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As a quick anecdatum, I'm on macos and I'm definitely more than 20 years old, and there is a quite perceptible difference in responsiveness between Zed and a VSCode-based IDE for me. (Though then again I did play fast-twitched games a lot when I was younger.)

Highly recommend it as well. I'm a junior developer; that course gave me a much better sense for how to design software and answered a lot of software engineering / design-related questions that had coming up over and over again. I'm also just really allergic to handwave-y fluff, and the Mirdin stuff is just so much more concrete and precise than, e.g., the 'clean code' software engineering advice I've seen on the interwebs.

Is there by any chance a publicly available recording of this presentation on purely functional data structures?

out of curiosity, how much applied math should one bone up on? (Obviously the more the better, but diminishing marginal returns and all that.)

I think it depends a lot on the specific school. I'm at an Ivy League school that tries to make its classes accessible even to people without previous experience.

there are languages that have better support with dependencies though, e.g. Julia (every time I have to debug dependency issues in some other person's Python code/requirements.txt, I find myself wishing it had been written in Julia). I'm not disagreeing with the overall tenor of your post, but I do think there's a medium that's possible to strike here: maybe something like a simplified DSL in Julia, or something like https://www.visidata.org/

Another, lower-risk option: at some universities, it's quite possible for undergraduates to take graduate classes, especially if they've had the relevant background. So you could try applying to be an undergrad at such an institution. And you might not need to take that many gen ed. requirements if you find a university with flexible requirements (e.g., google 'open curriculum')

This is likely to be the easiest way to learn more theoretical math-and-CS subjects, though it'll probably be more expensive than just getting into a phd program.

What other classes that you've tried would you recommend?

one example: https://about.sourcegraph.com/strange-loop/strange-loop-2019... another: I have RSI, and while I use speech recognition, my voice gets fatigued really easily. Also, using speech recognition in public can annoy people. Real time lip reading recognition would be a serious boon for me.

the art of problem solving series

I'm a philosophy grad student who is currently doing some data science classes. First, I think the connection might've been clearer if you had taken an intro ethics or political philosophy class. For instance, the free speech class for undergrads in my university has a session on issues like net neutrality and whether free speech on platforms like facebook should be limited.

And second, as someone else below mentioned, a lot of the more general and theoretical things you might pick up on humanities classes can be used as a lens to think about tech-related issues, even if the professor or readings haven't actually explicitly done that. (In fact, if none of the readings have done that, trying to do that might make for a good final paper --- it's something that's at least worth talking to the instructor about.)