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spyke112

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Working as a freelance software engineer in Denmark.

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Anecdotal data coming in hot.

I use Siri daily for controlling HomeKit devices. She's not always on point though. I've named a light basically "Radiohouse", because that's what the designer called it, but 25% of the time she insists of playing radio instead of turning on the light. I'm not a native english speaker and communicate with Siri in Danish, but still. Siri is definitely not useless and I would love for her to become a lot better.

You may be right that the majority probably doesn't use Siri, but that's because it doesn't really make sense to use Siri on the phone. I rely on HomePod speakers to interface with it, that makes a lot more sense for me.

Apple Exclaves 1 year ago

Well, I may be an oddball, but I never really find myself having the need for snapshots, I have a tendency to not really delete files. Once upon a time i recall Dropbox having versions?

Apple Exclaves 1 year ago

I don’t know, it’s my workstation so everything is in Dropbox/Onedrive/Github/Gitlab, making the machine itself ephemeral… Come to think of it I should probably get a NAS and mirror Dropbox/Onedrive onto, just in case.

Apple Exclaves 1 year ago

Fedora is really good though. I’ve daily driven Windows, MacOS and Linux, Fedora is by far the best developer experience I’ve had so far. But then again, I tend to setup my devbox quite spartan, so that it just works.

Well, I once got a notice from Hetzner, that I needed to either stop running or harden some random open service I wasn't aware of running on my dedi box (I may have forgotten to install a firewall...). If i recall correctly, they were bound by German law, to monitor their network for suspecious activity, and if the customers didn't comply, they could close down your box. Now, it was a while back, my memory is a bit fuzzy and I don't have the time to look through old emails. Consider this anecdata.

Maybe it’s not the engineers that need to grow up, but the indecisive product people incapable of sticking to their principles for more than a week at a time.

That statement may be a bit much, but working in organizations unable to, well, organize around ideas leads to the state we’re in today, where most developers has to run around like headless chickens and put out fires. There’s exceptions, but from my point of view they are pretty rare.

I think you’re right, and even though it scares me a lot seeing my portfoilio down like this, I still try to see it as an opportunity to buy at a discount. It means I have to hold onto some more liquid funds, but i think it can turn out to be well worth it if you’re long term.

Wow, had not read that before. It seems really offensive to ordinary programmers that just want to get stuff done. I also find my peak productivity when using the .NET ecosystem, which after all is good for business.

Even smaller nit: Isn't it basically two sides of the same coin in this context? I'm not sure what the intent was in the previous post, but it could just as well be from the perspective of someone living in a desirable country worried about a lot of immigration of less fortunate people.

Money bubble 2 years ago

I’m not saying my insurer uses AI, but I recently had two dental claims processed entirely automatically by just providing invoices, and answering some questions online. This is in Denmark. Really nice experience.

That’s also just a one line function with template literals in JS, if by Titlecase you mean upper casing the first character. Maybe a bit overkill to bake into a stdlib.

I’ve seen C#/Java projects with just as many dependencies, but much inferior dependency management.

To be honest, this reads like you’ve only experienced frontend from the outside, it’s really not that bad. Besides all the croft is still pretty much optional, you don’t really need that much in 2023 to create something nice, but as frontend engineers we typically care about the code not becoming a total mess, because of lots of prior burns, that’s why i always introduce mandatory linting and formatting as a pre-commit hook where ever i can. It’s such a small thing, but boy is it nice when all the code always looks and feels more or less the same. I’ve tried the same for C# but it seems like the community does not care to the same degree.

If you incorporate as a "single person company", the taxation is for the most part identical to being employed, you can chose another taxation scheme that's sort of like an LLC, but not really. If you're serious as a freelancer, you need to create a LLC, which gives you the possibility to properly save up capital in the company, and eventually pay out dividends instead of a salary which is taxed at a flat 27% up to a threshold that changes each year (in 2023 it's $16.966,24 if married or $8.483,12 if not), above that it's taxed at a flat 42%. We still have corporate tax of any profits at 22%, which means that you still need to pay out a salary and maximize the effective personal tax rate before paying out a lot of dividends.

The only reason this is even a thing in tech, is because of the massive taxation of salaries above ~$100k. If i recall then whatever personal income in the upper bracket is effectively taxed at ~60%, which sucks. It makes it extremely expensive for the employer to give meaningful raises to top performers, and creates an artificial ceiling on salaries that is really hard to break through, unless you go freelance, but that comes with a lot of uncertainty and extra work. I prefer full control over my income and accept the uncertainty in exchange for that.