My family and I are off to Germany.

After watching a violent coup attempt on Jan 6th, 2020, then absolutely no serious reaction by the US leadership to arrest and persecute the leaders of the coup, I knew it was time to bail. I started writing applications in fall 2020. It took years to get a good spot and to make arrangements with my ex wife over the kids, but it’s coming to fruition now.

I put in a few applications with Canada (BC/Victoria), but didn’t pursue it too hard. I figured if the US actually went down the fascism route as much as I feared, Canada wouldn’t be far enough away.

Is Germany better? Only maybe. They’re having a major fascism surge too with straight up neo-Nazi movements, but at least their government had some backbone to deal with it. The US is a fraking jellyfish in the face of open coup attempts so it’s done.

A failed coup with no actual punishment is just practice for the next one.

So moving straight to hydrogen bombs and skipping the atom bomb stage? That kind of move is always scary in Civ.

I’m no nuclear physicist, but I’m heading out with my family. It’s a computer science PhD, a applied mathematician with a PhD in education, and kids on track for engineering, history, computer science, art, and mathematics (we have a whole passel of kids).

My university has spent the last four years trying to hire a second faculty member to compliment my skill set and failed every time. I hope they succeed in the future, but now they’ll need to hire two people to fully cover the classes.

“Nach Ampel, Links!”

When they have a coalition government in Germany’s parliament that is made of parties who use the red, yellow, and green colors, it seems to track that the next election ends up going Left, especially to the Die Linke party. Unfortunately, it’s not drawing a lot of support out of the near-Nazi Musk-backed AfD party, but it’s pulling from CDU, which is a center right party. Hopefully it’ll help push the national Overton Window to a more leftist/progressive field in the next few elections.

If I was a company facing possible tarrifs I’d raise prices now. Just a little, say 5% or so. Thar way, if tarrifs hit, I can bump up a bit without being a full hit in the moment. It also means I can get the money now as pure profit. If the tarrifs don’t happen I can either keep the 5% or drop it later to look good and undercut competitors.

All wins if I charge more now. Just the chance of a market disruption can be a benefit.

If you’re a professor with a doctorate in Germany, the official way to refer to you is Professor Doctor [last name]. If you hold two doctorates it’s Professor Doctor Doctor.

Professor is also a serious and registered title in Germany. You can’t just start a school and start handing out professorships without oversight and approval.

According to Fox News, President Obama is still president and so is Traitor Trump. Everyone is president, depending upon who is watching at the moment to stir up one kind of hatred or another.

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.

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”!

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.

Yeah, those durn data size fields. At first you’re like “why would you do this? It’s specified in the spec, right?” Then you start consuming the data stream and go “oh, yeah need this”.

I was doing some driver work for a real time location tracking board. The serial stream protocol was very well documented and designed. Plenty of byte length count fields, though.

This approach is so much nicer than the threading/queuing approaches we used to have. One async showed up, a ton of the work go pulled out of protocol handing and distributed subsystem sync efforts.

Long lived the multi threaded C++ server buffer! Today, async beging to rule the roost.

“Weird conman doesn’t pay his bills” news at 11.

At what point are cities, municipalities, contractors, and everyone else learn what lawyers already know: get cash up front from the ex president because he won’t pay afterwards.

Oh, and always have two people on your team there for every conversation because he’ll like about everything said afterwards and you’ll need the two people testifying during the deposition and resulting court case.

You don’t need the voters. You need the states.

We’re about to find out what happens when states refuse to recognize the winner of the Electoral College. Georgia, Arizona, and likely other states are going to fuck the state votes and refuse to certify.

If you can get enough state reps and congressional reps to vote for you each cycle (as VP), then take over from the sham president, you could effectively be president forever.

The important thing to me here is that he has a master’s degree and it took on tough subject matter with a larger perspective of how humanity needs to learn to no repeat this horrible actions of its past. He just keeps getting more awesome.

Harris/Walz 2024!

The EU keeps doing amazing and tough things for humanity. I’m always astounded at how much they’re achieving and I wish my government had even a fraction of the EU’s current operational capability.

I was wondering what was up. My city has a skee of billboards showing that sores can be signs of syphilis and encouraging people to be tested.

Well shit people, if you stop doing practice things to deter illness, then you get to go back to doing the reactive things once you’re sick. Idiots.

The crazy part is that climate change is going to drive the largest human migration ever as regions become less habitable. The people in arid equatorial regions are headed north and the immigration to nations in northern latitudes is going to be epic. The immigration trickle we see now is nothing compared to the flood we’re creating by continuing to destroy the Earth’s ecosystems.