Sooo what I find funny is… all things considered, French Press isn’t even that sophisticated; it doesn’t involve adjusting the speed at which one pours the water, so it’s a lot less technically demanding than using like a V60 or something… I think the last time I went to a coffee class the instructors were all scoffing at the French Press lol (including one of them not wanting to “waste” a really high-quality batch of coffee on a French Press)

Also James Hoffmann has an alternative technique for using a French Press that makes coffee that is less “muddy”… basically doing the same as usual, but after 4 minutes instead of plunging, try to us a spoon to remove all the foam, and then keep the coffee inside for another 5-10 min. Then pour out coffee without plunging

Tommy does have yellow and green/blue eyes; the exact color seems to depend on lighting and the person

In my case… Ironically, almost everyone I know (which is not many). And not just the -tism, but all the other quirks I learned about myself from evaluations

My parents were literally involved with my psych tests and know everything. Despite them growing up in a culture that didn’t even believe depression is real, they’ve been incredibly kind and understanding

Most of my (now former) coworkers know. Half of them are understanding, the other half… I think they either don’t believe me or don’t have a grasp of the weight of the situation

I guess I try my best to not mask in order to alleviate some mental stress so there’s that…

Try to use some type of boiling water technique to invent drinkable sanitary drinking water that doesn’t get me drunk (might not be necessary in some parts of Asia)

Most parts of the world that is not North America: try to convince some wealthy persons and bar owners to sponsor me to getting a bunch of bread molds and rats/mice, possibly even pigs, to conduct antibiotics and vaccine research, otherwise I might die from random sources…

Not sure if I could reasonably do those given my limited biology knowledge, but I guess they are worth trying. Besides that I’d just try to be less blunt/offensive so I don’t get sent to jail and try to live my best life I guess

1. See other recommendations for gaming-specific distros as I’m not familiar with them… Overall, most “beginner-friendly” distros (Fedora, Mint, …) that are not named Ubuntu are good. Ubuntu is not bad per-se: they just have their own ways of doing certain things that are counter-intuitive. Also don’t follow the memes and use Arch Linux or something (Arch is good, but not-beginner-friendly)

2. Some multi-player games have anti-cheats that straight-up won’t work on linux, so if you play any large online-based games it might help to check their linux support first. Otherwise, there are unique examples like Skyrim that are very hard to mod on linux, but most mainstream games should work either out-of-the-box or with very minor tinkering. Unless if you’re into some weird esoteric retro games like me… if so then good luck learning WINE lol

3. As long as you follow 1 you should be fine. In my opinion most beginner linux distros are more intuitive than Windows so…

4. I’m not sure if it is a good idea to dual boot unless you are reasonably familiar with computers… as dual booting can be finicky and sometimes Windows can just eat the linux partition. But I think it is doable? Again I don’t recommend dual-booting so…

5. IMO the biggest decision most beginners have to make is between Gnome/KDE (two of the most popular desktop environments), not between distros. Try to see which one clicks with you more! Also make sure to back up data before switching. Good luck!

First day after I resigned from a somewhat toxic workplace. Currently working on obtaining Apostille for my recent psych eval to be potentially used for my future workplace

I might need to get groceries today… Not sure what to get yet

I think the best fit would be an immigration lawyer? Those ppl are incredibly expensive (probably in the $1000s to begin with) and are country-specific, so mostly only ppl who have difficult cases do that…

Can try to search the subreddits r/iwantout and r/immigration first, they have lots of good resources and past posts. Also can try expat.com

Also don’t make my mistake… finding a job in a foreign country is incredibly hard, even with a doctorate. So it helps to cast a wide net and/or get a job offer first before making further plans

Bear, but I think it’s because gorillas are known to be peaceful and will probably run away from conflict

If it is a fight to the death… Idk I think with how physics works it might be quite even?

Northwestern’s president sent an official email at 9 pm last night on this topic while being as sarcastic as ever

On the other R site there have been researchers at Cornell stating that they received stop-work orders

Shit is hitting the fan

My interpretation is that visitors don’t have specific rights to criticize a government per-se. However! In most non-authoritarian countries, everyone has the unequivocal rights to criticize a government as long as they are not intending on disobeying other harassment/discrimination laws, regardless of their status. Since visitors are also included in “everyone”, they can criticize a government too

Of course this only applies to non-authoritarian countries. Authoritarian countries don’t have that right even for their citizens, so visitors are not excluded either

(I hate where this train of thought is going but whatever…)

Welcome to the Google DeepMind Minecraft SMP server : ) (/s)

So the funny thing is… the lead researcher added “finding diamonds” since it’s a niche and highly difficult task that involves multi-step processing (have to cut wood, make pickaxe, mine iron, …) that the AI was not trained on. DeepMind has a good track record with real life usage of their AI… so I think their ultimate goal is to make the AI go from “Minecraft kiddies” to something that can think on the spot to help with treating rare disease or something like that

Y’know they could have used something like Slay the Spire or Balatro… but I digress

Without being sarcastic…

I think Project 2025’s goal is less about “cost cutting” and more about reducing bureaucracy & consolidating power… I genuinely don’t think they have real plans for where to spend the money besides some vague goals like lowering income tax or something

And in practice, they are cutting a bunch of important governmental endeavors that have very good ROI (NIH has always bipartisan for a reason), so they are literally wasting everyone’s money, not saving

I just thought it’s more of an issue of language/expression than anything… Methinks the concept of “leasing/renting” for an indefinite amount of time might be quite new in human history, so maybe we just don’t have a better word for it

Case in point… From a pure technical standpoint, I thought a game I purchased on Steam or an audiobook from Amazon is technically “leased indefinitely with no additional fees”, but doesn’t the lack of additional fees make it equivalent to owning something?

And as otherwise pointed out, under capitalist systems you can literally own a home, but would still have to pay taxes to pay for maintenance of publicly shared resources… so at what time should we call it “leased” instead

The Chinese language doesn’t quite work that way as it is based almost solely on distinct characters…

I guess you can just keep compounding characters together. Just as a quick example, “[the] People’s Republic of China” is a 7-character word in Chinese with no breaks… it can go much, much longer as necessary, but I’m not sure if that counts, since it’s essentially just three words joined together (“China”, “People”, “Republic”)

Otherwise, the closest thing might be some of the longer Chinese idioms (“Chengyu”), although most Chengyus are only 4 characters long

Learning a language where you need to know how to write thousands of differently squiggles (with almost no rules whatsoever) to even communicate is difficult in its own way though

It seems that a lot of scientist jobs are advertised on EURAXESS (sometimes mandated by law). There are also research topic-specific job boards… for example Nature Jobs advertises all sorts of positions across the world, although most are in China (since they are desperate for talent). Also by “scientist” I’m referring to anything PhD student-level and above, so yeah. I think Sweden is the country I know which has both reasonable research quality while still being a bit desperate on looking for more applicants

If that’s not possible: a lot of countries have their own job board too, but most of them require knowledge of the local language… (again, scientists kind-of get a pass on this due to English being the lingua franca)

Some companies do international transfer too… like how Denmark is known for pharmaceuticals, so maybe someone working for Novo Nordisk could theoretically ask for that? Although I assume those jobs would be very competitive now…

Unironically… I’ve basically hinted at everyone I know on ways to apply for EU-based science jobs if they are interested (surprisingly… a lot of ppl are not)

I’m still being optimistic though, really hope the US can somehow pull out a miracle

I… don’t quite feel comfortable sharing the full details, but F-1; I have submitted a green card application too but no way it’s gonna pass now. I might find an opportunity to write about it a bit more in the future

Sadly, not quite: several countries want to, but they all have their own funding difficulties. They are trying to though, since these days American scientists might be seen as being offered at a steep discount

The HHS official announcement link if anyone is interested.

Yes, the double speak is quite strong. Also quite obvious who wrote this based on the URL.