monster_group

It depends on what you want to do with your life and career. You haven't said what your interests are or what your Master's is going to be in. If you want to be a software engineer then starting career early is better. If you want to go into research then going to university is better. If your Masters is going to be in liberal arts then your prospects of a lucrative job out of Cambridge will be less than having gained two years of professional experience. Since I don't know the specifics, I'll give general advise - decide what's important to you long term and choose the option that aligns with it.

Downside is not "essentially uncapped". That would be the case if I did not have insurance. I do have insurance - one with high deductible with a fixed maximum loss that I am willing to accept should such an event happen.

Your point is perfectly valid. There is no single right answer. It just depends on what risk level one is comfortable with and that varies from person to person.

By catastrophic loss I mean an event that has the potential of causing bankruptcy (such as house burned to the ground). Home insurance rates vary a lot depending on where you live so our math is likely very different and we both could be right. While a big expense in one shot definitely pinches more, paying higher premiums every year, the annual premium hikes, in addition to raised premium for subsequent years due to filing a claim can also add up to a lot surreptitiously.

At this point, I buy all insurance (home, auto, health etc.) with highest deductible and lowest premium knowing that there is a high probability that insurance will not pay (or pay only partially). I mainly buy insurance to avoid catastrophic losses and hope that, if such an event were to happen, they would cover the loss at least partially. For smaller losses I am willing to absorb the loss and save money on premium every year. The money saved on premium can be used (to some extent) to cover the loss of the denied claim. Also, in the event of a loss, having high deductible discourages me from filing claim which keeps premium low for subsequent years.

Note the irony in the title.

A little off-topic - the movie Stowaway (on Netflix) is a good movie about journey to Mars.

Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.

Ideally yes, one would ask these questions. Practically, there is not enough time. You'd be lucky to get even 5 minutes to ask all these questions. Even if you have the time, you have to ask these questions in a diplomatic manner. Unless you are a well known hot shot in your field, a job interview is marred by power imbalance and any signal that you are cynical, confrontational, question authority etc. will count against you. So do ask these questions, but be careful how you frame them.

One doesn't need unlimited PTO to be dead.

Author's description of twin paradox is incorrect. In fact, the paradox is not described at all. The paradox is that since motion is relative then from both twin's perspective the other twin goes on a journey and ages slowly. So why it is that on returning, only the traveling twin has aged slowly? The answer is that both twins indeed see each other age slowly but for the traveling twin to come back they have to slow down to zero and reverse direction. At that moment the frame is no longer inertial. While turning around, the traveling twin will see the stationary twin age very quickly (enough to catch up with their earth age), so when they meet there's no paradox. For each of them the other has aged as per their observations.

Nothing lasts forever. Even 100 years is a very long time given the technology / cultural / legal changes. It's futile to try to come up with an eternal solution. Just host it on something that seems to be reliable / stable for the foreseeable future and tell the younger generation to migrate it after you are gone to whatever tech of their day is going to be. If the younger generation does not care to migrate your work, then it is not of value to their generation and it is OK for it to fizzle out. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it is probably best to have realistic expectations about how much people would care about your work after you are gone.

The main (and possibly only) benefit of networking is that hiring manager will look at your resume. Without networking, your resume may never even been seen by the hiring manager. But beyond that networking does not matter for the candidate. In fact, FAANG companies go out of their way to make sure that the person who referred the candidate is excluded from having any involvement in the interview process. The days where you get to skip rounds just because you know someone are gone.

This process is quite normal. The reason is two fold - first they want multiple people to interview the candidate before making a decision, one bad interview doesn't necessarily rule out a candidate. The second reason is the candidate experience. Some candidates feel humiliated if their interview is cut short and will harbor bad impression of the company for a long time. The company doesn't want that.

And I want to become a quantum theorist. I think being able to manipulate symbols on paper and explain the universe is food for the soul. Grass always seems greener on the other side. :-)

That's not the correct analogy. In classical case, the color of the ball is fixed even before you open the box (you just don't know it). But in quantum entanglement case, the spin is not fixed until it is measured (because the wave function hasn't collapsed). But as soon as you measure the spin you get either up or down value. If you get up, then the other entangled particle will necessarily have down value when measured, If you get the spin down, the other particle will necessarily have the spin up. Now you may say that, the spin of the first particle was fixed all along and we just didn't know it. This argument is called "hidden variables theory". But it is proven by Bell's inequality that such a theory cannot exist, so the spin of particle 1 is indeed a random outcome. What's "spooky" is that in spite of it being random, it instantaneously fixes the spin of the other particle.

While the article may have some truth to it, the emotionally charged language makes it difficult to see the article as having been written objectively.

It's the element in quick sort that you swap around to make sure all elements before pivot are less than it and all elements after are greater than it.

You don't need to get a degree from a top college or even a good one. Just get any easy degree through online / distance learning program to get past filters and dumb HR criteria. For online / distance learning degrees you wouldn't need to compete with million other students. As you get your online degree, you can keep looking for jobs and also work if you can find a job.

Can you elaborate? Are you taking this decision willingly or are being forced to because you can't clear interviews?

While I don't know Latin, I do know Sanskrit. In Sanskrit you can say entire sentences with one word. For example "जिगमिषामि।" is a full sentence and it means "I want to go." This is possible because Sanskrit (and Latin) are highly inflected languages. The price for brevity is that now you have to remember many more forms of verbs and nouns. So nothing impressive (at least to me).

I have been working on quantum physics since March of this year and am hoping to complete the whole text book (Townsend) by end of the year. Then on to special relativity -> classical field theory in 2024, general relativity and QFT in 2025 and 2026 - at least that's the plan.

I decided to start self learning theoretical physics late last year. I have been now studying physics every day for almost a year (before and after work). I did have to brush up on calculus and matrices but it came back very quickly (within a few days) after a 25 year gap so I'd say don't let that discourage you.

Not a physicist either but currently self learning quantum physics. Note that Planck length and time are just units - they do not mean that space and time are quantized. Quantum theory treats space and time as continuous variables. While it has been speculated that space and time are quantized I do not believe this has been experimentally verified because the scales involved are beyond current experimental reach.

If you want to get good at something, you will get far more return on your time and effort investment if you just practice that thing rather than something tangentially related to it. If you want to get good at programming, practice programming not math. Math may help you but it won't help as much as practicing programming.

By -

1 Listening to them talk about stuff that is interesting to them but not to me such as video games, kids' books, toys.

2 Fixing their broken toys.

3 Building science models with them

4 Helping them collect stuff (such as rocks etc.) for school projects

5 Not yell at them when they don't get a simple math or programming concept (I have had a multi decade head start on them so I need to be patient)

This is terrible advice. Great that it has worked for the author but it does not mean it's a good idea for everyone. 2 weeks is the standard and as long as you give that you maintain good relations. Most people are not as valuable or important as they like to think they are. I have seen very important people leave / fired and things still go on. (Twitter is still working - isn't it?) Once you tell that you are leaving, everybody's attitude towards you changes. You want to minimize that awkward period. There's nothing to be gained by staying longer than 2 weeks. If you have stock vesting, wait until stock vests before giving 2 weeks notice.

You can also ask Okta. They should be able to list tangible benefits. If they struggle to answer the question, you still get your answer anyway.

After using Ubuntu for 15 years, I moved to Pop!_Os (it uses Flatpak and no snap crap). Have been very happy with it.

That's not practical at any company of a decent size. High level executives routinely discuss highly confidential information which cannot be shared with lower level employees until the right time (if at all). That's the reason why they have closed door offices. They need them.