Interview behavior is certainly a reflection; presence of a whiteboard, on the other hand, tells you absolutely nothing about the quality of the workplace.
Something to keep in mind - experienced devops and security experts are extremely valuable, at the same time ML beginners are in oversupply. Do you really want to put yourself at a massive disadvantage in the near to medium term, especially if the future of ML is kind of uncertain while with your other skillset you can have a pretty stable career?
As someone working in ML (a couple of years of experience), I'd much rather be in your position than mine.
Managing the resources on the planet in a way that every human being has good quality of life and doing this in a way that's sustainable in the long term and without resorting to oppression, dictatorships or active population reduction.
I read the post and still have no idea what point it's trying to convey apart from a general sense of smugness.
> At the end of my programming day, I want to look on something that is beautiful. I don’t particularly care about how useful a chunk of code is or how much money it might make, or what silly little business problem it solves. If the damn code is ugly I don’t want to see it.
As much as I like 3blue1brown, watching those videos is not a good way to learn. It's maybe a good way to get some intuition about a topic and much closer to the "infotainment" category. A good textbook + solving problems + maybe writing code works much better for actual learning.
Simply switching devices helps. If it's after 5pm and I don't have any meetings or tasks that I can complete by 6pm, I turn off the work laptop and put it away until the next morning.
Your question is almost orthogonal to the way AI is developed. It starts with the task and the AI algorithm is specialised to it. In that sense, we have AI that has not just human but superhuman performance in tasks like playing chess for example, and we're working on many other tasks.
AI that resembles human intellect in the general sense is still just a dream. And we're not remotely close to even knowing how to approach this problem, let alone solve it.
Similar situation - still sharing in London and thinking how for the same amount I can have a whole flat to myself somewhere else in the UK. It's kind of difficult to plan things if I expect to move back to London in 6 months or so.
> And should they be able to do all or any of this?
Personally, I don't think they should which is why I wouldn't work for anyone who tried to enforce this. It would be a massive red flag if an employer brought this up. Also, the companies that manage remote well know this and none of them are implementing invasive monitoring. The ones that try it are a small number of short-sighted old-fashioned shops that feel like they're losing control if an employee is remote and are desperately tring to gain that control back.
> 71% chance of victory, which is anomalously low chance given current polling data.
Your question is based on 71% being low, which I don't think it's true. It's way way higher than I would expect or predict and certainly higher than what the polls indicate. Have a look at 538's methodology for creating it and also look at Nate Silver's article on how you shouldn't count Trump out yet.
As far as Taleb goes - who cares, the more people ignore him, the better.
Do you already have a degree in mechanical engineering? If you do, you will likely be able to switch to software without doing another full undergraduate course.
> I don't know anything about instagram's infrastructure but what I can tell you for certain is that every one of these companies has legacy infrastructure
So you don't know anything about Instagram but at the same time know for certain that they have legacy infrastructure that keeps them from meeting legal requirements? How about we don't give them a pass just because it requires a bit of work to comply with laws and regulations.