ghego1

Very cool! It can be very useful in an educational environment, especially in universities

I'm sorry the hear that, and I think it's mostly worng.

I should add though that some activities are indeed useful, one of those is certainly teaching. If PhD students have full responsibility over the course, or part of the course, of which they're entrusted, it can be a very productive activity.

It is particularly formative if PhD students are entrusted with teaching activities covering subjects closely related to their thesis. In this way they can practice speaking over the things they are studying, which brings a ton of experience and positive growth.

On the contrary, if it's just teaching to cover hours that the professor to which the course is appointment is not willing to do, than it's much less attractive.

As a general rule, I'd suggest to a PhD student to be as selfish as possible. Although apparently counterintuitive, in their position it is a good rule of thumb to only engage in things that bring some tangible (but not necessarily immediate) utility. There are way too many professors willing to take advantage of younger positions for their own agenda. And that is also why it's very important who your thesis supervisor is.

Finally: never underestimate the "contractual power" that a PhD student has over a professor. Apart of few exceptions, professors need PhD students more than PhD students need professors. And in the case of those exceptions in which the professor is so well known and respected that there is a waiting list to be a PhD student, then I'd bet that it will also be so because such professor knows how to properly supervise PhD students.

EU Professor here.

You're right, expectations are very different in the "old continent". Things very quite significantly from country to country, but generally speaking in most EU you can do your PhD while working.

Retrospectively, knowing what I know know, I should add that if I were to start a PhD now I wouldn't trust a university that asks for a full time commitment, no exceptions.

I would be very suspicious that they will burden me with all kind of side activities (e.g. tutoring undergraduate students, handling bureaucracy, paper work, etc.) that are not really of any actual help towards the thesis.

As a professor my view is that PhD students should have quite a lot of "free time" to explore, try different things and fail as many times as possible, with the highest degree of freedom allowed by the domain in which they work. I think that that's at the core of what academic research is all about.

If you don't need lab equipment or anything that requires in person training, I'd say to go absolutely for a remote position as a PhD student. It doesn't really make a huge difference if you can do everything you need in front of a computer.

If you can do your PhD fully remotely, the two most important things are how respected and wel known is the university in which you enrol, and the tutor that will be assigned to you (don't underestimate this!).

Best of luck!

PS you're definitely not too old, and not too settled, as long as you have "hunger" for understanding how things around you work!

Reading about the disease brought back to memory the "nerve attenuation syndrome" imagined by William Gibson in Johnny Mnemonic.

IMHO the fact that we are moving towards one reliable engine is not a bad thing per se. I think it's a step in the right direction, as long as those contributing to chromium do have a saying in how it should move forward.

As a full stack developer I've battled so many times with weird implementations or unexpected behaviors across browsers that knowing that I can assume that the user will be on chromium is just piece of mind.

As a counter argument I don't think that monopolization of internet standards will be a risk. As long as chromium stays open source and anyone can fork it, I think that the risk of monopolization on internet is not on how web pages are rendered, but rather on how users reach content.

I think the latter is the real problem and I don't think that battling chromium is any good at that regard. Money would be much better spent on developing new ways to allow discoverability of content beyond Google, walled app stores and alikes.

It's a million for each submission

Most likely, he already knew

I think you replied to the wrong comment on hiring processes

Great, thanks for sharing!

9986 is simply genius

Technically very smart solution, but legally way too risky.

If there's ever a breach, for example someone steals the key and then accesses the data, the fine will be super high given that the company has retrained data after the user asked to delete it.

To mitigate such risk, the company would at least need explicit consent of the user, at which point it's just as simply asking the user to not really delete their account.

A viable option, legally speaking, could be to send the dump to the user, in a way that can be easily imported back if the user ever wants to login again.

This looks amazing, good job!!