I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.

I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.

It wasn’t fun, that’s for sure.

… It’s nice, though you’re still driving a two ton weapon, but now you’re used to it.

What a wonderful world that would be. Fingers crossed.

The Amtrak system in the US shares rail, and is low priority, than freight trains. Basically, passenger rail has always been a side business for the train companies the US. It is subsidized and used as a bribe by the federal government to even try to keep a passenger rail service alive.

That means our trains are often kept as slow speeds to stay behind freight trains, and will be stopped to wait for freight trains if some is off schedule. The routes are also mostly only rated for 60mph speeds, so even at full speed you’re barely keeping up with cars on the highway, and then you add in stops at every podunk town that slows it down even more.

Until the US invests in a separate passenger rail network that can support consistent speed and schedules, it will remain on par with similarly under developed nations for rail service.

There’s also the very muddled announcement that to make it you’ll need to change trains at some small town.

Or, they just decide to not stop at your station, so you get to hop off past your station and ride a train back the way you came.

All that said, it’s still a miracle from God compared to the crap we have in the US.

It sounds like Twitter is hosting their services on several cloud platforms or replication services that weren’t blocked by Brazil. So, users in Brazil just hit the 3rd party platforms and kept going like usual.

Is that Twitter’s fault and/or on purpose? Don’t know yet, but services like Akamai need to make sure their hosting Twitter doesn’t get them banned in Brazil across the board.

International relations are often tough to build, especially when one side is quite rude and then wanting special benefits afterwards.

The UK cut the ties, so the EU has more say in how relations are rebuilt. The UK had a ton of special exemptions and their own national identity in the EU then many other members and the UK still freaked out about how oppressed they were.

The EU doesn’t really owe the UK anything that’s not in still existing agreements and if the UK wants a relationship they’ll have to come to the table bringing something, not just hurling demands.

I’m just really glad that the UK leaving the EU didn’t devolve into armed conflict. That’s a pretty normal arc for such a big relations change.

Your perspective might be why I enjoy microcontroller work. I love getting to know everything about the system, reading hardware documentation, and getting the low level parts to work in a highly deterministic way.

I use ATTiny85 cores when a ESP32 costs almost the same, but the 85 only has 256 bytes of SRAM and five I/O pins so I can track it all and ensure it will do exactly what I want.

The same meme with “wiring and lights” at the top. Then you descend to motors, transformers delta-y phases, RC and RL circuits, op amps, BJT circuits, reverse bias what?, differential equations, and eventually signals and systems.

The summary that I liked from the last post was “python is the second best language for everything”. There’s always something specialized and better for every given job. But, if you want one tool that’ll do a solid job everywhere, python is your go to.

We’re entering the ‘blockchain for every need’ stage. Expect massive money to flow into scams, poor ideas, and outright dangerous uses for a few years .

Before Blockchain we had ‘the web’ itself in the dot com era. Before that? I saw it in basic computing as a solution to everything.

I had a student came into office hours asking why their program got a bad grade. I looked and it didn’t actually do anything related to the assignment.

Upon further query, they objected saying that the CI pipeline built it just fine.

So …yeah… You can write a program that builds and runs, but doesn’t do the required tasks, which makes it wrong. This was not a concept they’d figured out yet.

As per all too often, the functional programming world invented them. Haskell (and its ilk) usually has all the future cool stuff already. Then python picks it up, then it moves over to C#/Java, then C++ says “mee too”!

Yes, yes we are. And it’s getting worse in many cultural groups.

They did that to my daughter. I’d setup a laptop for her. The windows boot partition was still there (my bad for scraping every last bit of Windows off - it was setup in haste) and she accidentally chose windows from grub one day. The Windows Bootloader decided to change boot options in the bios and then remove grub somehow, but there was no windows on disk to launch so it was bricked.

The next time I could out hands on the computer I scoured that disk clean of Microsoft’s plague rats so they wouldn’t get a finger in edgewise again.

woke Marxist liberal critical race theory.

Any more smooth brain buzzwords we can throw in there?

They’re afraid to be called unfair after he said that they’d be unfair. It’s one of the strategies that us uses to suppress fighting back against his lies and ineptitude.

First, your preemptively accuse someone of something. Second you do awful things that would normally rightfully get a response, but the authorities have to be careful otherwise you’ll accuse them of doing the thing they should be doing. Third, you get your way even though you broke the rules, or you get to yell about how you knew, just knew! That you’d be treated badly.

Incel shit.

Every Olympics is a political catastrophe. I’ve now watched all too many of them. They’re huge events and all it takes is some controversy or a fuck up by some middle manager and the whole world freaks out.

Overall, this one East that bad on France’s, except probably the river pollution thing (which I hope pushes them to long term cleanup efforts). Most of the rest was all the USA (we’re #1 in being assholes to people) being assholes. Our pearl clutching about religious insensitivity, transphobic right wing hatred, and generally bring dicks was well over the top. So, that’s not on France, but the US and our own swimming in Christian nationalist right wing sewage that spilled over onto the rest of the Olympics.