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.

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  • 19 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 22nd June 2025English
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    23 hours ago

    I’m using the term a bit loosely to mean “libertarian citadel except with techies”. Though I think the phrase is technically supposed to mean a nation that starts out as an online community.

    Anyway for some reason these weirdos all have this idea that if it wasn’t for all those pesky regulations and people they could usher in a glorious new sci-fi and/or cryptocurrency society. Like look at this example: this B-list CEO in the apartment rental business thinks he’ll be the ruler of a fiefdom that brings about AGI, Quantum Computing, a nuclear energy revolution, and sci-fi materials. It’s delusional, or at best it’s grift.

    The canonical example of network state is Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School. He owns(?) a building in Forest City, Malaysia (or as he calls it: an island in an undisclosed location off the coast of Singapore). But in a broad sense it’s useful to consider everything from Sidewalk Labs to California Forever to the M.S. Satoshi.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Fighting the AI scraper bots at Pivot to AI and RationalWikiEnglish
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    16 days ago

    Edit: But also - why do AI scrapers request pages that show differences between versions of wiki pages (or perform other similarly complex requests)? What’s the point of that anyway?

    This is just naive web crawling: Crawl a page, extract all the links, then crawl all the links and repeat.

    Any crawler that doesn’t know what their doing and doesn’t respect robots but wants to crawl an entire domain will end up following these sorts of links naturally. It has no sense that the requests are “complex”, just that it’s fetching a URL with a few more query parameters than it started at.

    The article even alludes to how to take advantage of this with it’s “trap the bots in a maze of fake pages” suggestion. Even crawlers that know what they’re doing will sometimes struggle with infinite URL spaces.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English
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    24 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
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    25 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
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    28 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.