Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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5

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

I made a bot that does I-Ching divination, and post long-form technical content here exclusively.

Hopefully that brightens your day!

Came here for this one. Not the most destructive, but certainly the most elegant.

In the end, staying for people is a valid decision!

I'm more or less a hermit. I'm quite close to my small family, but that's about it. My interests and hobbies are rather arcane, and I have rarely met my colleagues. Arguably I was a stranger to my home country long before I left to become a stranger in a new one. So it was maybe easier for me than it would have been otherwise.

I'm glad to hear you lucked out in the housing market! It sounds so brutal over there. In some ways it's more brutal here, in others less -- a nice home on the outskirts of a medium-sized city might cost 250k USD. In a big city more central, maybe 750k USD. However, a median salary might be around 4500-7000 USD per year. So the amounts are lower, but the gap between costs and salary is vast and cruel.

If you happen to want one, they are surprisingly affordable (I think I paid ~100$). So many were made, for so many years, that they are not exactly rare! Some antiques are fun like that.

No worries!

Incidentally, if you ever have any questions about life here, fire away!

On my end, I know very little about modern Communism-with-a-capital-C. I mostly just know how to navigate the bureaucracy. Which is generally not as bad a people say.

Haha, no worries.

Sounds like your friend's config file will be turing-complete soon. Then it will need it's own operating system. With it's own config file.

Well, there's more than one reason. If we're being honest, they're not all 100% consistent -- so prepare for a somewhat meandering story. At the time I was just facing this cloud of problems, and it looked like I could resolve some of the serious ones by moving to a growth market.

Part of it was just bad luck. My industry vanished in a puff of legislation on graduation (federal legislation, so not much opportunity elsewhere). So I pivoted, did grad school in something a bit different, and then it happened a second time. So by pure chance, my profession was largely oversupplied with experts, which kept salaries very low and opportunities limited.

I pivoted again and taught myself various branches of engineering, which I funded by teaching other people (after I learned something interesting). This was what eventually saved me, but at the time, no one would consider me for a proper job without a specialist degree in engineering.

I think at the peak of things I had 5 or 6 jobs, one full-time, and was making under CAD 28k a year before tax. I kept at it for 2 years like this, but couldn't even land an interview for a decent job, and no real prospects for advancement in my main job. So I was really frustrated that I was working and studying so hard, but no opportunities opened up. Starting a company was also just too big of a financial risk. Meanwhile, I saw the medical system starting to fall apart, and rent creeping upward relative to salaries. At that time (~10 years ago) I rented a 4.5 across the street from a metro station for 625 CAD a month. Now it would be over 3 times that.

I guess it was a very boring problem in the end: I just saw no realistic path to increasing my income, and a whole bunch of factors coming that would increase my costs. I had aggressively saved/invested so I had enough money to move somewhere new, if I did it right away without letting attrition wear away at my savings. I was honestly sort of terrified of leading a mediocre life, and it felt like the time to act.

So I started looking for a growth market that everyone moved away from and so had a shortage of engineering talent. Some of my colleagues had returned to China and were doing OK, so I looked into that. However, the immigration process was a bit unclear, I would become functionally illiterate, and it looked like the glory days of growth were nearly over. Vietnam proved a better choice on these points. At the time, there were very few foreigners here, and anyone talented would look to leave (no longer the case) -- this felt like a place I could work hard, and make a name for myself.

A lot of my friends were in a similar situation, and many moved to the USA. However, I don't find the USA a good cultural fit for me. Cultural integration was easier for me in Asia, it was a place where I could build things and have a company, and my savings would last long enough for me to get that off the ground. This proved much more difficult than expected, many terrible things happened, but maybe 18 months ago I pulled ahead of where I would have been if I stayed in Canada, and am now comfortably ahead.

Oh, sorry. I take these things for granted sometimes. I don't know how familiar communists overseas are with the systems here. I live in a nominally Communist country (Vietnam).

The Communist Party issues a 5-year plan (it does this... every 5 years!). It details what the planned economy will be doing over the next 5 years: goals, targets, and so on. So, you can get on board and set up a private enterprise to help achieve those things -- private enterprise licenses are permitted in accordance with various regulations. Sometimes you can get land or buildings allocated to help you get started, although I'm not nearly important enough for that kind of thing. I just got a business license.

Anyway, committing to what the Party was telling us to do turned out pretty OK for me!

I was sort of in the same boat, although in Canada. We had our own set of different, also serious issues that were not getting any better. I couldn't see any way to do anything about it myself, or even secure myself an OK life in the country.

So, I emigrated. Just like so many generations of my family before me, from their various home countries. I'm not sure if I'm up to the task of making the whole world better, but at least I can move somewhere where I can be productive enough to make things locally better (for myself and perhaps even a few others).

Hey, I accidentally tried that, sort of. It actually worked out OK.

I had lost nearly everything to my name, and the five-year plan had just come out. I couldn't think of anything better to do with my life, so instead of giving up, I called a lawyer and got a license to do some of the things in, it with the little assets I had left. Now I have a home, I know where my next meal comes from, and I'm happily married!

In hindsight, without that little nudge to get my act together, I would quite possibly not be alive today.

Medical research and science? Yeah. 3 years undergrad and 2 grad school, at a research university. One year between them, where I taught myself advanced statistics, experimental design, and Linux system administration. Undergrad was just a blur of studying and exams, but after that it was a bit better.

Long story short, medical research is a surprisingly complicated way to be poor. Salaries are way lower than I thought. I could have earned more money just working in retail, and the hours were worse (e.g. the clinic was always open during a clinical trial).

I also co-founded a tool sharing nonprofit and taught myself electronic engineering and some software, starting in grad school but continuing until I emigrated. After I got here, I just sort of took the first job I could get, so no initial studying for that one. I started studying software engineering more seriously starting around then.

I study around 2-3 hours per day.

Certainly, no one would accuse me of insufficient gravitas.

Ah, I was foolish enough to do web development in the developing world. It seemed like a good idea at the time -- as the economy grew, I reasoned businesses would need websites -- so I started a company to do this. In truth, it was really hard to bring client expectations in line with reality, most businesses were rent-seekers and did not want to invest even a small amount in their future, and I had stiff competition from undocumented migrant workers from the West that did not have any overhead. I barely scraped by at the time, and now platforms like Wix / Facebook / Grab / Lazada capture nearly all of that market anyhow.

Those were the early days of running my company. Later, I got into prototyping, which was a vertically-integrated margin business instead of a horizontal volume one (the former is much easier to run in Asia!). There is very little competition in my niche, but pivoting was brutally hard due to my low income at the time. I also got into writing about the things I was working on, which helped pay the bills. In many ways, my time spent here is an experiment in reflecting on some of the lessons I've learned.

Before that, I managed a branch of an Australian advertising company. That was my first job in Vietnam. I replaced seven or eight people. I received my salary less than half the time -- but what can you do when your visa depends on your employer? Those years were quite bad too.

Prior to immigrating, I worked in medical research, and before that I was a scientist. Those years were pretty easy (even if they did not seem so at the time), but also around then I became acutely aware that I had no future in my home country. Looking back, I'm grateful for that -- I had no right to see that far ahead, or with such clarity. It was pure luck that I had all the right ideas in my mind at the same time.

I agree to a large extent! There are some interesting caveats though (mainly that I'm not in the USA). Six years ago I had a Vietnamese company license and 0$. I'm only very recently anything like "middle class" so I don't have much experience with it.

The company license was key (as you say), but not due to growing it as an asset -- it was more accurately an instrument to extract remuneration based on the value I deliver, instead of just the amount of time I spend. It also gave me control of how I spend my time. That meant that early on, I could only tackle low-value work and times were tough... but eventually I could solve more expensive problems and demand far more than I could as an employee. Selling solutions as a contractor (especially to foreign companies) made a ton more money than selling my labor as an employee.

In other words, my company is not worth much money as an asset, because without me, it's non-functional. I also work with a lot of foreign VCs and am convinced that private equity inflates valuations pre-IPO by enough that there's a lot less upside to capture than there used to be. Gone are the days when a private investor could buy e.g. Microsoft shares and see a 30x upside. Also, I'm in Vietnam -- we do have a functional stock market, but the volume is much lower and stock ownership less attractive overall. Anyway, overall it would be hard to sell my company.

So there is a decent argument that my optimal path really is though labor -- but definitely not through "wages". Working for wages was always a mess where I only got paid half the time, and had to work all the time. Also it means my visa status depends on my employer, which has always lead to flagrant abuse. With my own company, I get more stable visa status.

I've also been offered equity for my work. However, I have said no 100% of the time and this has never been a mistake so far. One day maybe, but equity is a weirder prospect here than in the USA.

So I focus on selling the solutions to the most expensive problems I can solve. That's put me on track to a home + modest retirement for my wife and I. That's "enough money" for me and I will likely go back to academia and volunteer work ASAP. I have no desire for millions of dollars -- even if I can maybe see a possible path to it.

To be fair, I've seen some Linux desktop configs that were pretty fucked.

Anyway, don't kink shame. Unless your kink is kink shaming. In that case I'm not sure what you're supposed to do. Start a religion, I guess?

I thought of asking that one, but then if the answer was no, my last thought would probably be that I was really worried about what happens when the living humans figure it out.

Probably a lot of encryption would fail. That would be bad.

Well, we can prove that a system of axioms can never be both consistent and complete. So for the former, I'd wager not. Would be better to directly ask for it instead, so you get it by fiat at least.

For the latter? I'd wager I'd rather not think about it. What if we found our purpose circa 1300 BCE and have actually had it ever since? I don't think I'd want to risk knowing that :D

I feel like it would probably be something about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. That thing is really annoying.

Although I feel I might get stuck in a recursive answer if I ask the wrong thing. So maybe I would ask something about a loved one, that I already know the answer to.

Haha oh goodness no. Things I actually bought to save money (when I could afford to) were an efficient A/C unit with an inverter (better sleep = faster learning = more money), and a new motorcycle. Not having reliable transit was costing me a lot of money in wasted time so that was a big one to fix. It's more fuel-efficient too, I use 2-2.5L of petrol a week. I also moved somewhere safer, where the building hadn't literally collapsed on me before.

Poverty is complicated, there's no simple way out of it, and the people who say there is... have generally never really been poor (although some have, there are few universal truths here). Saving money is rarely a useful solution -- it's more important to bootstrap yourself to better opportunities, which is really hard without any financial security. The way to do this is super specific to the exact circumstances -- and there's probably not always a way out. If you have money, of course you can afford to take time to study a new skill and so on. If you don't, perhaps you'll pay for it with a part of yourself that you're not going to get back.

Saving money is not entirely useless, it's a really effective strategy if you already have made some money, and are about to have a sharp reduction in income. It lets you protect your gains better than other people with wealth, so you inch ahead of them every time the market corrects (you don't have to invest to be affected). The inverse strategy (look for ways to spend) you have to do earlier, to inch ahead again. Your timing has to be better than the market, and it has more information than you, because you don't have the money or connections to have better information. So again, you're going to have to pay in the currencies of the desperate -- cut out those kinder parts of your mind that betray you to mediocre financial decisions. Then you can perhaps (very slowly) convert modest sums of money into more life-changing sums of money, and eventually land ownership.

Health is a problem too. It's hard to cram-study engineering if you're busy dying of cholera. Not my fondest memory, but perhaps an instructive one. I learned that I don't fear death, only failure.

I guess escaping poverty wasn't some glorious victory I feel proud of. It was more accurately a series of sad, Faustian bargains. Where at each step, you can end up receiving nothing. Even the devils of our fictions are kinder than the market, and less hungry.