Meanwhile on the other side of the world - I noticed in SEA businesses are more like "just contact us" with a phone number directly available / facebook page. Like, they don't want you to do anything with the website, they expect you to chat with them directly.
Youtube is squeezing more and more to push subscribing to premium. Youtube is where "everything" is - they know they can squeeze hard, where else are you going to go?
Ironically it looks more and more like TV with the non stop ads and sponsors.
Can you explain the shadow banking / conversion angle? All I found was that selling knives was used to get a discount on steam balance thanks to price arbitrage.
> "Selling Knives" (挂刀) refers to the technique of buying in-game items from 3rd-party (Chinese) trading sites like NetEase BUFF, C5, IGXE, and UUYP, and then selling them on the Steam Market to obtain a discounted Steam Wallet balance by capitalizing on price differences.
I'm surprised the price difference did not disappear if people make that trade.
China notoriously has intense capital controls. It's difficult for ordinary Chinese citizens to take capital out of the country. CS2 items can be bought and sold in both USD and RMB, and can be transferred between Chinese and international accounts. It's not about Steam wallet balances.
Interesting. I'm curious though, assuming I am Chinese and I trade knives for USD - where would I be able to receive USD to evade capital control? Surely not my bank account or Steam wallet. Or is it for people with bank account in both countries? But in that case crypto could be more convenient? I'm puzzled
Yes you would need to receive in a foreign USD bank account outside of China, the whole goal is to get the capital out of China and into a foreign account. Cryptocurrency transactions/exchanges are illegal in China so that's definitely not convenient! Meanwhile you can buy CS2 items with any ordinary payment method.
Remember the 15% transaction fee on the Steam market? That's why the price difference hasn't disappeared. Players can avoid this fee through gifting and off-platform transactions.
And all of this is just Chinese players trying to buy games cheaper—after all, what else can Steam wallet funds be used for?
Some comments claim this is a way for Chinese people to evade financial regulations, but that's complete nonsense. The Steam market's capacity is entirely insufficient to meet the demand. They could easily choose to legally exchange currency using the foreign exchange quotas of relatives and friends, engage in cross-border wash trading through underground banks, or use fake trade and fake investment schemes.
> Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?
You could make the same claim to make a case for the usage of any technology that simplifies the coding work, ie: using Java instead of assembly, usage of AWS instead of implementing your own infra, etc. With higher level languages, by freeing up developers from having to worry about specifics of memory management or syscalls, they could become more productive and focus more on the actual problems to solve. Some still understand the underlying because they work on that low level layer, but this is not needed anymore for most.
I think LLMs are another step in that direction, although with caveats.
Believe it or not there is talent even in countries where salaries are lower. For 3000 - 4000 USD month you can get good english speaking senior engineers in Vietnam used to work in international environments. Not FAANG tier but strong fit for most $CRUD companies. This is cheaper than US by far, although the gap with Europe is unironically closing.
Where is the need of agents for this topic of instant payment? I understand AI and agents can be useful to look for a product and get a consensus on the reviews.
However when it comes to instant checkout and payment, some web browsers already have auto-fill for the address and payment forms that every netizen has completed hundreds of times already. Assuming web browsers already store the information for auto-fill why not go to the next step and create a protocol to allow them to do one click payment and checkout?
In short, I don't see why this instant checkout feature should be locked behind agent usage.
This has been driving me crazy, at my mid sized company, higher management insists pretty hard in only hiring senior/staff. But to be honest we are far from solving novel, challenging technical problems.
Inevitably we hire (expensive) super senior people who end up having responsibilities that do not match their level in tech and also in product. The good ones that want a challenge leave after ~1y. Junior or mid level would be a better fit in many cases.
When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company.
In the past when we hired junior, mid level engineers they ramped up pretty well, their salaries went up and they are still with us.
> When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company.
At every company at work to, each time there was openings for the team I worked in, I read the job descriptions and I was like: "I would never apply for this position, I'm not qualified".
So I asked HR to lower the expectations, otherwise we would never find candidates. They told me that it was to avoid inexperienced people to apply.
And then 99% of the candidates they pushed and I interviewed lied on their XP.
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