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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • My university in Germany operates entirely in English. The academic world is very international so it often falls back to English to support the faculty and students. Issues in the community will also be run through the university news routes, so while I’ve been learning German, I’ll also have a big resource with my work community.

    There’s a few places to check for positions. I interviewed in Ireland and Scotland as well (didn’t get the jobs). There’s also Australia and new Zealand hiding out there. Or Canada. Hell, Mexico has a great university system you could look into.

    Your PhD does open new doors. It’s by no means a guarantee of a faculty spot, but it’s valued so you can leverage it.


  • The position is in Germany. It might be out of the frying pan and into the fire given Germany’s right wing rise, but that’s happening across the western nations and we’re all in trouble.

    I don’t have a ton of advice for you. I defended over 10 years ago, so I’m moving straight into a tenured/permanent position as senior faculty. For an ABD, I’m not sure what the landscape looks like these days.

    If you want to make the move, start talking to people. Reach out to people publishing in your field and talk shop. Collaborate with them, talk about the future, and be willing to take a postdoc (or german system W1) position. It’s more ramen and a small bedroom, but it’s one where there’s healthcare and civil rights.

    Academia (and most professions) are all about networks. Talk with people, collaborate, and grow that network. Something will come along.






  • It’s never claimed to be a democracy. It’s not a monolith, either. Some projects have forms of input and/or voting, most don’t because it’s just a few people writing software that they want to write.

    Get over yourself if you think that people working for free should be required to listen to you. Just as in anything else, pay them if you want a guaranteed response.

    Otherwise, recognize that the key element of Open Source is that you have the source code. If a project isn’t doing what you want then fork it and build it yourself. That’s the whole point of this community and philosophy.






  • VPNs are not the security panacea that marketers would have you think they are. Using a VPN does provide some obfuscation as to your origin, but it does change your trust model. The VPN service provider may tunnel your traffic through your ISP to hide data from the ISP, but now it’s visible to the VPN service provider instead.

    There are plenty of use cases for a VPN, but just like any other technology or service, you need to know what it actually does so you know what it actually achieves or doesn’t achieve.



  • I’ve been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.

    It’s an impressive piece of technology, but it’s not very creative. It’s meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it’s a statistical model that’s using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it’s seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.




  • We had an ongoing project studying network communication structures within social media groups. The primary goal was to identify patterns of misinformation dissemination. We lost our ability to poll the API and pull messages to build up our data sets to work with. The cost to hit the API used to be free for a limited rate for researchers, but the new doofus in charge demanded a massive rate to get even a reasonable quantity of data so we had to fold up shop. We just routed the students to other projects, but it’s one more way to isolate and control the network so the dictator can be in charge however they like.