[TL;DR] My approach to tithing ranges from disaster relief to funding open-source projects like @Redot_Engine, which I use to help teach young people programming, robotics, and engineering. The goal is to stop infantilizing the next generation, challenge them with meaningful work, and equip them to build productive, independent lives. [WALL OF TEXT] I've mentioned this before, but I take a somewhat nuanced approach to tithing. Sometimes that means dropping everything, breaking out the "boys and their toys," and deploying our equipment and resources when SHTF and the local community needs help. Other times, it means funding Redot, an open-source game engine. You might be wondering, "How does LTG IV conflate disaster relief and funding a video game engine?" Well, dear reader, I'm glad you asked! 🤗 I've long believed video games are an excellent springboard into much more complicated engineering disciplines. There's a sweet spot between beginner-friendly tools like Scratch and throwing someone into the deep end with SDL, fbdev, or low-level programming (ask me how I know). Redot occupies that middle ground beautifully. It's approachable enough to get someone building something interesting quickly, but sophisticated enough to gradually introduce electronics, networking, physics, robotics, and systems engineering. AI makes that learning curve even more approachable. Some of you might remember my article about modifying a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet. What started as a personal project became an elaborate exercise in electronics, power distribution, virtualization, and hardware integration. I'm still working on further modifications involving 3D printing, hypervisors, SPICE, multiple displays, and low-latency remote controls, concepts that overlap with my robotics and teleoperations work. To the casual observer, it's a scaled TMNT arcade cabinet. To me, it's an engineering curriculum hiding inside a video game. And that's precisely my point. I've had families from Church use my articles to introduce their children to electronics and programming. After visiting @wwwLiveFarm, some of their kids spent the entire car ride home asking their parents why school isn't like this. YEAH, WHY ISN'T IT?! I homeschool my own son, and having found formal education painfully boring myself, I have strong opinions about how we teach young people. I also work with charitable organizations here in Texas helping homeless and vulnerable teenagers get fed, clothed, housed where possible, and educated. One point I push particularly hard: We need to stop infantilizing teenagers. Give them meat and potatoes. Difficult problems. Real tools. Meaningful responsibilities. Opportunities to fail, learn, and try again. Most importantly, give them somebody willing to sit down and explain the complicated parts instead of watering everything down until there's nothing substantial left to learn. That's why I spend my free time writing technical articles and developing curricula, and why I find Redot so useful (and fund it when I can, and as I rotate tithing around trying to douse the biggest fire at the moment). The objective isn't necessarily to produce video game developers. It's to give young people an approachable entry point into increasingly sophisticated subjects, then help them progress toward apprenticeships, skilled trades, university, or employment. We're already doing this at @wwwLiveFarm. This summer, my university interns explored some of my arcade and systems engineering work. We didn't have enough time to connect everything, but we did get our autonomous rover prototype out onto a public road, with the interns controlling it using an Xbox controller while we followed behind. Suddenly, networking, latency, radio communications, and systems integration weren't abstract concepts anymore. They were driving an actual robot on a public road while we drove behind it with neighbors staring and some even stopping us to ask us what on Earth we are doing. Several of those interns have since received full-time aerospace job offers based on their engineering work at @wwwLiveFarm over the summer. A number would also like to return as full-time engineers, but we're still bootstrapping and self-funding everything, so we simply can't afford that yet. If I can't afford to hire somebody, the least I can do is help prepare them for someone who can. And the interest keeps growing. Just this past Thursday night in Dallas, I had additional University of Texas students asking about interning with us. I told them yes. Now we'll have four universities under our banner: • MIT • Texas A&M • University of Texas • Purdue Young Americans are hungry for opportunities to do meaningful work. We should be giving them those opportunities instead of squelching their opportunities in favor of foreigners and denigrating our young compatriots. Which brings me back to Redot and tithing. When I financially support an open-source project, I'm helping maintain a tool I can use to teach children from Church, homeless teenagers, university interns, and others who might otherwise never encounter this kind of engineering. And because it's open source, they can take those tools and that knowledge with them, continue learning, and build something of their own. They don't need me for this; I'm just knocking over dominoes to get a chain reaction started. I don't particularly care whether they eventually work for @wwwLiveFarm (obviously this is what I'd prefer), an aerospace company, a machine shop, or start their own business, so long as they GGGOOO!!! My wife and I have friends in from Dubai right now, and their tribe's language is Batak from the island of Sumatra. When we were grocery shopping tonight, they told me their nickname for me is "hatop" which means "hurry" because I'm always bugging out and screaming "Code 3!" (lights and sirens), or when I'm really getting frustrated, "JUST F'N GO!!!" since I'm pressed for time and trying to get us all moved on from one point to the next with as little time as possible in between. Okay, I guess I can take that as a compliment. 😂 In essence, I care that they develop the skills to provide for themselves and their families, contribute something meaningful, and hopefully help the next generation do the same — especially as we become an interplanetary species. So yes, sometimes tithing means loading up a trailer and heading toward a disaster. Sometimes it means helping a teenager find a pathway out of poverty. And sometimes it means funding a video game engine. To me, they're different applications of the same principle: take the resources, knowledge, tools, and opportunities you've been given, and put them to work helping other people. Preferably while building some really cool stuff along the way. 😎