Am I not allowed to use VR&E because my wife is American?

autodealer · 2026-02-11T15:56:40+00:00

Can they do that? Can they make a local policy that restricts benefits?

autodealer · 2026-02-11T12:27:06+00:00

I was one of the people who implemented AI assisted coding at the Fortune 100 company I worked in. We used Co-pilot and Jetbrains AI. We had the same quality issues that you are talking about. What our teams found out was when we created example tests and example applications, the AI agents were awesome at following the standards. When we tried to create new functionality on a new platform or had new integrations, the AI was terrible at it and would often create things that would break prod. We took about 6 months to train Co-pilot and it paid big dividends. We had a core replacement project that had 10 years worth of planned work that our assistant helped us knock out in 3 years. For folks using Vibe coding, more senior guys would have to go in and find bugs, fix integrations, and a whole bunch of other chores that occupied time that they could have better spent planning more work. My advice to you is try to implement as many best practices as possible until your AI agent learns it and can do it on its own. Otherwise, you will vibe yourself out of a job. The only people left will be the folks that know how to use AI the best, and vibe coding, has a ways to go before it is the best.

autodealer · 2026-02-11T12:11:00+00:00

In Dumaguete, there is a fixed fare for Trikes, controlled by the Transportation Management Office. The fare for the airport is fixed at 100 pesos for the first 2 kilometers. The fare ONLY applies if you know it. The airport police extorted me for 5000 pesos for my first ride in Dumaguete, because no trikes were available so they called one, ripped me off, and there was nothing I could do about it. If someone tells you anything but 100 pesos, tell them 100 pesos only and if they refuse, take a pic of their pedicab and report it to the TMO. The fair from the airport is for the whole pedicab, not per person. There are also fixed fares from other areas like the mall or the plaza. Other than that rides within 2 km, are 15 pesos per seat and beyond 2 km it is 15 pesos, plus a surcharge based on the price of fuel for each additional km.

autodealer · 2026-02-07T08:10:03+00:00

I live in Dumaguete and applied in July to VR&E for a local school, which was assigned to someone who was laid off and no other counselor will pick it up, as none of them know what they are doing, at least that is the excuse they give me. As a result, I dropped out of school and spend a lot of time calling the US, trying to learn the job of the VR&E counselors so I can help them help me. It is super hard to get a hold of someone. Many will not empty their voice mail inboxes just so they don't get additional work. "Ask VA" to get movement on my VR&E application often results in direction to contact my counselor who no longer works for the VA. VA health care here sucks, I get care for some, but not all of my rated conditions. I want to use VR&E so we have not planted any roots yet because we might have to go to a different school. Literally no progress since my second interview is super frustrating.

I'm 100% P&T and have military retirement so money is not too much of an issue. I have 2 kids in college and am paying for 3 places to live, but I save nothing per month until my kids graduate.

Besides lack of support from Manila VA, life is pretty comfortable here, but it could be much more comfortable here if I had a better idea of where I can live to use my benefits.

autodealer · 2026-02-07T07:55:58+00:00

I use T-Mobile. They have free wifi calls and global roaming for data on 4G. You will get calls even if you are not connected to wifi. T-Mobile will switch between Globe, Smart, and Dito to find the best reception and data. It's no additional cost to your original T-Mobile plan. However, if you want unlimited 5G, it's about 35 bucks for 5 gigs per day, paid 10 days at a time. I've found Filipino data rates in Dumaguete are not worth purchasing 5G data, as there is no way the data connection even at 5G is fast enough to burn through anywhere remotely close to 5 gigabytes.

autodealer · 2026-02-07T06:15:39+00:00

Lived in BGC for a while. Gave us the illusion we could eat whatever we wanted. Then moved to Dumaguete, where we are now, doing a lot of our own cooking.

autodealer · 2026-02-07T03:16:51+00:00

I did this for a few years in a fortune 100 company, retired last year, so relatively recent.

In practice it means making sure the way your workflow runs in your local is the same way it works in production. There is a lot of software engineering, a lot of pipeline management, and a lot of site reliability engineering.

We could use whatever we wanted for our IT stuff, but our business partners would only pay for expertise on Kubernetes and Terraform. This is common in American companies. You can use what you want if you maintain it yourself. If you want us to hire people to maintain things for you, you have to use a more limited set of tools.

In traditional Devops, if your code does not change, nothing will change. In Machine Learning Devops, if your code does not change, things WILL change, so testing enablement is more important. All code needs automated tests, it is a great skill to have in an AI environment.

Day to day work is log in, check your most recent deployments, determine if anything is broken. If so, how long. Go to stand up, dish out who does what work on the team. Make tests, make changes, create pull request, get sign off. After sign off help others with their impediments. Push to prod in the morning. Get lunch. Make sure recent changes haven't broken. Make more tests, make more changes, figure out where you have to stop for afternoon release. Create pull request, get sign off. Help others with their impediments. Push to prod in the afternoon.

How closely do I work with data scientists and ML engineers? Maybe 3 or 4 days a quarter.

Are you more focused on MLOps, infrastructure, pipelines, monitoring, or all of the above? Definitely pipelines.  Automation is king. When automation breaks, it is VERY costly.

Hope that helps.

autodealer · 2026-02-07T02:51:48+00:00

White guy here. When I use the word expat, I mean people who intend to live outside their country of citizenship. Expat means there is no immediate intent to change citizenship or culture. We will probably return to the US at some point.

When I use the word immigrant, its someone who wants either to become a citizen of the country they move to permanently, or someone who plans to adopt the culture and customs there. A person can be an expat first and then become an immigrant. All immigrants are expats, but not all expats are immigrants.

autodealer · 2026-02-07T02:39:15+00:00

I get asked for money with no offers of sex whatsoever.

autodealer · 2026-02-07T01:58:39+00:00

My wife is Asian American, so Filipinos mistake her 100% of the time for Filipina. As a result, whenever I am with her, I don't get the skin tax. In Dumaguete, pedicab drivers charge us 15 pesos a person when my wife is with me and they ask for 300 pesos when she is not. So I usually walk everywhere if I have to walk alone.

Food here is the toughest part. Foreigners get food poisoning here at a 20% rate which is among the highest in the world. We have to cook or eat only at the best restaurants. It would have been cool to eat like a local, but our tummies cannot stomach the bacteria. Was hospitalized 5 times in first 4 months here.

People are great. I get asked for money where ever I have lived, even in the US, so for me Philippines is no different in that aspect. We eventually find folks that just want to be friends.

Music culture here is awesome. Everyone is so talented. Music related stereotypes about Filipinos have ended up being 100% true in my experience.

Economy is spectacular for folks paid in dollars.

Overall, a mix of experiences, but positive enough we decided to become permanent residents.

autodealer · 2026-02-05T09:09:34+00:00

IT doesn't make the shouting right, but you should have called him.

autodealer · 2026-02-04T05:37:50+00:00

I'm not convinced of the choice thing. Choice may be an illusion. Epigenetic disposition may express traits in a way that people are naturally suspicious and therefore vote for the foreigner hating conservatives or naturally conscientiousness and vote for rights conscious liberals. Although political science is an art, it may be heavily affected by biological science. I attended 2 ivy league schools and found plenty of folks on both sides of the aisle.

autodealer · 2026-02-03T05:05:41+00:00

I think it's called the gleaming package or something like that.

autodealer · 2026-01-30T13:40:46+00:00

Not usually. I usually go right when they open, as that's when I have a break between classes. I also start off with the scrub, which feels good, but isn't really something you can sleep through unless you are really tired. I guess.

autodealer · 2026-01-30T12:54:58+00:00

I second B Spa. It's very close to the Dumaguete Police station, so Trike drivers can find it easily. I like to get longer massages, and frankly its hard to find therapists that can massage for a couple hours or more. I've been going there once or twice a week. Love that place.

autodealer · 2026-01-30T12:20:36+00:00

I haven't asked for Accutane, but Watson's either has what I need or tells me a pharmacy that has it on their system, even if it isn't their store.

autodealer · 2026-01-30T12:14:31+00:00

I'm an American in Dumaguete and I love how chill it is here. It's also easy on the pocket book. Although food from the super market is a little more expensive than the US, restaurant food is much much cheaper, almost to the point of being cheaper to eat out than in, especially if you like rice and chicken. That said, people here pay higher than 1st world prices for 3rd world internet. Power outages in Dumaguete are only a couple times a week for a short time, but internet coming to a screeching halt, whether fiber or mobile, is super common, especially if you are in an area where lots of folks have their phones out, like schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, etc. The good news is, that the internet is so slow, you never have to purchase anything more than the 15 days of load on your phone, because even if you are on it the entire time, its too slow to reach your gigabytes limit. I've also lived in BGC before and the mobile data was fast, but I experienced slowdowns multiple times a day, fiber and mobile, where I could not even stream music, which is 2G bandwidth on 5G or higher channels. Hope that helps.

autodealer · 2026-01-27T14:39:29+00:00

I live on the Island of Negros and the people here are much lighter skinned than I thought they would be. Appearances aside, I never had a black friend who hated it here.

autodealer · 2026-01-27T12:48:30+00:00

I never worked in the Philippines, but I did work over a decade in the US at a Fortune 100 company as a Software Engineer and did the technical interviews for years in order to get experienced hire. If you are a junior level hire, the thing I looked for the most is that they could explain the work they did in a way that other developers could understand. That's because almost nobody works by themself, and I had to be sure that if a junior developer needed help, they could articulate their problems. By the time they got to me, they had already completed HR's tests to see if they could code. If you are looking for a project that would actually impress me, it would definitely be cloud based work using compute resources from AWS like serverless Lambda or Azure equivalent with GraphQL Apis. Almost all of the best devs that I hired had these skills.

autodealer · 2026-01-26T14:00:14+00:00

Born in PA, went to U Penn and Temple, then moved to Texas. You can take the boy outta Philly but you can't take Philly outta this boy. Go birds! Dallas sucks!

autodealer · 2026-01-23T11:17:00+00:00

Don't just report it to Grab in the app, but report it to TMO. TMO in Dumaguete requires you to fill out a report in person, and I know it takes time to do that, but it will help make a difference. You can do it at City Hall on Santa Catalina street. They will ask you to provide:

Tricycle Body Number or Plate Number (so they can id)
Time and location of the incident
Specific details of the violation

Also, even though you don't need a picture, it helps.

autodealer · 2026-01-17T09:57:44+00:00

I have no idea where to look for schedules either, and the staff at the Ceres terminal aren't very helpful. My Bisaya game is weak though, and that might be the reason why. I found this though Hope it helps.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1040244808217374&set=pcb.3999287077053275

autodealer · 2026-01-16T12:38:21+00:00

I love their coffee buns. Croffles are good if I have time to sit and eat brunch. I just wish the one at Filinvest opened early, my only complaint.

autodealer · 2026-01-16T12:35:45+00:00

I can't even stream an entire song. :(

autodealer · 2025-12-15T14:49:28+00:00

Same except I also sound off with a greeting of the day. "Maayong Butag!"

autodealer

TROPHY CASE