I'm usually just in reading mode, but occasionally I turn it off to see a/the blogs design because I feel it gives just a little bit more context to any post of text (for example, the author has a playful design and it gives me a small idea of their character). Unfortunate it's hardly readable, but it still says something about the author. HN is fun :)
I totally get the idea, but when a company can easily fire you for no good reason it's hard to develop any real attachment to a job so that it is something beyond just an exchange of labor for payment.
In my experience I find pair programming with collaborative tools like VSCode's "Liveshare" [], paired with audio-only call (Slack huddle, Google meet, what have you), far superior than in person pair programming.