The resources you link to are helpful; however, this is not really practical advice for most people most of the time. To the extent that our smartphones are a very helpful device to have in our day-to-day lives at home, they're even more useful in a foreign country where they become our only available computing device; indispensable for keeping in touch back home, navigation on unfamiliar transit systems, translation of unfamiliar languages, and so on.
Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
I'm traveling overseas tomorrow and my partner and I will both be taking our phones with us as we do every day in our home country.
I find modern smartphones more and more unusable, both OS becoming more hostile towards the user, and applications widely moving to dropping logins in regular intervals. That has been happening for years already, so I slowly moved more and more stuff back to a computer.
By now I'm at a point where I no longer even backup my phone - there are a bunch of apps, but I can just install them and log in again on a different device as needed.
The final step to make it truly throwaway was me doing a custom matrix bridge for SMS earlier this year - I had voice routing setup for a while already. So now my old SIM cards are in a 4G modem at home, and the phone I carry around with me just has a data SIM. Huge quality of life improvement, as I can terminate as many numbers as I want there, and have access to both voice and SMS data from my computer as well.
> Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
The trick is to have alternate accounts, and not have your "real" ones configured as you transit sensitive locations like borders. Once you're past, download your apps and log in to your real accounts.
With LLMs that's even easier. I suppose you could set one up to populate your fake Facebook account with convincing, up-to-date "local sports team" fan activity.
Don't call attention to yourself, make noncompliance look like compliance.
> the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
Wouldn't a sensible way to do this be to create an encrypted backup of your device on a VPS, then restore it to the "burner phone" once you're on the other side of the border, and wipe the device again before you come back?
The idea being that whenever you're at the border crossing, the device contains nothing, and the passphrase for the backup is in your head.
I think there's just too many confounding variables to say. ZIRP policy ended in 2022, with interest rates going up 5% between 2022 and mid-2023[1]. This both means that money was historically cheap when these early-career developers were being hired in the peak, and it was relatively (in terms of the past couple of decades; eg, the modern tech industry) expensive after.
We've seen layoffs as a result of this, and nobody's hiring a cohort of juniors when they're trying to afford the employees they already have.
On top of that, companies are firing the money cannon at AI initiatives and experiments (some of which will be successful and others which won't), leaving less money for humans.
Anyway, it's just a single occurrence of a hiring drop in a single economic cycle. Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI. We may never be able to tease apart cause and effect in this period, and we certainly won't be able to do so until we have at least a handful more years of data to see how junior hiring does or does not rebound.
”Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI.”
Right. That’s just something I think we should keep our pulse on and keep looking at this data every six months (seriously, this needs to be tracked by devs because this data may start forming into that proverbial “writing on the wall”).
No one should be planning on being a software engineer in about 3-5 years, all need to plan for alternative income sources or early retirement. I think, at least.
>No one should be planning on being a software engineer in about 3-5 years, all need to plan for alternative income sources or early retirement. I think, at least.
Interesting. I recall Geoffrey Hinton saying something similar about Radiologists.
“People should stop training radiologists now” "it is just completely obvious that within 5 years deep learning will do better than radiologists”
My situation at work is absolutely untenable. Constant redirects, logins that used to have passwords but now have passkeys, but you don't find out until you enter the password. Chrome hijacks the passkey dialog and wants me to use my yubikey, but I have to fumble around and bypass that to then get it to prompt me for a passkey in Apple Passwords. (as long as 1Password isn't trying to intercept my passkey requests today!)
Then on top of that there's a whole 2nd factor layer which _also_ typically involves a touchid press but for a totally different reason (as the 2nd factor, not to unlock the password safe storing my passkey.
It's just an ugly inconsistent dance, dozens of times a day.
I know these gripes are mostly about implementation, and partially about user-facing software, and partially about user choices, but it doesn't make it any less ugly for the user.
My parents (born in the late 30s-late 40s) just moved from a 5 bedroom house larger than my own into a 2 bedroom retirement apartment.
The house sold more quickly than expected, so they were in a panic to move out.
They're not hoarders -- in fact, the house was always impeccably tidy, and not at all cluttered.
They had to get rid of SO much stuff. My dad was an only child, so he had kept so much stuff from his father before him. My mom was one of many, but the eldest, and the family archivist, so she has the photos and old movies and stuff.
Ultimately the biggest problem is their children (my sister and I) DON'T NEED THEIR STUFF. We're adults in our 40s and 50s. We have houses of our own, filled with furniture of our own. Smaller houses than our parents', smaller garages, already more cluttered than our parents'.
Yes, we took on some keepsakes we love, we took on some furniture to upgrade our own. But mostly, there just isn't room. I don't have room for 2 generations' worth of accumulated tools, no matter how handy they may be. I don't have a house full of empty walls waiting for artwork and pictures. We're already storing heirloom china from my wife's side of the family that we haven't touched in the 10 years we've had it, we don't need to store another set of heirloom dishes we'll never use at dinner parties we'll never hold.
As generations get spaced further and further apart, the heirs no longer need stuff to start lives of their own. As property gets more expensive, our homes get smaller, so we wouldn't even be able to use all the stuff if our homes were empty!
As a data point, I counted all of the chairs at my parents' house. 44. 44 chairs. We thought it was hilarious, so we told my in-laws, and they counted chairs at their own home -- also 44!
Oh, man. It's getting to that time where I can see downsizing my parents' stuff as being on the horizon.
There's so much of it that is unremarkable. It fits into their house+garage, but it consumes a great abundance of space. There are, IIRC, 3 generations of China, each with its own China cabinet -- and I wouldn't know which dead person they once belonged to anyway. Tools. Furniture. Stacks of rough-sawn hardwood lumber, and logs.
I have enough furniture. I don't need rolling toolboxes full of mixed hoarded socketry, unsorted wrenches, and rusty tap-and-die sets in inch-standard sizes. The bench-mounted belt sander my dad made from scrap 40 years ago is cool and all, but it's been over 25 years since he's bothered to have it set up, it was always finicky to get running true, I've never suffered for a lack of using it.
If I ever move stuff like the tools and the lumber, I want it to be the very last time it ever happens -- and then I never want to see it again.
The China is particularly daunting: For as long as that stuff has been sitting around on display at their house, it has been both too nice to ever use and also too good to get rid of. (If the time ever comes that I want my own set of nice China for whatever reason I might, then: It's easy to get.)
I will work hard to dissuade anyone else from taking anything that is physically big, just on the basis that nobody needs that kind of curse in their life.
But I fear that others will find that a lot of this stuff will be too emotionally-precious to depart with. It will then be "temporarily" relegated to a storage facility until enough years go by that someone finally gets sick of paying the bill and it all gets sold to the highest bidder, thrown away, or donated anyway.
That expensive trip through purgatory seems like such a waste of money and effort.
My parents found one familiar, in particular, that wanted a huge (and extremely nice) china cabinet. After moving that, they put claim on more and more things. Great! Some neighbors also helped take things off their hands -- it would be great if they had a use for it, but I half think they were just taking things to be nice and help my parents; either to sell or dispose of later, which is also kind.
I'm so thankful that, in addition to making the smart move to move to a retirement home before it's too late, they also did the hard work of downsizing rather than leaving my sister and I with this chore a dozen years in the future. None of us have ever had a storage unit, although my parents just took on a "temporary"; I think 8x10ft unit. I know 2 things in there are for me, I just couldn't haul them in the one car trip I had time for. (and, unrelated, I'm living in a small apartment during construction on my house, so I don't have the space for a few more months).
I _do_ suspect that temporary storage unit will become relatively permanent, which is honestly probably the least-bad solution here. On the other hand, my parents are frugal and have lots of time on their hands, and probably opposed to storage units on principle, so we'll see :)
my 10 year old 75" TV cost me upwards of $70, probably $100, to move across town -- at the cost of the boxes and packing material and labor the movers provided.
When I move again in a few months I think I'll just throw it in the back of my SUV and hope it doesn't break.
I used to run a traveling pro sports league and we transported our own scoreboards.
A bunch of foam pool noodles, a blanket and plastic wrapping tape can very quickly and cheaply get you a padded container that is easy to add handles to.
We shipped boards all over the country in the back of semi trucks with this setup and it worked great.
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
You don't think maybe it's just a little bit tongue-in-cheek? Maybe a reference to how the US Military sometimes goes into foreign countries saying we'll be greeted as liberators?
EMT here. I've never had a patient with a tungsten ring but I'm pretty sure our ring cutters would not work. So I looked it up. Apparently you have to break them off with vise grips [0]. One more tool for my kit I guess.
Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
I'm traveling overseas tomorrow and my partner and I will both be taking our phones with us as we do every day in our home country.
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