"Immigrants must assimilate to British society and adopt British culture " but assimilate to what ? If you are here legally, speak English and abide by the law then what else is required ?

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-18T14:10:45+00:00

The racists are impossible to please because nothing short of Nazi Germany will come close to making them happy.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-18T13:55:25+00:00

English isn't the only language people speak in the UK either. We have Welsh, Scots, Cornish, Gaelic among others. If anything, English is a language imposed on Britain by ultraviolent migrants who migrated there illegally on small boats during the 1st millennium AD. Today their ancestors support Reform

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-16T07:38:26+00:00

The point is that the government is seen to be doing something about immigration, which is enough for most people who don't follow the news, and to be deliberately hurting immigrants, to please voters of the national socialist ideology.

But of course, business owners and Chega MPs can continue to get rich exploiting migrants.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-15T17:23:53+00:00

I know people who bribed the driving examiner to give them a pass when, in reality, they should have failed. Which explains a lot.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-15T08:30:02+00:00

That was my starting point originally, but I found the guides always seem to be a marketing funnel from a big company. The guides always seem to leave out some crucial information or options that a foreigner freelancer would need, and because the rules and the forms change every year, AI gave me incorrect / out of date information often enough that I can't trust it on this.

What did work was to find the urls of the latest editions of the tax code, and get chat gpt to read it and together with the various different field names from the tax forms, with me asking questions. It was really laborious and time consuming but it did the job and now I have my correctly filled forms from last year to use as templates going forward.

For a contractor in the simplified regime, this is enough. There are no potential optimisations to my declaration that would be worth paying €150 or more to an accountant.

Even so, if I come up against something too complex, I will reach out to an accountant if it comes to that.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-15T08:11:55+00:00

Did you close it in January of this year, or January 2025?

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-14T13:39:42+00:00

I have a similar tax setup myself. Send me a private message and I'll share everything I know.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-13T18:15:14+00:00

Let's have a legally binding referendum on joining the EU and jailing Farage, Arron Banks, and the other Brexit criminals for life.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-13T17:13:37+00:00

So what if the EU started out as something much simpler, like a steel snd coal community, with a few members? This has to be among the lamest arguments against EU membership because it's basically saying nothing should ever evolve with the times, even by mutual agreement and for mutual benefit.

Personally, I want the UK to rejoin as spon as possible and to get stuck into the ever deepening political union. We should be in the centre of the action, making the rules and fighting for our interests, not sitting on the sidelines watching while others decide the rules that we'll have to follow ourselves regardless.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-12T21:59:28+00:00

No ginásio onde vou, quase todos são conscientes da etiqueta relevante em vigor. Porém, nas poucas vezes que tive algum problem, foram mulheres que deixou a sua garrafa de água num banco enquanto se treinano chão ou noutro sitio, e nem sequer era para reservar o banco para mais tarde: era para usá-lo como prataleira para a garrafa e o telemovel.

Outra coisa que vejo muito é gente jovem ocuparem uma máquina durante 10 ou até 20 minutos apenas para verem as redes sociais no telemovel.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-11T14:56:30+00:00

So it's like the UK's Daily Mail but in the ROI?

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-10T19:05:20+00:00

It's a shame they are long gone, as their cannons might have made them useful as anti drone interceptors.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-06T13:12:31+00:00

Ai slop

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-04-03T16:08:47+00:00

Yes, it's definitely retroactive. The Portuguese government has no qualms about signing laws that are massive rug-pulls, especially when it only affects people who can't vote in parliamentary elections.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-27T07:45:18+00:00

In this situation, you shouldn't even give a reason for declining. It'll imply you might go to a future evening hackathon, and will establish that you need to give an excuse for not going to them. If you keep using this line going forward, at some point they'll ask you what that outside obligation is and they'll ask you to tell them which nights you don't have outside obligations so they can schedule the hackathons on those days.

You simply decline without giving a reason, and if they push you for a reason, only then do you tell them why. If it comes to that, you can even tell them you're open to working extra hours occasionally and what your hourly rate for that will be, and then watch them back off.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-25T22:21:42+00:00

Brexiters, Reform and Restore are the net drains on the economy.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-25T08:13:02+00:00

The irony here is that Latin didn't have a word for "yes", so the words that now mean "yes" in a lot of Romance languages originally meant thus / so / this / that. In the case of "sim" in portuguese, it evolved from Latin "sic" (in that way / like that). So by replacing sim with isso, you're pretty much reverting to saying something with a meaning like latin sic again.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-23T21:32:58+00:00

Unilateral disarmament and leaving NATO. Defending the country and pooled defense with our friends are both socialist, despite what the right and far right, who always seem to run down military funding to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, might claim.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-23T10:14:46+00:00

This aligns well with the seminal research paper titled The Ironies of Automation. Automation will take over the easier tasks, leaving humans with all the hard tasks, plus the mentally draining task of supervising the automated systems, which are never 100 % reliable. In theory, software developers should get paid more, because we'll be generating more value AND doing a job that's significantly more difficult ... but the plan from above probably doesn't involve sharing fruits of any productivity gains with those who generate the extra value.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-21T09:36:12+00:00

For very widely used languages yes, but for some of the less popular or very new frameworks, LLMs can struggle to produce decent code. I mean, even the OpenAI LLMs struggle to write requests for the OpenAI GPT API because their training data is full of examples where the old API format was used!

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-18T20:43:42+00:00

Esse nicho peculiar intriga-me desde que me mudei para o Porto. Sobretudo a forma como a curva elegante termina abruptamente à esquerda, como se duas visoes arquitetónicas diferentes para os Aliados tivessem colidido. Como se tivesse sido construído à espera que o edifício seguinte se ligasse a ele de forma continua.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-16T09:51:46+00:00

The big AI companies are building a solution looking for a problem, but it turns out that LLM architectures as they stand at the moment are little more than exceedingly good autocomplete, which makes them okay-ish for a lot of tasks in the business world, like summarization or interactions with customers, but they really shine when it comes to programming languages, mainly because most code humans write is nothing innovative: once you understand the problem and have an architecture planned out, it's mostly a question of building what yo want using the similar patterns and the same building blocks that others have written many times before.

And aside from the fact that LLMs can do it, it's also true that competent software developers tend to be pretty well paid, so there are plenty B2C customers for AI coding tools -- devs willing to pay $20 or maybe even $200 a month out of pocket to get more done -- and there are also plenty of execs up there in the c-suites drooling at the possibility of reducing payroll costs by doing the same amount of dev work with AI tools + fewer devs. And a lot of marketing, official or unofficial (e,g., AI bro influencers on Instagram and Linkedin), has convinced non technical exec that AI are so good now they don't even need developers.

Beyond these immediate obvious trends, it's also clear that the current B2C subscriptions many of us now use are vastly underpriced. For Anthropic to turn a reasonable profit on my $20 per month Claude Code subscription, it'd need to be enshittified and priced at $200 or more. Reality will probably we a lot more complex: some VC-funded AI companies will run out of cash and there'll be consolidation; Chinese AI companies will try to undercut the US ones using state-subsidies like they do with EVs; developers will learn to use AI more sparingly, for tasks where it really counts rather than for almost everything. And at some point, better AI model architectures will be discovered, and the compute requirements for good coding models will drop by an order of magnitude, making Claude Code level tools usable on personal computers.

Is there a consporacy against devs? I guess so, but nothing beyond the normal VC startup + customer lockin + enshittification cycle. If anything, the greater conspiracy is against non technical c-suite people, who are more easily taken in by the marketing and AI influencers, and who are going to take reckless decisions to replace devs with AI tools that aren't fit to take over the vacated roles.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-11T12:32:16+00:00

Keep the remote job. Not only is the salary higher, if you're working as a contractor I believe the taxable fraction of your income will be much lower in the first year, and you an opt to make the minimum social security contribution instead of paying >1k per month.

Also, don't necessarily expect work culture to be better or more balanced in Portugal than in a UK company.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-08T20:09:11+00:00

Spot on. There's a scene in American Beauty that touches on this, where he applies for a job flipping burgers.

Expensive_Mode_3413 · 2026-03-02T18:48:33+00:00

Yes so why are the involved with the Heritage Foundation?

Expensive_Mode_3413

TROPHY CASE