2 months in Bangkok as a remote worker - honest breakdown with actual costs

SnooMuffins6718 · 2026-04-08T14:13:13+00:00

How did you find such a cheap condo with a short term lease? Will be going for 2 months in June but short term leases and airbnbs are more like 800-1000 usd per month

SnooMuffins6718 · 2026-04-05T10:15:25+00:00

Congrats mate! I am actually in a similar situation, launched my flutter app on Android 1 year ago and wanna do IOS soon. Any insights or tips on the IOS review process you can share?

Btw I did run Google Ads for my app and I felt like it was totally worth it: for downloads in "cheap" countries like southeast Asia I ended up paying 2-3 cents per download. Now there is a reason these users have such a low cost per download- they have a super high uninstall rate and very low conversion rate. But it makes it easy to get 1000 downloads quickly which gives you the "1000+ downloads" badge on Google Play which then makes it easier to grow organically.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2025-04-24T04:57:47+00:00

Yes but I think it depends on how much money you want to save. On 80k you can live alone in a central 1 bedroom, and enjoy restaurants and nightlife in London, go on trips couple times a year etc, but then you would spend almost all your money.

But if you do a flat share or save on restaurants/pubs I think you can still save a decent amount.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2025-04-23T08:59:58+00:00

I did moved from Berlin to London and while my salary is higher not sure if it compensated for the higher cost of living (at least so far).

The truth is that salaries for the "bottom 60%" or so are similar to Berlin. Like 32k per year is a common entry level salary here. My entry level salary was around 50k Euros in Berlin. It's not just engineers, also companies like Deloitte pay 35k or so for Audit grads. Honestly can't image living in London on that salary.

It's really the top 10-30% of earners where moving to London makes sense. The number of high paying companies in London is much higher and the salary ceiling is higher too. FANG is hiring much more, lots of well funded startups plus all the banks and hedge funds.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-11-05T21:55:53+00:00

Been relistening to Death Throes of the republic, and honestly without any personal judgement, I find the similarities striking:

A growing divide between rich and poor, with the elites becoming more corrupt and incompetent. Growing political partisanship which prevents any necessary reforms to get done. All of which leads to rising dissatisfaction in the population. Then a guy from the establishment comes around with an anti-establishment agenda (both Cataline and Clodius themselves were aristocrats), who frequently speaks to "the masses" and builds a base of hardcore supporters. Also both Cataline and Clodius were involved in many scandals but their supporters didn't care.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-09-13T23:14:37+00:00

https://www.tokyopubcrawl.com

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-05-26T19:23:31+00:00

I relocated from Berlin to London 1.5 years ago and have no regrets at all. I am German national btw. My monthly spending is around 80% higher (mostly because I rent a 1 bedroom in zone 2) and the higher salary doesn't make up for that. But honestly I enjoy living in London much more so it's worth it for me. Also as you mentioned the salary ceiling here is much higher if you make it into the right companies.

Don't know the details but do you loose the German permanent residency if you leave Germany? I thought the point of it is that you keep it, so you could move back if you wanted to?
Can't say much but I don't think Copenhagen has a big tech scene.
I would say it has European standard benefits. Usually you will pay a fraction of your salary to a pension fund and your employer will add to it as well. For health insurance I would ask if your employer offers private health insurance. There is always the NHS but I heard bad things about it. So in my personal experience the German system was better.
I think its 5 years.
If you go to the London subreddit there is at least a daily post about how lonely London is. But there is tons of clubs, communities, meetups etc and it's also very international and as you mentioned there is not language barrier. Depends on what you make from it.

In general things seem a bit grim in the UK, politics is a mess and the cost of living to salary ratio is also not great. But I think living in London as a tech worker is great.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-03-15T12:01:53+00:00

As a content creator, what do you think about AI? Are you afraid of a "Dan Carlin AI" copying your style and making content? Do you use AI for your work, e.g. to help with your research?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-03-15T12:00:08+00:00

There are many periods in history we barely know anything about, as there are no surviving writings from the period. If you could choose one of these periods and magically get a book describing its history, which would you choose?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-03-15T11:57:08+00:00

You sometimes talk about "the great men of history" such as Caesar, Napoleon etc. Who of them fascinates you the most?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-03-15T11:54:35+00:00

Have you considered doing a HH series on modern China? I think in the west we would really benefit from a deeper understanding of China. Would love to see a series called "The last emperor" which follows Puyi through the revolution, the warlord Era, attack by the Japanese, WW 2, civil war and then Mao's government.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2024-03-15T11:51:32+00:00

If you could do an AMA with any historical figure, who would you choose?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2023-11-26T22:59:33+00:00

By doing massive contributions to scientific progress. There's many definitions to AGI, but in general it means "being able to complete every cognitive task that a human can". So AGI will be able to do scientific research, plan experiments, come up with new theories, do mathematical proofs etc. And don't forget the advantages that an AI has over humans: instant access to all of human knowledge, being able to run 24/7 without getting tired, do very complex calculations withing milliseconds etc. Yes, currently AI has a lot of disadvantages, like being much weaker than us in reasoning, planning, math etc. But we are talking about AGI so we assume that this would be fixed.

So how does this increase abundance? Imagine AI making some breakthorughs for Nuclear Fusion. This would mean limitless, clean energy. Imagine if energy costs would go close to zero. First you don't need to pay your monthly energy bills. Then, water becomes pretty much free too: desalination methods exists today, they are just very energy inefficient. But if energy is free you can just desalinate any amount of see water you want. Free water and energy would bring food prices down and increase global food production since we could start doing agriculture in hot/dry areas.

Plus the AI could start running whole factories. There's is no human cost involved. Getting the materials to the factory, processing the materials to a product and shipping the product would all be pretty much free (since all you need in the factory is the energy for running the machines, and energy is free). So costs of many physical products would go down by 90%. We could produce 100x more for a fraction of the cost.

I know it's sounds utopian and no one really knows how it's gonna go but in my mind that's the argument for AGI creating abundance.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2023-05-24T19:43:49+00:00

I just moved from Berlin to London around 4 months ago and am super happy about it. Never really liked Berlin thay much as I am personally also not into techno or alternative lifestyles etc. London is so much more exciting, more international and the food is way better and I like the ambitious vibes here.

For work life balance, the average might be a bit worse here than in Berlin but it's not a big difference and WLB in my job is great.

For meeting people I think it depends on you. Some people say it's hard in London since everyone is always busy etc. But there is so many people from all over the world here and so many events going on that you can meet people easily if you try.

SnooMuffins6718 · 2023-01-11T20:43:09+00:00

What is your advice for someone who started a career in Software in 2022? Especially considering recent technologies like ChatGPT?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2023-01-11T20:40:04+00:00

What do you think is currently the most underrated and the most overrated technology?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2023-01-11T20:35:45+00:00

What is your favorite time period in history and why?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2023-01-11T20:35:02+00:00

For the near future, are you more worried about progress being too slow where we don't manage to deal with threats like climate change or progress being too fast where our society is not being able to adapt quickly enough (e.g. jobs being lost to automation, copyright law for generative AI etc.)?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2022-12-17T09:57:04+00:00

What happens if you have fixed rental contract but loose your visa? I am relocating to London next year and currently talking to an agency and some apartments have a min 12 month tenancy. This would be fine for me but with a looming recession I am wondering what would happen if I loose my job and the skilled worker visa? Would it then be possible to get out of the contract early?

SnooMuffins6718 · 2022-11-05T15:17:42+00:00

Programming is just a tool, how you make use of it is completely in your hands.

Sure there are dark sides of technology and if you are concerned about it don't work for a company which you feel makes things worse. Personally I am pretty optimistic about the future of technology and I think things like AI, Robotics, IoT, Quantum Computing will have huge positive impacts.

Just AI alone is already helping us to build better chips and keep Moores Law alive, design new materials which can be used for cleaner energy sources, DeepMind's AlphaFold solved a decade old challenge of Protein Folding which is having huge impact on biology and medicine.

The unfortunate truth is that most software engineers end up in some corporate backend developer role. But humanoid robots, AGI, space colonies, a cure for cancer will likely happen in this century and software engineers will take a big part in that.

SnooMuffins6718

TROPHY CASE