sarah_eu

I would not pursue this idea.

We work in the sleep space

Is this another way of saying you work from bed?

Americans look at their 9k a month salary and don't care about loosing an extra 300 USD on health insurance. I've experienced the British and Swiss systems - Swiss is like the American - pay roughly 600 CHF a month - and it's way better than the NHS. You can see a specialist the next day, get a scan the next day etc.

throwing money on the floor outside Manchester Piccadilly train station

Has been happening for at least 10 years.

Well it will be multimodal, training and inferring on feeds of distributed sensing networks; radio, optical, acoustic, accelerometer, vibration, anything that's in your phone and much besides. I think the time of the text-only transformer has already passed.

In the UK, most CS degrees are actually Software Engineering, little maths content. There are probably a handful of universities where CS is treated as a branch of maths (top 3 or 4). Any kind of engineering or physics will leave you in a better place to do engineering design work or scientific programming than a CS degree.

Nick Bostrom has written good stuff on this, and all of the morbid implications.

What's a problem you get only after 15 years? Lower back pain? I've never heard of interesting problems being gate-kept by years of experience. PhDs have the best share of current interesting problems.

I prefer to work for between 2 and 4 hours on Saturday and Sunday. And it's always work for myself, not an employer. I'm always fresh for a few hours after I wake up, and enjoy it. Never regretted fewer hours more often. Often regretted more hours in a single sitting (ie. I don't work late).

I think there's reason for concern. I own, but haven't read Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence", which lays out the risk scenario in depth. I have read Bostrom's "Global Catastrophic Risks", which treats AI in a chapter rather than a book, and I found the argument for AI being a genuine threat convincing.

How can you work for 26 years on a US salary, and then panic when you're laid off? Guess you have somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 of a million USD, in some form. I'd lay myself off if I had something like that.

You should put it all on black 28. If it doesn't roll, put 65k on 1st third. Thank me later.

I would wipe your partner from your mind. Forget about tracing any problems to your parents too. It's worse than unhelpful. If you can't stand your parents, keep them out your mind. Focus on yourself. Be consistent with your gym. Finish the PhD in in least stressful way possible. Take up some hobbies; something manly, like Judo or BJJ two or three times a week, and something social that has girls, like swing dancing or salsa.

Never regretted quitting either. My first job was pretty stellar too, in engineering R&D, and probably the smartest set of people I've worked with to date. I must have been among the top earning graduates from the CS program at my university (which isn't a great university for CS, to be fair). I quit because I couldn't adjust to being a company employee, working in a bland business park on the edge of a new city, writing Python in an open-plan, doing agile, and going to lunch with the same people at the same time every day. Great company, feel nauseous just thinking about it.

I've been working with it for a few weeks. Developer but no gamedev background. I love it. Very easy, documentation is extensive, good support on the forums. I will agree with others in this thread who've said they don't like GDScript. For me it's not necessarily a problem with the language (although it's not immediately clear how script execution works - each script is attached to a tree node), but rather that it's another thing to learn. Given that, I've used custom modules (module compiled into engine) and GDExtension (module compiled as a shared library). GDExtension is what I wanted, and I can write a game in C++, and have it build quickly.

What's easier than dd?

I'll expand on this by adding that at the beginning of your career you're often happy to be doing any paid work related to your degree. After time you want a combination of interesting work, independence (autonomy) and scope for the future. You find this combination more often with research institutes and university labs. A Masters can prepare your for this route, but only if you go hard with it, and if it's specialised and not in generic software engineering. I'm thinking something like Robotics / Mechatronics, Computer Vision.

Some points to consider:

If you want a job in science (in Europe), then you'll want a Masters. If you want to work for companies like LEGO, then probably not.