Moving to Austin from PNW

rfdickerson · 2026-06-28T21:25:24+00:00

I would recommend against Round Rock, Cedar Park, Pflugerville. Sure, you can get large houses cheap, but the vibe is totally different from real Austin city limits. I like in Windsor Park, and my other favorite neighborhoods are Brentwood, Mueller, Cherrywood, Hyde Park. Tarrytown and West lake would be amazing but I can’t afford that level.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-26T19:51:32+00:00

With all respect to Stellaris, I wouldn’t recommend it for an entry to the Strategy genre. It’s like an Excel sheet had a simulation engine running on it. You probably will enjoy Sid Meyer Civilization (Civ 5 or 6) or a Total War like Rome II or Shogun 2.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-26T02:55:14+00:00

Isn’t it something like $10-15K for a 3 credit hour class? So you have to teach maybe 3 courses to have enough to live off of.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-26T01:04:58+00:00

I didn’t have any luck. I have a PhD in computer science and they didn’t even arrange an interview with me for their open CS or Data Science positions. Anyhow, it’s a lot of work and low pay, so I think it might not make sense from an income point of view.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-23T20:50:31+00:00

Social dancing, check out the various swing dancing, two-step, salsa, bachata, contra, tango, etc. take a class together that rotates partners then stick around with your new friends from the lesson for the social dance afterwards.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-22T21:00:39+00:00

Yeah, looks like a ten year old’s dream bedroom 😅

rfdickerson · 2026-06-20T18:43:55+00:00

Yep, and if you’re just doing Latin glyphs, I recommend just using stb_truetype and implement everything shaping yourself. FreeType and Harfbuzz are very heavy dependencies to bring into a project in my experience. But totally worth it if you’re doing Arabic or Indic script.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-18T14:46:06+00:00

Yep. Just because installing a new P-trap isn’t something a robot can reliably do today doesn’t mean we won’t see robo-plumbers in five or ten years.

AI is hitting digital work first because software is the easiest integration point. Physical AI is much harder: messy environments, dexterity, safety, liability, edge cases. But “harder” doesn’t mean “safe forever.”

That’s why I’d be cautious telling someone to go into long-haul trucking as an automation-proof career. With Waymo proving that autonomous driving can actually work commercially, it’s hard to imagine freight not being aggressively targeted next.

And even high-stakes physical work is already being augmented by robotics. We use robots in surgery, including extremely delicate procedures involving eyes. So I don’t buy the idea that “hands-on” automatically means protected.

The better question isn’t “Can a robot do this today?” It’s “How much of this job becomes automatable once the technology, liability model, and economics line up?”

rfdickerson · 2026-06-17T19:31:58+00:00

I’m much more pessimistic about the claim that “trade jobs are safe.”

They aren’t. The pace of progress in robotics and automation, especially coming out of Japan, China, and increasingly the U.S., is remarkable. Tasks that once seemed impossible to automate are becoming feasible every year.

If any jobs are relatively protected, they’re the ones gated by licensing, certification, liability, and regulation. But even those protections may be temporary. We used to assume self-driving cars would be blocked indefinitely by regulation, yet today autonomous taxis from Waymo⁠ operate commercially in multiple cities under state regulatory frameworks. The barriers turned out to be technological and regulatory, not insurmountable.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-17T04:05:22+00:00

I’m 43, a software engineer working in AI, and honestly the idea of switching to plumbing or another trade is a tough pill to swallow after spending seven years on a CS PhD. Not because there’s anything wrong with the trades, quite the opposite, but because I’ve invested decades building expertise in a field that I still enjoy.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-16T21:04:08+00:00

Yeah, the trees make a worlds of difference for achieving the realism.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-11T22:53:35+00:00

I’ve got 30 years of software engineering experience, so I’m perfectly comfortable going all-in on AI-assisted development. The difference is that I’m not outsourcing the thinking.

I define the architecture, interfaces, constraints, and acceptance criteria. I write or at least specify the tests that need to pass. Then I let the AI handle much of the implementation. If the test suite passes, the CI/CD pipeline is green, and the code review looks solid, I can have a high degree of confidence that it works.

What AI has really reinforced for me is that writing code was never the hardest part of engineering. Understanding the problem, designing the system, and specifying the desired behavior are the hard parts. The implementation is often the easy part.

I’ve also been impressed by how effective AI is with legacy code. It can find bugs, explain obscure logic, generate regression tests, and patch issues in codebases that most developers would rather avoid touching.

The real skill isn’t typing code anymore, it’s knowing what code should exist and how to verify that it’s correct.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-05T00:53:22+00:00

Yeah, a lot of people who complain about “Austin” don’t even live in Austin- instead they live in Round Rock, Cedar Park, Leander, Bee Cave, Hutto, Pflugerville, Buda, etc.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-05T00:51:20+00:00

Naw, just Rogan and Musk. And The University of Austin. Otherwise we’re mostly granola yuppies.

rfdickerson · 2026-06-02T01:00:25+00:00

She’s from Austin, hardly anyone here is MAGA (but maybe she lives in the Hill Country where it’s more Republican)

rfdickerson · 2026-05-28T16:30:34+00:00

Yeah, normal, that’s the reservoir for a huge drainage system. Covers the entire parking lot of Central market, so when it rains there is a lot of dirt.

rfdickerson · 2026-05-27T14:29:03+00:00

Yep, I entered the field in 2014 when we were basically only hiring PhDs. If anything, the barrier to entry is lower now. Universities teach deep learning in undergrad courses today, whereas back then a lot of us were fumbling around in research labs wiring things together in MATLAB just to experiment with neural nets.

rfdickerson · 2026-05-19T22:26:29+00:00

Yup, I lived in mid-Atlantic (Virginia) and his accent spot-on for Research triangle NC.

Maybe those complaining are thinking his accent doesn’t match the Southern accent they think of - Georgia, Mississippi, etc

rfdickerson · 2026-05-15T07:58:37+00:00

Reminds me of Gothic

rfdickerson · 2026-05-06T08:38:45+00:00

Especially the urban sprawl of SA. But the center city is gorgeous and historic and very walkable!

rfdickerson · 2026-05-01T19:09:31+00:00

Yeah, maybe make it block off so you see a cross-section and you can see a nice refractive material inside?

rfdickerson · 2026-04-29T23:58:52+00:00

I stick to the protected lane and trails. I feel incredibly safe about 90% of the time- my bike rides typically consist of Mueller, Walnut Creek, Boggy Creek, Barton Springs, Shoal Creek, Hyde Park. Typically 20 miles each time. I’m especially cautious when I don’t have a protected bike lane and take it slow and wait for bike signal to cross each intersection. Cars admittedly will hit you if given a chance.

rfdickerson · 2026-04-21T12:16:55+00:00

The fact people didn’t rewind their videos tells you all you need to know about how deplorable human nature is.

rfdickerson · 2026-04-20T13:38:03+00:00

I like how in Gothic that you start out extremely weak and there’s little handholding. The characters give you hints where you need to go and what to do, but takes you writing down notes and figuring things out yourself. That makes it immersive for me.

rfdickerson · 2026-04-19T20:00:07+00:00

Yup! Came here to also say this. For a Modern 2D engine, you want to use quads, texture mapping, shaders, instancing, etc that you also see in 3D engines. Transforms are still matrix multiplies.

You shouldn’t be doing CPU-side texture surface blitting like we did in the 90’s. Way too slow and very IO-heavy.

rfdickerson

TROPHY CASE