crimsonpoodle

24 M at a 3‑way fork for my life:

 ① Seattle/Portland SWE job, 

 ② unfunded CS PhD (live with in‑laws),

 ③ $90 k Columbia BME master’s. 

Which of these should I do?

Stats:

Me: 

24 M, fresh BS CS (+ physics minor, 4.45 GPA, undergraduate research internships, swift student challenge winner, US citizen)

Spouse: 

27 M, tech lead remote, $210 k comp, recession resistant job, very smart. But is not yet a citizen, temporary protective status from Syria, been in US since he was 13, scary times but ignoring it. 

Current debt: 60 k @ 14 % (2k / mo) (Consolidated credit card debt)

Accepted programs: 

• PhD CS @ UCCS  (3-4yrs, 20k per year est)

• MS Bio Medical Engineering @ Columbia (18 mo, $90 k tuition) (Have two weeks to accept/decline)

We like the PNW, the humidity and rain, and culture have been so nice(at ABnB right now). I could maybe get a tech job at about 100k, but slightly concerned with this economy, love research, my dream job would be R&D engineering job in the long term, but often requires masters/PhD. 

Or maybe I pay money and network with rich people and create a start up at Columbia, or maybe I should start working now in case my spouse gets deported and we need to do something(sorta in denial about this option for now).

Or maybe we live in big house with my spouses parents (adoptive US citizens) in the country, like we have for 5 years now, but the 40 minute commute for UCCS PhD and isolation in Colorado Springs is something my partner, and to some extent I, want to leave. (Very loving and supportive, very grateful for them but we want to be adults and decide things like what’s for dinner for ourselves). 

Or maybe I’m young and dumb and lack perspective and we should stay there until we pay down debt, but maybe moving is the jolt we need to start budgeting properly.

(Consolidated credit card debt is going down from 80k, just that partner used to have slightly excessive lifestyle, and has paid my way through college)

What do I do with my life?

So many choices right now, and they feel so final, difficulty sleeping for the past few nights.

Thank you for all your thoughts ahead of time!

Hi all, 

I'm working on my personal website, my first forway into javascript and web development.

I wanted to create a flip dot style display which has since morphed into more of a CRT look. 

You can take a look here if you like:  https://343f-66-113-2-158.ngrok-free.app/main.html

However, I've recently, when sending it to a friend, we found it only seems to work with any performance on Safari, sometimes in fact failing entirely on Chrome and Firefox.

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas on how I might change my design to migigate this or whether there is some way to give myself more resources on firefox and chrome.

A cursary look into fixing this seems to suggest I should use RequestAnimationFrame, however, this drawing of all elements smoothly at once, while efficent, destroyes the organic effect that the timeouts gave both on the individual dot level and when refreshing line by line.

My general design is outlined here: 

I'm using HTML5 canvas; each dot is a class which redraws its section of the canvas with a 50-300 ms delay to emulate the per dot lag of a given hinge on a flip dot display. The display class again using setTimeOut(), schedules each line of the display, consisting of dots, to update at a slight offset so that you can see the display refresh from left to right. Then the rest of the program modifies the "next frame" array with text or images which I wish to be displayed. 

Thank you!

I’ve seen some digitizers on amazon that would do the trick but they’re rather clunky and don’t split songs as they are played or save any meta data. I presume this would be possible given that the song title is often displayed on various Bluetooth car stereos. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated for hardware / software.

Recently one of my friends won a permit to raft down the Grand Canyon for 21 days, I’m going along rowing one of the boats.

I want to find a cheap little laptop, that is at least semi waterproof / rugged so I can put Linux on it and get data from some of the sensors im bringing (spectrometer, ph, etc), plus do a little programming in the evenings.

It really doesn’t need to be powerful, i would just bring my MacBook but I don’t want to break something expensive.

Secondary objectives are at least reasonable battery life, but not too much of an issue with the solar and batteries we’re bringing.

• only you know
• zombie type is up to you

I’m in my mid 20s, and an atheist. I remember back in 2014, when I was an edgy little shit, I thought once people lost religion, as per the trend, people would be nicer to each other and science would rule the day. Probably a naive thought.

Yet, it feels like nothing is sacred anymore. Everywhere you look it’s just people trying to get their slice of the pie, ethics be damned. Everything feels like it’s going badly. I’ve just graduated and the job market is full of time wasting rituals. It just feels like people have lost touch with decency and community. No one has any pride in what they do.

Correlation != causation of course, and so the decline in religion may not be the cause. Still I wonder if for a certain segment of the population, those that seem to thrive and filter to the top of our wonderful society, the fear of damnation was check on their base impulses.

Or if perhaps this is a part of the process, perhaps the reasonable people have all left the churches leaving an ever growing concentration of barbarous individuals holding the reins of that decrepit institution.

Or it’s just the lack of community that religion once forced upon us, to see and be civil, if not caring for those in our immediate geographic community that hold differing opinions from us. A moderating influence if you will.

I’m working through the vulkan tutorial and came across GLFW_TRUE and GLFW_FALSE. I presume there’s a good reason but in looking at the docs it’s just defining 1 and 0, so I’m sorta at a loss as to why some libraries do this (especially in cpp?).

Tangentially related is having things like vk_result which is a struct that stores an enum full of integer codes.

Wouldn’t it be easier to replace these variables with raw int codes or in the case of GLFW just 1 and 0?

Coming mostly from C, and having my caps lock bound to escape for vim, the amount of all caps variables is arduous for my admittedly short fingers.

Anyway hopefully one of you knows why libraries do this thanks!

The only time I seem to interact with Pinterest is when I’m searching for images of something on my phone, let’s say “pictures of mountains”. I want to get the image in full res so I go to the site, then I can’t copy it or download it.

From these brief interactions and exploring the site I just don’t see the appeal. Pinterest just seems like a terrible image search engine with the ‘feature?’ that every few scrolls pulls up similar-ish categories to the image search you did(Mausoleum might bring up Pharaohs for example). It could be that I’ve just never taken the time to use it properly, so I thought I would ask people: what is Pinterest good for / why does it exist.

Hopefully is not too harsh I am high atm.

I get that there is probably a more complex answer in reality, and probably an objective ranking, but I’m interested in what people’s perceptions are.

For most of college, I’ve kept it simple: I’d create a directory in my home folder for each project, then eventually move older or inactive ones into ~/programming/. When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.

This setup has worked pretty well so far. But now that I’m graduating and my projects keep stacking up, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a more efficient system out there.

Curious—how do you all organize and store your projects? Any tips or methodologies that have made your lives easier over time?

The only person I’ve talked to about this is my mentor who’s been programming since the 60s (started on the IBM 1620 and Bendix G15) and he just mostly keeps projects in directories in his home directory and uses his godly regular expressions skills to find things that way. Makes me wonder if I’m overthinking it…

I want to preface this that I think public transportation and more dense urban housing is a pro-social idea. I would consider myself to be on the side of urbanism in general.

As I prepare to move from my semi-rural Colorado home to Seattle after finishing my CS degree this fall, I find myself grappling with a big question: in a future where more people live in dense urban housing without cars, will certain hobbies and hands-on endeavors go extinct or at least be relegated to those with the financial means to purchase extra space?

I’ve learned so much from my time in this house doing projects and building things; through it all the garage for me has been a space of infinite possibilities graciously provided by my mentors/hosts (old school engineers). 

get a cool old CNC machine and need to move it inside and put it somewhere? -> garage

need 220V power? -> get some from the box in the garage 

ill advised experiments with neon sign transformers? -> garage 

do experiments which fill said garage with noxious fumes and need to air it out? -> garage

spill acid on the floor and need to dilute with water and not cause water damage? -> garage 

need a big indoor place to fly drones? -> garage 

build a hovercraft snow removal thing that never worked? -> garage 

build a greenhouse and stage it? -> garage 

fix an old whitewater raft and take it out rafting? -> garage + truck

covid screw your chemistry lab class? -> garage

It seems to me that the single family house is the boogyman of the urbanism movement and to some extent rightfully so: 

• car dependency bad 
• bad land use efficiency
• heating and cooling a lone house is inefficient due to surface area exposed to elements 

Although I see this, and generally agree with it, I have a fear within me that when I move—and indeed, if other people always lived in dense urban housing without cars—many of my formative experiences that relied on the garage as a space, and a car to pick up heavy items, will be lost to me and never found by others. 

The most poignant argument I can think of is that urban areas have maker spaces, but in my experience, they have many rules about taking up space and restrictions on what is allowed and what is not—all very responsible given the shared nature of the space. Lastly, age requirements: in high school, I would have loved to go to a maker space, but it was 18+ due to liability reasons. This led to me setting up a lathe under some stairs at my parents’ house, which was never very easy to use.

In short, I love the idea of walking to the local shop and not having to drive, reducing my environmental footprint, and enjoying more socialization (seriously, we’re lonely out here). But at the same time, I worry that I will lose my autonomy to make things. Many of the condos I’ve looked at don’t have garages, or they only have parking garages that I doubt would welcome industrial equipment setups. You have limited power service and can’t break into the walls to route new cables.

As with any place where people live closely together, more restrictions are placed upon the population. These restrictions are generally shaped to avoid impacting most citizens' lives and to keep those who don’t know what they’re doing from harming themselves or others. If I burn down my house out here, it’s mostly my problem. If I burn down a condo building, it could be a problem for everyone in it and the surrounding city.

What solutions are there to these problems? (Hey, you European folks!) 

Are my fears grander than they need to be, or are these just the costs of the benefits I’ve mentioned?