My buddy used to obsess over having the perfect camera setup before any trip. He'd research lenses for weeks and almost skipped a sunrise hike waiting for a new filter. Missing that moment totally changed his view on stuff. Your post @bena67 hits that same spot, how being there beats having the fanciest gear any day. Now he just grabs his phone and goes, and his pics are way better because he's actually out there. It's crazy how much we overthink the tools and forget the whole point is to just go do the thing.

In a color theory class, they explained multiply mode works like thin ink layers in comic book printing. It clicked that these digital tools copy how light acts in the real world. Overlay and soft light are similar to adding transparent glazes in old oil paintings. That idea of mimicking physical materials changed how I use layers completely. Now I pick a blend mode based on the actual light effect I need, not just guessing.

Have you thought about helping out part time? Your career is important too, so don't throw it away. Maybe you can find a balance.

I saw a Google DeepMind paper that found over 10% of some big training sets were duplicates. It totally messes up how the model learns patterns because it sees the same weird thing over and over. Honestly it makes sense why the answers get so bad, the model is basically trained on junk it thinks is important. Tbh most people don't realize how much garbage data is floating around in these collections. Cleaning that up is probably the most boring but critical step before you even start training.