For those interested in his work, I really recommend viewing the recent documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, a failed film project Giger and several other proto-luminaries worked on (inspiring much of the iconic imagery in Alien, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones). Giger appears throughout the documentary. I believe it's still playing in the Bay Area.
Had a set theory professor who taught us that for the non-negative integers, m^n was just the number of unique mappings from a set of cardinality n to one of cardinality m. Ergo, for all sets A such that |A| = k, k^0 is just all mappings from Ø, which is necessarily the one with empty image and pre-image. So 0^0 = 1.
It seems to me that it in part was the effect of the boom: the hot local economy drawing a lot of unattached young men with money, the local government expanding too rapidly for controls.
I would be troubled by the thought of spending 80 minutes each day trapped in a steel cage. That's 400 minutes per week, or about 300 hours per year just sitting in traffic.
Even if SV were the best place to be an engineer, it's hard to imagine it being worth sacrificing 300 hours per year.
A 10 minute commute is 25% of that, which is 75 hours per year, which is still a lot. But for me, there is a huge psychological difference between a 10 minute commute vs 40.
Cutting commutes up into hours per year doesn't seem all that useful. Lots of stuff takes up what sounds like ridiculous amounts of time if you look at it like that. I'd rather look at it in terms of your day.
If you plan to spend 8-9ish hours actually working, and another 10 per day on sleeping, eating, shower, and other such necessities, that leaves about 5 hours of real free time. A hour and a half a day of commute time is a pretty solid cut into that. 20 minutes of commute time is hardly noticable. Personally, I'd sooner take the 10 minute commute and have that mental seperation between work time and off time than have an extra 20 minutes a day and work at home.
I've done a not-quite-so-bad commute, Seattle to Redmond, only 20-40 minutes on the way to work, 50-70 minutes on the way home. I found it soul-crushing. Most of the wait on the way home was in the line to get on the freeway. I became a worse person, unwilling to let other cars merge in, always assuming the worst of other drivers.
Currently I have a 20 minute pleasant bus commute to work, and I wouldn't go back to that commute. For me, it wasn't worth it.
For about six months I commuted from south San Jose to Mountain View. It was a fucking nightmare. I will never in my life live in a situation that requires such a commute.
Of course, now I live in the midwest and am hating the weather. My commute? Not so bad. But I miss the weather.
I came to the conclusion last time I was visiting SV that Northern California actually has terrible weather, everyone there just calls it 'traffic.' ;)
I've adopted a similar attitude as you here when it comes to past machine learning jobs, and discussion of detail. What ends up being your bright shiny line that you don't cross? I tend to just not talk about the specific feature engineering, being relatively upfront about such basic things as "I used a random forest".
Is "unlimited PTO" ever not window dressing for a more predatory policy? Anywhere I've worked with this policy had implemented it so that ever taking vacation was a negotiation with your boss (not something you could just comfortably declare), and it led to not being paid for any surplus vacation days (as none exist but an "infinite" amount) when you do finally leave said job because of burnout.
Anecdotal data point to the contrary: the company I work for switched to "unlimited" as of the 1st of last year. I took more vacation on the unlimited plan than I used to than I had on the accrued-PTO plan (4 weeks vs. 3). So it can happen, if the culture is right, and you have a manager that actually understands the value of vacation for both the employee and the employer.
It can be good. I've had it a couple of places, and never had to do any more "negotiating" than at my job before that had regular metered vacation. Now that I'm somewhere that's not in the really early stages, where I'm not solely responsible for as much stuff, it's pretty easy to just say "hey, I'm going to be out a few days next week" or "hey, this is the time I'm taking off over the holidays."
What's rare, but an extremely nice bonus on top, is when you get to "accrue" a small amount (maybe a week a year) as well that you never dip into but's there to be paid out to you when you leave. But that's not something I'd expect to be able to negotiate for at my next job, so if they didn't have it I'd try to just get a bit more salary to compensate...
