I've found the internet to be a pretty generous community.. of course with any community, there are bad actors that will attempt to commodify that generosity by subtly asking for more and more, all the while profiting on the generosity of humans as a whole. Stack overflow needs to start paying it's workers.
I use mine for designing and building robot parts. I can design, print, and test like 5 different component designs per day. The difference this makes in quality of construction is insane. Even if I had a full tool tool shop I wouldn't be able to iterate like this. It's truly incredible.
The connection you are trying to make is somewhat unclear. Yes, forest dwellers probably have a higher carbon footprint, but probably not much more than a wealthy city dweller. People living in the forests actually reduce the near term impact of forest fires because people don't like their stuff burning up, so they have fires put out which reduces carbon in the short term, but in the long term creates conditions for devastating megafires.
Partly that but also partly "we spent that sweet infrastructure money on other stuff so we have to turn things off now because our infrastructure is decrepit and we learned that we get sued when our transformers explode and cause fires, so we are, again, passing the inconvenience on to consumers.
Tell that to all my brilliant friends stuck in the Midwest or other countries.. that work harder than I ever have, but can't fall into a high paying job like i can simply because of geography.
And 10 blocks away, where I have lived for 10 years, I see none of what you describe. The city is funny like that. Sad fact is, the homeless are incredibly concentrated around areas with lots of tourism and public visibility, because when you're homeless, you want to be around other people because you have _nothing_.
I've done about 3 of these kinds of "interviews" in my career.. basically a small work for hire each. Didn't get the jobs.. but took great joy in checking in on each of these companies after 6 months to find they no longer existed.
It's only pointless to you. It showcases the cards general compute capability. Just because they use it to raytrace doesn't mean you can't use it for physics/mining/ml etc.
For all I know, that article was a phishing attack. It literally served up some fucked up looking Microsoft ad in the middle of the sentence talking about fake ads. The internet is fucked. Burn it down and start over.
Write the least amount of code that will solve the problem, then write the least amount of code that will make the feature as efficient as possible to your ability.
Effective task switching is a learned skill.. I often find that switching between 2 or 3 tasks a few times over the course of a day, helps me be more productive because blocking is less of an issue and sometimes blocking due to problems needing to be solved, can be iterated on subconsciously while you're forebrain is doing something else.. I think there are parallels with neural networks.. task switching helps make your network generalize better.