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.

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.

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

“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.

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>

#! Linux was amazing. So simple in the UI, but plenty of features if you wanted to set them up.

Been there! It was Avery different time.

The first program I wrote was in the Logo Turtle Game on an Apple Iie in 4th grade. Did some BASIC programming on the Apple IIe’s building interpreter too.

I use Arduino boards with Atmega, Esp32/8266, and M0 chips on them for embedded projects. These $8 boards have more processing capability then my first desktop computer…

Yeah, our big democracy talk is just like the pirates code from Pirates of the Caribbean: flexible, with a strong vein of selfishness.

I was given a logging on a RedHat server in 1997. It was operated by a fellow student in the dorm.

My school taught the engineers how to use SunOS for class, so it wasn’t a huge leap to start using a telnet connection to a local Linux machine.

Within a few months I was dual booting an older desktop Linux/Win95, and away I went. Since then it’s been about 90%+ of my daily computer use on Linux machines.

When the US tries it’s hand at nation building, and our government diplomats, consultants, and mentors are making suggestions to nascent nations in what kind of republic framework to use, we do not suggest the same Constitutional system we have. We normally try to guide others to a variation of parliamentary systems with a weak president figurehead.

Our own government knows not to use it’s own model for other nations! It’s not that we’re exceptional, just that we’ve beaten the odds so far. We used to try to copy the US system other places, but they kept failing to executive branches that seized power. How the US held on as long as it did is a wonder. That said, it looks like our exceptional run is effectively over. The fox is in the henhouse and Congress is cheering the bloodbath.