Wanted to get something from the supermarket. Supermarket was closed due to Easter :(

Yes I know this is really minor

Not directly. But

My Autism is actually a bigger issue. Allegedly Australia/NZ have regulations on disabilities, which I’m not sure how much being on the spectrum would affect

More importantly… One needs a job/education to live in somewhere like the EU (the few non-EU European countries almost all have equally or harder visa requirements). Education still costs lots of money for non-EU folks, and job market isn’t particularly good in EU. So having depression, which makes getting/keeping a job harder, certainly don’t help…

Short answer: Try medication (which worked)

Long answer:

I have clinically diagnosed depression, Major Depressive Disorder. Known it from first year of college, symptoms started way earlier probably around middle school

Psychologist from a few years ago recommended me to read the Feeling Good Handbook. I ended up reading the entire thing end-to-end… Most of it I don’t really recall anymore at this point. But the book did mention about how there are two gold-standard forms of therapy: “talk-therapy” (usually what psychologists do, most popular one I think is CBT), and antidepressants/medication. And the people who respond most effectively to these two options are almost anti-correlative with each other

It turned out I was among the smaller group of people who don’t respond very well (if at all) to talk therapy, but respond very well to medication. I was quite mentally against antidepressants up until that point, but I decided to just bite the bullet and give it a shot… So I talked with my psychologist, who then connected me with a psychiatrist who helped me get a prescription for Fluoxetine (Prozac) and monitored my progress every 2-3 months. It was basically a miracle drug for me. MDD can’t be cured, but me taking prescribed antidepressants, along with me getting adopted by two cats at that time, almost “cured” my depression for good. I was on a very low dose too, only 10-20 mg/d

But to echo what others have said. Therapy is work. I was very committed to finding an intervention. Even though CBT didn’t work very well I still managed to visit my psychologist every month and self-reflect afterwards, and that continued several years onwards even when most of my symptoms were greatly reduced after medication. No one forced me to read through a several hundred page book either, or to overcome my mental barrier of taking medication… I chose to partake these actions on my own

But yeah I think therapy does work if one is willing to put the effort into it

I have a pretty high respect for nearly all professional athletes to be honest. The aspect I respect the most is mainly how much technical competence and practice are needed to perform at professional levels

… although it may be because I do play really difficult video games, some of which can be considered to be e-sports. A less niche example, when I played chess semi-seriously for a year I really learned just how strong the Grandmasters are. Maybe this view bled into my view of conventional sports too

… do parents count?? I don’t have too many friends, if any at all

Otherwise I indirectly helped a coworker find a BF a few months ago. Yeah I guess that was it

For the most part yeah. I think that’s unironically how I “cheated” my old JLPT exams and got way higher grades than I should. And really high-level Japanese (such as political news, debates, legal matter) are mostly Kanji, and by that point you’d fully understand all the non-Kanji parts anyways so

But in real life you still have to actually say the words out loud…

Yes… Until when you’d have to pronounce it 😭 And then there’s a ridiculous amount of Japanese names that seem to follow no rules whatsoever for their pronunciations. And then there’s online JP users who would put the weirdest pronunciations for Kanjis, sometimes they are so weird that they have to annotate the pronunciation themselves

… Anyways, Japanese is difficult

Native Chinese speaker who is quite decent at Japanese and should in theory find Kanji quite easy, because of Chinese… YES

Not that the other parts of the language is easy, I find the keigo system quite complex so

I’ll say the stupidest swear word I could imagine. Something like “Krankenscheisse”

For context, my apartment is within the blast zone of both the EU and the NATO headquarters… if I see a mushroom cloud I’m assuming for the worst, if it’s not directly on top of my head in the first place

Yup I didn’t realize it was a prison at all, took several pictures all over & only found it out later via Wikipedia

Saint-Gilles Prison in Belgium. Apparently it should have just been closed so…

You don’t say!

Literally “a random building” I saw while waiting for a timed museum visit nearby. This is a patriot’s monument. The building on the back (which was what caught my attention in the first place) turned out to be the city prison

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock

A proper Apple laptop, for just 600 bucks? And discount to 500 for educational purposes?? I’ve actually had a previous workplace where they would only issue Windows or Mac computers for work… which I think this would have been extremely handy. Because of this I’m honestly quite happy to hear the news, since it will probably make me requesting dedicated work computers easier. 8GB RAM is a bit of a bummer, but there are HPCs and virtual machines for heavy computation tasks so…

I refuse to pay Apple out of principle, so I don’t think my personal opinions about the Neo matter much… I guess one positive thing I could say is that I find the idea of using ARM chips for full computers quite cool

I’ve read upon a particular prediction that I thought would be quite likely to happen. The bubble itself will likely burst, similar to the dot com bubble… but AI as a technology is likely here to stay, similar to the dot com bubble. The hope is that most of the current AI expertise/research will shift more toward academic institutions, who will primarily work on building scientific AI for research purposes. Similar to how foundation models/LLMs are already used in studying genetics/genomics and protein structures… And a few commercial AIs might eventually find a way to be profitable & stay on the market

Will suck a bit for the ML engineers who will have to find new jobs in academia and suffer massive pay cuts though

GrapheneOS on a Pixel 6a. Technically have a few Google apps, but they are only banking/governmental stuff and one gacha game (which I primarily play on a tablet anyway). Too lazy to set up Nextcloud myself, but I do have a VPS I rent… and I used to have a local RasPi running PiHole

I am apparently a bit too uncomfortably close to the exact stereotype OP listed

Well… I might be a special case. Most folks I know don’t acquire languages that easily

What does an “Average American” look like?

I thought it would be whatever the stereotypes one would get from popular American TV shows… which is not very Asian all-things considered. But I guess the language plays a role too. This is something that is hard to grasp while I was in the US, but Americans as a whole do have a rather distinct English accent that is different from folks from say Britain, Australia, other places where English isn’t the primary language, etc…

Yeah, being in a country since 18 yrs old does something to you… Fun fact about the accent. Apparently most ppl I’ve met in the EU assumed I’m from the US, despite me not looking remotely like an average American

US visa system is a bit… Interesting. Student visas also work for PhD programs, which can last a while. And after the study concludes there’s an option for ppl to extend it by 3 years (OPT). So one could be into their mid-30s and still be technically on a student visa in the US

• Mandarin Chinese. Native, but actually not that good. Can’t speak Cantonese though
• English, with heavy “American” accent. Basically native-level fluency
• Japanese. Somewhere between B2-C1 based on test results but that was a long time ago. I can probably get to C1 if/when I have the time to practice
• French. Still actively learning, around A1 across the board

I also have some passive knowledge of Dutch and German… But really passive though

Researcher. Important? Kind-of, I work in a supposedly very important biomedical research area but my position itself is not that important due to a variety of reasons…

Am I proud? Hell no. I’m only staying because I get paid enough (especially since I lived on near-poverty income for 5 years and below-average for another…). I’d disappear the moment I have a better opportunity, or if my paycheck is gone. This is position-specific though, I don’t mind working the same job as long as a few small things change

Yes and I have done it a good bit back in the US. Striking up a conversation with a total stranger is a bit frowned upon in the part of Europe where I live now… so I won’t

This is comparing two pretty extreme scenarios… which are both pretty strange but for different reasons

A lot of performing arts (music, sports) and related industries have a “winner takes all” model, where the most famous performer makes exponentially more than the average one. OF is a bit similar. So if you are a top OF model who won the genetic lottery, you could make millions… which hides the fact that the average OF model doesn’t make remotely as much (as others have pointed out)

Open source is more like a normal business, but with the problem that it doesn’t really generate profits given that many FOSS software are free as in free beer… If there is no revenue then of course there wouldn’t be a good salary either…

I do think there is a rather similar but interesting counter example: academic scientists. Many scientists do make rather comfortable wages; where I live now, postdocs/professors actually get paid above the national average. However, this is because science is very important to society… so the money we make come from governments/taxpayers. Governments generally agree to fund science at the taxpayers’ expense, because it will pay off in the long run. If governments don’t fund science then most scientists (barring some engineers) would make peanuts as well… So yeah, if governments believe FOSS has societal benefits and fund FOSS developers, that might be a way for them to make a lot more