Arcade rhythm games (DDR, Pump It Up, maimai, etc) are subsidized by the Japanese government to get Otakus/NEETs to go out, touch grass, and exercise

Have you ever wondered why you can have 10-15 minutes of game time for the same amount of money as one (sometimes half) a pull on a claw machine?? /puts on tinfoil hat

If I recall… I have gone on at least 7-10 days without any beyond-surface-level human interactions and fared just fine (if not better than normal), so yes

Is there a bright side?

To be fair I might have exaggerated a bit… I can navigate my way around pretty advanced statistics/machine learning stuff, it’s just that I don’t have enough fundamentals to call myself a programmer; I assume most of my classmates are similar. But on the positive end, there are a lot more advanced methods in biomedical research now. People used a lot of cutting-edge machine learning in biomedical research (case in point: IBM and DeepMind had biomedicine in mind when they are trying to diss chess champions with AI models). Also there are some very competent programmers/research groups who ended up building open source bioinformatics tools that everyone could use, even though it seems against the hyper-competitive trend of biomedical research. So even if individual labs couldn’t do much, there are indeed better tools/pipelines available now

Are there jobs out there?

I… think a lot of research labs/pharmas are still pretty desperate for competent (or just any) bioinformaticians? Not in computational biology/methods development though, that field is too competitive even for me (and there are a surprisingly large amount of AI/ML/LLM slop)

About those genomics stuff… most biomedical researchers still couldn’t code worth shit. It is bad enough that there are even dedicated computational biology programs now (I was in one), and from personal experience I confirm that even comp bio graduates can barely code worth shit and are also somewhat bad with biology

Pay is still shit. So… yeah.

Second this, and I also agree that this comes with a lot of caveat…

Biology as a field has an issue with looking down on anyone without a PhD and sometimes people can get weird over it; there are also LLMs and machine learning bullshit (I’ve dealt with some personally); and frankly the most in-demand skill is bioinformatics, not traditional CS… but yeah it is not a bad field

Personally though… I might be giving bad advice here, but I find some bioinformatics tools rather poorly maintained. This is FastQC which is one of the more important tools in bioinformatics data processing, and… yeah its GitHub records look like that, most are way less maintained. I always wonder if some of these projects could use some help with maintenance

Chinese. I… don’t think China accepts immigration, so I don’t think it matters what most Chinese people think of Americans. Not that I think China would be an ideal expat destination for most Americans anyway… China also have most of the problems US have. Maybe for some highly accomplished scientists/business executives who can be offered a job (since China is spending a lot on R&D), but that’s probably it

As someone who lived in the US for a long time and actively considered this?

• Northern European countries are nice for anyone who doesn’t mind living like a vampire; there is basically no sunlight in winter, but they are probably the best in terms of providing what an “average person” wants and needs
• There are countries here and there which have low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life, assuming that I only want to be an “expat” who wants to live temporarily and am not trying to find work there (remote work, savings, or something else). My parents insist that Thailand fits this category; I believe several South American countries fit the bill as well
• Realistically, if I actually want to immigrate, it will probably end up being one of the random EU countries, whichever I can get in via ancestry or find a job in…

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I don’t hate income tax. But from my personal experience, when I was a young lad with no political leaning, seeing a quarter of my first paycheck just… disappear into the void (what I thought back then) definitely made me feel something not great

I mean right now I can see that an income tax system is at the very least a “necessary evil”, but I could also see how ppl without a fuller perspective of things might interpret this as almost theft (the evil guvunment stole muh money!!!)

Free rent/mortgage if basic necessities are allowed. If not… a Michelin Inspector permit (and associated training courses), I do like some good culinary experiences

Nothing, and it’s not because I don’t play mobile games. I have a GrapheneOS phone that is so insulated from modern technology that it can barely run Uber/Lyft… so I keep games on my computers and tablets. Me having a bunch of gadgets (I have a Steam Deck and a dedicated tablet for mobile games) helps too

And… speaking of this topic. I am slightly competitive on a mobile gacha game at the moment; almost no serious players for these “mobile game” play on phone because screen too small, so they end up using the PC clients anyway…

Got a second-hand Walmart folding table + chair set at the beginning of my PhD, I think the entire set was like $15 or $20; it was the only furniture I had that lasted my entire grad school

If I count everywhere in the world… When I was growing up, me and my parents ended up renting some absolutely atrocious apartments that were close to where I went to school. The worst one was my middle school apartment… it was a tiny 1-bedroom for the three of us, don’t think it had a real kitchen, AC barely works (actually I couldn’t recall if it even had an AC), toilet clogged every other day, and once in summer the hot water broke down for an extended time and I had to take showers at the swimming pool I visit… To be fair, my parents grew up when China was a 3rd world country, so I guess the 3rd world country haven’t left them at that time

If I only count in the US… It was not that bad per se, but I lived in a shady 500 sqft tiny house next to the one bar in my college town for two years. It definitely felt quite shady and wasn’t exactly quiet at night. I’ve also had issues with the AC/heating and the metal pipe bursting once in winter. This place also gave me a peculiar core memory in college… I used to have a bucket by the front door to wash my car; once my school’s football team had a big victory, and the next morning the bucket was just gone

Also honorable mentions to my AirBnB adventures when I was younger… which includes once when I saw my landlord being put under house arrest as I was returning to the bnb, once when I think I shared a place with a drug dealer, and once I managed to get myself homeless in NYC at 3am in the morning because the host didn’t give me the room code & I couldn’t get in the building

Dark Souls 2 was the first and only Soulslike game I played… Was a great experience and a good time killer during my summer break (when I still had one). Only later did I learn how poorly ppl thought of the game

…are we describing the same restaurants? Unironically all the restaurants I go to generate less waste than me cooking at home lol…

As in, every time I go to a restaurant they would always bring in washable dishes/utensils, and I assume they would probably have to fill the dishwashers to the brim (in contrast to me living alone & only filling up half each time). The one time I ordered a takeout, the restaurant put all the food in insanely high-quality takeout boxes that were freezer and microwave friendly, I used them for meal prep for a full year…

Granted these are fine dining and all cost a fortune. I guess fast food/takeouts do describe that a bit better

The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture

I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire”… then got old enough to see through the nonsense

I believe no one else mentioned this but… China is a case study of why this is a terrible idea

The entire PRC uses the same time zone, even though in any other parts of the world, China should have been split to at least 3 different timezones

It is very disorienting to try and go for breakfast in Tibet at 9 am to find that nothing is open and the sun is just out… So yeah. Imagine if this is extended to 12-hr differences

Wikipedia has a nice summary of this

On laptop:

• Primary LibreWolf, as it does everything I need, and I don’t 100% trust Mozilla anymore after recent incidents so I wanted a non-Mozilla fork of Firefox
• Secondary Chromium, when something refuses to run on Firefox and derivatives

On phone:

• Primary FOSS Browser, I think it might be some guy’s passion project… It works so yeah
• Secondary Vanadium, basically GrapheneOS’ in-house Chromium fork. For when the primary browser doesn’t do the job, which happens more often because I have FOSS Browser set on blocking all JavaScript…

Absolutely not. There is a reason I’m personally noping out of the US and told every international person at my former workplace to do the same so…

Disclaimer, was an international student for many years, not a law expert

I think realistically, an administration has many ways to make it incredibly difficult to recruit international students even without a blanket ban…

Such as making overseas visa applications even more difficult (it already happened between US-China and various Muslim countries during Trump’s first term), making legislation that require more from unis if they have international students, general societal xenophobia, …

I’m not sure if an actual blanket ban would be permitted under US law though

Edit: that’s just my take on whether a blanket ban is feasible. If you ask me personally I recommend every international student to get their rear end out of the US as soon as possible so…

donate it to me

Jokes aside… If you don’t use Mac stuff at all and don’t mind bricking the computer, would you be interested in trying out Asahi Linux for science?

I’m not familiar with the project at all so I’m not sure how it works, but it might be cool to try. The lead developer had some personal issues recently but is otherwise quite active on Mastodon