I work 25 hours a week remotely as freelancer (although I'm available in slack more or less all the time) and earn nearly twice as much as during my PhD. Only that in more than 3 years I never really got into demotivated/frustrated phases. During my PhD I often felt depressed when sitting in the office all day, never getting a bit of daylight... And paying 300€ a month to have someone walk my dog.
I have lots of time for learning new stuff and also teach a course twice a year at a local college for some extra cash.
Started when my daughter was born and never stopped ;). Couldn't be happier and I really hope I can somehow keep it that way.
Read that article couple years ago, but still I just have to look at the quality of all the electric devices around me... It's not all bridges and hospitals. Heck, even my electric toothbrush from Philipps can't make it through a full year without failing (planned obdolesence or not).
Security aspects are typically even worse in non-software development fields. Just look how awfully unprotected things like babyphones, elevators, cars etc. always were and are.
Only that hardware hacking is usually riskier and less convenient (and often not very rewarding).
But yeah, of course... The threshold to get started with software is lower.
Personally I liked Andrew Ng’s course much more. While fast.ai seems to have some practical gems hidden, it's just so much noise surrounding it.
So much time wasted just by stating over and over again why their top down approach is so great. And even more with how to install this and that, dealing with the command line, setting up stuff, using AWS etc.
Things the "coders" the course is targeted at should be able to do anyway.
I always found myself jumping around the videos to find the useful parts (with the help of the time markers in the wiki) but then dropped it every time and did Andrew Ng’s course in combination with "the" deep learning book instead.
They just have much less noise.
Yeah especially compared to interrupting the editor, grepping code, parsing results getting back in, opening file and line number..
Find in files/project in Visual Studio makes that so much faster, also you can easily jump through all results without ctrl z and fg thousand times.
Versus a single hotkey press. Where is the context switch? :)
I use the first workflow myself pretty often, only with vim, because I work a lot per SSH. And it is just massively slower.
The single hotkey press is virtually never applicable though. If all you need to do is navigate to the definition, after the single first time you find it, it’s a matter of ctrl-b <file> enter.
At least in my experience, 99.9% of the time, I need a fast and organized way to see all the places where something is used or mentioned. The one special case of the definition is only a super tiny fraction such that the difference between a hotkey or an emacs key combination is utterly meaningless.
I do also think that being transported to some location of some file is a context switch that requires you to stop and think about where did the hotkey take you, what part of the source tree, what else is there.
When you git grep and open a file of your choice, the experience is just different. The path there aides you in understanding what to look for or do, at virtually no extra cost because it’s so fast and easy even in large codebases.
Maybe there is some slight benefit of the IDE handholding and hotkey approach in a codebase you literally never looked at before during the first few times you search for something. But that “burn in” effect isn’t enough to offset how the UI gets in the way, features that have to be accessed by menus or clicks, inevitable failures of integration with linters, compilers, or runtime programs.
2 is a really good point. It's the right wing parties here who talk most about direct democracy bla bla (but in reality only for stuff they would like to have). And present themselves as the people for the masses. Not that different to Trump I guess...
I'm more leftish but also feel that democracy isn't perfect. Mostly because of the "majorities voting for issues regarding minorities" thing. But authoritarian is even worse.
Only that basically every right winger I've left didn't call himself right but center. Might be a European thing because they'll quickly call you Nazi otherwise, but still... "I'm not a racist, but...".
The other point is that they really do love their hierarchies, but probably don't think they do. Just looking at all the Burschenschaften (fraternities) I've seen with their strong sense for hierarchy and leadership. Yet only few of them acknowledge it and feel it's that way. It's only from the outside that you can see it really. Person cult is certainly strongest with the extremer parties. Looking at people in Austria dressing their babies in Strache or Hofer shirts and filling their Facebook profiles with photos together with them etc.
You never see that with the traditionally centrist parties. They don't have those strong figures but seem more like a homogenous mass of people where you're hard pressed to name one of them. But I have to admit that it's probably one of the reasons why they're losing so much nowadays where people are seeking for those personalities again and love to hype Jobs, Musk or whoever else comes along..
Most gamers will object to the last paragraph. There are really a lot of strong friendships without ever meeting in person. Back then eben without ever hearing each other's voice. I've been working for a startup at the other end of the world for 2 years now and rejected lots of much better (remote) offers because I like the team... Which I've never met in person.
But I grew up in that ICQ/IRC/Forums culture and as a teenie stayed home alone for weeks while my parents were on vacation, didn't bother me. So certainly a personality thing. Now with wife and kids, my remote working times are the only lone times I have,so I love it.
I'm in Europe so YMMV but still I'm currently working for a US startup and will be gone for good starting now