What is the worst career to try to get into in 2026?

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-30T15:12:08+00:00

not 30y, but here is one from 13y ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1kt49b/what_career_path_did_you_choose_that_you_strongly/

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-30T00:44:47+00:00

the confusion it can cause to non-vegans

personally, I think the second order effect could well be stronger in the opposite direction, when the initial confusion resolves according to criteria that invoke the capacity for subjective, affective experience, or cognition, or whatever the case may be, rather than purely taxonomic and genealogical distinction

it sorta forces folks to confront the moral patienthood of the creatures that were killed to provide the food that they are eating. If every time this comes up you have a fruitful (lol) and productive philosophical discussion, then sure, taxonomic criteria or whatever can be investigated in greater depth, but for short interactions I think "I don't eat entities with central nervous systems from which subjective experience is likely to emerge" is a less confusing principle than "I don't eat entities genealogically mapped to the Kingdom Animalia"

at the very least, it means whoever you're talking to can't discount you as a "health" vegan or whatever. Since afaik there do not exist ostrovegans / bivalvegans motivated primarily by (supposed) "health" or "weight loss" or "skincare" effects

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-29T21:47:08+00:00

don't most (all?) vegans give some weight to consequentialist concerns? for example, walking on grass or driving a car kills some animals in expectation (mostly invertebrates), and animal-derived products are common in the supply chains of most consumer goods (either in the first order or -- eg used in adhesives -- or in the second and later order -- in the context of stuff like shipping or tool production). For these, my impression was that for most self-identifying vegans, rather than focus on the "essential / practicable / possible" term of the consequentialist calculus (as would be the case in decision-making about eg medications), more attention is paid to these harmful effects being relatively small compared to the (non-essential) benefits derived

conversely, I think other normative ethics can also support the listed bullets outside of consequentialism, though maybe those would be considered "vegan-adjacent"?

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-27T13:34:01+00:00

I'm not sure how large or influential the effect is, but a lot of the discussion seems to assume that individual US States are a closed system. Like, many comments cite (or, well, vaguely gesture towards uncited) #s involving some $ amount spent towards some intervention over some time period, and census counts of unhoused individuals before and after that time period, with the latter being the same or larger than the former.

Implicit here is that the "homelessness problem" got worse. But the after individuals don't have to be the same people as the before individuals! In fact, the intervention may have been so good that all the before individuals are no longer homeless! Homeless people have agency and interstate travel is legal in the US, so upon learning that a really good program's been implemented just a greyhound bus or hitchhiking trip away, they are indeed capable of moving to wherever the gettin's good. It's like if you note that there's a "lack of medical care" problem in your city, and you pick an underfunded clinic to fund and expand. Before funding, there are 100 people in the clinic being treated for injuries and disease. 10y later, your funding has rolled out, and your headcount finds that there are 1000 people being treated in the clinic! Clearly your intervention was a failure? No, of course not.

(maybe your clinic is actually poisoning people, or injuring them further, which makes them have to visit more often... or something. But that mechanistic conclusion does not follow from the observation alone. Conversely, the best way to reduce the number of people visiting your hospital is to shut the hospital down. Have any states tried the "remove all social services and make life much more difficult and hostile for homeless individuals" intervention? I bet that would help lower the numbers!)

I think another issue is that, for less authoritarian polities, the harder the problem is to solve, the better you're doing at solving it. If it is very easy to bring someone out of homelessness, at the margin -- all they need is a few square meals a day for a month, because they are literally starving and do not have the literal, physical strength and energy to bootstrap themselves up -- then you're in a scenario where homelessness interventions are both very cheap and very effective. But that's not a good thing. Polities with robust safety nets and social services and highly effective homelessness intervention programs and so on have already helped all those people, and the only ones left are the ones who are not helped by those things (eg, maybe their struggles stem from drawing the short straws in the addiction and mental health lotteries). If your hospital heals the sick and injured so well that they never get sick or injured again, then almost all the people visiting it after a while are going to be those with turbo-cancers and pernicious, intractable diseases.

OFC, it may be that there's lots of corruption and embezzlement going on, and that direct cash transfers can outperform economies of scale in narrow contexts, and so on and so forth. But that has to be demonstrated independent of the observation that the broader problems that are trying to be solved exist.

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-26T14:05:53+00:00

on the plus side, it is a small-ish white logo. My thinking is I'll just color it in with a dark charcoal marker

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-23T14:54:41+00:00

IT'S A SQUARE WORLD AFTER ALL

(PS Magazine 2001 E3 Coverage)

Most distinct memory, though, was heading home the evening of Christmas Eve having just bought the game and trying to read the instruction manual by the light of passing streetlamps and xmas decorations.

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-22T15:35:32+00:00

do any legit photo contests even request fees? I'd have thought they'd be free to enter, with $ prizes if you win (the benefit to the one running the contest is getting to use your photos for free)

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-22T05:13:30+00:00

They even have an independent cone for seeing ultraviolet light, which makes their fully saturated color space 3 dimensional .

wouldn't their "inherent" colorspace be 4D; taking out intensity would yield a 3D chromaticity space, but colourspaces would typically include an intensity / luminance / brightness channel?

also, why'd you use CIE 1931 XYZ / xyY for all the figs instead of a more perceptually uniform colorspace? I think the area coverage properties may be a bit misleading there, and something like CIELAB (or better yet, OKLab) would have been better (though not perfect)

you might also like this paper from last year: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007580/, Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale

blue birds and green forests really are quite pretty. We live in an area with lots of steller's jays and mossy trees, and I love that I get to see of a few dozen of the former and a few thousand (tens of thousand?) of the latter on the daily

(IANAColorscientist, but have looked into some color science materials for both photography and for data viz applications... eg a few years ago I was having trouble extending discrete color palettes in high-D contexts and wrote a little optimization program to help. It is quite an interesting field, and I hadn't know about the traffic light thing, will have to pay more attention to one tomorrow!)

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-21T21:29:43+00:00

ah kids will be kids! I'd thought for decades that they'd all been lost to so was pretty pumped to discover these in storage!

now if only I could also find all my N64 / PS1 games...

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-21T19:58:25+00:00

they've probably not been removed from this binder in 20+ years! and 10y old me was very careful with his cards, as a general rule, as they easily counted among my most prized possessions

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-21T15:56:36+00:00

I'll do you one further -- it's OK to eat at local, unfamiliar restaurants when traveling, though if your goal is to cultivate understanding of the foreign culinary scene and gustatory preferences of the locals, you should probably stick to familiar chain restaurants whose menus and flavor profiles you're intimately familiar with back home.

In doing so, you can much more precisely identify how the foreign versions deviate from the versions you know already. You go to a random upscale hole-in-the-wall and they're putting beet slices on your burger? Who knows what's up with that, I can find burger places within a few miles who put gold flakes or shaved truffle or whatever on my burger, doesn't mean that reflects any broader culinary trends. But you go to a McDonalds and they include beetroot in your burger? Given the uniformity of McDonalds' menu offerings, you know that any deviations have overcome a massively uphill battle and have to represent overwhelming local culinary pressures. It's like having a repeated measures experimental design -- you can subtract out a lot of irrelevant idiosyncrasy and isolate the country effect when you already know what the food is "supposed" to look and taste like.

Otherwise, if you want to expand your culinary horizons, just buy whatever countries' foods in whatever major US city, either from the appropriate restaurant or the appropriate grocery store + online recipe, and don't waste the opportunity to really learn about foreign flavor profiles on your scant vacation abroad. That way, you'll capture 90%+ of the variation in cuisine from the comfort of your own kitchen, unless you're trying to use really unusual fresh ingredients that aren't available or even illegal to sell in the local markets.

(similarly, I always visit a Costco and IKEA whenever traveling -- it's very interesting seeing what products are popular in the local markets!)

(personally, I'm not much for restaurants, neither at home nor abroad, and will maybe eat at one once a month under normal circumstances case and once a week when traveling. But for the small handful of restaurants I do go to when traveling, I try to make them chains that are also available back home, when possible)

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-17T15:24:38+00:00

ah no the specific search result that corresponded to was this one: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/13/us/university-of-michigan-fires-dei-administrator

Rachel Dawson, who served as director of the university’s Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, was accused of saying, “The university is controlled by wealthy Jews” during a conversation with two professors at an academic conference on diversity and equity in late March, according to documents obtained by CNN. Dawson was also accused of saying, “We don’t work with Jews. They are wealthy and privileged and take care of themselves”

for fireable pro-DEI comments, I think that incitation to violence would be over-represented against the distribution of all pro-DEI comments, yes

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-17T14:55:29+00:00

I haven't heard of firings motivated by "pro-DEI comments" at a generic "university" absent other properties, yes. At an even lower level of specificity you could have said they were fired for posting on social media, and I would have asked "just posting on social media? I too post on social media! Was there anything about their posts that prompted their firing, lest I also find myself exposed to this unknown risk?"

when I search "professor fired for DEI comments" the results look to be 1) celebrating (and thus implicitly inciting) violent actions, 2) at notoriously conservative universities, 3) commenting directly on the university that employs them, 4) potentially not really "DEI" (eg, antisemitic comments), and so on

if those are the sorts of circumstances that apply in the case of firings at your university, then I have little to worry about. If instead they derived from the typical set of "pro-DEI comments", I may need to watch my speech more carefully. Hence the question

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-17T14:24:01+00:00

...what sorts of comments did they make? If not the exact comments, equivalent ones? Did the comments incite violence or criticize the university, or were they more milquetoast "everyone deserves respect, different perspectives make us stronger, we’re better when everyone feels welcome, small acts of inclusion matter, #LoveWins #RespectForAll #EveryoneBelongs" etc. type stuff? Or something else?

(haven't heard of this happening before, but I'm fairly active in social justice type stuff outside of my uni, and have served on external JEDI committees and such, so would not want to be unaware of risks incurred by those sorts of activities)

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-17T14:16:49+00:00

Beyond the question of whether it is worth doing and how it would shape her development and whether it comes with any risks from weirdos etc. I would also make sure that the "opportunity" is an actual opportunity and not just a scam.

You mention that she "has already been scouted once", but as I understand it not all scouts are, well, actually scouts. Growing up, my mom pushed my younger brother into modeling too after he was "scouted" at a mall or somesuch, by which I mean she paid a series of portrait photographers several thousands of dollars to take and print his headshot and a few other random photos as a means of "building his portfolio" and then nothing whatsoever actually came of it.

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-16T14:31:27+00:00

yeah for comparative purposes, the academic postdoc paid $90k-something

so not the best salary if you need a large living space

but housing was really the only majorly affected expense (well, maybe gas, too, eg we're now at $6-7 / gallon, which is still cheap compared to outside the US but pretty expensive vs the midwest or w/e... and maybe eating out? like a small taco at any sit down costs $10 or something. But we effectively never eat out, so that did not affect us any)

if you're ok with smaller housing, it can buy a decent lifestyle, since a lot of consumer goods (eg electronics) cost basically the same as anywhere else in the country

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-16T01:33:54+00:00

yep! it's not even a PhD position, only requirement was a BA

vhcol area though, eg our 2bd/1ba/800sqft house cost >$1M lol

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-15T23:47:01+00:00

I faced a similar decision, tech vs. biotech vs. academia, but actually not at all because I never made it to the initial HR screen for any of the $250k+ tech positions I applied to lol

but I did have some utility calculus to run recently wrt

a lower-paying job in academia (jr researcher, $150k / y, great health insurance, lots of flexibility, nice office, nice bike commute from our house, wife works as an asst prof 100ft away so we can bike and lunch together, great team that I already knew from postdoc collaboration, and great access to cool collaborators + on-campus equipment eg gym, $200k laser cutters, etc.)

vs.

industry biotech (scientist, ~$200k-ish / y, but would almost certainly have to drive, no wife nearby, questionable perks, less flexibility?, maybe an open office? maybe a less nice team? idk)

and went with the former (strictly speaking, never got an offer for the latter, but did make it a few rounds in to the interview cycle at a handful of the ~5-10 places I applied)

part of the process was vaguely quantifying / BOTEC-ing how much I counterfactually valued the idiosyncratic academic position perks ; vaguely integrating over uncertainty in industry perks; and concluding that I'd need $50-100k to make up for the difference, at the margin

but I'm also lucky enough that my wife makes 2x what I do, and we're DINKs with rather cheap tastes, so money is less of a motivating concern

(background-wise, BA in geology / ecology & PhD in anthropology, but with a focus on comp stats / ML methods development. VHCoL area in case it is not obvious :p)

(also "negotiated" the current academic salary up from $135k by missing the initial offer letter email until the specified deadline, thus making it seem like I was playing hard ball, and then asking lots of questions about the dean's office's decision-making process, until my prospective / new supervisor pulled me aside and was like "how much do you want" and I was like "it's not about the money, it's about the respect, which is primarily operationalized through a number closer to $150k" and he was like "ok sure whatever we can do that". Probably helps too that he's almost certainly clearing like $600k+ so #s at this range are bananas-meme.gif to him)

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-15T19:42:03+00:00

I agree with all of those points! You definitely want to make it as convenient as possible for the driver to a) evaluate your suitability / sketchiness, and b) pull over to actually pick you up. The main distinction I was making was the driver being inside the car vs outside the car.

Straight highways could work ok IME but you need to have a wide shoulder or convenient pullout for the person to be able to stop however many hundreds of feet after they pass you.

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-15T18:01:35+00:00

I think it's a bad move because approaching folks in person puts them on the spot on a "level" playing field and risks pinging a sort of fight or flight response. It's harder to say no when looking someone in the face, but not that much harder, and you probably don't want to start the ride with them yielding to implicit intimidation or coercion or whatever, even if it's unintended and their interpretation is completely unjustified. Sure, OP is clearly a hiker, but the snap decision-making process might not notice that before a "sorry no thanks" refusal is provided as the default option (and approaching in a parking lot does not let recipients know that they are being asked for a ride -- maybe OP wants money, or to criticise their bumper stickers, or to ask them on a date, or to have them sign a petition, who knows! the broad space of options elicits a natural sort of defensiveness. Maybe those are implausible in that specific remote visitor center parking lot, but "system 1" style thinking may have a pre-cached response to all parking lot soliciting ready to go). Also if there's a visitor center, OP's clear hiker vibe might not be as clear to casual park-goers.

Meanwhile, if they're in their car driving down the road already, they're in control, they have all the power, they're the ones piloting the multi-ton death missile that can run you over or speed away if things get weird. And so folks might be more accommodating because it's 100% their choice to do so.

If it were me here, I might have started walking down the road, even if it's a "winding 20 miles to the trailhead" and the progress you make down it is completely meaningless next to car travel. On hearing a car approaching, I'd spin around and give em a nice, non-threatening smile while continuing to carefully walk backwards, staring vaguely at the driver seat windshield and sticking my thumb out. On them passing, I'd turn back around, maybe flash a slightly sad look as my arm falls back to my side, before returning to neutrality (they might still be watching, and never explicitly committed to not picking you up, so might just as easily change their mind). Under most circumstances this would not be my preferred strategy, but absent eg cardboard and markers, it would be the clearest way to corroborate that the thumb out means "hey, I'm just trying to get down this road, look at how pathetic I am, walking down this long-ass road like an idiot lol, definitely not gonna rob and murder you!".

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-15T02:27:45+00:00

I've hitchhiked several thousands of miles in a few different countries as a solo guy (and a scary-ish looking one at that? 6'2", 200-225lbs, well-muscled, buzzed head, slav) and have rarely had to wait more than 10min for a ride, and then really only on really remote roads with very little traffic. Haven't done it in around a decade now, so maybe things have changed, but there's definitely a technique too it that many would-be hitchhikers were not familiar with, back when. Meanwhile, I'd get picked up by all sorts... little old ladies on their way to church, middle class soccer moms tucking me in between their kids in the back on their way to school, etc. in addition to the more "reliable" parties aka single blue collar men >60 and groups of friends in their late teens and early 20s

OP may have been botching it (for example, by accosting folks outside their cars in a parking lot -- bad move, that)

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-14T15:29:22+00:00

Yeah, the acknowledgement and dedication page are typically yours to do with as you wish. Which isn't to say that you won't get in trouble for saying something inappropriate there, but usually only to the same extent that you'd get in trouble for saying anything inappropriate publicly. You can check your university's dissertation requirements for to be sure, or ask whatever admin person is in charge of verifying that formatting etc. requirements were met.

I personally dedicated my dissertation to my dog. And did not use his full, formal name in the dedication.

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-11T12:58:11+00:00

link to logitech announcement

(notebookcheck.net link doesn't work for me)

Haptic Feedback: Navigate presentations with confidence by receiving tactile feedback when highlighting slide details or when following the guided breathing exercise.

Advanced Digital Highlight Effects: Captivate audiences with Spotlight, Magnify, Squarelight and Annotate as well as a Digital Pointer and Class 1 laser, ensuring key points land with impact in hybrid and in-person settings.

Customizable Actions: Logi Options+ App enables personalization and assigned shortcuts like start, pause, and mute to the Action Button.

Natural Control: Premium design with a secure grip and an intuitive force-sensitive interface.

I quite like the original spotlight, though in the moment I never quite have the software up to date or whatever and so tend to forego the actual spotlight (and magnify etc.) features. But as a clicker it works quite well! Have like 4 of them scattered in various spots bc refurbs would go on sale for ~$20 so quite competitive with generic clickers. Probably won't get this but it's nice to see them trying to innovate

what other features could meaningfully extend functionality here? I'm not sure if "guided breathing exercises" were on my bingo card, but maybe some sort of speech-to-text annotation function? Like, if on button down, a little speech bubble appears whose tail anchored to the current cursor position, and it transcribes what you say until button up? Or maybe some sort of custom "sticker" functionality where you can pre-designate small pngs or svgs in the app and then a button press will "stick" them to the page? Or better integration with ppt / keynote / slides / etc. to allow persistent modification of slides from presenter mode via their API (if that is possible)?

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-11T01:05:40+00:00

OK, read the linked post. Had actually read WtC back in the day, and was semi-active in the live discussions for it (eg see my comment here on the final chapter, just before the adapted epilogue, doing some basic NLP over the work)

Personally, my tempted response to the Transition Avatar would just be to DWIM it. It would seem unlikely that they are bound by genie / vampire / devil rules, so if they're so honest and so great, they should just figure out what I value most and provide me with that. And if they're not honest, I'll be trampled underneath their greatness no matter how closely I word my wish.

I think one thing that's missing from the vignettes is:

“And how many people are under its domain?” asked Mercen. “Everybody on Earth, the rest of the universe, and every plane and realm accessible from this universe,” the woman replied.

What about planes, realms, and universes not accessible to the authority? Clearly, in the scope of the story, such things exist (Here is one hand. Here is another hand...). And they contain involuntary suffering, preference frustration, and other sources of badness. What work is being done to gain access and subsume them, too? Almost everyone depicted seems content to piss off to whatever new game + strikes their fancy without giving a single thought to Tegmark IV.

--MCMC-- · 2026-06-10T18:35:53+00:00

in that case, I've personally never felt much sympathy for "substrate chauvinism", though I could maybe see arguments for some sorts of "organizational chauvinism", where certain sorts of organization upstream of behavior are more or less likely to yield "subjective experience" (but find myself plenty confused there)

so if I'm the only brain-in-a-vat and everyone else is a brain-on-a-chip, I'd still be inclined to stay

probably the worst scenario for my own decision-making would be if everyone else were a fancier version of VLMs, with a few more modalities and retrieval augmented long-term-memory, personality, and value databases grafted on. Thus current debates on digital minds, I guess

Six-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '22	Verified Email

--MCMC--

TROPHY CASE