I care that runtime developers know and understand their codebase deeply. 1M LOC written by 1 dev in a short time does not inspire confidence in such an important dependency.
There's no way this code is understood fully by the original author, let alone anyone else. I wouldn't accept this from an intern, let alone in code that's fundamental to my business.
> I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally
You're (literally) missing links then. If A is a high-value target that we look at closely (because they're a high-value target), what if B frequently contacts A? If C, D, and E always recieve messages from B immediately following A messaging B?
What about times? Is B messaging F at a consistant time, and never outside of that? Is A only messaging G, at a set time, with G's phone immediately being put into (ineffective) airplane mode immediately before and after?
Facebook built their business on the social graph, but the CIA's been at this for decades
Thanks for explaining. I guess we are talking about espionage or something like that. I've been so focused on the rise of domestic surveillance lately that I forgot about the noncitizen aspects. Which is ridiculous but at the same time, it does seem like a trillion dollar focus lately.
My examples are all based on the CIA and NSA playbook though, as it was the NSA director that said the quiet part out loud, explicitly, in front of Congress. The NSA is effectively America's red team, an offensive arm, meaning they (should be) focused on threats (percieved or otherwise) outside the country
The FBI has been much quieter about this though - there has yet to be a Snowden-for-the-FBI, though they would be one of the agencies I would fully expect to be doing similar work domestically.
As this becomes more well-known, I would expect state and county police to start looking into data and metadata as well. In some cases, they already are [0] - even if some aspects of that case are less relevant today (Google Maps no longer uploads location history, though cell tower trilateration is getting more accurate, not less).
It's far more prevalent than most people realize, though I invite you to consider which you'd rather have when building a second-by-second profile of a person's life: the message contents, or the metadata?
Isn't this already happening? It's why the war department uses ChatGPT and Claude to target drone strikes. It's why Anthropic had to make a public scene to pretend that wasn't happening.
In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, thoughtcrime, also known as crimethink in the official language of Newspeak, is the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling Ingsoc party. It describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of The Party controls the speech, actions, and thoughts of the citizens of Oceania.
Maybe just search for it and pick a source you trust. Take the search term "kill people based on metadata" and no noise comes up, just tons of articles about General Hayden's interview and related
When these mega-companies block new competitors it really ought to be seen as collusion. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft certainly have the resources to test and approve the occasional new browser.
They don’t even have the resources to test the most common browsers on every scenario of every page of every application, let alone fix every issue such testing would find.
NHR (the tax scheme that the parent is discussing) ended. If you didn't already move to Portugal under it, it's no longer available to you, so your question should really be in the past tense.
NHR 2.0 offers much reduced benefits and in a much narrower scope.
I'm moving from California to Portugal this week. I get to retire much earlier with low-cost healthcare and a cost of living lower relative to CA, and the Portuguese people I've met have all been wonderful. The food is great too!
I'd rather be on the side that supports Ukraine, clean energy, and stable trade agreements. I don't feel safe in the US anymore.
I know a guy that worked for good UK salary (fintech) that moved to Portugal(Lisbon) almost a decade ago. It seems to be a lovely place, he also happily tell me how much he manage to save and how early he will be able to retire. He got many friends there too, but mostly expats.
If I'm to believe my Portuguese friends however, the extreme influx of digital nomad types have really changed Lisbon. There's almost no authentic Portuguese thing there anymore, just thing LARPING as it. The rent is too high for any local young Portuguese to pay for, while the landlords are super happy for these influx of wealthy expats, so the young either move out of the city or move all together.
In a very utopia like set up, there's something depressing about that reality.
When I asked about to my expat friend living there, he acknowledged it, shrugged, and said "don't hate the playa, hate the game".
I'm not moving to Lisbon, but my experience in that city aligns with your friends'.
Other cities offer much better value for money and hold a lot more of the Portuguese culture intact. There are beautiful cities and towns all throughout the country.
I heard something similar from residents of Lisbon when I visited, but it was always framed in terms of tourism, Airbnb, etc, not digital nomads or expats. And to the extent it is expats, my guess is probably more British than American.
Sure, seeing well-to-do foreigners live an easy life when one struggles in one's own country can feel bitter but the issues in Portugal are structural and predate the 1926 dictatorship. Have you noticed the same handful of families have glided gracefully through the different political regimes? This is not a culture that fosters entrepeneurship or thinking outside the box, and being physically on the tail of Europe does not help. Corruption is endemic and considered part of everyday life, as is "it matters who you know to get ahead." People have become subjugated by this environment to the point they might not even consider it can change.
Couldn't agree more. If you have any pointers (to web sites) that were helpful to you as you were making your decision or preparations, please do post them.
Also, did you consider any other countries that you later struck from your list?
I used an immigration service to help me through the process. Alongside that I spent several months learning the language then weeks traveling through PT before making the decision.
You can do the immigration process yourself, but it's a long process with a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross. It was helpful to have experts guiding me through the process. Learning the language also helped a ton. The Portuguese in cities all speak English extremely well, but they really embrace you when they see you putting in some effort to speak Portuguese. I learned with Pimsleur for native pronunciation and Anki frequency vocabulary decks. I had some background with Spanish, so it was easier for me to learn Portuguese than starting from zero.
I also considered Uruguay and Malta but preferred the safety of Portugal and its bigger size.
My uncle moved from Germany to Portugal for the same reason. He loves it and the main pain point is healthcare - low-cost, but in his 70s he travels back to Germany for health issues due to quality. It's unpopular opinion in Portugal and everyone will tell you how nice the hospitals are, zero wait times and no hidden expenses. May be my uncle was unlucky, but minor heart issue wasn't properly diagnosed for about a year there, and required a single visit in Germany to get it under control.
It runs a modified Debian and can run Android apps in containers. To my knowledge this is the closest we come to "open-source phone that actually works as a phone" today.
D&D had a massive player revolt a while back in response to WOTC (at the requirement of Hasbro) trying to take ownership over everything players create in the D&D universe, breaking their long-standing promise to all of those creators and players.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
There's no way this code is understood fully by the original author, let alone anyone else. I wouldn't accept this from an intern, let alone in code that's fundamental to my business.
reply