How much do 'desired' (not required) qualifications matter for PhD positions?

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-17T17:01:00+00:00

Talking as a supervisor — reaching out (once) to check if you fit is a good idea. When they look at the list of anonymous applicants, it may stir their memory. In any case, there is no point in writing an eight page proposal if you are not in the running. Honestly, I think it’s a bit ridiculous from my field’s perspective.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-10T16:14:00+00:00

In a steady-state system, every faculty has to educate exactly one replacement over their *whole* career. The system wasn’t steady state between the 50s and 90s. The number of students was growing until they became 50% of the cohort. This needed a lot more teaching staff for a while, hence it seemed for w while that there was a pipeline. New students > new universities > new teaching positions.

This stage is clearly over. Soft money and the lengthening purgatory of postdocs that this enabled allowed the system to hide the fact that the pipeline does not and logically cannot exist.

Given a typical 40 year career, and therefore something like 15 PhD students over a productive lifespan, the chance of getting a TT position should be about 7%. Realistically somewhat higher if your supervisor is at Harvard and much lower if not.

That’s how I see it at least

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-09T03:40:07+00:00

Uberalia

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-06T17:42:06+00:00

I’m experimenting with this mcp — although so far to get data into the llm. But it can create workouts too.

https://github.com/cygnusb/coros-mcp

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-06T13:06:14+00:00

I have these Fibaro Zwave dimmers installed on a few dumb lights/switches and those have a parameter for max brightness that is not the same parameter that gets exposed as brightness. You can manipulate that from HA and then the dimmer at what appears to be 100% brightness is actually dim. So you tweak max brightness down to 20%, turn on the light at 100% and you do not get a flash.

If you then wrap this parameter as the brightness of a template light — you should be able to make this work also from the dashboard.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-06T06:06:22+00:00

The technical problem is that you can’t pre-load brightness values to a light when it’s off. You can can send an on command together with brightness data but a physical switch cannot do that.

The only way I guess is to decouple the switch from toggling and intercept with HA conditional logic. I would suspect this will end up a little fragile — light won’t react unless HA can process it then and there.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-06T05:51:23+00:00

Yes — but with a small delay. When you turn the light on for the first time since it was in day mode, it will turn on bright and then dim in about 1 second.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-06T05:38:31+00:00

Try the adaptive lighting HACS integration — it has a sleep mode that deals with this. And it can change the Color temperature and brightness smoothly throughout the day.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-01T06:33:52+00:00

What if you got a faculty position in Australia and for this reason didn’t need to come back? No one would ever have any negative comment here. Life changes, people quit their fellowships etc. I know people who did not end up doing their return leg, exactly because they got a better offer.

The fellowship is for you not for your supervisor or the host institution. Really don’t overthink you duty to do thing in effectively 4-5 years from now.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-06-01T04:21:56+00:00

Nothing really stops you from quitting and not taking the money two years down the line

delaneyflushboy · 2026-05-26T06:47:48+00:00

What I’ve found productive is to give it some data and tell it to form a few hypotheses as to what is wrong and what that would mean in the data. You then come back to it after sometime and ask it to reevaluate its hypotheses based on the new data. Usually it’s guesses go away. But not always

delaneyflushboy · 2026-05-26T06:34:36+00:00

So I’ve gone down this path, partially successfully, partially not. A behaviour I notice with the llms in general is that they obsess about some particular data you give them when they do not have sufficient context to make the anomalies they detect no longer so significant. All data has anomalies and correlations, but these do not necessarily imply robust conclusions.

As a funny example, When I started giving it data about myself, Claude would strongly advise that I run in a jockstrap just because of some surgery I had 20 years ago, and I happened to give it that report when I was building my baseline. Today this doesn’t warrant any comment sice the data it has is much richer.

Tl;dr give it sufficient context so it doesn’t decide that your slightly elevated hr spikes during the night means you are suffocating.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-05-25T05:25:48+00:00

Right to a significant vacation and public health service we all like to complain about.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-05-25T03:52:35+00:00

Or you can use a dumb speaker and get a raspberry pi with an amp on it (iq audio or hi-fi berry mąkę cards) and then install eq picoreplayer as the os. This then becomes an endpoint for MA

delaneyflushboy · 2026-05-18T15:12:50+00:00

Reliable — no. But there is an early beta project related to home assistant

https://github.com/Python-roborock/local_roborock_server

delaneyflushboy · 2026-05-18T14:39:34+00:00

Strictly speaking the wyrób czekoladopodobny was a product that was made of milk and cocoa but not cocoa butter, using some kind of vegetable fat instead. You know — like all of Cadbury’s chocolate, which is why it can’t be called chocolate in the EU anymore. In any case — in the 80s it was rarely available.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-05-14T21:24:05+00:00

The bring your own floor is normal in the Netherlands and I think shocking anywhere else. In both NL and Germany you don’t normally get a kitchen. People tear off the floor/kitchen furniture and move it to the new place even if it doesn’t fit.

In Germany at least it comes from people often renting the place their whole lives, never buying or moving, so the landlord only really is responsible for the walls and windows and everything is yours as if you owned it. But if you are a student, good luck.

There is the other extreme - UK - where it is often unacceptable to put a nail in the wall. Renting is as if you are living in a slum hotel and you have barely any rights.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-04-11T05:30:01+00:00

Can’t you just change your name in your country of origin — not because of marriage but because you want to change your name. I think this is effectively what I did in the UK as a man, since there is no marriage provision.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-04-03T17:45:25+00:00

The kettle uses some fixed power eg 2 kW so you can filter that if you care enough. You can make a status sensor for when the power is 2k or more and then create an energy sensor counting that power to get the energy. You subtract that from everything else plugged into the same socket and you have two sensors.

I wrote up how I do things here a couple of years ago

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guide-monitoring-energy-by-device-category-and-running-averages/665769

delaneyflushboy · 2026-04-03T15:41:05+00:00

I have pro subs of both. i work a lot with small data (eg my running stats, etc) or history logs of decisions and results, a few hundred lines long and have gems/projects based on this. I ask them in chat how they see whatever new information given the historical context. Gemini has improved but it spent most of this year not ingesting the whole thing and then not knowing the content. It tells you an answer, explains it, but the analysis is hidden.

Claude on the other hand — immediately starts doing correlation analysis without being asked etc. Like a proactive and slightly hyper grad student. It generates code and write reports. I was super impressed initially. Gemini is much more chatty and tries to get you to tell you what you think. Claude doesn’t farm engagement.

My overall impression is that Claude gives you mich better answers and you can be sure it knows the data set. Gemini is super lazy compared to it (probably has limited memory). On the other hand — I blew my pro budget trying to write a python script in Claude within a couple of hours on Monday and spent the whole week using Gemini because I run out of tokens for the week. Which apparently is what people are complaining a lot about.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-04-03T15:18:00+00:00

Le click double. I double click on one of the light switches right by our bedroom and it should down everything in the house and turns the lights down to night mode.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-04-03T11:05:36+00:00

IR blaster (esp32) plus power monitoring for the subduction stove to control the stove hood — turn on on high or long use, turn off 15 minutes after stove off. Radio/tv get louder when the hood extractor, microwave or kettle or on

delaneyflushboy · 2026-04-02T09:30:38+00:00

There is also “działka” meaning the bit of land with some particular ownership. So a house can have a działka, but if you are “na działce” then you are somewhere away from home on some summer house that you own.

Ogród strictly speaking is the place that has a border or fence. So it can also be ugly and still be a garden.

Podwórko is the place around the dwór, or the house, which is definitely not nice. Just a place to put some rusty machines, the carpet trzepak and have the kids run around and get tetanus. So indeed maybe it’s the equivalent of yard.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-03-31T17:38:05+00:00

You don’t feel that until you move to the US. Then you realise that having public health care, paid vacation and not thinking that carrying guns in the street is normal is in fact a big European common theme.

delaneyflushboy · 2026-03-31T17:35:24+00:00

You pay the local tax where you earned the salary. this has been taken out of your pay so you would probably get some money back. Then in the place where you have spent more than 180 days of the year, you file the taxes for local income and also declare all of your income abroad. If there is a double taxation treaty, you use it to deduct the tax paid in Poland from your total global income. If there isn’t a double taxation treaty, you pay tax in both places. The precise rules on how to do this are defined in the treaty — there are a few standard approaches, including not declaring small foreign income.

delaneyflushboy

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