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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • I’m an American often in China for my job. If you want to be in a tier 1 city rent relative to income is insane even compared to Canada (and by extension the US). If you’re a foreigner in a skilled profession who can secure a job there, this would be pretty easily avoided as your salary will typically be far above average and housing likely even paid for by the company sponsoring you.

    The downside is that the expectation of workers and office culture is also drastically different than in the US. Your savings also won’t go as far should you ever choose to leave. Mandarin is pretty difficult to learn, particularly for reading characters which is more or less essential to get around New areas efficiently.

    People are surprisingly quite nice to foreigners. I’ve never had a problem with the complete lack of privacy personally, since everything in public is tracked/recorded crime is incredibly low. But I have the ability to make that choice while others don’t, so I can get why it’s an issue for some. It’s a weird contrast from the US where the police are most certainly not your friend and the government is too disorganized to help even when they have all the relevant information. The urbanism is everything you’d imagine it to be, even in tier 2/3 cities it’s incredibly easy to get around without a car. If I weren’t tied to my family in the US I’d likely consider spending a few years working there while still young. But even then it would be hard to justify such a huge pay cut from US engineering salaries.





  • Containers are often simple enough you don’t even need a guide. I don’t trust myself to configure anything on the host system correctly, and using Docker containers completely solves concerns of conflicting dependencies during updates. I personally avoid hosting anything that isn’t available with Docker anymore. It’s just too much work for a worse result.







  • Starting yesterday unfortunately Chrome and not Firefox. I just need a working web browser and haven’t had the time to figure out what is wrong with my Firefox installation. I have no clue why but after updating to firefox 135 it eats up all my RAM (20GB+) and uses a significant amount of CPU while idle with only the process monitor tab open. Attempting to browse is unreasonably slow. Refreshing Firefox did nothing, despite now having a Firefox installation which isn’t logged into anything and has no extensions. So I figured that if I’m going to deal with a browser not logged into anything it might as well be Chrome for a bit until I can figure out what the problem is since that’s what all of the internet is designed to work with lately.








  • Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

    But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.