Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

I dropped out of a PhD -- took the master's I earned for coursework, did my quals so it would be clear I chose to leave, then took an "academic-ish" job that paid very poorly. I'd hoped to do that a bit then get hired by a big tech company, but I found out that you have less free time in a job than grad school, and my tech skills began to erode, further sending me down a path I did not want.

What caused me immense, IMMENSE distress is that I felt, for lack of a better term "involuntarily destitute" -- my adviser in grad school had told me that she'd ONLY give me a positive reference for "research" jobs, and that trying to leave for industry was evidence I had lied my way into the program, and thus she could not give me a positive reference for any roles without a research component.

I feel that she purposefully tried to "trap" me with her -- she was having trouble recruiting new students as word of her behaviors and convictions spread (she'd racked up a DUI during the liminal period between my acceptance and starting school, among other gems).

I currently work in a job that has nothing to do with my field -- I had many, many years of strife because when I was fresh out of college, I looked around my hometown and found I couldn't even get a helpdesk job because my skillset was that of an open source nerd, and they wanted people who could answer questions about the UI of Windows like "How do I enable this printer" that, having not used it for years, I couldn't answer off the top of my head -- and it's not sustainable to "just Google it" on calls over and over, people will get frustrated with the wait times.

(That was the way people generally broke into infosec back then -- get a help desk job at a bank, hospital or university, study during downtime, maybe do some certs or try to do an interesting project to present at a conference, move up to sysadmin, and eventually security analyst/engineer)

I thought I'd found a third way -- I could do this PhD, and at worst leave with a master's, and sidestep the tedium of the help desk and the uncertainty of if I'd move up. (I knew people who got worked many hours, struggled to study up, and got trapped).

Anyways, academia can be incredibly abusive and downright medieval. That's not an excuse for violence, but it is an explanation.

(But I did find this article better than the WaPo one)

But as with many of these situations the truth might not make sense-- sometimes it's simply irrational thinking by someone mentally unwell. It reminds me a bit of the Reiner killings as well, considering there too there's no clear motive except maybe a hypothetical mental break. Truthfully, we might just never have a satisfying answer as to why this tragedy happened.

You "suspect possible mental health issues"? Amigo, what further evidence could possibly be required?

Makes me furious, but it doesn't surprise me.

The ability required to get into an ivy is so significant I don’t see how someone could fail to make substantial sums if they wanted to.

And (so I'm told) at least half the value of an Ivy degree is the people you meet while you are there. I guess that assumes you do some network-building, which maybe not everyone does.

Where exactly did I imply that it was the cost of the degree that is the constraint? Everyone knows poor kids and even middle class kids don’t pay anything to go to elite schools. I simply don’t think that means they face financial constraints exiting undergrad (or during undergrad). Why would they when HRT is paying $500k for new grads?

There’s this weird belief that I should feel sorry for people that didn’t come from means but got into Yale or Brown or Stanford. Sorry, they’re just as alien and inrelatable to me as Jeff Bezos’ kids. These people are in an entirely different plane of existence and ability so I have a lot of trouble thinking they wouldn’t have unlimited opportunities exiting university that I can’t even dream of.

There is to a point, and it's not some random organic sentiment: this is the image that has been crafted for decades, if not centuries. The police has a role in pushing it, but it's also has been a useful fiction for our societies as a whole.

"crime will somewhat get punished" has more weight with a competent agency with at least average intelligent people.

D) Going to be "solved" by catching someone unfortunate who seems plausible enough and lacks an alibi.

As for the expectation, other than if civil liberties are going to be violated in the name of safety I expect much faster results, and I’m sure the MIT professors family would agree.

Now he doesn't have to worry about paying for that. Or getting reasonable treatment but hey,

Like presumably the US has doorbell camera databases and every car on the highway is electronically flagged?

(Because then it would have hit the berg head on, crushing the front, but not ripping most of the side open.)

> Now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything

We’ll see how it turns out, but I don’t see why even the internet mob would hate him. He probably can’t live in Brown’s basement anymore, but maybe with the reward money and recognition he can find a real place.

  >> Maguire clearly "comes from a culture that lies about everything."

I'm trying to understand the downvotes and if people think you said what they said

> Maguire clearly "comes from a culture that lies about everything."

This is a reference to Shaun Maguire's Twitter post where he said that Zohran Mamdani "comes from..."

https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1941135110922969168

> > Maguire is Jewish, with ancestral ties to early Jewish settlers in California.

> Sir, we are going to have to ask you to leave.

This comment appears to be reacting to the first one by assuming the first one is saying that Jewish people lie about everything, and it responds by saying this is unacceptable to say.

I have been off Twitter for 2 months and when I go there I can't understand anything. People are always saying "can I say something?" and "we know what this means" and shit like that and either the 2 months have killed my brain or something because I never know what the first guy isn't going to say and the second guy knows.

Now Hacker News is similarly incomprehensible and I'm starting to think my mind is no longer able to handle human speech. If this is happening to anyone else, then I hope the interpretation helped. If it didn't, then maybe I'm just losing my mind.