Yes it is like French poetry - not many people like it. I've been on a Spark project the last 2 years and its a horrible code base. Everyone on the team hates it, will move to PySpark next year. Scala is dead.
That's the problem right. Learning Chinese wont help you, China is a closed shop, no immigrants, no sharing work with anyone outside the country, no employing people outside China, no cooperation with any other country really; just keep buying their stuff.
China is not a isolationist, monoethnic economy with draconian restrictions on its commerce and immigration. You are plainly wrong, uneducated and defeatist in your take. I'm a non-Chinese person who has lived and worked there for a decade.
China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.
Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.
Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.
The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.
A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.
Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.
> China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms.
This just isn't true. There's a K visa for young STEM professionals, which is about a year old. It's a bit more flexible for this very narrow group, otherwise you need a Z visa and work permit. You need a job first before the provincial labor authorities will approve a work permit. There's a points system, salary requirements and age cap.
There's no practical path to permanent residence in China. The Chinese "green card" equivalent has been issued to under 15,000 people since 2004. Even under Trump, the US issues about 10x more green cards in a single year than China has in two decades.
The numbers don't lie: in a country of over a billion people, there are well under 1 million foreign workers. There's a massive problem with youth underemployment and unemployment and net migration has been negative for 75+ years.
Yeah forget foreigners. They have plenty of trouble integrating their own rural Han population (hukou system). Eventually that might change, but not today.
I dont care about how many green cards the states has issued, its a backwards looking metric.
Comparing visa datasheets and application requirements will not give you the complete picture on immigration. I cant iterate case by case over every western nation here so I will limit my myself to the US since this is HN.
For most H1B immigrants residing in the US on dual intent visas, there is no realistic pathway to PR either, due to country caps and observation that one country supplies a majority of immigrants to the US.
Most H1Bs here spend their full careers in an anxious immigration limbo between USCIS, unreliable employers, power tripping border agents with 3/6 year renewals and periods of restriction on travel. Many who arrived to the US pre-2001 are still yet to recieve their promised green card. That is not practical in any meaning of the word. Immigration and PR into other western nation is an order of magnitude easier.
Many without the fortitude pack up early and return home, the USCIS does not account for them AFAIK.
Most immigrants get the same or better experience under the Z visa with minimal pretense and bullshit. The Chinese govt is kind enough to dictate reasonable terms. You renew every 3/5 years at the local visa office until you reach 60 and head back home. You arent treated like a criminal at airport immigration. The points system used for Z visa not a hurdle for anyone remotely compenent. It does not ask you to learn fluent Chinese, getting paid sufficently, having enough prior experience making grants enough points, its table stakes for most immigrants. If you want to reside in China beyond 60 you can figure out an avenue with immigration consultants, but it rightfully requires justification.
Peering into the future, net legal immigration into the US has passed its inflection point. As DJT admin looks into curtailing OPT, H1B and birthright citizenship I would say US is looking worse today than China in matters of immigration. Compared to just 2 years ago, 2024, nobody coming to US is expecting to stay permanently. That door has long shut. In contrast foreign student enrolement in Chinese universities is trending higher every year. Eventually this may lead to better terms to reside in the country.
You've gone from arguing that "China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms" to arguing that the US is now no better than China and worse than other Western countries.
There is no doubt that the Trump administration has hurt America's appeal, and that Indians in particular face a pretty tough road ahead.
But you're overstating so many things. China's system is working as designed. The US system has a huge backlog. Those are not the same thing.
And you still don't want to acknowledge a simple fact: a US green card provides a real pathway to citizenship and full rights for your children. China has no similar path for immigrants.
The numbers simply don't lie: despite Trump, the US issues more green cards in a year than China has issued its closest equivalent in 20+. China has had net negative migration for 50+ years. The US population will be modestly higher in 2100 than it is today, while China is going to lose as much as half of its population in the next 75 years.
Are you nuts or just misinformed? China is investing everywhere. Africa, south America, Russia, EU. And they do have immigrants, as a Western person it’s actually quite easy to move there to study or work. Lots of Europeans I know have studied and worked in China and Taiwan.
Everyone loves money but socially and culturally China is a lot more closed compared to US, much more so than what people are used to atleast.
US was arguably the most open country on the planet in terms of acceptance of ideas and cultural diversity especially in 20th century.
But I also don't think people need to be very worried but still we haven't had monocultures on the top or close to the top of power hierarchy for several decades so it's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
For instance China is heavily censorious of LGBTQ and very likely against the Idea they haven't banned it outright yet thankfully. But then again lots of countries are in a similar boat.
But the biggest difference is China can easily back slide without possiblity of return on any metric because it's not a democracy.
China has a pretty vibrant LGBTQ scene, even Shenzhen was known as comrade city in the 90s. China is at the same time very closed and very open. It’s hard to describe.
I had lots of friends when I lived in Beijing who were gay, the gay bars weren’t underground and my gay coworkers weren’t in the closest, for L/girls it was even more out in the open (especially at the art schools). If you haven’t lived in China I guess you wouldn’t have a clue.
I went to China recently it felt different, the recent govt stance seem a lot more against the idea and the ones before which was my point, China in the 90s was a very different country from the China of today, then again I haven't been there then.
Again it's hard to say where it's open or where it's closed, they seem to be back sliding in very weird ways. I am not part of the LGBTQ community so I can't say for certain how bad it is, so I won't comment further but UN & human rights watch has been citing increasing censoring of LGBT representation and open-ness in China in recent times.
The biggest concern with China is lack of democratic freedom means as long as it's not bad enough to revolt the country can back slide pretty easily on many metrics with complete silence, no protests etc.
China is definitely not a democratic country, but nor is it a country where LGBtQ is repressed even if they don’t provide rights like gay marriage. It’s mostly chineee families you have to worry about, and even then the concern is more about having children, where even the straight young adults are uninterested these days.
I didn't mean to imply that if I did that was unintended, I meant to say it's something that's going in the wrong way directionally, starting with recent heavy censorship, and folks in China don't have to good way to speak out or change things.
Even countries with back sliding freedoms with good democratic structures have a fighting chance, China is just so weirdly removed from it that it's concerning when and if something does go wrong.
"Was" being the operative word there. It's been a long time since new (foreign) ideas were accepted, and the resistance to cultural change has been ever present.
American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.
This is bs. It is admitedly difficult to become a Chinese citizen, but a huge number of foreigners work in China, especially in tech, higher education, etc. Also, Hong Kong is another good place to find a job if you want to increase personal exposure to China without having to learn Mandarin.
CPR is code for "registersamkøring". Register matching. The small wellfare nation needing to be able to see the populace as a sum of abilities and leanings and willingness to be swayed and pushed to support present and future economic needs of the whole.
Absolutely. Self driving cars/rideshares have the same problem. If a driverless car hits who who pays the damages? Needs the government to set some rules or it just wont happen.
Its just a start though right? Most people here are male and aren't that scared to be out and about. The women in my life have a much different outlook on things, I really think CCTVs and AI can really help make things safer.
You can see with videos already helping to catch people (and potentially scaring people off from committing crime in the first place).
Yes its a problem in the US where its criminal system is inconsistent at best, but the UK at least has much fairer legal system.
It makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.
Monopoly is a word that has a real meaning, and not a blanket term for companies you personally don't like and not even a blanket term for big companies.
Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly. You can go right now to a store built from bricks and purchase goods.
Sortof? It probably doesn’t have a monopoly in any segment that matters, but it does have many illegal monopolies (as defined by US FCR and the Sherman Act).
Evidence: Amazon has been found guilty of being an illegal monopoly multiple times already.
I don't think it does make sense. I think Amazon is way overestimating brand loyalty, and underestimating how much of their success comes from being a one-stop shop for everything.
I'm using Claude for everything from finances to dinner planning to project planning. If Amazon doesn't let Claude search and buy, I'm not abandoning Claude, I'm abandoning Amazon.
As long as my actions are as simple as possible, I don't care whether Claude is searching 5000 online retailers or only 4999, minus Amazon. I'm certainly not going to say "ok, this project requires buying 13 things for about $500, but I don't see amazon in the list, so let me go manually search for each one on Amazon and see if they might have a better price or something."
This is Walmart / Apple Pay all over again. Yes, near-monopolies, lots of power. But they got there by making things easy for consumers. Making things difficult to force consumer behavior never ends well.
I never let agents make purchases unsupervised. But that wasn't the point; the point is that the convenience of getting a complete list including multiple-vendors when pricing makes sense is way better than going to amazon and searching one by one, therefore Amazon will lose this power play.
The same would be true for someone shopping for one $10 item.
I always check Google before Amazon, because it's impossible to find anything on Amazon. Amazon is a bit like the bargain bin of a DYI shop. If it's immediately visible it's okay, of not, don't bother searching.
Half the time I can't even find the category page. And if I do find it, the filters will just be useless anyway.
In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction.
Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big.
Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that.
Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.
One of the optimistic aspects of what's happening is that it doesn't seem like the leading model capabilities are outpacing the more open ones by that much- that just as a general principal there are pretty ok models relatively close behind the best ones.
This could mean the long term viability of my open claw bot to shop for me- that openai / google etc won't control AI, and I'll still just be able to use a model via API to do what's actually in my own self-interest.
The ads (in general) will be redirected to where you will see it, regardless of whether or not Amazon allows bots. You don't think you're getting off that easily, do you?
Once AI is good enough the AI will control what I see, plus, I will just spend a lot less time looking at screens altogether.
It's also trivial for Amazon competitors to pop up in this potential AI future. Maybe you only sell door knobs, but all you need to do is set up a mostly text-based API designed for AI consumption and you're in business. If you offer the door knob for 10 cents less, why wouldn't the AI agents buy from you?
Right now making an Amazon competitor will fail mainly because humans are lazy and can't be bother to check other sites. AI might change that.
I still prefer the Amazon shopping experience to anything else, unless I already know the product is available locally. The primary quality problem I've run into is the quality of the products themselves.
reply