I moved to Bulgaria last year, and while I love the country and its... rugged and quaint people, let me assure you, tarnishing their driver's reputation is impossible.
On an unrelated note, studying Bulgarian brought me a lot of joy.
I stopped paying attention when the major browsers started to act somewhat against the interests of ad-blocking add-ons, some years ago.
Would anyone who has kept up let me know what would be the 2026 "industry standard" in terms of an ad-blocking and privacy stack?
I primarily use Chrome on Mac and Safari on iPhone but I'm willing to change browsers for better ad-blocking and privacy.
I would also be interested in solutions that scale beyond a single machine, for when I'm at home (e.g. should I get a little box and use it as an ad blocker between my internet my router and my network or something?)
> The Internet-circulating quote comes to mind: Planet Earth is pretty much a vacation resort for around 500 rich people, and the remaining 8 billion of us are just their staff. The Relative Few have got the system set up perfectly so that whatever we do, we're probably serving/enriching them. AI doesn't really change this, but it does further it.
I don't necessarily disagree with the analysis on how Planet Earth is currently setup to be, but something that I've been thinking about lately, is that to the extent we can consume the public image of some of the Relative Few, they seem oddly unhappy.
On a certain level, it’s also a question of different parenting philosophy.
> Stuff like online communications will come at a later age. Absolutely no reason to start explaining that to a 5 year old.
I agree, but I also see absolutely no reason why 5 years old children would have access to a gaming device. Pretty much any other activity I can imagine is better for them.
In my experience, if you get a dog you go to the government and pay the dog tax. The dog needs to have id, be chipped, and comes with a token you put on the leash. Part of the process is enforcing vaccination. If a dog has no such token, it’s considered a stray dog.
To so many issues, watching as a bystander from the outside, solutions exist, but the US seems to have a penchant for ignoring them and then claiming their problem is somehow not comparable to everyone else’s.
Whenever I need some sort of quick data pipeline to modify some sort of file into another format, or do some batch transformation, or transform some sort of interface description into another syntax, or things like that, that would normally require me to craft a grep, awk, tr, etc pipeline, I can normally simply paste a sample of the data and with a human language description get what I need. If it’s not working well I can break up the steps in smaller steps.
In my experience, it seems the people who have bad results have been trying to get the AI to do the reasoning. I feel like if I do the reasoning, I can offload menial tasks to the AI, and little annoying things that would take one or two hours start to take a few minutes.
What I’ve seen being done before, not only by lefties but actually by quite a few people, is to shift your paper 45~90°, so that you’re effectively writing bottom up (right handed) or top to bottom (left handed). It can get a moment to get used to it but it alleviates the smudging significantly.
For what it’s worth, personally, I don’t like it so much, but I know people who swear by it; and had fast, clear, legible notes to back it up.
PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).
Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup.
In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.
Perhaps you and GP aren't really the target market for their products. Part of why, after many years of Slackware and Arch Linux on desktops I assembled myself, compiling kernel modules, etc etc, I decided to pay Apple for the past decade is exactly because I don't want to make these decisions.
Frankly I pay Apple for the following things, in order or descending importance to me:
2) MagSafe cable so I don't trip on cords and/or damage my machines;
3) The subjective feeling that their corporate interests are more aligned with mine than other players in the market, viz. privacy etc.;
4) Pixel density;
5) Well-built aluminum bodies;
6) Large trackpads;
To be fair, I'm not saying the prompting for things I don't want (e.g. I don't consume any media services or exercise stuff) isn't annoying, but it seems to only happen once I switch devices every few years. It's been useful for me to discover services I wouldn't know about otherwise, which I now am a customer of, such as iCloud.
Next year marks 20 years that I started to code for money. I've been working from home for about 5 or 6 years of those.
I'm in my mid 30's so this industry is all I've ever known, but if it ever shifts such that the expectation of being in an office is something I'd have to deal with, I'd literally change careers.
I believe Portuguese got there looking for a shorter route to India (money) and eventually settled the land for gold, silver, brazilwood, diamonds and sugarcane (money).
It's been decades and instantly in my head I could hear Cid Moreira's voice. I'm sure I'm not the only one :-) Watching that on Sundays, with my father, as a child. Good memories.
Oh, I see, you'd like to immigrate to Europe. In that case, I'd suggest looking at the multiple options for immigrant visas, the rules for which vary country by country.
I believe, as others have stated, that the educational way is probably the most practical, as you can get a residency visa based on attending school (not necessarily a graduation, I know plenty of people that initially came to study the language, and that would qualify you for such visas), and subsequently after living there for a while follow the normal paths towards long-term residency.
As far as I'm aware, the Netherlands and Germany are destinations that have reasonably well-understood processes for immigration and a significant technical market. Both of these countries also have the advantage that you can mostly live your life in English – albeit you should of course strive to learn the local language if you intend to settle there.
For Germany specifically, there's been a recent reform in the laws which give you a very fast track even towards German citizenship, which then would allow you to live and work anywhere in the EU. On the other hand, the Netherlands seem to have a more digitalized bureaucracy, which can be practical: in Germany everything is still done by snail mail.
I've also heard good things about Switzerland, but there I have less personal experience. It is also not in the EU, for what it's worth.
That being said, I'd point out that from a technology market perspective, it's certainly more difficult to find employment at the moment than it was perhaps 10 years ago. This comes and goes in cycles, so I'm saying that so you don't get discouraged if it takes long and requires applying to hundreds of positions: that's the case even for us natives. There's geopolitical and macroeconomic reasons for that, interest rates, etc.
I wish you the best of luck!
P.S. Of course, if you're so inclined, you might want to be aware that Svalbard has no specific visa requirements for residence. You could conceptually move there tomorrow, as long as you're allowed to transit through Norway, which assuming you hold a US passport shouldn't be a problem.
However that place is certainly... not for everyone :-)
P.P.S. On a more serious note, and it's of course not the EU, but Australia has very friendly immigration paths and I personally know multiple people who were able to move there, quickly obtain work in technology, and two of them actually obtained Australian citizenship by now.
In software engineering there's rarely an objective way to answer "better" or "worse", it's more often a question of trade-offs.
An ORM is the choice to trade some performance and a little complexity in exchange for some convenience.
This is of course a simplification, there are other aspects to be considered.
Personally, it seems to me that this is a trade-off which is often valuable.
That being said, it's not necessarily the case that by using an ORM you are not using SQL. There are ORMs that offer you a way to abstract away SQL, others take a mixed approach where you use SQL to define structure and migrations, but use the ORM to manipulate data, for example.
What's more, each ORM has a slightly different set of features, depending on what their authors thought would be better. There's no universal "correct" way to build an ORM.
In some situations the loss of control you get when using an ORM is not worth it, because one could write better queries by hand. In other situations it might lend itself. Also different people will have different experiences and a different skillset, which also leads to different decisions.
It's all about what makes your life easier in terms of building maintainable software in the specific situation you find yourself in.