I only moved recently so I don’t know too much but… No rating for both

No local government for almost a year and a half now. Allegedly there is a left-wing Islamic party and a left-wing socialist party that have severe difficulties with forming coalitions

Federal government coalition is led by a right-wing party with the prime minister being an asshole so I don’t exactly like it… But things are running & far-right wasn’t in the coalition, so I guess I can’t complain

I physically cannot focus or think too hard on something for too long (somewhere between 1-2 hrs), otherwise I would get physically sick. It was so bad for me as a child that I stopped watching movies… but these days it seems no more than a fun fact for my therapists

Unironically… it is considerably easier to relocate as a scientist, if not only for the lack of language requirements (English is the lingua franca everywhere in academia) and being automatically a “high-skilled immigrant”

Also this is Nature News where my personal guess is 90% of their reader base work in academia sooo

Sooo what I liked about this news is… On subreddits for researchers, I see a lot of negative sentiment towards the hard numbers of ppl wanting to leave US, because “EU has even fewer funding”, “difficult to integrate”, “no one really moved during the first term”, etc… In contrast to that this is actually a surprisingly level-headed and well-written report that discusses this on a more personal level, so I do appreciate that

Last impulse buy was literally just delivered today. An entry-level gaming monitor (around $200) and a desk-mount for a laptop + monitor combo (around $30-40). I recently moved so I didn’t have a monitor yet

Had a quick gaming session with the monitor and it was worth every penny! The games I play do require low display lag so 1 vs 3 frames of delay actually does matter…

The desk-mount however was only a good idea on paper, the desk my landlord provided doesn’t have a place to mount it

Holy shit that is terrifying. I’m glad the woman got the breast reduction (and somehow ended up with bigger honkers at a healthy size lol, from B to GGG back to D)

I’ve never seen any one studying sudden breast growth now that I read this… Hope this doesn’t get me into some weird rabbit holes

That checks out, thanks for pointing this out. I’m much more familiar with clinical trials where ppl’s race/ethnicity do play an importance (and is also a hot topic for debate… from both sides of the political spectrum), hence I was a bit surprised they didn’t include it. If there really is no significant cultural differences that would be amazing

Also one can dream they get 120+ participants for scanning

To give them credit… neuroscience and scanning ppl’s brain is expensive lol. But yeah, 15 participants and no open access, I have no clue exactly what or how they did this

No, because I’m close to 30, literally had a more favorable version of this option (enough money, relocate to a low cost-of-living country and doesn’t even have to be frugal) presented to me, and I chose not to. And I already live frugal enough that 65% would be really rough… I’m okay with a lite version though: only take fun and engaging part-time/flexi jobs, and dedicate my full time to a rewarding but not necessarily well-paid (or paid at all) career, while cutting down a bit on spending

I just felt that with all the education & things I have going for me I’d rather do something productive that contributes to society. If I literally couldn’t find a job that’s not a metaphorical meat grinder then it’s another story, but I’m not at that stage yet

Apparently food scientists did the research and found out that people liked the imitation chicken nuggets more than real chicken nuggets. I didn’t fully believe it at first so I gave it a try, and promptly got hooked on veggie nuggets lol (I only stopped since no one sells it at where I live now)

Personally I do support reducing meat consumption for environmental benefits. I find meat substitutes a bit of a roundabout way to be vegetarian/vegan especially since some other cultures (e.g. a lot of Indian food) have been making delicious vegetarian food for a long time without needing meat substitutes. But I guess meat substitutes did indeed work?? As long as there is a demand for it I don’t see an issue. Maybe having to make sure ppl have adequate vitamin B intake (which might be less of an issue for lab-grown meat), but that’s pretty much it

Someone else mentioned this too, but if anyone is into Japanese songs: I think there are probably more songs (especially Vocaloid ones) with extremely messed-up (and convoluted) lyrics than those that do not… I don’t think most of them are well-known outside anime/vocaloid circles though. Trying to think about the more “cute and depressing” ones I could find:

The ones I could think of are mostly on the Fediverse. In fact I think a very large chunk of the Fediverse are non-US/China: mastodon.social is currently operated by a German non-profit, misskey.io is operated by a Japan-based group, the Mastodon server I’m registered on is owned by a Dutch guy, … I think if it is just for friends/family that are willing to switch, Fediverse might be the best option at the moment

My proposal… this is a “long con”, so this seem more like a political proposal rather than something that can quickly fix up our society to be less polluting:

1. Start/contribute to a political party that is catered towards young voters, with somewhere between center-left to full left-wing orientation. Note that sadly this party cannot be “far-left” so no eating billionaires or drastic corporate taxes… yet. Climate change will be a core part of the agenda, but at this point the party has to only focus on low-hanging fruit options (improve recycling & waste management, fines on recycling, taxes on cars, company cars, and high-consumption households, etc). Very important that intermediate steps such as nuclear is accepted (in contrast to some Green Parties), we can’t afford to ruin the economy at this point
2. Try to pre-emptively rule out serious cases of corruption and/or nepotism, and try to base party focuses and decisions on politically unbiased scientific outputs; might need to hire a good scientific panel
3. Use whatever means possible to try and gain popularity without changing the party’s principles. Ads… yes. Social media… yes. Paid influencers… have to swallow a hard pill here but also yes
4. Try to win enough seats to form a majority coalition government with left-leaning and/or green parties. This is where point 1’s not being far-left yet comes into place as the party will need to be at least somewhat popular with most voters and most other politicians
5. Work with the coalition to reduce tax loopholes, try to classify more forms of rich-people “income” into regular taxable income, and shift the main beneficiaries of party politics to focus on the working class. So no more tax loopholes for the rich as much as we can try… and the “no corruption” part from point 2 becomes very important here as otherwise the plan can go to waste
6. The government should have a healthy tax base at this point. Now start giving tax incentives to perform more serious individualistic environmentally-friendly options (for example, subsidized high-speed rail instead of plane, install solar panels, biking instead of driving), and heavily tax or penalize situations that are polluting with no particular upsides (one-time use plastic, private jets, ,)
7. Now THINK BIGGER. Invest tax money to public transit and green energy infrastructure; the population might be accepting of more radical interventions such as banning private jets or prison time for some execs now so we can start doing that

… Frankly, if anyone actually carries out this plan until like step 5 or 6, I think the exact details regarding combat climate change would be trivial, since the government would have very sufficient resources/good will/power to do so at that point

Obligatory X… I mean CGP Grey

In totally unrelated matter, I now really despise ppl who put their personal item on the overhead bin and then take like 1 min to take them off even though it could fit under their seat

I think it is hard to give an objective rating on this since even extremely skilled individuals (probably half of Lemmy by societal standards) tend to skew their ratings toward the middle. Basically what Dunning-Krueger actually found from their research

That said… I’d rate myself as a 6/10. Maybe I actually know more than that

Cheats? Never tried these myself, but I was being told that some dating apps use their own ELO system for “rating” users, and they try to keep the best matches hidden, so allegedly you can try to game the ELO by rejecting more ppl than necessary and on Hinge you can cheat by leaving the age range completely open (18-99)…

… or I guess beg family/friends for help to completely bypass dating apps I guess

Disclaimer I have never even dated & my only “dates” from a dating app ended in complete disasters, so… I wouldn’t trust what I have just wrote

I have been following this curious incident for the past 72 hours, it is… quite fascinating. Vshojo was the largest English vtuber company with a stellar reputation and had some of the most famous English-speaking talents (case in point, Ironmouse is probably the most watched female streamer at the moment?) and they essentially imploded in under 72 hours, probably less than 24 if you consider the cutoff point as when all the talents quit. I think the news article only scratched the surface and was probably too generous towards the founder

• Vshojo was a Silicon Valley startup (this gets important later on) founded in 2021. They are/were somewhere between a talent-management company and a typical vtuber “corpo” (think Hololive, where Gawr Gura worked at). They heavily advertised themselves in a way that made them “better than Hololive”, such as talent freedom, generous payment splits, …
• As the article stated, Vshojo gained $11M in series A funding… but no further VC funds. For the longest time, a lot of fans were confused about how they make money since their advertised rates for talents are extremely generous and “too good to be true”. Turns out they were indeed too good to be true
• According to various sources, they employed somewhere around 25-30 ppl… company is private so no one knows their exact financials, but 30 * $100K/yr = $3M/yr, which alone would make the series A last no more than 4 years. And this is not factoring in their advertisement costs and stuff like custom rigged 3D models, performances, … I think someone crunched the numbers that their annual revenue from the talents is probably $200-300K/yr. So they have been hemorrhaging money from the very beginning
• The company has a rather… unprofessional culture that has been exposed by all the talents. Stuff like their lawyer having an expired license, discouraging talents from discussing salary, slandering ex-talents who quit, having a C-suit being a sex predator, influencing opinions on 4chan’s /vt/… yeah. Allegedly these issues have been around since the company’s founding
• The company was in deep financial troubles a year ago (probably series A ran out) and have basically not paid any of their talents or artists/commissions since late 2024, as well as cut their Japan branch manager’s salary by half (they probably did a lot more). This led to a lot of talents already consider quitting. Earlier in 2025 three talents either quit or were dismissed; also two C-suits quit
• Notably about the charity… the talent in question, Ironmouse, has severe CVID so she has been running donation events to the Immune Deficiency Foundation for a long time. Vshojo’s CEO knows this, he even retweeted a lot of the past donation records. Last time Ironmouse received $515K which Vshojo was supposed to donate on her behalf… and the money never got delivered, likely got treated as regular revenue

There’s way more but I think the community is now universally hating the CEO at the moment. Since the CEO also publicly announced embezzling charity funds… I’m wondering if he will be going to jail. Since most of the ppl involved have heavy YouTube/Twitter presence there are lots of primary evidence around if anyone is interested in more details

I know a good number of Japanese cultural stuff (including video game companies) do! Not sure specifically in cases like “hey let’s give SEGA money so they can make the funny laundromat game more popular” though. Hence why it is my low-stakes conspiracy… Would be pretty cool if things like DDR really gets a subsidy though, it is genuinely a good means of cardio

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

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)