There’s precedent for Georgian dissidents fleeing to Ukraine. Saakashvili was living in Ukraine for a while before he returned and is AFAIK still in prison in Georgia.
I fled to Georgia when the invasion started and lived there 10 months. I’m grateful to the Georgian people for their hospitality towards me and my Ukrainian colleagues who took shelter there in a very dark time. But having said that we all subsequently returned to Ukraine.
Georgia isn’t a bad country. It’s very under rated in my opinion. The Georgian people are very friendly, their (private) healthcare is high quality, and as long as you don’t run afoul of the ruling party it’s pretty safe as well. But Ukraine even in a time of war is more advanced and has better economic infrastructure. If I were a Georgian dissident I could easily see myself fleeing to Ukraine.
If you really believe that you’d be better off somewhere else, and you’re a US citizen in decent financial shape, you are absolutely not trapped in the USA.
I’ve in Europe for 7 years now, not to escape any particular political ideology back home but suffice it to say that I was motivated. If you’re motivated and willing to endure some discomfort there are multiple options for European immigration available to you.
Making any statement about “Europe” is painting with a broad brush, that said I am not particularly bullish on Europe now, for various reasons. But I can’t think of any European country that has the same problems as the US; they all have their own problems, as well as just different ways of doing things.
I’ve never lived in an agrarian commune but I can say with certainty that it would be my absolute last choice.
The move that I’m fighting in my company now is hiring bargain basement Indian outsourced heads who are very obviously vibe coding slop. It’s a raw deal for us since we’re paying extra for a meat wrapper around an LLM coding agent, but I’m sure it’s a boon for the outsourcing company who can easily put one vibe-coding head on three or four engagements in parallel. It’s hard to imagine LLM coding technologies not being enthusiastically adopted by all of the outsourcers given the economic incentives to do so.
Whether or not they end up losing business long term, it seems like a nice grift for as long as they can pull it off.
I’ve experienced this as well. If management is not competent they can’t tell (or don’t want to hear) when a “star” performer is actually a very expensive wrapper around a $20/mo cursor subscription.
Unlike the author of the article I do get a ton of value from coding agents, but as with all tools they are less than useless when wielded incompetently. This becomes more damaging in an org that already has perverse incentives which reward performative slop over diligent and thoughtful engineering.
Is that really something you are doing in your job?
Most of my teams have been very allergic to assigning personal blame and management very focused on making sure everyone can do everything and we are always replaceable. So maybe I could phrase it like "X could help me with this" but saying X is responsible for the bug would be a no no.
Not really. I was talking more in the context of the parent comment. If your management is dysfunctional, allowing AI slop without the accountability, then you go with this extreme measure.
I don't mind fixing bugs, but I do mind reckless practices that introduce them.
Not the parent, but I take it by going to any pharmacy in Ukraine and asking for it. Prescription not required. In my case it’s part of a treatment protocol for insulin resistance but the pharmacist doesn’t ask and I don’t tell them.
This bullshit Russian propaganda talking point needs to die. “Russian-speaking Ukrainians” are Ukrainians.
I was at a birthday party in Kyiv about a month ago, the only non-Ukrainian guest. Most of the day most the guests were speaking Russian, even when cursing the Russian invaders and toasting to their deaths. These were “elites” economically speaking.
The idea that there are Russian speaking Ukrainians being oppressed like Jews in Nazi Germany is idiotic and not at all based in reality.
Source: I speak Russian but not Ukrainian, my wife is a Ukrainian whose native language is Russian. Every time we wake up in the night to Russian bombardment we curse the Russian invaders—in Russian!
You regurgitated Russian propaganda about Russian-speaking people in Ukraine which is clearly not based on your own experience and I provided a counterpoint based on actually living in Ukraine. If you think I have misrepresented the actual experience of actual Russian-speaking Ukrainians in actual Ukraine then by all means educate me.
Ukraine has a long history of resisting Russian subjugation, long before supposed CIA plots and conversations with Victoria Nuland. I wish there were some sinister plot to vanquish Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine; maybe then the Western powers would finally jock up and put an end to Russian imperialism once and for all. Sadly I’m afraid this narrative of Ukraine as pawn to destroy Russia is only a Russian propagandist’s fever dream.
I had the opposite problem. They closed my account with very short notice back when they decided to purge all customers with any connection to Ukraine. This was an account for a US company owned by me a US citizen receiving payments from the US and paying contractors in Hungary, but once upon a time I had paid contractors in Ukraine. All addresses and legal agreements were in the US.
So if anyone else is having trouble closing your Mercury account I suggest you contact support and ask to change your principal location to somewhere in Ukraine. Your account will be closed in no time.
In almost every restaurant and cafe that I frequent in Ukraine, each table has a unique QR code that links to a site with both the menu and an option to pay the bill. The pay option shows the current itemized bill with options to pay with monoPay (a payment service operated by MonoBank which also operate this QR code system) or Apple Pay or iirc Google Pay. Tip can also be paid here (although it’s not pushed on you with dark patterns like in the US and 10% is reasonable). It felt odd at first to just walk out after a meal without having given money to a person but it quickly become my preferred payment method.
There is no app to install. WiFi is always available so you don’t even technically need to have a mobile data plan.
If you don’t want to use this then you call the waiter over and someone brings the mobile credit card terminal instead.
The “how does the waiter know to come and take payment” problem is unique to how restaurants in some countries handle paying the bill.
I too am impressed by Cloudflare Workers’ potential.
However Workers supports WASM so you don’t necessarily have to switch to JavaScript to use it.
I wrote some Rust code that I run in Cloudflare Functions, which is a layer on top of Cloudflare Workers which also supports WASM. I wrote up the gory details if you’re interested:
School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.
Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.
I fled to Georgia when the invasion started and lived there 10 months. I’m grateful to the Georgian people for their hospitality towards me and my Ukrainian colleagues who took shelter there in a very dark time. But having said that we all subsequently returned to Ukraine.
Georgia isn’t a bad country. It’s very under rated in my opinion. The Georgian people are very friendly, their (private) healthcare is high quality, and as long as you don’t run afoul of the ruling party it’s pretty safe as well. But Ukraine even in a time of war is more advanced and has better economic infrastructure. If I were a Georgian dissident I could easily see myself fleeing to Ukraine.