I don’t know… I would definitely blame companies that raise prices on life saving products like insulin just because they can. You should at least be willing to own the blame if you are ready to take advantage of regulatory and legal restrictions just so you can get the best price for products that are important to society. Like, come on… at least take the blame for being a crappy and greedy company.
I wouldn’t say anti-innovation. The EU just places more value on protecting workers/consumers than businesses. I can understand that to a lot of Americans a government that tries to protect its people from businesses may not make sense. But most of us in this side of the world cheer on when big companies like Apple have to bend to the EU. Yes, even if it makes starting my own business more difficult.
As a European entrepreneur I care a lot more about consumers/workers being treated fairly than I do about innovation. I know the EU does not always get this right. But man, the US treats is workers and consumers like crap.
I wish I more fully understood the cultural differences that makes this business-first stance so prevalent in the United States.
> The EU just places more value on protecting workers/consumers than businesses
This is flagrantly bullshit, unless you're claiming that there's some sort of intellectual and moral difference in European human beings because... reasons...
The EU is as corporatist and protectionist of big business as it's possible to be, it just hides it (poorly) behind a number of veils while throwing moral-sounding legalisms at certain companies and entrepreneurial culture in general. I say this as someone who fully detests some of the rapacious grubbiness of many American tech companies and the silicon valley culture and believes both should be watched carefully. Nonetheless, this placement of the EU on an absurd pédestal because it's "European" needs to burn and die.
>As a European entrepreneur I care a lot more about consumers/workers being treated fairly
These sorts of claims are tediously common here on HN from too many people obviously from Europe. For one thing, as a European the only thing you can establish under that rubric is that you're from that part of the Eurasian continent. Nothing more, certainly not morally or emotionally. Being a European menas being part of dozens of cultures that all have their own details, and of which many are no less greedy, self-serving, dishonest and in further extremes racist as hell, than they are in many other parts of the world.
Does your smugly self-indulgent statement somehow imply that American entrepreneurs only care about squeezing every last dollar while crapping as much as possible on their employees and customers? If so, I invite your to open your eyes wider.
>This is flagrantly bullshit, unless you're claiming that there's some sort of intellectual and moral difference in European human beings because... reasons...
There is most certainly a cultural difference. I’ve lived in the USA for 10+ years. My “self-indulgent and smugly” European opinion is that the average American is a lot more individualistic than the average European. Which could partly explain why they just see things differently. Why is it such a scandalous thought that our morals and priorities are just different?
> The EU is as corporatist and protectionist of big business as it's possible to be…
I disagree. I’m more optimistic. There are a lot of good people and organizations within the EU working very hard to level the playing field. A lot of good work has been done. I can certainly say that I prefer being an employee and consumer in the EU, which is the reason I moved back here. Compared to the States, yes I think the EU deserves the pedestal. No doubt.
>Does your snuggly self-indulgent…
No, I’ve met many hard working honest American Entrepreneurs. But big businesses, yeah, for sure they want to squeeze the American labour force and consumers for every last penny. Just like big EU businesses do. The difference is that our governments are doing something about it.
A Russian billionaire arrested in France after repeatedly ignoring French authorities. I am sure there is a whole lot more to that story than any of us could even possibly imagine. Specially given the state of things today. Maybe France is completely in the wrong here, maybe not. We just don't have enough information to jump to any conclusions.
Look, I'm not saying the EU is perfect. We have our own lot of crazy and corrupt politicians to deal with. I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of why the EU sucks. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise.
I'm saying that in my personal opinion based on my life experience, the EU is doing a lot more than the US when it comes to passing laws that benefit consumers and workers as oppose to businesses. And that's not something I just read in a news headline. It is something I have personally experienced as a person that lived in both places.
i also cheer when apple has to bend over but when i'm honest it's more for primitive reasons and a general hate for their product line which i am somewhat forced to use. but apart from that EU regulation is mostly a negative in the sense of prohibiting and restricting business activities - which some might consider innovation. but EU isn't particularly strong with regard to enabling innovation and business activity.
Personally, I'm not interested in a FAANG or hot startup job. So not sure if my "classic" strategy works for those positions. I also got 15+ years experience(in my late 30s). I use the exact same approach today as I did 15 years ago. When I'm in job hunting mode I search through job postings every morning. If I find an opening that stands out I write the company a short email stating my interest and why I think I'd be a good fit (I normally got a template ready for this that I customize for each job), and then I submit the job application. I got a 100% success rate of landing a job within 2 months with this approach.
I'm quite selective about the jobs I apply to. I read job descriptions carefully to try and get a sense of the place. I know the kinds of environments I prefer to work in at this point.
Same age, same strategy, same results. The "searching and applying" time cost every morning is usually 1-2 hours the first few days, but ends up taking 20-30 minutes after you've tweaked the signal-to-noise ratio effectively with adjustments to your bookmarked "newest" job postings with filters applied.
You'll also have at the ready your "copy paste" document for those fields the application portals tend to screw up at scraping from your resume after upload. You will undoubtedly run across postings mentioning products or technology that you have not personally used. I take those opportunities to watch a quick YT video in my second monitor on the topic to gain a nugget of understanding while I continue my search.
I often walk away each morning having learned a little something new, and it doesn't feel like such a grind.
This YT video thing sounds very familiar. I do the same thing whenever I run into a job application in an industry/niche market I never heard of. It does makes the whole process less of a grind for me.
I don't really have a portfolio. There is nothing impressive in my Github. I don't have my own website/blog. I do have a good track record in my previous companies and plenty of old colleagues willing to give a good reference if needed.
and perhaps industry/domain. Though these days it feels like all parts of tech are extending the interview process. It was already too long to begin with but it feels like every person in the company needs to slowly schedule an hour to talk every week for 3 months straight before considering you as a candidate.
Htmx has been great. I reach for it in a lot on my projects. Although I have to admit that for my larger Django projects it gets a bit difficult to work with. Creating a url then a template then a view every time I need my page to change gets a bit repetitive and difficult to work with.
Alpine.js has never really clicked for me. Outside of anything simple I find myself struggling with the framework.
For my side project, I feel stack simplicity, error handling, "dont break back button" and eliminating many papercuts pulls me to HTMX, while Vue+TS offers type safety and model of "html is a function of state". I suspect more complex projects may make the stringly typed HTMX and Alpine less attractive.
I no longer default to creating a new or alternative view for returning html specifically for htmx. Sticking with existing views and using hx-select to select and swap content is totally fine most of the time.
Playing around with a Raspberry Pi Pico. After more than a decade of building digital applications, being able to write a program and seeing the output change something in the physical world was pretty cool. I remember feeling that same spark I had years ago the first time I made an LED blink.
I used chatgpt4 recently for two projects. One was a success, the other a complete failure.
In the first project I asked it to help me build a one page ui with html and css, it did great! I know a lot about html and css, so I was able to ask for what I wanted and help it debug.
For the second project I wanted what I thought was a simple threejs animation of an object following a line in a scene. I know very little about threejs and graphics in general. I spent hours wrestling with chatgpt to get this working, but I just got what looked like meaningless non-working code to me. So I took time to learn about threejs, did a few chapters of a course, and came back to the problem. And all of the sudden I had new vocabulary I could use to ask chatgpt what I wanted. And I got pretty close to what I wanted, but not quite. I suspect if I keep learning about threejs and how graphics work I’ll get there.
I don’t think this is the death of our craft, but definitely a big turning point for how we build and use software.
The New York comic example is pretty impressive. I tried creating a short comic story with both Dalle-2 and SD. After a lot of hacking I finally gave up an decided the technology was nowhere near ready. I may try again with this. I wonder how consistent it can be with its output. Can it generate a bunch of consistent and coherent comic book pages?
