7 ms·

I'm honestly impressed that this even happened at all. "Rio de Janeiro's homegrown LLM" is probably the last headline I ever expected to read on HN.

cscheid 5mo ago
Yes! That "prefeitura do Rio" huggingface URL is definitely shocking to read to this Brazilian as well (I'm assuming you and parent also are from your usernames).
airstrike 5mo ago
Worth reminding everyone that Lua was also created in Rio, though admittedly at PUC rather than by the government. Rio has a strong engineering talent pool, along with many other major capitals in Brazil
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago
  Brazil does have talent. Mauro Carvalho Chehab is a Linux kernel maintainer. Elixir was created by José Valim, a brazilian. I have also created my own programming language. What Brazil doesn't have is a history of properly rewarding talent, which often causes it to migrate elsewhere. So it's definitely surprising when any sort of technological development happens in Brazil: it implies someone who stayed managed to get something done, most likely for much less than what that something is actually worth, while also being crushed by extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware.
  - rbanffy 5mo ago
    > extremely high taxes I always find this funny. Brazilian taxes are nowhere near what I would say “high”. I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil, and that would be as if I did zero tax optimisation back then.
    - fabioz 5mo ago
      I can second this. Compared to many countries Brazil doesn't have such high taxes (I'd say that if you work remotely for a company outside of Brazil, you'll probably have much lower taxes compared to almost any other country -- working locally the difference isn't as big, but you have higher taxes in many other places). What it really lacks is access to capital (which is the real "mojo" of the US compared to the rest of the world).
      - iterateoften 5mo ago
        Also the bureaucracy, employee rights, etc. Incorporating and getting a functional business entity in Brazil is harder. In USA I literally do in 5min online including bank account. In Brazil they are taking out microscopes to verify your signature on the paperwork matches. And in the USA if you have one bad employee, just fire them any time. In Brazil for better or for worse nowhere near as easy. Obviously better for employees but businesses don’t like it because you can get stuck with a employee dragging down everyone unless you pay them a years salary etc.
        rbanffy 5mo ago
        > Incorporating and getting a functional business entity in Brazil is harder It’s still something you can do in less than a month. That’s nothing compared to the life of a functional enterprise. For you to have to pay “years of salary” the employee must have been with you for a very long time - as in decades. Considering most companies don’t live to 2 years, the odds of it happening to you are very slim. Labor laws exist to protect the weak part against the possible abuses of the company. You must agree the harm a company can do to its employees is far greater than what an individual employee can do to a company. And this is why unions exist: because collectively is the only way the employees have teeth.
    - rglullis 5mo ago
      As an employee: your taxes are not that high, but public services are terrible so most of middle-class ends up paying for the private alternative as well. As a business owner: not so bad if you are a freelancing or just a few business partners providing some type of service, but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people.
  - jdahlin 5mo ago
    Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.
    - matheusmoreira 5mo ago
      Import taxes in Brazil are 60%, plus something like 18% on top of the product, shipping and the aforementioned import taxes. The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics. One for you, one for the government. That 6% figure is just the Simples Nacional rate for micro-businesses making less than 35kUSD/year. The actual income tax tops out at 27.5% at middle class thresholds. On top of that Brazil stacks social security tax, payroll taxes and a yet more taxes embedded in every single purchase. If you calculate all of this you can figure out something like up to 70% of a brazilian's income can flow to the government. You say swedish companies pay 70% taxes. Well, swedish citizens get excellent services and a generally functioning country in return. Brazilian citizens pay 70% taxes and they get... Brazil.
      - drdexebtjl 5mo ago
        This is very misleading. My salary in Brazil is on the very top end (with most of my income in the 27.5% bracket), and my average effective income tax rate in the last 5 years has been about 16%. I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses. We do have high import tariffs for individuals, and especially for consumer goods, as it's been pointed out in a different comment. This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. But if you don't, you'll find that individuals don't really pay that much compared to other countries.
        matheusmoreira 5mo ago
        > This is very misleading. It's your comment that's misleading. I was trying to account for the numberless taxes that exist and get applied to every single transaction. You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top. > tax deductions Discounting deductions from the nominal tax rate doesn't change the fact those taxes are high, nor does it change the fact you max out your tax bracket at middle class incomes. Deductions are actually the bare minimum. If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights. Not deducting these expenses would be robbery. The fact most brazilians have plenty of deductions at their disposal is only evidence of how absurdly tax inefficient this country is. These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax. Finally, other countries no doubt have deductions too. I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison. > This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. What a dismissive comment. US government just banned Fable for foreign peasants like us. If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now. If you think having some degree of sovereignty over our computing is "worshipping consumerism", then I don't know what to say to you. Europe is currently fighting tooth and nail to develop some technological independence. China is creating Manhattan projects to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing and kick them out of their supply chains. If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind. Brazil taxes foreign products in order to "protect local industry", then it taxes the local industry as well, which means pretty much nothing higher up in the value chain gets made here. Brazilian efforts at creating national computer technology date back to the military dictatorship, to the import substitution policies. The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact. What have we been doing since then? Nothing. Don't have our own industries, and we can't really buy the products produced by other nations either. This is why people leave: Brazil combines the worst of both worlds.
  - red-iron-pine 5mo ago
    > extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware. I think people are missing the last few words -- cost of computing hardware when I used to do ISP work I did a lot for LATAM. The joke was that you'd get better bandwidth for Brazil routing out of the country and through Miami than going across the country. The reason? crazy high tariffs on hardware. No reason to base anything locally, and if you're not basing it locally then there isn't really much reason to stick around, either. Go to other hot markets like Zona America, Austin, CDMX, Miami, Los Angeles, etc. and make the big $$$. I worked with 2 Brazilian engineers who were in country (and currently work with a 3rd now, based in Monteal) and they were very good but all said they had to get out of country to lock in the serious engineering roles.
- mathattack 5mo ago
  Yes. Though even more than the US, their engineering talent from top schools heads into consulting and finance.

cscheid 5mo ago

Yes! That "prefeitura do Rio" huggingface URL is definitely shocking to read to this Brazilian as well (I'm assuming you and parent also are from your usernames).

airstrike 5mo ago

Worth reminding everyone that Lua was also created in Rio, though admittedly at PUC rather than by the government. Rio has a strong engineering talent pool, along with many other major capitals in Brazil

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 5mo ago
Brazil does have talent. Mauro Carvalho Chehab is a Linux kernel maintainer. Elixir was created by José Valim, a brazilian. I have also created my own programming language. What Brazil doesn't have is a history of properly rewarding talent, which often causes it to migrate elsewhere. So it's definitely surprising when any sort of technological development happens in Brazil: it implies someone who stayed managed to get something done, most likely for much less than what that something is actually worth, while also being crushed by extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware.
- rbanffy 5mo ago
  > extremely high taxes I always find this funny. Brazilian taxes are nowhere near what I would say “high”. I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil, and that would be as if I did zero tax optimisation back then.
  - fabioz 5mo ago
    I can second this. Compared to many countries Brazil doesn't have such high taxes (I'd say that if you work remotely for a company outside of Brazil, you'll probably have much lower taxes compared to almost any other country -- working locally the difference isn't as big, but you have higher taxes in many other places). What it really lacks is access to capital (which is the real "mojo" of the US compared to the rest of the world).
    - iterateoften 5mo ago
      Also the bureaucracy, employee rights, etc. Incorporating and getting a functional business entity in Brazil is harder. In USA I literally do in 5min online including bank account. In Brazil they are taking out microscopes to verify your signature on the paperwork matches. And in the USA if you have one bad employee, just fire them any time. In Brazil for better or for worse nowhere near as easy. Obviously better for employees but businesses don’t like it because you can get stuck with a employee dragging down everyone unless you pay them a years salary etc.
      - rbanffy 5mo ago
        > Incorporating and getting a functional business entity in Brazil is harder It’s still something you can do in less than a month. That’s nothing compared to the life of a functional enterprise. For you to have to pay “years of salary” the employee must have been with you for a very long time - as in decades. Considering most companies don’t live to 2 years, the odds of it happening to you are very slim. Labor laws exist to protect the weak part against the possible abuses of the company. You must agree the harm a company can do to its employees is far greater than what an individual employee can do to a company. And this is why unions exist: because collectively is the only way the employees have teeth.
  - rglullis 5mo ago
    As an employee: your taxes are not that high, but public services are terrible so most of middle-class ends up paying for the private alternative as well. As a business owner: not so bad if you are a freelancing or just a few business partners providing some type of service, but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people.
- jdahlin 5mo ago
  Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.
  - matheusmoreira 5mo ago
    Import taxes in Brazil are 60%, plus something like 18% on top of the product, shipping and the aforementioned import taxes. The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics. One for you, one for the government. That 6% figure is just the Simples Nacional rate for micro-businesses making less than 35kUSD/year. The actual income tax tops out at 27.5% at middle class thresholds. On top of that Brazil stacks social security tax, payroll taxes and a yet more taxes embedded in every single purchase. If you calculate all of this you can figure out something like up to 70% of a brazilian's income can flow to the government. You say swedish companies pay 70% taxes. Well, swedish citizens get excellent services and a generally functioning country in return. Brazilian citizens pay 70% taxes and they get... Brazil.
    - drdexebtjl 5mo ago
      This is very misleading. My salary in Brazil is on the very top end (with most of my income in the 27.5% bracket), and my average effective income tax rate in the last 5 years has been about 16%. I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses. We do have high import tariffs for individuals, and especially for consumer goods, as it's been pointed out in a different comment. This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. But if you don't, you'll find that individuals don't really pay that much compared to other countries.
      - matheusmoreira 5mo ago
        > This is very misleading. It's your comment that's misleading. I was trying to account for the numberless taxes that exist and get applied to every single transaction. You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top. > tax deductions Discounting deductions from the nominal tax rate doesn't change the fact those taxes are high, nor does it change the fact you max out your tax bracket at middle class incomes. Deductions are actually the bare minimum. If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights. Not deducting these expenses would be robbery. The fact most brazilians have plenty of deductions at their disposal is only evidence of how absurdly tax inefficient this country is. These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax. Finally, other countries no doubt have deductions too. I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison. > This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. What a dismissive comment. US government just banned Fable for foreign peasants like us. If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now. If you think having some degree of sovereignty over our computing is "worshipping consumerism", then I don't know what to say to you. Europe is currently fighting tooth and nail to develop some technological independence. China is creating Manhattan projects to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing and kick them out of their supply chains. If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind. Brazil taxes foreign products in order to "protect local industry", then it taxes the local industry as well, which means pretty much nothing higher up in the value chain gets made here. Brazilian efforts at creating national computer technology date back to the military dictatorship, to the import substitution policies. The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact. What have we been doing since then? Nothing. Don't have our own industries, and we can't really buy the products produced by other nations either. This is why people leave: Brazil combines the worst of both worlds.
- red-iron-pine 5mo ago
  > extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware. I think people are missing the last few words -- cost of computing hardware when I used to do ISP work I did a lot for LATAM. The joke was that you'd get better bandwidth for Brazil routing out of the country and through Miami than going across the country. The reason? crazy high tariffs on hardware. No reason to base anything locally, and if you're not basing it locally then there isn't really much reason to stick around, either. Go to other hot markets like Zona America, Austin, CDMX, Miami, Los Angeles, etc. and make the big $$$. I worked with 2 Brazilian engineers who were in country (and currently work with a 3rd now, based in Monteal) and they were very good but all said they had to get out of country to lock in the serious engineering roles.
mathattack 5mo ago
Yes. Though even more than the US, their engineering talent from top schools heads into consulting and finance.