Yeah. Not necessarily applicable here, but in general, it's good practice to use guard clauses/early return when appropriate which don't have else (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_(computer_science)). Deep nesting is usually best avoided and a "code-smell" indicating that you may want to do something different.

Ive been hired at every job ive applied to

That's crazy. Straight out of high-school, I spent about six months driving around and applying to a job or 2 every day before I got a job (applying to pretty much every business in the small towns I lived near; McDonald's, Wendy's, Walmart, factories, everything). Now, I'm an unemployed software engineer, and I've probably applied to > 500 jobs, and still no luck (I think every job posting gets > 1000 applications in this job market). The vast majority of the time, I never actually get a chance to even talk to a person to impress them with my awkwardness and anxiety :)

IDK. I have 2 vehicles and wish there was public transit where I lived so I wouldn't need to drive. So much time wasted driving. I could do work or read or whatever on a bus or train.

No, someone would have to create a new mesh project. I suppose Reticulum could be used on those, since it's transport agnostic.

IDK, this post says "GPT-5.3-min" which is not an open-weight model AFAIK. Either way, everything is public on the Fediverse, so IDC very much. Specifically asking for political classification is a little bit weird though.

I believe it's some kind of digital spread-spectrum protocol that's able to still function when noise is more than the signal. You can use the same ~900mhz signal, which is nice because its penetration characteristics, but LoRa pushes it a little more than would normally be possible with analog.

Edit: Did a little searching and there are open standards that do similar things such as Wi-SUN (802.15.4g), and MIoTy (ETSI TS 103 357), and Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) (though with much less range).

Edit2: IDK how much the LoRa license fee is, but to sell in the US, all "intentional radiators" need at least self-certification. I've ran into the problem before in a startup I worked at; my bosses thought it was safer to go with an all-in-one module for BLE, that was supposedly already certified, so that the certification for our board was very likely to pass on the first try (and it did).

I like C. Rust is better, but I like the simplicity of C too. C++ is an abomination :)

I'm mostly just surprised that a mod would pay for tokens to moderate. The Fediverse is radically public by design, so I don't have any expectation of privacy. I'd bet at least someone is gobbling up the entire Fediverse to train AI, since companies are so desperate for new human-generated data.

Generally, no. The firmware/software is open source, but it uses LoRa which is proprietary. I think every manufacturer has to pay a license fee to use LoRa. You could probably buy a LoRa transceiver module and a general ESP32 or NRF devboard, connect them somehow, configure the firmware, and get something working though.

My red state makes "preemptive laws" to undo anything remotely nice that the more liberal cities try to do (bike lanes, solar panels on school roofs, municipal banks).

There's tons of corruption on the municipal level as well (things like large development companies and Flock bribing politicians to get approval), which is kind of discouraging. But, I think you need to attack the problem on all fronts (federal, local, primaries, mutual aid, protest, civil disobedience).

I doubt it's the "culture." It's just that they used to specialize in making things for the lowest cost possible. That's changing bit by bit. DJI is best in class for example; no other consumer product comes close. They are also leading in many scientific fields.

Technically, I think the Internet is considered a mesh.

I know of nothing trying to replace the Internet, but some wireless projects like Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (technically can't use encryption on amateur radio bands), Meshtastic (messaging), MeshCore (messaging), and Reticulum (messaging, simple pages, BBS-like stuff). Any community could also try to set up a wifi mesh with something like the BATMAN protocol. Wireless meshes have all sorts of problems though. They must be carefully planned to get decent bandwidth because everyone's using the same "wire" (radio bands). Also, governments could easily jam or DoS them.