José Devezas

They’re actually quite lucky to be called “Microslop” instead of what we used to call it back in the day…

And not just Microsoft. This applies to all of the big tech names training AI models. Not to mention the destruction of a few rare books (I kinda forgive the paper itself, but some copies are just rare and they don’t seem to care).

I think nothing beats experience, regardless of what your education is. As long as you can prove that you know what you’re talking about, companies will hire you. So, if you’ve got a masters or a doctorate, but no experience, you’re in a tough spot immediately. On the other hand, there’s a trade-off with time; the time you spent on your education is time you could’ve spent instead gaining experience and networking. It’s hard to do both, but during a masters it might be possible. Quite harder to do while pursuing a doctorate though, unless the networking is happening inside academia.

That’s my perspective as well, we’re either overqualified or underexperienced, as you said. For, personally, it also took a toll mentally, both because the journey was tough due to the pursuit of funding, but also because I finished during COVID, which took any chance away, due to the absolute lack of networking happening at the time.

Put my life on hold to pursue a PhD in CS, because I thought that would guarantee me a future. Well, it did not. Going straight into an industry job would have made my life a lot better financially and I would probably be buying a house by now.

It depends on what you actually like to do. For something like computer science, I wouldn’t pursue a higher education. This was my path. CS was the hot thing back then (it might look like it still is sometimes, but it’s not really, it’s a lot more like plumbing now). I ended up with a PhD in CS, which is essentially useless. In CS, the only thing that matters, after understanding the basics, is keeping up with new tech and learning for yourself. No college degree can really prepare you for this. Now, if you want to be a doctor, you wouldn’t be able to skip the degree. That’s why I said it depends.

Personally, for my job, if I went back I wouldn’t pursue a higher education anymore. I was doing perfectly well learning by myself even before high school. If you are able to get into an online community of people with the same interest, you’ll be able to learn a lot more, and build a network of contacts. You’ll skip useless subjects and just build up what matters.

My advice to you is to follow your passion (everything will fail anyway, so that’s how you get motivation to keep going). After you know what you want to do, then decide if you need a course or if you can get a job and learn by yourself in order to progress. Unless the job you’re seeking requires some kind of credential, like medicine or law, then you can progress much faster by doing. It won’t look like at first, but you will. If you end up pursuing a higher education, then my advice is to try and go through it as quickly as possible. The goal is to get out quickly. Staying in academia has a terrible cost for the mind. If you lose your mind, you’ll lose everything later.

Reddit is quickly becoming a den of censorship, the opposite of what it used to stand for.

It’s not a nightmare, but I’ll still go with AMD next time. I think NVIDIA does a really poor job with drivers still. I keep having sleep issues.

Data Centers should produce their own energy through solar or wind. I believe they should be off-the-grid energy wise.

The fact that I’ve been a Reddit user for 17 years and I’m reading this on Lemmy says a lot about what Reddit has become.