region with known rights abuses. E.g. If it’s near Beijing or Shanghai it’s probably free of outright slavery.

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I’ve thought about this a lot, perhaps too much.

1. Slavery and wage slavery is happening across the globe, but companies with thin margins don’t resort to it any more than companies with huge margins (e.g. Nike). If anything, monopolistic corporations have much more power to use and enforce slave labor than the small and medium-sized factories selling at razor thin margins on Temu.

2. IIUC, the Chinese government needs US dollars so they can pay for things like chips, so they offer very favorable exchange rates to companies that export. Companies can offer cheap prices as a result, and still afford to pay their workers a living wage.

3. Things sold in the US are way overpriced. Temu is actually pretty normally priced if you consider the average cost of living in the countries it ships to.

4. Most online and physical stores mark up items 10-50% from factory price. So buying from the factory directly will net you a 10-50% discount.

5. If you buy it from somewhere else, it’s still coming from the same factory in China.

6. Finally, many of the items on Temu are factory rejects that would have gone to the landfill otherwise.

I have many complicated feelings about Temu, but economically their prices make sense.

Here’s an article that explains more about what this is: https://www.androidauthority.com/device-lock-controller-1175637/

From low tech to high tech:

• You could put a box in your closet that says “In case I die”
• You could make a website with a password that your loved ones can log into to mark you as dead
• You could use a physical device like a magtag, and when you push the button on it it resets a countdown timer that, when it goes off does the thing
• You could scrape your email server and reset the timer whenever it sees a sent message
• You could set up your phone to reset the timer every time you unlock it
• You could set up facial recognition cameras that would reset the timer when they see you
• You could use differential equations to predict the exact moment of your death and schedule messages to be sent after that

You don’t have to donate to use donationware. Donationware donations are optional.

Donationware is a well-defined term that’s been around for decades. I don’t know why everyone ITT is hallucinating that it means something different.

Nope, that’s not what donationware means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donationware

Isn’t Vim donationware? (Hint: it is)

“You can find this scene on YouTube but I won’t link it for fear of accidentally causing someone to view an advertisement.”

I love this energy

FWIW, at UCLA, computer engineering was a different degree than just computer science, and had more rigorous courses including electrical engineering and ethics courses. Many people dropped out and switched to the CS degree instead.

Uhhh where is this person getting those stats? Turnover at Google is nowhere near that high.

Source: I used to work there

1. Reading “Clean Code”
2. Doing a coderetreat
3. Volunteering to be a code reviewer for my product area.

Edit: Shortened, excuse my braindump

Kotlin! I love that dataclasses and extension methods are a first class citizen.

Corporations aren’t people and don’t behave like people. Giving credit to corporations doesn’t work in the long term, because people who work for them are constantly changing. The ones who did a good job may leave or get replaced, and the ones who take over may not care about maintaining their legacy.

Not because I think it’s the best of all time, but because I’m grateful it made my work easier: Kotlin.

I used to write tons of boilerplate in Java for my job, and now I don’t.

Wow, such vitriol in some of these comments. Y’all are kind of proving his point…

Android:

• ads in every app
• “tensor cores ate my battery”
• tracks your every movement

Apple:

• no

Good point. That used to be the case, but I think that’s been a solved problem for a while. IIRC, most places cache functions for up to a day, so any site with reasonable traffic won’t have to wait for boot.

Regarding scaling, one cool thing about serverless libraries is that some are open source and provide instructions on how to self-host.