This is the THIRD time the Republicans have cancelled funding to my research projects over the course of 15 years. This country isn’t conducive to stable research work.

The projects cancelled were on senior care tech with smart homes, augmented reality to help prevent falls, and air quality feedback to help people during wildfire seasons. No exactly hotbeds of controversial topics, but having my career and livelihood jerked around against and again by these assholes is enough for me to go. The lastest bend to fascism was just the nail in the coffin.

It is, and I’m well aware of just how hard it is to be in my kind of position. I’m leaving very soon for a job overseas.

It took 12 years of college. It took massive debts that I spent a decade earning to pay off. It took a further 15 years of competing in academia to become a desirable candidate for the job. I’m taking a serious pay cut and spending the saving from a decade of work to make the move.

Its a privilege, but having come from a family that valued education, but had little money to help me, I kinda feel like I’ve earned it. Decades of effort on my part went into this.

You can be pissed all you want, but I’ve paid my dues and I’m spending them on a better and safer future for my children away from the US Banana Republic of Dumbfuckistan.

https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

No ruler or leader ever does.

In my city, the last trolley went through in 1936. Still waiting for the next one.

The population pyramid for Russia is terrifying from a societal stability perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/File:Russia_Population_Pyramid.svg The cliff of a drop for the under-30’s (of both genders) is an echo of a dip in the 50-60’s group, which is a carry over of the 78-82-ish group. Each generation grows a larger hole in the population and that hole is growing with each generation.

Add in a combination of destructive wars, emigration (mostly due to people not wanting to die in said wars), and alcohol consumption and it’s not going to get better. No amount of money or medals awarded to women having children will really change this. It’s a region dying generation by generation to dictators’ abuses.

The next big nail in the coffin is that complete collapse of the pyramid in the 7 and under group. There’s just no children to replace the 33-50-ish group. That older group is essentially the bulk of the Russian workforce right now and as soon as they start to age out shit’s going to get real bad real fast. There’s literally no one to replace them across the entire country.

Except in public media, but I guess data, daily on-street evidence, and open statements by the right-wing party leadership isn’t “evidence”:

“Germany says far-right ideology behind record 40% rise in politically motivated crimes”

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250520-germany-reports-40-jump-in-politically-motivated-crime

I consider that analogy somewhat different. Being able to leave your home to travel safely is a basic human right. Cars on roads are inherently dangerous, even if you try to be defensive as a pedestrian. You can be sitting in your grassy front yard and vehicles can come crashing in to kill you. That happens on a regular basis in the US. You can be walking on the sidewalk and have a car run you down. The vision of kids running into the street to be hit isn’t the only risk, merely existing is. Hell, there’s plenty of people killed in their home by cars crashing into their houses!

Car crashes are the #2 reason for children’s deaths in the US (#1 is now guns, it was cars until about 3 years ago). It’s the #3 reason for adults to die after heart disease and cancer. Those stats are actually low balling it because we’re finding the noise and pollution from cars jacks up many of the other categories (including heart disease, cancer, dementia). Living by car roads is just inherently dangerous, regardless of how you try to teach your kids to avoid being run down in their own neighborhood.

The government building car only infrastructure, I feel, is an immoral and murderous act against the public. It’s categorically different from the parental preference of whether your 14 year old manages to see some porn using a computer you bought on an Internet connection you installed.

I’m at the PhD level. I’m very fortunate to be in a place with more mobility in academia circles.

I’m leaving a university in the US that’s not heavily reliant upon soft money (grants/donations), but we’re still losing research support in various ways to this crazy administration. I start at a school in Europe in the fall. I guess I’ll go teach and do engineering research there since the US isn’t really interested in having academia exist.

I did the same thing with the Linux machine there, but we got it up and running with a sweet potato using a patch set for the kernel and cross compiling it from the basic potato release. We did find the drivers for the VGA card we salvaged from a scrap pile too! Got it up to the full 640x480 supported by the card.

You could say it was a sweet setup.

The 9600 baud to 14400 baud leap was serious business. That was a notable jump for people back in the day.

Of course, I was stuck with my 1200 baud modem while my buddies could start playing more serious games like Spectre together.

I’ll definitely have to check out the underpinnings and use of that term. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

I hear that. It’s been over a decade (or so) since I’ve played and I still remember a few of the games very specifically. The rest are a blur with a general feeling of annoyance left over.

Since I never spent the hours of learning how to min/max my build against every conceivable combination of enemies and teammates, I never could do well at the higher levels. The net result was mediocrity in my style and huge waves of anger from the random people I was teamed with.

To be able to compete you have to invest huge efforts into learning the builds and styles to match. I just didn’t care enough, but with the XP system always climbing (by sheer games played), I was pinched out just because the system has room room for casual play.

The spikes of reward from the mid level games were quickly dwarfed by the constance negative experiences as I was forced to level up.

High five as fellow recovering ex-LoL players!

“It turns out not burning a bunch of fossil fuels leads to less pollution”… news at 11.

The really dumb part of all of this is that people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation for so long that it’s hard to even envision a world without them. They’re normal, despite being expensive, dangerous, horribly inefficient, killing people actively (crashes) and passively (air pollution, plastic in our lungs, parkinsons/dementia, obesity, and more), and directly contributing to isolation in our communities. Every car we can get off the road, especially in our cities, makes the world a better place.

These days? Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns

It’s the best RTS game I’ve every played for my level of care about units and willingness to invest myself in tech trees (which is very little). I hate min/maxing stats so let’s get some units and brawl instead of tuning upgrades just right, or being forced to place buildings instead of paying attention to the overall strategic situation.

Holy carp you do. Once I hit about level 20 the culture of that community just went crazy. Everyone was just a complete shithead and cared so much.

I wish I could have capped myself at about level 10 and hung around with the other casuals forever, but instead I quit once I got enough counseling to put down the mouse and stop running bottom route sup.

I just finished teaching an Internet of Things class this term. I went strong on the ‘things’ bit of the title. We did all kinds of hardware projects, along with web apis, mqtt, and a tiny bit of clouds services to move data.

It was one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taught. That stuff is great!

I still live it. I use some Atmega chips like the attiny85. It only has 256 bytes if RAM and 5 i/o pins to work with. I code in C++ so I have 100% control over memory if I want it.

Someday I’ll find a reason to work with attiny10 chips… There’s almost no resources on it and it’s about the size of a grain of rice!

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/attiny10

He’s on the short list for the head slot at the Library of Congress.

Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.

They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>