The imperative thing is so frustrating. Even the latest models still write elixir like a JS developer, checking nils, maybe_do_blah helper functions everywhere. 30 lines when 8 would do.
Haven't used skills so far -- do you simply store them in your skills directory and have them automatically get used or do you have to specify one of the skills every time?
Yes regarding directory. They merged the concept of slash commands so I often do /elixir-genius to force it. Or if I just need subagents tell it to use "elixir-expert" or "elixir-qa" in parallel with other appropriate subagents. Also helps to put a mention in the Claude.md file.
Truly, this is one of the greatest losses of the UK leaving. For both parties. Advising EU startups on where to incorporate that isn’t London could be so much simpler.
If you have to setup a company today, and want the easiest path to EU-wide SaaS, probably Estonia is the way to go, very easy for EU citizens (don't know how the experience would be from outside, if it's even possible).
Checking the requirements, it seems to me that any "first world" citizen would encounter a low barrier for entry, with exceptions for Russians ("second world" citizens).
Avoid Luxembourg like the plague unless you are a company like Amazon. And even them are making a massive mistake form a governance and risk management point of view of being based there. But they have their tax deal...
- They are optimized for Big funds, Holding structures and Multinationals
If you are a bootstrapper, or small company or any early
stage startup, the ecosystem works against you.
- Setup costs are absurdly high if you include Notary
around plus possibly Lawyer, Bank onboarding
plus accounting you are looking at burning €10k to €20k
easily before making a cent.
- The scourge of the state Fonctionnaires. Untouchables and incredibly well paid state employees. One told me would take care of my long delayed VAT returns... AFTER they would return from their long summer holidays in Switzerland ...
- It only works if you have some special deal like the famous Mr Marius Kohl also known as Monsieur Ruling used to do...
"Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg"
https://www.icij.org/investigations/luxembourg-leaks/leaked-...
- Banks will treat you like a criminal by default and assume, you are laundering money, or hiding taxes and you are compliance risk. They have extreme KYC requirements, and do account freezes for trivial reasons.
- Accounting is rigid, expensive, and slow. Taxes are not low in practice. On paper, it all looks good, but in reality they have the Corporate tax and municipal tax. Many complex withholding rules and limited deductions unless
structured perfectly.
- The legal system is slow and formal. Everything takes a lot of time
and a LOT of paperwork with more costly intermediaries. Small changes
like directors, statutes will force Notary, Formal filings, Delays.
- The ecosystem is completely closed and relationship driven and the few startups
like Talkwalker and Doctena are coming and financed from local families.
Luxembourg runs completely on local networks and specially reputation over
merit. If you are not local, from finance, or law or government circles you are
invisible.
- Incredibly promiscuous relationships between the banks, law and legal professions, with a permanent revolving door between local companies and banks management and government officials. We are talking about less than just a few hundred people. This means Luxembourgeois families with long term historical relationships. Good luck on any legal or business dispute between you...and a local, who is a cousin from the local judge or government official....
I have had the chance of setting up and running companies in many countries. Specifically for Europe, currently I would suggest as two best options right now: Estonia and the Netherlands. Avoid France, Luxembourg and definitely avoid Germany.
Wow thanks for the long reply, unfortunately many if not most of your points are common in all of Europe. I asked you to clarify because I am not only curious about the topic but I strongly believe that these issues should be talked about way more frequently and reach when possible the general population.
Most people are completely unaware of the risks and difficulties of running a company in our countries.
In Italy for example the tax agency operates on a model that is often no different from extortion and innocent people can suffer greatly because of it, I have seen it happen.
I am skeptical that EU Inc will solve all the main problems or even that it will become reality at all but let's see.
> Banks will treat you like a criminal by default and assume, you are laundering money, or hiding taxes and you are compliance risk. They have extreme KYC requirements, and do account freezes for trivial reasons.
I see that everywhere though; my banks in my birth country NL, one of which I have used since I was born (my parents made an acc obviously) half a century ago treat me like that every year. Achtung! We are not sure who you are, provide a lot of paperwork or else! Worse even in other countries. And they are all very afraid of US residents.
The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now.
Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.
It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
If you don't have a good drive and a clean disc you may get skipping/jitter and thus possibly never get a AR or CueTools DB match. (CTDB has parity records that can be used to repair some small errors.) This is the point of the elaborate re-read stuff Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia does. Though even with a good drive you ought to be using a tool that checks for C2 errors, and that won't necessarily catch everything; error correction and detection is always probabilistic.
Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)
Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.
I archive CDs continuously with a workhorse of an external unit from 2010 and it converts a full album audio disc to 320kbps VBR MP3 in like ten minutes.
Only issues come from damaged retail discs and dead burned ones.
I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it),
The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.
The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.
I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.
Generally DVD players make lousy CD players. Most of the annoyance is in the UI which is optimized for watching movies, not playing CDs. But there are also sometimes problems like a small buffering pause between songs, etc. which you don’t get with quality CD players.
I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.
How common were HiFi CD players without DACs? My recollection is that S/PDIF never really caught on that much so output to the amplifier was almost always analog.
Mid range/high end CD players almost always have both analog and digital outputs and have since some time in the 90s at least, so I’d say quite common.
It’s called the Humdinger set. Made by an eccentric guy in NZ with no online presence beyond resultantly keeping an email address.
Stumbled across him randomly at a market when we visited last and had to triple take - “is this THE Humdinger” type thing. My mum confirmed it was the real deal, so we bought it on the spot.
Trying to implement their gRPC api from their specs and protobufs for Live is an exercise in immense frustration and futility. I wanted to call it from Elixir, even with our strong AI I wasted days then gave up.
We are updating the API to be REST centric. Very fair feedback, see the new Interactions API we just shipped, very REST centric and all future work we do will be REST centric : )
If you’ve spent any time with the vertex LLM apis you wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about using Google’s platform (I say this as someone who prefers GCP to aws for compute and networking).
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