You have experienced the pinnacle of Windows (we could probably also add Windows 7 to this). Do yourself a favor and never touch a Windows 10 and especially Windows 11 machine. It’s unimaginable how Microsoft managed to break everything that was working and how clever they are in terms of marketing to sell you stuff you don’t need.

They made me finally switch to Linux because my paid 365 subscription offered me to try the new outlook because Windows Mail was to be discontinued in future. I activated the test and the fun began: Only one of seven accounts was imported into outlook. Of course it was the only Microsoft account (Outlook). All other Accounts were ignored. I thought „Ok migration didn’t work, I’ll do it later manually“ I had a new email. I clicked on it. Edge opened although Firefox was my standard browser. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that I was clickbaited into opening an advertisement by one of the biggest companies on this planet.

This made me immediately stop my work and install Linux Mint. I’m not going back any time soon.

For job related reasons I have to use a lot of VMs. Unfortunately most of them are Windows 10. I created a naked installation years ago and basically use this as the base for individual development VMs. One of these annoyed me for days to make an update. All I could click was „remind me in one hour“ or update immediately. So I chose the one hour a lot of times. I finally let it update. Now my (Windows default!) task bar is transparent and also the whole windows menu. A colleague using the same VM with the latest updates (without changes to installed software) has no issues.

The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

That’s not entirely correct: One achievement was me donating money to the IA after this nonsense 😁

30 years ago we definitely had snow in winter. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But I remember playing in snow basically every winter as a kid. And I’m living in a very mild region of Germany. Now I’m considering all season tires (just for legal purposes) to not change wheels twice a year, since there is maybe some snow for one week in total.

Spoke with a guy this week who was born in the 30s. He said winter back then was much harder. Whole lakes or even rivers were frozen solid. I can’t imagine being able to walk to the other side of a major river…

But I’d say (at least that’s my experience) it’s not a very addictive substance. Or it depends heavily on the person.

I drink 0-5 cups a day. I like the taste and I like drinking it in some social settings. I don’t need it in the morning to get my body awake. I can just stop drinking coffee any time for longer periods of time without any issues.

Once I was working in Bavaria for about 6 weeks. We drank around 1l of beer every dinner. Returning home I wanted to drink a beer after the first dinner. This made me stop drinking alcohol for two months and since I made this experience I regularly stop consuming substances that may be addictive. I never experienced this with caffeine.

This is the correct answer. Don’t overthink this. Just go, have a look and that’s it. Tell everybody involved that you don’t have to proof anything if they ask.

I know people who could afford this house easily that walk around like a regular farmer. Sales people having regular contact with wealthy people know this.

No Christmas tree? Straight to jail!

What about a GOpher?

I’m relaxed. IMHO this is just another trend.

In all my career I haven’t seen a single customer who was able to tell me out of the box what they need. Big part of my job is to talk to all entities to get the big picture. Gather information about Soft- and Hardware interfaces, visit places to see PHYSICAL things like sub processes or machines.

My focus may be shifted to less coding in an IDE and more of generating code with prompts to use AI as what it is: a TOOL.

I’m annoyed of this mentality of get rich quick, earn a lot of money with no work, develop software without earning the skills and experience. It’s like using libraries for every little problem you have to solve. Worst case you land in dependency/debug hell and waste much more time debugging stuff other people wrote than coding it by yourself and understanding how the things work under the hood.

Good old brainfuck 👌

IMHO assembly isn’t hard. When you gain enough experience you start to see „visual patterns“ in your code. For example jumping over some lines often equals to a if/else statement or jumping back is often a loop etc. Then you are able to skim code without the necessity to read each line.

The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.

I needed it often in the past in the PLC world but it is dying out slowly. Nonetheless, when I encounter 30+ year old software I’m happy to be able to get along. And your experience transitions to other architectures like changing from one higher language to another.

Nonetheless, if I’m able to choose, I’ll take Go. Please and thank you 😊