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.

Why?

> 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.

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.

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.

That very quickly adds up to some real savings.

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.

My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool.

Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.

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:

1) Decisions / sensible defaults / ecosystem / walled garden;

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hed40Muo50

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard

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.

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.

Additionally, the data types in your data model are limited by what your data layer supports, but on the domain side you might want to have richer data types.

ORMs make it easier to obtain the data in a shape and in types that are useful to you from a domain model perspective, while still storing the data in a way that's useful for the database side of things.

Example 1:

I want to store Users which have a `name` and `date_of_birth` property in a table. However, when operating on that object in the domain side, I might want to have instances of a User class which might expose a method such as `isOfLegalAge()`, which would let me know whether that user is old enough to, let's say, sign a mortgage contract.

A ORM makes it easier for me to get back an instance of a User class (which can have useful methods), instead of having to operate on a database row structure, which would give me strictly data.

Example 2:

A given Product, which has a `name` and a `price`, might be supplied by a Supplier, which has a `name` and an `location`. When fetching a user from a database, I might want to have an object in a shape such as:

  Product {
     name: string
     price: number
     supplier: {
        name: string
        location: {
           city: string
           country: string
        }
     }
  }

So from a data model representation it might look more like this:

  Product {
     id: number
     name: string
     supplier_id: number
  }

  Supplier {
     id: number
     name: string
     location_id: number
  }

  Location {
     id: number
     city_id: number
     country_id: number
  }

  City {
     id: number
     name: string
  }

  Country {
     id: number
     name: string
  }

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization