Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

> 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.

Ireland is in the same ballpark if you go private (insurance usually covers most of those €60).

If you go public, it’s free, but you’ll be in line based on the risk to your life, so it might be a long while. You really don’t want to check in to a public hospital and get an MRI right away because that means whatever you have is really, really bad.

It should be readily apparent to anyone paying a little bit of attention that large corporations do not pay their fair share.

> You're the one that brought up a comically inflated 70% number as if it were realistic.

Nothing "comically inflated" about it. That's pretty much the upper bound. It's not just income taxes, we've got property taxes, vehicle taxes, financial taxes, not to mention taxes on consumption, especially fuel, electronics, telecommunications, food, clothing, medicine, you name it. Employment taxes also reduce potential salaries. The brazilian doesn't have any savings. Sum all of this up, it can definitely reach 60% to 70% of income.

> You can't act as if the nominal rate is the effective rate, then complain when I bring up numbers based on the effective rate.

You dismissed entire categories of taxes in one fell swoop then started hedging with some deductions. Come on now.

> No, it means I'm picky about my doctors.

What, SUS not good enough? Of course not.

> You seem to have ignored the tax-advantaged retirements accounts, though.

Because it's tax deferral, not tax deduction. You're still gonna get taxed. You're basically claiming you're saving money by using credit cards. Brazil has no equivalent to the american Roth IRA either.

> You just need to ask for receipts and put them in a (digital) folder.

So... Time and effort. Multiplied by every deductible transaction. Plus the cost of actually learning how to deal with all this nonsense in the first place.

I know how much my time is worth. Even if it were "five minutes tops", it would definitely be a tax. And it absolutely isn't "five minutes tops".

> Then do it.

OK. Data from OECD's Taxing Wages 2026 provides total tax as % of labor cost figures.

  Germany 49.3%
  France 47.2%
  Sweden 40.6%

  OECD average 35.1%

Brazil is not in this dataset. Add INSS + employer contributions and Brazil can definitely reach the ~34-39% range, which by itself is already comparable to or exceeds the OECD average. USA is at around ~30%.

However, Brazil actually shifts most of its taxes onto consumption. It leads the world in that particular tax burden: ~12.5% of GDP, roughly double the OECD average, ~56% of total revenue. Add that and we're in the ~49-55% range.

Meanwhile, Brazil ranks literally dead last in the world's most-taxed countries on welfare return to citizens. Literally 30th out of 30. It collects taxes at European levels and delivers developing country services. Europe has world class schools, healthcare, infrastructure. Brazil has drug gangs that dominate vast swaths of our territory and which perpetrate more homicides than active war zones. Quite the quality of life.

> Lua was created in 1993 in a lab doing research for Petrobrás.

And Reserva de Mercado was in force from 1977 to 1992. Petrobras had to follow strict rules under these restrictions, which included software acquisition. This directly drove the creation of Lua and Lua's predecessors DEL and SOL.

Lua is a direct child of the policies of the brazilian military dictatorship. Born from the constraints they imposed.

> What part of that is due to an increase in taxes?

The part where half of the price we pay is taxes. On top of the global shortage price increases.

> In fact, there's a record high number of computer hardware parts in the most recent list of products exempt of import taxes.

No. GECEX 852 (2026-02-04) actually raised taxes on 1252 IT/capital goods. What you're citing are the follow up tax exemption requests. Which only exist because of the tax hike. Which only apply to companies with actual industry projects. You and me won't see a dime out of this.

> just to name a few that you probably know about

Brazil does not have a single competitive semiconductor fab. No actual computer technology to speak of. Half a century behind China, to say nothing of the US. Electronic voting machines are commodity hardware, just assemblies of somebody else's computers with Linux and some custom software on top. Pix is the only brazilian achievement on your list that's impressive, and even that is still completely dependent on foreign technology.

> Elixir, LangFlow, Neovim

First you say that individuals doing cool things is irrelevant to the national interest. You just dismiss it all as hobby tier. Then you cite open source projects by individuals as evidence of Brazil's strength? Which is it?

Not the kind of hobby that gives you career experience? Ridiculous.

> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)

Linus Torvalds, 1991. Need I say more?

I'm going to say more.

The demoscene influenced the games industry. Minecraft was made by a single guy just messing around. Bought for 2.5 billion. Tim Sweeney built ZZT, became Epic games, led to Unreal Engine, also drew heavily from the home computer scene, as anyone who ever played Unreal Tournament knows. Wozniak built the Apple I to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist club. Trillion dollar company. Facebook was once a literal campus dorm room project. Linus wrote git in 10 days to scratch an itch. Fabrice Bellard built ffmpeg. Python was Guido's christmas break project.

Individual computing capability is the seedbed of national computing capability. Everything is a throwaway toy joke project, until it goes into production and starts making money.

The brazilian government is not furthering the national interest. It's holding it back.

> I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil

Brazil relies heavily on indirect taxation, not income tax.

The average Brazilian effectively pays about *41.1%* of their gross income in taxes when all major taxes are included. (https://ibpt.org.br/brasileiro-trabalha-150-dias-por-ano-ape...)

They break it down as: roughly 15.2% from income-related taxes, 3.1% from property taxes, and *22.9% from consumption taxes*.

---

And anyway, the real problem is that the burden of tax is way way higher for a brazilian than someone in the global north.

As a general rule, in Brazil only people who do qualified work can reach the (converted) 1000 USD threshold. People who spent years in university or trade school, and are either very good at their jobs or graduated in prestigious professions such as engineering, law or medicine.

Even if they were to pay no taxes, most 40-hour week professional programmers here would still earn, at the end of the day, less than a high-school diploma 20-hour worker in US. Let that sink in.

Now take into account that on average, out of those $1000, $400 becomes taxes: In practice, there are lots of qualified workers here who don't even make $8k/year after taxes...

And no, the lower living cost does NOT offset it. Imported/technology goods are disproportionately expensive relative to income since we receive in BRL but still pay the dollar price, if not higher, due to said consumption taxes.

It's nigh-impossible to have true disposable income that your average Joe or plain Jane can use to dedicate to homebrew their personal projects in Brazil. And when it happens, it tends to in software form, since software still is relatively cheap to make.

People whose income in the top 25% bracket here make less in dollars than US's bottom 25% bracket, simple as that.

This is, of course also true of many many countries, which is why you usually don't hear about the new cool tech from Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Congo, etc. The people who are qualified enough tend to leave the country for better conditions. Of course, I'm not saying it's impossible, but people get surprised, just as you can see in this thread.