I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.
eh, you can buy a great hardtails for 800-1.2k, even less if buying second hand. the main thing to point out is that at $700 including all the electronic add ons the components will be worse and trail rideability/durability will suffer significantly compared to even a low end mtb at the same price range. I've let friends use my nice bike while I ride my crap "general purpose" bike and it works on easier trails... (probably) safe enough on those trails, but still wouldn't recommend it.
adding on some recs that aren't necessarily 'good for the mind' but great from a gaming as art perspective and not designed for addiction -
co op: terraria, Deep Rock Galactic, and Magicka
various interesting games: Subnautica, Transistor, noita, hyperlight drifter, control
The New Yorker has always had high quality investigative journalism (albeit with varying levels of left leaning bias depending on the writer) in my opinion, and seems to be quite doing quite well.
Why do you associate learning and diving deeply into topics exclusively with research? A phd program will only require you to dive deeply into your topic of research. You can get very far in many fields by reading through relevant texts and sci-hub papers.
In addition, even though their is a dearth of theoretical experience in industry, at FAANGs and similar you will find opportunities to learn a lot in areas such as systems design, networking, and machine learning from senior/principal engineers who are as savvy as professors, albeit with a practical lean.
Even the hands on aspect of a phd can be done on your own time with a little know how and income, see applied science[0] on youtube. Full time engineer who often tinkers and replicates scientific publications in his garage in his free time.
As someone who listens to numerous genres but is also selective with what I listen to, I am confident that spotify simply doesn't cater to my demographic. They are really about scaling to the masses, as is evident by their move into podcasts and constants frontpage ads on new releases, as well as aggressive song caching. From a business perspective, I believe its simply not worth the compute/development effort from their side to have a recommendation engine on par with say Pandora.
At the risk of being trite, the response to FAANG employees being underpaid is also more or less 'you're underpaid, brah, go get another job!'. The bar for hiring and compensation is much higher, but management still wants to minimizing costs. This means systematically limiting internal salary growth, and hiring external rockstars at higher salaries to replace the internal rockstars that leave. Overall, it seems to be more effective to spend a couple months preparing/interviewing for the role you want than navigating the internal bureaucracy for an indefinite amount of time on the order of years.
I think it's more simple human nature. When you have billions, it's so easy to delegate work that tax avoidance becomes as simple as flipping a switch that says 'pay less taxes'. And if your highly distanced from the effects of your actions, I doubt many people would not flip the switch.
work on linux, daily driver is windows. how exactly to these commercial parasites 'spoil the original experience'? Sure theres preinstalled bloatware and telemetry, but you still have root access and I have had no problem tinkering to have my setup to do what I want how I want, probably much less than what I would have to do to reach parity on a linux system.
