mbeex

> a capital loss can be used to offset a gain

Same in Germany. It's a bit more complicated, because you can only offset certain asset classes against each other. Most prominently, losses in individual shares cannot be reconciled by gains in ETFs.

> Real estate is also tax free after two years

Gold one year (and free of VAT, when buying)

> Wireless headsets are something I understand because I'm someone who never wants to go back to wired headsets.

That's also true for me. Ultimately, I think it's a matter of using good judgment. All my major devices - even laptops - run on cables by default, tablets/phones wireless of course. For keyboards and mouses (OK, not WiFi in a strict sense) it depends.

It hasn't to be the 'best' work. The actual value comes from the conversation.

I think, you don't get the full grasp of "early, friendly internet". Very few people do today. In my bubble - programming, for example, young people can't even imagine that there were times when you could focus on _things_ instead of writing layers of security code around them.

This is not a binary "the people who don't want" / "the people who do".

The old Google was able to do an exact search using Boolean expressions. Man, I miss that all the time....

It's not rocket science to provide a user interface for this. A combination of GUI configuration, keywords, and specific URLs for these cases would go a long way here without bothering the regular user in the slightest. Yes, it's probably slower than in earlier times, pure search volumina and its handling by AI weighting etc. considered. But there is also a "don't want" on the part of Google and the other players.

But he also mentioned in one of his popular books about his own experiments in this regard that he stopped playing with these things because he considered the health of his brain too valuable for that.

An example of digital dementia in my opinion. Just test which list entries you still remember after two hours (or in many cases, after 10 minutes)

I'm using "Zoo for Zotero". Works for me as a more or less r/o synchronizer. My data are webdav-accessible hosted.

Will this

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-date-time-for...

work?

> It’s well-known among developer tools creators, for example, that integrating with GitHub and GitLab will help make your tool much more useful and appealing.

Certainly not for me personally, nor for the 10 or so companies I've worked for as a freelancer over the last 10 years. Among them are some - real - market leaders as well as small and fine companies that are extremely demanding when it comes to self-used technology (including development tools, of course).

Just look at who the owners of github (most people know it) and especially gitlab (most people don't) are.

More generally, just the single arbitrary picked difference between one company producing something tangible and another producing a pure software product should be eye-opening to anyone who has had both types of experiences. As for my career path, I've worked in instrumentation, avionics, cars, and Embedded, among others. Each with a very different culture, even among themselves, not to mention compared to software companies.

Sometimes a cigar Is just a cigar. I'm a mathematician, I love numbers. But believe me, many do not. And even in a considerably insistent way, they define themselves literally about it.

> So I type single quotes and let black do its thing on save.

It is the one small grip, I have with black. C&P for example some string-indexed dict element as argument into a f-string sometimes produces duplicate double quotes if it gets into black's hands beforehand. But in the end, black outweights all these minor things. This particular issue also is probably better considered as a tooling task for editors, IDEs etc.

As a mathematician by training - even with a now almost full career in professional software development - it's simply one of the handful of levels of abstraction I like to switch between. Much more concise then than usual code. I did all these things, massaging bits down to machine code, designing systems on the other end. Math has its place there, and if the toolbox supports it, I'll consider....

I remember that one of the first things I did when learning C++ was to implement a matrix library, operator overloading and all (oh, how naive when it comes to getting it right!).

Indeed it is (slight improvements not excluded). I would love to be able to write things like M^TA (w/o the HTML rubbish seen here - flavour of the same problem) for two matrices directly as code (can Julia do that?). Instead, I've been forced to learn row and column precedence in OpenGL, DirectX, Numpy, and whatever, paying attention to it in endless constructs.

Even after 25 years in the business, it's still a pain.

> Though I think the biggest benefit of JSON is that it is so simple

Still, I wish there was an option to insert comments.

To me, this is simply a rant against technical qualification - more bluntly, an excuse of the own inproficiency. Something whose significant increase as a trait of software development in this age is in my opinion undeniable. And this is a problem.

> no-code movement will continue its expansion

One of the many examples of false opposites.

A good programmer / software engineer / whatever you name it, is characterized by his ability to move smoothly between very different layers of abstraction vertically as well as the ability to adopt different points of view, technical caused ones and others. This requires different levels of mastery of all of these things. Not always at the same time, but ultimately no one can be avoided.

Regarding the example from above: Dealing with a real programming language becomes unavoidable with certainty at some point. And this isn't simply "glue code", a pretty derogatory term often used by people who just can't program. It is part of real quality.

> low-context

I understand where you're coming from, a lot of freelance work these days is just code grinding for a short or maybe longer period of time.

My projects are not of this type. Most of the time they are a mixture of specialized mathematics, software design and implementation.

I was there when Agile was invented. In my opinion, Scrum has always been the worst embodiment of a good idea.

In terms of content, teams of experienced developers have always worked in the spirit of Agile (of course there are exceptions). This informal understanding was and is superior to a formal horizontal Scrum implementation. For example, it preserves seniority and true accountability - two things that Scrum pretty systematically destroys in my experience. Initially, I was hoping for additional solutions to problems in the vertical direction - management, customer relations, etc.... But that never materialized, at least in my environment. And since I've been in the industry for more than 20 years, that's not too little.

These days, mandatory Scrum is a contra-indicator for any project that crosses my path as a freelancer.

It depends. The general shortage implied a relatively high average level of knowledge.

I grew up in Eastern Germany. At the time I started my studies, the country routinely created clones of the early 8086 PC. As a common user, you got a manual, describing things down to machine language. 'opcode hunting' (finding the assembly instructions from previously unknown opcodes) was kind of a competition among us aspiring physicists and mathematicians.

I like this kind of meandering.

A little gem of language history. Quite interesting, even for me as a German who already knew a few things about it.

You should probably re-read the quote I was referring to.

> Am I alone in not jumping on the Visual Studio [Code]

These are at least 3 different questions:

1) Why should I use VS Code in general?

2) Why should I use VS Code online? (the articles topic)

3) Why should I use VS?

The answers might turn out completely different.

Personally, I have for my main languages (C++ & Python) full IDE's (VS & Wing IDE). For quick Python scripts, VSCode is considered an option that I use rather often.

In what VSCode shines is - as also other commenters mentioned - his plugin eco-sytem. This has true swiss-knife traits. So I'm using it for many secondary and ad-hoc technologies:

- CMake files

- Julia

- GPS files

- JS files

- LaTeX

- JSON

- XML

- CSS

- Markdown (vanilla, asciidoc, ReST)

- remote editing

> and have more than one customer long-term.

This is rather a counter criterion. Government finally found out several years ago, that there is a new non-significant class of well-earning people - IT contractors - that can be legally milked by abusing laws, created ostensibly to 'protect' the weak.

The same in Germany. The people can be easily classified as bogus self-employed (scheinselbststaendig). The company would have to pay social security contributions retroactively up to 4 years. Furthermore, the 'contractors' could sue their way into employment. Also, workarounds mentioned elsewhere, like employment as temp by utilizing intermediate staffing companies, became widely known in time also to government agencies. Most companies will fire/replace such staff after 18 month max for this reason.

Proof?

https://www.umwelt.sachsen.de/umwelt/infosysteme/ida/q/eg

Same here, not looking back.

In Germany you can find both variants. My local market switched from refrigerated to non-refrigerated a year ago. Personally I (and probably most people?) have them in the fridge.