In the Mojave? Mountain lions, coyotes, maybe a dog, and snakes (though that is more a matter of “avoid” than “defend”).

I’m not sure of your country, but are you tied to it? (For example, do you have family, or are trying to attain citizenship?)

Opening up your search might be helpful. Look at a variety of universities in many countries to see what options there are.

Yes and no. I would say for the field OP is in, a lot of jobs will have B.S. or M.S. as the “required” education, and then M.S. or Ph.D. as “preferred”. The U.S. just dumped $280B into the CHIPS act, so now is a pretty good time to be in semiconductor R&D. The folks I work with seems to have little trouble popping back and forth between industry, academia, and government.

I mean, that’s basically the option. Set up a domain, set up dynamic DNS, and safely do the right port forwarding and IP reservations in your router.

Unfortunately this is not easy for a lot of people, and the overall picture of home automation requires a combination of skills that not everyone has. Then they basically get two choices: pay for a company to maintain the system, or use someone else’s cloud. A lot of people will pick option 2.

Unlike a lot of DIY tasks, it’s not even one that I would suggest to someone who is hesitant. It’s not a “oh just try planting tomatoes this year, see how it turns out.” Someone who messes up their port forwarding rules could potentially open their home network to a lot of trouble.

I mean, I agree, but the target market of a lot of this stuff couldn’t care less. They want their hot tub synced up to their Outlook calendar or whatever, and can afford a monthly maintenance contract to keep that working.

For the rest of us, there’s this sort of odd limbo. Most people expect some kind of remote control app as part of their smart stuff, which means either going through an outside cloud service, or running your own server and contending with the fact that most of us don’t have a static IP. Of course there are services like no-ip, but again, you’re stuck using someone else’s cloud service, just for a much smaller part of the overall task.

My point at the end though is that I don’t necessarily want “all in one” control, whether open source or proprietary. I’ve seen what well-implemented smarthome looks like, and it does not (to me) seem worth the money or time. I’ll take the ecobee, maybe the security cameras, and I’ll even go though their commercial cloud to get that remote connectivity, but I’d rather keep my services separate, than go all-in on one hardware/provider/app.

I know someone living in a really high-end “smart” home. We’re talking about a ton of hardware and proprietary software controlling practically everything in the house. From one app in a phone or iPad, you can control everything from the security cameras to the heater to the pool.

It’s basically the pinnacle of what all this technology intends to achieve, and tbh, it’s all a bit of a pain.

Diagnosing anything in the house has an extra layer of work. Is it the pool heater not working? Oh, no, it’s the app not working. Security alert from the house? A fly walked across the camera lens. Everything acting weird all the sudden? Guess the shitty monopoly broadband cable provider in the city is having issues again.

The system only stays afloat because of a 24/7 service contract with a company that specializes in these houses. Give a few months without that support, and things will start falling apart.

I get that this is a different class from the products from Google and Amazon, or even the various open source products, but tbh, I’ll take fragmented over monolithic and overarching.

The $1M salary is really typical of California tech job postings, and it is essentially meaningless. Under the new transparency law, employers have to list the salary range on job advertisements. For many of these speculative or open-application type roles, it’s common to list $90k-$900k as the range.

It makes great headlines, but nobody in that job is actually going to make 900k.

Not in Windows 10/11. You can still “eject” if it makes you feel better, but it’s basically redundant. They reworked the support for removable media so they are always ready to remove except during active read/write operations.

Look how many jobs in the private sector also require a security clearance. Most things in aerospace, but also a lot of enterprise/cloud/telecom computing will have a “federal” arm, and they need cleared workers for that. Amazon, Google, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft and many other big names have divisions that do classified work. They pay a premium over regular positions because the clearance is a PITA for everyone involved.

Putin took some steps to strategically wreck any semblance of politics in Russia. One of his advisors, Vladislav Surkov, secretly funded a variety of opposition parties, ranging from “green” environmental parties to openly Nazi groups. They let these groups grow in an organic way before “leaking” the information that they were all funded by the state/FSB.

This type of move, and similar actions, have made true political engagement very difficult. That march, protest, Facebook group, or underground newspaper? One has no idea whether it’s legitimate grassroots movement, or purely astroturfed campaign. Unless you have significant time and resources to study the issue, it is impossible to tell.

This was the exact objective: to basically make politics inaccessible for 99% of people. Sure there will be 1% who do have a good picture of what’s going on and who try to create movements, but their voices are drowned in the confusion. The average person may simply find that it’s too difficult to participate in a meaningful way. Even someone with full intentions to learn and participate may find themselves sidelined into a fake movement and essentially neutralized from a political perspective.

And then you use a generator and vault, but there’s some stupid caveat like “you can’t use the ^ character.”

I’ve felt this way about twice in my life, and it’s when I had a really well crafted Jupyter notebook running in VSCode.

It’s definitely the kind of thing you want to pop open when boss is showing some new sponsors/customers around.

This really hit me hard once I had a kid.

The degree to which those small early lessons will stick in their mind, much less something that’s ingrained in their heads every single day.

I think I get it now - if kids are hearing this stuff day in and out from the moment they can talk - that they absolutely could be convinced that Trump or Putin or Xi are some kind of divinity. Even when they later learn otherwise, there will be some kernel of that propaganda remaining in their head.

Some people reach a phase where they’re really ready to question these things, but I met plenty of people in college for whom that dissonance was just too unexpected and painful. They simply retreated into what they already identified with.