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  • Blake C. Stacey (non-boonary)bstacey@icosahedron.website
    Oct 27, 2026, 6:14 AM

    (For this thread edited into blog-post form: sunclipse.org/2026/10/to-zero-)

    My physics career is dead.

    There's no point in trying: There's no funding, it's literally unsafe for me to do the traveling and life-uprooting that are demanded of me to pursue the positions that aren't even funded anymore and that I couldn't accept in good conscience because AI has rotted what institutional morals we had.

    My physics career is dead. Not because AI can solve all the physics problems, but because institutions and too many of the people in them are intolerable.

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Replies

  • Blake C. Stacey (non-boonary)bstacey@icosahedron.website
    Oct 27, 2026, 6:35 AM

    I was always better at what physics was supposed to be than what it was. I had a decent sense for interesting problems, and I made progress on them. I was an enthusiastic teacher, perhaps an effective one. I expected the best from my students and was mostly not disappointed.

    I lacked the ambition to pursue an ever-shrinking slice of the tenure-track pie. Oh, I could be plenty ambitious, but that channeled itself into goals like crafting the best possible explanation of the addition of quantum angular momentum. Intensely satisfying for me, potentially helpful for a few, yet useless for advancing a career.

    And then, of course, I had to choose between living a lie that was killing me or outing myself as a member of a minority that an increasing number of governments want to see die.

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  • 𑂐ꚳ㎰ꪭthe_dot_matrix@mastodon.gamedev.place
    Oct 27, 2026, 4:12 PM

    @bstacey my condolences, and if it's any consolation, you are not alone, and thank you for making my story feel less lonely as it's taken me over half a decade to process the end of my own academic career

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  • Ginevra SunshineGinevraSun@masto.nu
    Oct 27, 2026, 6:31 PM

    @bstacey This is unbearably tragic. I'm so sorry.
    I hope you can find something where the people are not all elite, hierarchy-obsessed bullies. (oops, projecting from own experience!)

    But seriously, physicists make excellent strategists and process analysts etc.

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