I don't understand this attitude. It's clearly more conducive to solving problems to be able to move around our environment more quickly. It's extremely useful (compared to a beginner who only knows insert and write quit) to understand the different vim modalities as well as a few commands to jump around a file or to perform regex or to call an external command.

When you're not proficient with the necessary tools, you're interrupting your flow with what you consider mundane. That you consider text editors mundane is more reason to move as much of that process into muscle memory as possible, not less!

Why are we pretending like mastery of our tools is unimportant? I hear this sort of opinion most eagerly expressed by engineers who in fact are quite handy with vim! Is this some new kind of flex where we're all pretending to take a purely academic approach to programming instead of becoming proficient with the tools of our trade?

This is wonderful! Just what I need. I keep returning to this one YT series by Frederic Schuller, "Lectures on Geometrical Anatomy of Theoretical Physics"[1], where he goes through the mathematical foundations of theoretical physics from the very bottom. He starts with propositional and predicate logic, presents the ZF axioms of set theory, and then boom, you're off to the races!

Recently, I posted a comment in a questions thread on /r/math asking where I could get a more thorough treatment of the philosophy of mathematics, as these lectures can get a bit arm-wavey, but the responses I got were disappointingly dismissive. One guy said all this philosophy was "not interesting" and considered the foundational stuff to be "just a construction". I get that it may not be directly useful for current research to a mathematician trying to get published, but common!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V49i_LM8B0E&list=PLPH7f_7Zlz...

The one thing keeping me on MacOS is that it is "*nix that works". I have never found Ubuntu / Linux to be as stable; worrying about updates breaking things, updates indeed breaking things, drivers randomly stopping working, googling in desperation for half-baked fixes online, randomly trying different options in some dotfile until stuff works etc. Mac just works; maybe there are features that Linux would give me, but as I spend my time between the terminal and the browser, I'm not sure I'd notice much.

I think I'm not alone in this approach; I wonder if this project has the change to be as rock-solid as Apple's offerings. If not, I'm guessing it's not for me.

Assuming you are talking about a US remote job - short answer: the talent is not the same on average, and search costs are high.

While pure coding talent may be on par, unless you are a solo dev you must be part of a team. Therefore communication skills are more than half the job. This is vastly underweighted by IT folks in general, and by gross stereotype, by the graduates of Indian technical schools.

An American company might be willing to hire someone, but it takes tremendous work to recruit, train, retain, and manage an employee. Especially at 12 hours time difference. So those are real costs. And this is why you rarely see "real" cost savings from outsourcing IT functions.