I had a good experience with the Huawei D15, which is my main machine presently (I live in Asia).

I installed Ubuntu. Everything worked. I've had exactly zero issues. Even battery life is decent.

I realize it might not be the most popular company in some parts of the world, but truth be told it's been pretty fantastic for the sticker price of almost USD 750.

+1 for Huawei, I have a MateBook X and it's almost perfect (the camera placement is the one annoyance, other than that it's just never in my way - unlike my AMD ThinkPad). Never thought about Huawei before buying this thing, and I keep getting asked if it's a MacBook.

Depending on where you live, Huawei also has pretty decent support and - something that I value - the ability to look at products in a shop before buying them! In Moscow they have a few shops for that, and even in more "chaotic" cities (like Cairo, where I bought it) they have decent resellers.

I've been using a Huawei Matebook D14 for 3 years now and it's still a fantastic little machine. Only $400 at the time and it's just as well built and nice as an old MacBook Pro with aluminum body, great screen and trackpad, etc.

I agree, but perhaps not in the expected way.

For me at least, Stable Diffusion has been this great tool for personal expression in a medium that was previously inaccessible to me: images. Now I could communicate with people in this new, accessible way! I've learned more about art history and techniques in the last 3 months than in my entire life up to that point.

So I came up with a few ideas about making some paintings for my mother, and children's books for my nieces and nephew. The anger I received from my artistically inclined colleagues over this saddened me greatly, so I tried to talk to more people to see if this was an anomaly. There was more anger, and argument for censorship! I have to admit I struggled to maintain any empathy after receiving that reception.

I'm personally really excited about a future where we don't have to suffer to create art, whether it's code, an image, or music. Isn't more art and less suffering in our lives a good thing? If there are economic structures we've set up that make that a bad thing, maybe it would be fruitful take a critical look at those.

Presently I'm looking at creating a few small B2B products out of various fine-tuned public AI models. The first thing I realized is that I'd be addressing niches that were just not possible to tackle before (cost, scale, latency). The second thing I noticed is I'd need to hire designers, copywriters, etc. for their judgement -- at least as quality control. So at least in my limited scope of activity, the use of AI permits me to hire creative professionals, to tackle jobs that previously employed zero creative professionals (because previously they weren't done at all, or just done very poorly, e.g. English website copy for small business in non-English-speaking developing economies).

I do feel for people that have decided that they need to retool because they feel AI threatens their job. I do that every couple of years when some new thing threatens an old thing that I do, it's a chunk of work, and not always fun. To show better empathy, I think I'm going to reach out to more artists and show them what the current AI tools can and cannot do, to help them along this path. So thank you for your post, because it gave me the idea to take this approach!

...and on the weekends, I can still write code in hand-optimized assembly, because that's the brush I love painting with.

In my limited experience (I immigrated to a developing country in Asia 10 years ago) it's more common to inherit your sole home from your parents, and live with them in it your whole lives. It's not unusual to have three or four families living in a 20 square meter home -- although these properties thankfully usually have 2-3 floors. So you're never alone, ever -- for better and worse.

Wealth here is primarily inherited, not earned. It is uncommon for people to afford to buy an apartment over the course of their lives. In my city at least, an OK apartment is around USD 200k-300k (not even close to the city center). An OK salary is about USD 500 a month.

The free daycare aspect is absolutely critical so that both parents can work, and maybe bring in enough to send their children to university. It's not uncommon for one or both parents to additionally have a side gig evenings or weekends. Later on, maybe when one parent can afford to work less, you care for your parents.

Also as an additional thing, there's always a family shrine. You still cook meals for ancestors. You leave a place for them at special occasions, and celebrate their death anniversary. It's not unusual for someone to stand up in front of the shrine and talk to them for a long period. I'm not a spiritual person, but that frequent shared connection to the past, and its interaction with grief, is interesting.

Anyway, I thought you would appreciate that small slice of life here.

I live in Vietnam.

The first time I saw this, I asked my colleagues: Who would want to work one day more per week, for half what someone makes in the UK?

We were all willing to do it without hesitation (actually many of us already do this for less revenue -- side gigs are fairly ubiquitous here).

One of us added that they hope the West shifts to a three day week soon, so we can get 2 more days of work!

I know this misses the point about time vs. productivity, but thought I'd share that the attitude here is very different.

Interestingly, a pair of glasses here in Vietnam -- including eye exam, fancy lenses (high refractive index, anti-glare etc.), and frame -- usually runs in the 20-40$ range. As with most things here, you can find cheaper if you need (e.g. secondhand).

I'm not certain, but it sure feels like the inflated cost in North America makes it seem like eyeglasses are less affordable here than they actually are, at least in the cities.

The kicker is when I fly to North America and I see the same frames being sold there!

Edit: Eyeglasses are one of the things I recommend colleagues buy here while visiting. It's conceivable some (from nearby countries) save more than the cost of their trip!

You can get eyeglasses for $40 in US, from online stores like Zenni.

We do. Furniture companies use it a lot already. You can be licensed to import lumber, manufacture using local labor, and export -- without having a license to sell locally. We don't have SEZ, but do have big industrial / IT parks offering support for foreign enterprise. Some are pretty nice.

Overall, the permitted activities on your business license matter. Getting licensed is usually easier than people think, except a handful of sensitive areas.

A small slice of life: this does make furniture tradeshows sad affairs. You can see great things made in Vietnam, but you can't actually buy any of them. This has improved a lot over the last 10 years, but it's still somewhat of a thing.

It seems pretty silly to discourage sale of Vietnamese made furniture in Vietnam.

From my reading of the situation, it’s not discouraged, rather the companies would rather avoid finally paying tariffs and instead sell abroad. Not sure how significant the charges are?

It depends how you look at it. I doubt it's the companies avoiding tariffs, it's that customers in Vietnam wouldn't buy the goods because the tariffs would make them too expensive. If Vietnamese would buy the goods anyway I'm sure the companies would love to sell their goods in the country.