What change in visa policies have driven the change in rank? Have any countries switched on visa requirements for US passports? Or are other countries switching off visa requirements?
Edit: Thanks to the responses. My bad for missing that in the article.
> The loss of visa-free access to Brazil in April due to a lack of reciprocity, and the US being left out of China’s rapidly expanding visa-free list, marked the start of its downward slide. This was followed by adjustments from Papua New Guinea and Myanmar, which further eroded the US score while boosting other passports. Most recently, Somalia’s launch of a new eVisa system and Vietnam’s decision to exclude the US from its latest visa-free additions delivered the final blow, pushing it out of the Top 10.
>US being left out of China’s rapidly expanding visa-free list
Really? My visa is probably expired now but I remember my Chinese visa being sort of a headache to deal with 10 years back from the US. Certainly a couple different visas to there weren't "visa-free."
Most Western countries (except the US, as noted) now have legit visa free access to China. No e-visa, no ESTA, no advance notice, no nothing, just rock up and get stamped in.
And to be clear, this is not the previous restricted "X hours transit, don't leave the city" thing, but a full blown 30 day entry permit valid for the entire country (minus Tibet), any port of entry, any port of departure.
Yes, this is a massive departure from their previous policy, but yes, it's real. Having also gone through the regular China visa process multiple times in the past, I could hardly believe it myself when I used it earlier this year.
Ugh, Canada used to have this kind of visa free travel (at least for British people) and it was really jarring to me. I spent the whole flight worrying that I would be denied entry upon landing, but nope: no worries.
Until I tried to travel back a few years later and they didn't let me board the plane because they had changed to an e-visa scheme called eTA.
My own fault for not checking, but, in fairness, I didn't expect the agreements between Canada and the UK to have materially changed.
What part are you disagreeing with? It says the US is being left out of China's expanding visa-free program, not that 10 years ago the USA was on the visa-free list for China
The US was not on a visa-free list for China 10 years ago the last time I applied (at least for a business event). But maybe it isn't on some expanding visa-free list which is something I really haven't paid attention to.
I and a couple of friends of mine have been to China since they introduced visa-free access for my country (low on various "passport power" lists), and it's been an absolutely painless experience. No advance notice, no ETA (like e.g. South Korea does), just buy the tickets and go. The officers at the airport were very nice too.
If anything, dealing with WeChat and AliPay is much more of a headache.
Most countries eligible for the South Korean ETA are currently also exempt at least until the end of 2025; I think chances are good the exception will be extended. I travelled visa-free to both China and South Korea last year and the experience was quite similar.
> but I remember my Chinese visa being sort of a headache to deal with 10 years back from the US
I got one recently and it's not bad, except that it needs to be done in-person at an embassy based on the state you live in, so there's a 90% chance you'll have to trust a third party business next door to the embassy to walk your documents over and mail them back to you after. I would much rather be visa-free though, it was expensive and time consuming for no real reason.
This is mostly answered in the article but in short China refused to extend preferential status and the United States refused to reciprocate with several other countries who in the past were content with an asymmetrical relationship but are no longer.
In general, I think many of the countries that used to be visa-free or visa-on-arrival are implementing Electronic Travel authorizations or e-Visa systems, which decreases mobility in general.
Human beings are ephemeral. They're born, they die.
Everything human beings create is ephemeral. That restaurant you love will gradually drop standards and decay. That inspiring startup will take new sources of funding and chase new customers and leave you behind, on its own trajectory of eventual oblivion.
When I frame things this way, I conclude that it's not that "software quality" is collapsing, but the quality of specific programs and companies. Success breeds failure. Apple is almost 50 years old. Seems fair to stipulate that some entropy has entered it. Pressure is increasing for some creative destruction. Whose job is it to figure out what should replace your Apple Calculator or Spotify? I'll put it to you that it's your job, along with everyone else's. If a program doesn't work, go find a better program. Create one. Share what works better. Vote with your attention and your dollars and your actual votes for more accountability for big companies. And expect every team, org, company, country to decay in its own time.
[2] Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
[3] What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
[4] A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
[5] The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
[11] For I know full well the plans I have for you,
plans for your welfare and not for your misfortune,
plans that will offer you a future filled with hope.
[12] When you call out to me and come forth and pray to me,
I will listen to you.
Agreed, but If I can add one more angle: creative destruction is strangled when engineers are glued to the Internet about “how software should be built.”
I've published a blog post urging [0] top programmers to quit for‑profit social media and rebuild better norms away from that noise.
To add to this, many of the things we consider "high quality" are labors of love of 2 people. Many things we consider low quality are built by massive organizations and hundreds of developers each trying to ship one feature, get promoted, or find another job.
My hot take is that quality is inversely proportional to income. The more someone is paying for something, the more bloodsucking mercenaries are attracted to it that have less consideration for the quality of the output than for their own enrichment. (A corollary to this is that the more a job pays the more it will suck: the only way they can get people to come help and keep them there is to offer high compensation).
Look at trappist brewers. Long tradition of consistent quality. You just have to devote your life to the ascetic pursuit of monkhood. It attracts a completely different kind of person.
It's certainly a provocative thought. But I think it's too blunt. In our commercial world sometimes the cheaper thing works better and sometimes the more expensive thing works better. So the lesson I take away is that price is not a great signal in the absence of other context. Trappist brewers have some other cultural norms going for them, and the focus should be on those norms rather than price. The people attracted to it aren't thinking much about the money. If you value them, why would you?
As others have stated here, I think there’s this constant push for features and not enough investment in improving reliability, observability, scalability. Of course, there is a lot of context required to make actual conclusions.
At many large companies, there is an incentive to create systems that are as complicated as possible. A side effect of that is gaps in what’s actually observable. This manifests itself in shitty user experiences with partially loading pages and widgets or widgets that take multiple times longer to load than other parts of the page.
All this is a direct result of large company barriers in communication, crossing between stacks with no single vertical observability solution. At medium sized companies (<9000), it begins to fall apart. A single user request has dozens of internal hops to arrive at the final API and product managers wonder why a response takes several seconds.
Email is only part of my electronic memory. Over time it's become more important to me to maintain my own copies of my memory on devices I control. The forms and formats are many, and they all need a commitment to maintain control. So yes, use email over more mutable media. And avoid remotely mutable extensions to emails. And keep a local copy of your email. And maintain date-stamped archives of stuff you work on, and keep your codebases easy to run from any point in their history, and write good notes. Constant vigilance.
This works if your code snippets generate relatively static output. Lately I often need to create animations, often interactive ones. See https://akkartik.name/debugUIs.html, for example.
In my life I've often switched to more manual tools when I notice that the more automated tool causes me to live within certain limitations. Sometimes it has taken me a decade to notice these limitations. Automation matters when I do something tens of times a day. But I publish a blog post once in tens of days. It feels worth some additional work to get a little more control and break out of ruts.
The neat thing about org-mode for writing and publishing (I don't use it for "productivity") is that every time I have a new requirement, there is a solution that I can integrate into my existing writing workflow. And I get multimedia publishing "for free".
I also blog with org mode and anything that can be exported as a block of html can be easily included. Recently I dropped an interactive chart using React into the text, for example.
Ditto. I wanted to show JavaScript text art animation, and could "just" do this:
*** ~setInterval~ and ~setTimeout~ worked just right
These let us call functions that do exactly the thing we want,
viz. punch /[[#the-aesthetic-of-text-art-and-its-animation][characters]]/
into our "live spreadsheet" medium, exactly the way the artist
placed them in the original art source.
These methods can make a CPU sing, but hey, the awesome art
is worth every watt it, ah, draws.
#+html: <div class="box invert">
#+html: <em>Random twitch loop <code>setTimeout</code> and recursion.</em>
#+html: <div id="blink-demo"></div>
#+html: </div>
#+html: <script type="text/javascript">demoBlink();</script>
#+html: <div class="box invert">
#+html: <em>Flipbook-like frame-by-frame animation loop with <code>setInterval</code>.</em>
#+html: <div id="glider-demo"></div>
#+html: </div>
#+html: <script type="text/javascript">demoGlider();</script>
This works very nicely because I've structured my website as "every post is just a microsite". See:
Fennel looks quite great! And I love Lisp so there is definitely some allure there. I don't use it for mostly the reasons mentioned in OP:
* to minimize dependencies. Lua < Lua + Fennel. I'm more extreme than OP in that I don't even use LuaRocks. When I need a library I copy it in, and I pick a library that won't change often so that is a reasonable approach. I try to avoid native libraries.
* for even greater stability. Fennel is pretty stable, but I use Lua 5.1 for the most part which hasn't changed since 2008 or so. I'm more extreme than OP in even avoiding later versions of Lua.
Bottomline: the reasons I like Lua have nothing to do with syntax and are much more about these operational meta characteristics of the language. If I cared more about syntax I'd be on Fennel in a heartbeat.
I use Lua the same way, without LuaRocks. I use a Makefile to run my programs on Lua 5.1~5.4 and LuaJIT and compare the output files, to ensure portability across versions.
I forward everything including spam to Fastmail. Their spam filter is absolutely fine. This way I don't need to check for false positives in 2 places. You're probably losing one genuine message a year if you don't check your Gmail spam folder.
Critical data here is how many PRs one is creating on others' projects and receiving on one's own projects. To me OP sounds like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." At my level of git collaboration, just git push contributions on any code forge and send me a link, and I'll do the work to pull it in wherever I am.
reply