85 karma · joined July 30, 2023
It's fun to read the piece, I worried about many of the same topics, but with completely different reasoning (e.g. I dislike megacities, crazy work culture, and I'm likely not google/stanford/top-tier material).
But in general I think going abroad for anything, not only a PhD, is a good exercise.
Air temperature is already high (e.g. 36C at my location just now), and radiant heat from sun and concrete can make the felt temperature more like 60C.
It's sad that new real-estate layouts continue to be approved, which will only be good for this type of dense concrete hell.
I memorize really little and tend to spend time on reinventing algorithms or looking them up in documentation. Verifying is easy except the fee cases where the llm produces something really weird. But then fallback to docs or reinventing.
I think in any field it's natural to start out naive with an idea that may just be a few steps away from solving something important. Somewhere in the middle only to realize you're not, and then scramble with the ethical dilemma around your work, is it "good enough" or not. I was there anyway.
For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source).
Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs' Org-Mode which compiles to LaTeX.
I use LSP a lot (through eglot with Emacs-29). For each "mode" in Emacs there are alternatives to LSP, mostly what was there before LSP, which may be equally good. However, I found that switching to LSP simplified my setup, and having the same functionality/keybindings between modes is great, e.g. my projects switch me between Python, Rust, and Java, earlier that was basically three different "IDEs", while today they're very similar.