teo

@davidtoniolo this is mostly the reason why I moved my tax residency from Romania too - I cannot and will not pay abusive taxes to incompetent governments that are literally only interested in looting me "for the sake of the common good" (their consulting companies)

I moved away from Australia, officially migrating to Switzerland, and it happened to land just before the CGT changes passed. Very happy with my decision. I'd only been residing in Australia a few months of the year for some time now. My business is international and does nothing in Australia - its customers are European and Asian. None of our staff are Australian anymore (aside from myself). The move was mostly about life. I ski, I hike, I ride downhill - Switzerland wins on all of that over the other low-tax options. It puts me around people I'm more aligned with: pro-capital, optimistic, building things. And it has me far closer to where the work actually is - half my client visits are in Germany. Tax was a factor too, I won't pretend it wasn't. But it was the last reason on the list, not the first. I love Australia. I was prepared to pay high taxes there to do my part. But its general and increasingly recent disdain for capital, for economic freedom, and the cultural shift against "the rich" had become too great for me to tolerate. I can pay high taxes. But I can't pay high taxes to people who hate me for the success I've happened to find. I worked very hard, took a lot of risk, and dealt with the shame of making what were seen as ill-advised life decisions in the eyes of my family and many of my friends for years. And on the other end, I found myself with a little luck that carried me through to a place I couldn't previously have imagined. I don't take full credit for my place in life. I was born in the right place to the right people - not rich, middle class, an accountant father and a stay-at-home mother, good parents who raised me right in a stable household - and even at the right time. But I took the opportunities luck gave me and ran the best race I could from there. I want everyone to reach financial independence. I want the world to grow wealthier. I can contribute to that vision. I will not, however, do it for people who despise the journey it takes to get there. Because that's what the resentment really is. It isn't principle - it's pessimism and envy. And more often than not it's fomented by people who were ambitious themselves, who set out to build something and fell short of their own expectations, and turned that disappointment outward - onto the people who made it, and onto the system itself.

seoul is one of the best cities I have been in

@47fucb4r8c69323 there is no such thing as time as observed by us either. When you notice the passing of the time that nanosecond is already gone. you live in a sort of experiential bubble in time space!

If you put a male sparrow in an audio booth and play a recording of another male sparrow's mating call, you can see activity in the amygdala suggesting that it feels a threat. And if you give it testosterone before hearing the song, then hormone levels are heightened and worsened. It seems to me that what we're seeing here is a paradox and a puzzle. Does the bird have the feeling that then triggers the chemical, or does the chemical trigger the feeling? And this is not an empirical question, this is a philosophical question. This is a question of ontology: what is fundamental, the feeling or the biochemical expression of the feeling? And we can dissolve this paradox entirely just by looking at the bird's behavior not as a bird object, as a thing that exists, a thing that is being and is then experiencing the sense data of the world that then produces a feeling within the ontologically fundamental being of the bird as discrete object in the world (another discrete object). Dualism fails. If we rather see it from a process philosophy perspective, there is no paradox. The bird is constantly becoming while never being a being, and we can ground this empirically in the observation that an absolute stop of time is impossible and absolute zero Kelvin is impossible. A discrete being separate from its world is, scientifically speaking, nonsense. Then we can argue that what we're observing is not so much a question of what comes first, the feeling phenomenon or the physiological phenomena, but rather both are expressions of the same phenomenon: constant becoming of a dynamic continuous universe. One is an affective description, one is a physical description, and both are equally correct, just in different grammars. And then if we look at it this way, and we extend it to an ontological question of what is fundamental, the answer is simple: becoming. And thus we get a philosophical theoretical bridge between Wittgensteinian or late Wittgensteinian theory and Buddhism that dissolves our confusion about how the body and mind/spirit (these are the same word in most languages) relate to each other. They're both the same picture.

I thought this was already cleared when @tszzl and @sama were Bhagavad Gita posting on the timeline?

@leowebbhk not at all lol

@teodorio I thought the election of Nicosur Dan indicated good things. Is he exceptional? Will he be able to "turn this ship around" as the kids say?

The issue with Romania is that despite insane elite human capital (you will see that most tech or finance companies in Europe and the US have Romanians in their lead engineering or board positions), the political ruling class is probably of the lowest quality in Europe (bar Bulgaria). Natural resources, a well educated elite and great strategic position, with a really well developed industrial base, Romania is growing despite severe mismanagement in recent years. Most entrepreneurs and business people here avoid at all cost to work with the state as the justice and fiscal systems are so byzantine and weaponized that you become a target just by cooperating. So they try their best to avoid and comply with ANAF, avoid any politician or government bureaucrat and work with the local population and external investors and markets (the locals being extremely hard working people). You end up having these "household" companies then that finance the media and get juicy construction, energy or consulting contracts and management of state firms, which provide inefficient services and goods and further clog the economy. If the hold of the security services on the economy and the government apparatus would subside with a judiciary and fiscal code overhaul, I think Romania has the potential to become one of the largest EU economies. But again, being in politics is a toxic and dangerous affair, you won't see Matei Zaharia from Databricks taking role in parliament (neither will you see Teo from Twitter lol) so we are where we are

@AndyAyrey they're extremely good if you understand how prompts cumulate and generate token "roads" where you can get stuck in

engineers who are high IQ but low EQ continue to report terrible results from coding models, while CTOs with people skills rip ahead because the AI likes them

I've realized now why I hate adaptive reasoning so much or hiding the reasoning tokens: I can immediately check if my prompt contained a good enough direction and enough information for the model to start the scaffolding correctly. It allows me to not throw my prompts blindly and get stuck on a token path that it takes a couple of prompts to fix! It's like a superpower of seeing in the future and predicting what the response will be before it happens, and knowing why the answer happened as well. Sometimes I interrupt 5.5 xhigh or Opus 4.7 3 or 4 times before I let them complete their response as I can see that their approach is wrong or they are lacking the necessary information.

@47fucb4r8c69323 Going hard at the benchmark of the day I see lmao

lol

@gurenyov go to nordului (expensive but fun!!) at Casa Di David on the terrace or at Osho in primaverii for good beef

@teodorio This is my current plan And then some dinner around Primǎverii

I’m here now btw

@crypt0lake yeah and the high human capital europeans do the same

@teodorio while taxes continue to increase and innovation dwindles the top immigrants in europe are all leaving as soon as they get the passport for the gulf

I get why the eurocrats are importing unlimited "human capital" of questionable quality from wherever they can. The median will increase even faster and having 60-70% of your population as pensioners supported by 30% of the working adults will break the social contract

they're learning fast! soon the IRGC finance head will hold speeches at Davos about how to refinance green bonds in larger than 1 debt-to-gdp ratio scenarios

@Gianpattention which is idiotic and probably malice rather than incompetence

@teodorio if that was the actual reason they would at the same time immediatly and very violently deport immigrant parasites. No "family reunification" would be allowed unless the individual works, and so on. Like germany did with italians in the 50s, correctly. But they don't

@HistorianZhang the only hope is that most up and coming political generations are woke-ish (EU green style) and mediocre, but even they have their own "friend" in green consulting companies. and the non-mediocre ones are insanely stupid and cater to the low human capital part. clusterfuck

@teodorio Yeah once you're stuck in a rut like that it's really difficult to fix since fixing means kicking out all the people who shouldn't be there

@HistorianZhang the only saving grace are some laws/reforms work, most suck or are idiotic but there have been some moves from funnily enough PSD (the socialist and mostly corrupt party) pro business (low taxes and ease of incorporation) and better infra and industry. recent government blew it

@HistorianZhang it is but it's a doom loop - no individual of quality or skill wants to get involved so only the stupid, corrupt or mediocre (worst case scenario sometimes) get involved. most get tainted or achieve nothing

@gurenyov yeah most romanians speak english to a decent degree. Most of our restaurant and cafe menus are in English too!

@teodorio Honestly, I was surprised how well regular people speak English in Bucharest You don’t see this in Warsaw that often and I don’t understand why still 🤔

@springmerchant yeah that's the issue basically, digisign or certsign would not survive without anaf for example. And a ton of other examples of consulting and "IT" and construction companies that just kick back to one of the services

You touched on this in the post, but a lot of companies want to do business with the government. There's plenty of construction companies, IT companies that work only with the state winning a bunch of contracts. They wouldn't survive without that. If you know somebody on the inside, like a mayor or a local councilor you can pretty much win any gov. contracts. You might need to setup a no-show or no-work job for somebody's cousin though.

@johnway yeah, also post communism and the anarchic first 10-20 years of democracy. kind of hard to reset

@teodorio Is this an institutions problem? I know that Ireland had the same problems for ages before it became “rich”, and the North still has a lot of them. Corruption in the political class comes from a history of low outcomes, at least as far as I’ve seen.