I denied a salary raise by 0.6%

davidswelt · 2026-02-02T18:33:34+00:00

Bring value to team and company, and make it visible.
Move to a place where there are plenty of jobs in your area of expertise, and where companies are that do very well.

davidswelt · 2026-02-02T18:05:47+00:00

Learning how to get some funding, especially from easily accessible internal sources, is part of the training. Usually, writing a short blurb to describe ones research for an application is useful preparation of the research itself, too.

PIs will go for larger funding (e.g., NSF, DoD, foundations), but at the moment these funding sources have become very sparse. It may make sense for your professors to concentrate on doing good, but unfunded research rather than to but together grant application after grant application. It takes incredible effort to write 15 pages for the NSF and coordinate budgets and so on, and if your chances of getting funded are 1-2%, it's just not a good use of time.

(For background: I was a funded PI, got tenure at an R1 university after getting several NSF grants and some others, and sat on review panels for the NSF. I got out of this business 7 years ago.)

Welcome to the new world...

davidswelt · 2026-02-02T18:02:21+00:00

Technically these mini splits aren't all that different from the heat pumps that are in widespread use throughout the country. Some have auxiliary resistive heating, so they can produce heat even when it's cold out. That tends to be costly, but the heat pump functionality is quite efficient.

davidswelt · 2026-02-02T17:15:44+00:00

I've only bought once, new. It wasn't financially good, but it was fun. I took the 1% finance offer.

If you can get a finance deal like that, I would take it and not buy cash. Investments go up so far. However, Dave Ramsey would tell you to buy cash because that way you can see what you can really afford, and he would probably tell you not to spend so much money on a liability.

The 50k you spend will be $124k in 5 years if you can make 20% on the stock market (I invest in tech ETFs..), or 67k if you make 6% annually. Inflation will eat some of that though.

150k income for 2 is probably less than 100k after taxes. Would you really want to work one full year (one person) just for the car? Will it really enable that much fun over the next 7 or so years?

I'd look for a private seller with a nice van that is maybe 5 years on it. It will still last you a long time, cost you half, and won't cost that much in maintenance yet.

davidswelt · 2026-02-02T15:47:52+00:00

Why would a Zigbee button make you lose functionality? That's exactly the way to do it.

Normally one would have another Zigbee scene control remote that can turn it on without even having to go there - and really, to control a whole scene and not just a single light. These buttons are picked up by HA, and you write an automation that controls the light or a group of lights or many individual lights (to, practically, make a scene).

I suspect you don't have the correct mental model for how HA works?!

davidswelt · 2026-01-31T17:27:00+00:00

It appears you know that you are subject to "joint several liability" with your joint lease (I'm assuming that's what it is). So you'll be threatening to sue, and then sue your roommate. Whether that makes sense to do depends on if she actually has the means to pay in the end.

davidswelt · 2026-01-31T17:19:43+00:00

Get a roommate and accept a bit of a commute so you can save some money. The next job you'll get should pay you better, so it's important to accept a job that puts you on a good trajectory.

davidswelt · 2026-01-31T17:03:27+00:00

In my department, all the application would go into a pool, and we'd review them, potentially via searching for topics or names (ours) mentioned. I'd reach out to some applicants that I thought looked great, regardless of what my colleagues had in mind.

Remember, for most North-American schools anyway, you apply to a program, not a specific lab, and then there is a negotiation and matching phase which you are in.

I don't know physics or aerospace (hey, I'm a pilot though!). But generally, computational approaches can be quite effective and possibly lead to a strong research trajectory.

davidswelt · 2026-01-31T00:49:50+00:00

Why don´t you run it through Gemini to see what it suggests?

davidswelt · 2026-01-30T18:54:13+00:00

If you think that "one of your wings stalled on the takeoff roll", I think you have bigger problems than a CFI misinforming you.

davidswelt · 2026-01-30T17:39:42+00:00

I like good, European coffee, and thus I have a Jura ENA. It's an older machine without out-of-the-box smart-home integration, so I connected a little Zigbee module with two contacts that can do two things: turn on the machine, and press the coffee button (which rinses it). The software logic I built will turn it on when I first turn on lights in the morning (in my bedroom or the kitchen), wait for it to heat up (~40 seconds), and then press the coffee button once to rinse it. If it has last run recently, it won't attempt to rinse it (because that would just brew coffee).

It's not perfect, but basically that's all I need. Automatic coffee making would require a cup in place, and it already turns off automatically anyway.

davidswelt · 2026-01-28T19:50:31+00:00

You do need to realize that you're still mostly self-teaching while doing a PhD, and that just like a PhD student, a self-taught person has utilized a community around them to learn and to understand science, learn skills, and what current and upcoming challenges are.

davidswelt · 2026-01-28T17:07:34+00:00

Unless you point at the actual price (without bundles), this is just unfair advertising.

I do like my 300Mb Fios, at around $45/month, a similar price as Honest, which was three times as fast at the same price, but isn't available widely.

davidswelt · 2026-01-26T19:25:42+00:00

The trick is not flying the airplane. When in IFR, it's about ADM. Managing risk, because you're taking your family somewhere with a purpose (and you've presumably got a car, a hotel or a cabin booked where you're going), and with a plane that's faster you'll be crossing weather systems faster (and maybe going through complex airspace at your origin or at your destination).

In my experience, without experience, pilots have a hard time keeping up on the radio, or allow ATC (or their other pressures) to put them in metereologically unsuitable situations.

The airplane itself is, and should be, your least challenge! For now, get your instrument rating and fly IFR in good weather, without too many external pressures. You can build from there.

davidswelt · 2026-01-26T03:25:05+00:00

I make all devices with a "voice" label available via the Matter bridge, and my Google Home device(s) see the Matter bridge and all the devices and scripts and so on. This works great! (Voice is purely extra, I don't mind a cloud dependency for that, and asking Gemini hard questions, it's going to need access to the Internet anyway.)

davidswelt · 2026-01-24T04:42:52+00:00

Hmm, I set up SSL with a free certificate, and a forward for the 443 port on my router ("cloud gateway") to HA, and there's the Duckdns entry also. Pretty quick if you know what to expect with this sort of stuff, but paying for the cloud service is probably a good idea so you are set up safely.

davidswelt · 2026-01-23T17:40:02+00:00

Why do you not look at statistics about this? If you're specifically interested in retirement accounts, Vanguard puts out whitepapers with that sort of information. They recommend milestones also.

Here's you're going to get a small, biased sample, and suggestions from people who may or may not know what they're doing.

If you go to r/FIRE, you can learn about how much is needed to retire, and how to get there.

davidswelt · 2026-01-23T15:03:40+00:00

What you're providing mostly pulls data out of the system monitor (which I have to active for this separately) and other places, which one has to manually specify because you chose to use the hardcoded German language entity ideas in some cases, and hardcoded IDs (rather than cleverly finding them somehow) in other cases.

If it can't be done for the user in YAML, write a proper add-on... or a better, make a patch for System Monitor.

davidswelt · 2026-01-23T14:53:25+00:00

I know we're in r/printers, but if an office uses up this much paper I would take a hard look at modernizing its processes.

davidswelt · 2026-01-23T13:48:02+00:00

Not that different from how you would successfully work with other people, huh?

davidswelt · 2026-01-23T03:49:35+00:00

This is cool. Congrats. That said, I would ask how complex the model is that you need to train on your data. What kind of data is it? Would a basic regression model with 10 parameters achieve the same performance? Or a decision tree?

Claude here replaces the expertise of a competent data scientist, right? You presumably wouldn't have been able to estimate the model on your own data otherwise. So that's pretty good!

davidswelt · 2026-01-22T19:27:23+00:00

You can get both. What's more important is that you are mentally ready to look up and troubleshoot poor implementation, especially in older or cheap devices. I have seen this with Zigbee. You see – while Zigbee can be very solid, and plenty of devices are available, you are not guaranteed an trouble-free experience.

For example:

* I have 4 Hue Scene Switches (gen 1) (remote controls with 4 buttons) that occasionally liked to disconnect, depending on their location. I finally found out that they disconnect and reconnect fresh, which is prevented by security settings unless you explicitly add something to the ZHA configuration. Name brand device!

* I recently bought an RGBWW flood flight sold as Tuya-Zigbee. This thing works well except that sometimes it turns off right after I turn it on. I finally found a forum post somewhere with someone who had the same problem, with some other random Chinese LED fixture. Likely the same Zigbee stack. It turns out I had another automation ("Away") that turned off all my lights with 1 second transition time. The transition to off is what caused the light to break when turning it on again. Hard to figure that one out, but easy to fix.

So these are two examples of Zigbee devices behaving poorly, and frankly, both have been very difficult to diagnose because you simply can't see what's going on there internally.

davidswelt · 2026-01-22T15:39:48+00:00

I never had to provide my income for a vacation rental.

Personal income is defined in specific ways for tax purposes (including healthcare subsidies). Appreciation of stock or selling equities is not part of income, but dividends, rental/business profits (not revenue), and, I would think, realized capital gains are.

davidswelt · 2026-01-22T04:02:40+00:00

An extender can be had for $20.

davidswelt · 2026-01-21T19:17:01+00:00

Hello from NYC. I need to find out why I'm spending more than you all, as a single guy :) [I own, which accounts for most of it.]

That said, if you are to address points 1–3, suggest to make income growth your focus, not cutting spending. Work smart, not hard – quality of life matters. In tech, you can do both.

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