> Since this was going to be the first Linux Rust GPU kernel driver, I had a lot of work ahead! Not only did I have to write the driver itself, but I also had to write the Rust abstractions for the Linux DRM graphics subsystem. While Rust can directly call into C functions, doing that doesn’t have any of Rust’s safety guarantees. So in order to use C code safely from Rust, first you have to write wrappers that give you a safe Rust-like API. I ended up writing almost 1500 lines of code just for the abstractions, and coming up with a good and safe design took a lot of thinking and rewriting!
I bought a Framework 13“ with AMD. I chose Arch, with Wayland and Sway. So far, everything works great! I can even upgrade my screen to the new 2.8k version if I wanted to.
OS X was the reason why I moved from Windows to Mac many, many years ago. macOS is the reason I moved to Linux.
My work offers me a laptop, and I chose a MacBook I have to say. I cannot yet justify spending time tinkering during work hours on unrelated problems.
And boy do I wish anyone would (could?) compete on a hardware level with Apple. Their new MacBooks are just the best on the market.
But after using Linux daily for my private life, I wish they would fix macOS. I love how easy and straight forward everything is with Linux.
That hasn't changed from before, just regular ones everyone uses.
FT, WSJ, NYT, one Indian paper from back home. I don't read all of course, just pick the ones I want to read from RSS reader and any interesting things I come across on HN and some subreddits, also via RSS.
Your employer is not allowed to fire you if are in jail for less than 2 years. You also can't evict someone from their home because of jail. And the government might be paying your landlord for your time in jail as well (depending on the time etc.). It's complicated, but basically, Up to 6 months, all fine on all ends.
Germans don't have car payments usually. They pay for the car in cash, if they don't have enough, they buy a smaller car :)
That's new cars. Which is mostly what employers buy for their employees. It's 35% alltogether.
Just wanted to highlight the different mindset. I am a German living in Canada with my family. The mindset is very different. Based on feeling, 70% of Canadians I know have car debt, whereas I know one person in my German friend circle who took out a loan. It's just not very common to take on debt for cars.
I have noticed that in the US people have much more tolerance for debt. Even relatively poor people in the US are much more likely to buy a new car (or even multiple of them!) than in most of the Europe.
For example, the proportion of financed new cars to all new cars sold is 84% in US vs 47% in Germany.
But that does not say anything how expensive are the cars, how expensive compared to income, how long they are being used or what is the proportion of new cars sold to used cars sold.
In Europe people tend to use the cars for longer after they buy them new and then the cars tend to be used for longer after they are sold used.
Also, in Europe people tend to buy smaller cars. And, historically, we preferred cars that use less fuel which means a lot of older cars are still very viable compared to older US cars.
In the US at least it has often (although not at present) been true that the interest rate on a new car loan with good credit is less than one could return from relatively safe investments. Thus the financially smart thing to do was often to finance the car, even if you could buy it outright.
Too much debt is a bad thing, but so is being excessively debt averse.
I would also say, historically, a dollar now is worth a lot more than a dollar 50 years from now, and your quality of life is probably better, too.
I see lots of people from my parents generation who saved their whole life… and now they have money but nothing to do as their health doesn’t
permit the sort of travel (or outdoor activity, or whatever) they wanted while a 20 or 30-something.
> Thus the financially smart thing to do was often to finance the car, even if you could buy it outright
I think the financially smart thing is to avoid debt as much as possible.
Also, if you absolutely need to take on debt and decided to buy a car, the financially smart thing to do would be to buy as cheap a car as possible. But that's not what really is happening, isn't it?
The reality is that taking debt changes how you think and make decisions and has far more reaching consequences than just the financial cost of the debt.
First of all, buying a car so that you can drive your ass around is very different from sticking those borrowed money into an index.
Second, there exists no index fund that can reliably return 5%. Borrowing money to put it in a financial instrument is called leverage and is a quick way to get poor, not rich (and I know a bit about it because I work with financial risk for a pretty large, well known bank).
Third, for some reason (and, do explain this if you can), people are not storming banks to borrow at 3% to then go to a brokerage house to buy a supposedly reliable index. Please, show me ONE person who got rich this way... I guess not. You see, this is not how people get rich... people get rich mostly by earning a bunch of money and then not losing it. You know, not losing it is kinda important part of getting rich.
In fact, there is lots of people interested in how people actually get rich. And funny thing, nobody gets rich by repeatedly borrowing money and buying index funds. BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK.
Fourth, the act of taking debt changes how people think. I also know something about it because for large part of my life I had a lot of debt. Wonderful things happened to me after I paid it all. And while most of it might be in your head, the results are very real.
The avoidance of as much debt as possible is an irrational, emotional attachment to avoiding debt. Excessive amounts of debt is also financially unsound to collect, but the financially prudent thing is some debt, after which you end up with money, or equivalent, than if you not had taken on that debt.
My impression of Germany is people are generally very anti-debt. Credit cards were barely used when I visited back in 2019 (although that changed by the time I went back in 2022)
The primary reason credit cards were rarely used is because Germany already had an electronic payment system (Maestro, formerly eurocheque), so there was no need and credit cards often came with a fee. Online shopping and a huge push by Visa/Mastercard to replace maestro changed this to some extend.
"In Germany, while customers purchase 50 percent of stock cars through financing, they buy 35 percent via lease-based products and additional services."
That's corporate, mostly. But this is changing a bit, there are more private lease constructs but they are quite expensive compared to just owning the car.
And many other industry publications. Private lease is a very small fraction, but it is growing. Same picture in most of Western Europe, in Eastern Europe it is very variable from one country to another.
1% of the purchase value is taxed, regardless of usage (company car could be used only for private purposes). That way the same cost for the employer leads to a bigger car (than if bought with taxed income) for the employee and less money for the government.
And a happy car industry, of course, being able to sell bigger cars.
Well that just sounds like taking a relaxing 6-month vacation from work while the law-abiding taxpayers pay your rent. Meanwhile, your employer and landlord are forced by the government to accept the employment and housing of someone with a criminal history?
I'm usually all for protecting the little guy over the corporate entity, but that sounds like n awful deal for everyone involved except the criminal.
You can try your hand at Blockchain projects! They usually hire globally. And with hire, I mean freelance contracts! No VISA or anything related needed.
You just have to make sure to comply with your local tax authorities how you have to write the bill.
Based in Germany, but worked as a contractor and employee for US companies and companies based in the EU.
It's all a social game. In the last 10 years I worked in various different companies (due to freelancing a lot more), and it all boils down to: Does the person opposite of you like you or can see you fit well within the team or company. It might seem like you need to be "good enough" for a job. But that's not the case. If you somehow managed to have worked 10 months for Google, you get hired elsewhere because of your social status now, and people make themselves believe you are good, and see everything you do through the lens of "this person must know what they are doing". I got rejected from jobs which claimed I don't have enough expirience, just to be hired by a company which paid more and looked for the exact experience. I did not vibe at all with the people from the interview, every mistake I made in the challenge was seen as weak, whereas with the other company I had a good connection, so they asked about why I chose x instead of y, and didn't really consider my lack of experience in some areas as a barrier for me to join.
Skill, behind the scenes, just means you have seen more than the person they also consider for the job. Noone is re-inventing the wheel in a job which earns up to 300k a year, or is not a researcher of some sort. Which means, the more you have seen, the more you know, the more "proficient" you look. Coding challenges are not a challenge, but just: Have you seen this before? If not, you will not pass. If yes, you do it in the right amount of time.
This is fundamentally why hiring is so broken. People play charades and tell themselves they can remove bias by putting a test out there and just hire by skill. But none of the tests actually test how fast can you learn and how well can you communicate within the company. Instead of just saying: We like your past, now we have to like you and then you are hired (2 steps), they say: Let's test these things "objectively" for 5 rounds and still hire the one they like the most.
Many people, when they leave a job, are really leaving the boss/manager. When you hire someone, you have to keep them from getting so annoyed at you that they leave, keep them from annoying their co-workers so much that they leave, and keep them from annoying customers so much that they leave. (That's in addition to getting them to do actual useful work.)
So, yes, the social aspects matter. But it's not just a game. It's a reality that people are social, and therefore work is social. So when hiring, you have to pay at least some attention to the social aspects.
That can be a cover for discrimination, but it doesn't have to be. The person being hired has to fit the job, and part of that fit is social.
I am the author of “Rust Web Development” (Manning) [1] and I am using Rust now at my third job full time for “web development” (which is: for backend services).
What I like about Rust, and where it makes the biggest difference to my previous jobs, is the type system and the compiler.
I am using it currently to build distributed systems, using gRPC, adding GraphQL services etc. So there is enough there to take you started without having to rewrite everything yourself.
The community is great to get answers, even many crates have active GitHub discussions or Discord servers.
Sure, there are differences in axum, actix and others. But to be honest, will this impact your productivity all that much?
For some cases, the tooling could be more mature, but the language itself makes you more productive and you are having more fun with it. I also talk about it on the Software Engineering Radio podcast episode. [2]
So I can’t speak for frontend apps, or if you come from Go etc. But I have fun using it for my side projects, and in my day to day life for 3-4 years now, Rust had a substantial impact on the productivity of teams I am working at.
Rough edges are there, yes. Async is maybe not as easy as in Go, and you have to think about memory management more. But these tradeoffs are worth it for me.
Other languages I've used kind of give you this false sense of security and progress, but then suddenly you're troubleshooting some issue for hours and hours. With Rust, you might be troubleshooting the borrow checker for hours and hours (until you get a good grasp on the language), but once you're "Done", it really feels like it's complete and will run without many issues. It shifts some of the mental work to the left, but you're more often left with a feeling of accomplishment and "finished"-ness (at least in my experience).
