Wanna try NL? I heard they have pretty good mental health + neurodivergence support, and they are pretty open to all tech matters too. They seem to have a lot of cultural/hobby imports from all across the world too, so hopefully you will be able to find most of whatever strange fixations you may have (I go to NL all the time for my hobbies lol). Heads up though, I heard the language requirements are getting stricter, but that could just be temporary due to current job market…

Otherwise, I guess a brief stunt at whichever job pays the best/gives the most take-home pay would never be bad. EU citizenship grants a lot of residency freedom… so literal immigration might not even be necessary depending on the circumstances

Immigrating to any third country without a preferential agreement such as the EU would be astronomically more difficult, so you can certainly try… but might not be very easy to do, especially with only a Bachelor’s degree

I have only seen this matter from the other perspective, am scientist, not technically a CS person but I do programming/data analytics for work. I saw…

• A colleague of mine, who teaches a statistics course, mentioned that literally every student of his uses LLMs aggressively for homework assignments. Worse, a lot of his students would just plug the assignment into an LLM, and if he quizzes/asks them for reason, they don’t know why 💀

• It gets worse. So I have asked ChatGPT to make a powerpoint template once, but didn’t like it so I didn’t ever ask it again. However, after that exercise, I started to notice the exact template that Chat gave me for the slides to appear… in every scientific meeting I go to… among my coworkers slides… at startup/tech events… everywhere

• It gets even worse. Based on what me and my colleagues observe, my supervisor straight-up prefers slides and presentations with that distinct AI-generated style. The workloads we are given also basically more-or-less expects us to heavily use some type of agentic workflow. When I’m searching for jobs, a lot of data engineer/software job openings directly mention that they either want someone experienced in agentic/vibe coding, or want ppl who are not morally against AI

So yeah we are in strange times. I don’t know what schools/unis are supposed to do… probably give them long enough time and they can come up with a solution, similar to how high-schools treat graphics calculators. At least my hopium says that, from a learning/job training perspective, someone who is ok with agentic coding but not blinded by it probably has pretty good job prospects so

Got into Magic the Gathering (MtG) a few months ago because I have no other social hobbies lol. Surprisingly fun! Not the cheapest hobby… but good way to spend disposable income I guess. Had I known I’d enjoy it (should have figured from my Slay the Spire game hours…) I should have gotten into it quite a bit earlier, cards used to be cheaper back then. There’s a local game store which has weekly events so there’s that

Recently there was a new set (Star Trek) where I played the prerelease, and there was a guy at the prerelease who is a massive Trekkie and wanted to collect highly thematic cards (which I traded quite a few with him), so I was happy

Sounds a bit nuts but I have serious considered working as a handyman-type of guy at a really, really remote location. Like forest rangers, working at the South Pole, etc…

These are ridiculously competitive jobs that don’t pay that well, but I guess they do appeal to a certain group of ppl so…

January 2025 for a tax receipt; if you count deleted emails saved locally, probably a legal matter-related email in 2023. I delete almost everything as long as they are no longer useful so…

The “mouse scanner”

This is way too meta, and somewhat of an inside joke to my previous lab… explanation below

It’d probably feel quite weird for the first week or so… but I’d eat them. Probably more nutritious than my average meals anyways. Unless I’m losing weight of course

Not the O1… I’ve tried the EB-2-NIW though, and seriously considered EB-1 before

My understanding is that you need a lawyer for this, as the law firms have effective templates that can help to “fluff” up a profile. Many law firms do initial consultations too to see whether one person can be considered. Self-writing a competitive O-1 application (sans being a Nobel Prize laureate or along those lines) is almost impossible

Edit: if this is relevant. For EB-1, the numbers I got from the law firm were 200+ citations (or 150+ with very good other records) and select other accomplishments as scientist. Non-scientists are a lot trickier, but not impossible

Belgium. Personally, I have a job now so I feel fine, has a good bit of leftover money despite being on single salary. Salaries here are indexed against cost of living (not too many countries do this anymore), so anyone who is not living in the capitol can survive even on minimum salary; and in the capitol, yes with cohousing. People without a job are somewhat fucked though… yes the unemployment benefits are quite generous, but there simply aren’t many jobs out there. Belgium has a competitive strength in pharmaceuticals but then last year there was a pretty notable company shutting down, and recently GSK let go of a large chunk of their R&D team. Things are not looking very bright

I guess this isn’t what the topic is about but… macro-economics numbers seem functional? The fiscally conservative leading party implemented some budget cuts that were supposed to help, I’m not an economist so I can’t say whether they helped but there certainly were lots of protests. GDP is slowly growing, not as fast as NL but the numbers are going up

Edit: Just saw the news that the PM (Bart De Wever) submitted an official request to the king to resign. I take it back, we ball I guess 😂

For those of you who are interested and still want to go on Reddit for any reason, Redlib still works… kind of. My personal instance running Nachtalb’s fork still works, but not sure for how long

There are still a small shortlist of public instances that are up, and ppl are pushing fixes that circumvent whatever shenanigans Reddit is pulling. Although, some folks are suspecting that Reddit SWEs are monitoring the redlib project with close attention & trying to shut down any workarounds the redlib team finds

Took a stroll in the city center and bought some clothes. I go to the city center a lot less after moving to the new apartment so it was a nice change

Oh and got chewed out by bossman again but that’s not a problem

I dunno I’ll try to befriend some nice sailors, most ppl are reasonably nice to ravens… Into the ocean is out of the question unfortunately

A raven doesn’t sound too bad. Can fly, smart, doesn’t really have a predator so I can explore the world at ease

Whatever I could find in the nearby grocery/supermarket 🥲 Bad at cooking & generally don’t have enough free time…

Since I’m literally from the namesake city, Peking duck? Basically it’s duck meat wrap with some veggies, almost like a Chinese taco wrap so to say. It’s not something you can easily make at home and is typically quite pricy for how much meat you’d get, but it is quite good

Fun fact, the ducks used for Peking ducks (including in Beijing) are no longer bred in China for a long time

The real one that should have been famous is the Douzhi. Trust me it tastes even worse than it reads, Beijingnese ppl are weird

Wanna try hugo? I can’t vouch for the others, but since I have tried it I can share my experiences… It’s not 100% as intuitive as Microsoft Word so there will be a learning curve, but it is reasonably simple & can scale up to professional web development quite well. Lots of templates out there too so for the most part you won’t need to make everything yourself. Some professional web devs use it too. But because it is also used professionally, AI is good at generating Hugo sites, so it may make your site look AI-my…

Just a heads up though, most hugo themes use JavaScript quite heavily; if you’re against JS by chance, you may need to dig a bit deeper into their themes

My trade, bioinformatics/computational biology… a ton of software documentation, tutorials, guides, vignettes… And some programming books here-and-there (which the authors released online for free). There are Master’s programs, but realistically hands-on researchers overwhelmingly learn by doing. The field is just too small and scattered… The downside of this approach is that my field is traditionally criticized for having little to no adherence to software engineering best-practices

My hobby, there are like 2 websites (one is a dedicated webpage, one a GitHub wiki) that contain literally everything one needs to know about them

Chinese native speaker, pretty good at Japanese (passed N1 many years ago). I actually think spoken Mandarin Chinese is a lot easier to learn for most situations except for a complete beginner:

• For a complete beginner, Japanese has one of the (if not the) fewest possible valid pronunciation among all languages. There are literally only ~50 “alphabets” (officially only 48, there are a few weirder non-official ones), all of which are easily pronounceable. Mandarin Chinese also has a pretty restrictive pronunciation set, it’s simply that the tones (especially the 3rd) tend to trip ppl up
• Past the complete beginner stage and Japanese becomes noticeably more difficult than Chinese. Japanese grammar is an absolute nightmare, and you do have to know most of the grammar rules; not to mention you can have multiple different ways to pronounce the same word… Whereas Chinese has almost no grammar and overwhelmingly relies on memorizing vocabs, which someone who only wants to speak doesn’t even need to worry about how to write them (which is most of what makes it difficult)
• Just to clarify, both Chinese and Japanese are high-context languages (to compensate for way too many words sounding exactly the same), so the fact that a local might not understand you often has less to do with shitty pronunciation, and more to do with that the entire sentence makes no sense. A lot of Chinese ppl understand regional dialects (which are pronounced very differently) just fine

The Chinese dubbed anime thing is for Chinese ppl too. JP has a very robust seiryu (voice actors) industry, and a lot of CN/KR dubs just simply can’t catch up with the voice-over quality… A good example, think Genshin Impact: it’s a Chinese game but the default VA is JP (edit: to correct myself, it’s the de facto VA most ppl use; a lot of Chinese ppl happily switch to JP VA whenever they can). I highly doubt this has anything to do with the language themselves. The language themselves… I’ve heard some ppl say that spoken Chinese sounds “angry”, might have something to do with the tones. Not sure about Japanese…