https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

No ruler or leader ever does.

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 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…

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.

Back when a PROM really meant something.

You could also drop into a serious bios-style motherboard manager to really control booting and hardware configs.

Wow. I haven’t seen a Sun keyboard like that in … geez forever. Whose were fun times. I was younger then.

A corporation will gladly kill you and your children for a dollar.

They’re not your friends.

The Republican state reps in my area all voted in favor of protecting child abusers and child rapists. They’re in favor of it too.

He will sieg heil, tho!

I haven’t looked into it too hard yet. I saw some design that would allow remote GUI rendering for Wayland, but it likely won’t be the all in design for network transparency that X11 had (has).

I use SSH with X forwarding for all kinds of system maintenance and demos in my CS courses.

15+… I was there, Gandalf… We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.

Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.

The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.

Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.

I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a “grab latest” button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.

Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.

Did some politicians hold up signs while the Nazis laid out a fascist plan in a government meeting? That’ll stop em!

Every time the Republicans get control of the government they fuck over my current career trajectory. They’d been nothing but harmful to me and my family for three decades now.