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zlatiah

@ zlatiah @lemmy.world

Posts
51
Comments
237
Joined
2 yr. ago

Ask me about:

  • Science (biology, computation, statistics)
  • Gaming (rhythm, rogue-like/lite, other generic 1-player games)
  • Autism & related (I have diagnosis)
  • Bad takes on philosophy
  • Bad takes on US political systems & more US stuff

I'm not knowledgeable about most other things

  • What's a song in a language you don't speak that still gets you dancing and yelling along hyped?

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  • Lots of K-pop get people who don't understand Korean at all to vibe; there's also famous (infamous?) songs like the remixed Caramelldansen (which is Swedish), Tunak Tunak Tun as you mentioned is a good one too

    Personally I... vibe to a lot of songs that don't have any lyrics at all

    Or how about ones with fictional lyrics? Such as siromaru + cranky: conflict (OK this might be a bit too niche...)

  • You have $10,000 to make your town/city a better place to live. What do you do with the money?

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  • This amount is peanuts compared to the operating budget of the city I live in...

    Realistically? I was pleasantly surprised by someone trying to make little tree pit gardens on the street where I live. $10,000 might be enough to make some of those on a few residential streets and kickstart a local initiative for the community to keep maintaining them. There may be some leftover money for acquiring a few communal trash bins to help with trash issues around the neighborhood as well

  • Whats the worst game mechanic?

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  • I'm speaking from experience, I have tried... To give them some benefit of the doubt, designing a good difficulty variation is difficult (pun not intended), even games like the original Hades which has a very extensive difficulty modification system still gets flack for it

  • Whats the worst game mechanic?

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  • For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable

  • Whats the worst game mechanic?

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  • Something that hasn't been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay...

    Case in point, unmodded Skyrim's legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation'd...)

  • That moment when you graduated from MEME

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  • What? At least their whole career isn't defined by a Suite of MEMEs

    (William Stafford Noble is a very famous computational biologist)

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    What do antidepressants actually do for people who are depressed?

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  • Replying as someone with diagnosed depression ("Major Depressive Disorder", isn't as bad as it sounds) which apparently first started in teenage years

    For me "talk therapy" (such as CBT) has never been ineffective, but not effective to the extent that I considered my depression "managed" so to speak. I'd always have negative thoughts, bad feelings, etc... I was reading The Feeling Good Handbook and became open to the idea of medication, so I was put into contact with a psychiatrist a few years ago who decided to put me on a very low dose antidepressant (10mg fluoxetine/Prozac per day), later upped the dose (20 mg/day, still low)

    A week or so after being put on antidepressants (a very low dose, mind you), a large part of my depressive symptoms just... went away. I'm no way near being "constantly happy" or anything; it's just that the depressive thoughts left. And it was significant enough because I don't think I've ever achieved that with talk therapy

    There was an extended period a year and a half ago when I stopped medication due to relocation, and depression came back after like a month or so, but it could have been compounded by the fact that I got a bone fracture back then & was not in a good mood in general... but the symptoms went away again after a week or more of me restarting medication. I stopped medication again 3-4 months ago for another relocation, and depression hasn't come back for me yet

    My understanding is that antidepressants, depending on the type, alters the body chemistry... so depending on where someone's depression comes from, antidepressants is sometimes the most effective treatment out there (for many others, talk therapy is the most effective). Since it appears that my source of depression is due to losing the genetic lottery, antidepressants probably was the perfect solution. But realistically psychology/neuroscience don't have enough research funding despite how important and interesting they are, so we don't actually know that much regarding how antidepressants work... just that they work quite well for some people

    And to answer your question: no not really. It just "treats" depression and is not always effective. Happiness seems like something very much separate, but can probably be induced by certain controlled substances (which are highly addictive and bad for you)

  • What's your favorite joke that doesn't translate to English very well?

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    What is your income and do you feel wealthy or poor?

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  • Exact number is between 3100-3200 EUR/mo after tax. My current salary is fixed by the government and is under a preferential tax treatment (no income tax first 3 years, only social security)

    Number might seem low... but in comparison, the country's median salary is like 2500-2600/mo, 2800+/mo where I live. I also don't spend a lot (I literally don't know how to spend more than half of my monthly salary at the moment) so I feel like a king here lmao

    The literal same job title I had in Chicago was $61,008/yr exact before tax in Chicago and I definitely felt poor. Enough to survive, but poor

  • What did you get fired for?

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  • Never been fired fired as I haven't had that many jobs and jobs in academia usually don't officially fire someone... the closest one I had was pretty wild though

    I was taking a summer job in college on a clinical research project; part-time job, we got assigned working hours at the beginning of each week. I was one of the few students who did not have clearance for clinical/counseling work so I could only do lab work. My performance wasn't the best and I couldn't do anything besides processing samples, so after 2-3 weeks they stopped issuing me work schedules and I was "fired"... or at least that's what I thought. Later it turned out the lead professor and the entire project got into a massive scandal (sexual harassment, bullying, etc... got on local news) that eventually got the professor fired (tenured btw so they can't be officially fired, uni "convinced" them to leave), so every student worker was essentially laid off at that moment. Probably likely that the entire research team got something akin to a stop-work order earlier so that's why I never got work assigned for those weeks...

    So yeah, the answer was a combination of 1) I wasn't that good of a worker and more importantly 2) the entire project we were on got into a scandal and was terminated

  • What are things you know because of your personal interests that most people have no idea about ?

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  • Anyone remotely interested in Japanese music, J-pop, or rhythm games might have seen some music being labelled with something like "BOFU2017" or "BOF:NT" in song names, and a lot of these music have surprisingly high production value. This actually has some rather interesting history

    So Beatmania was a DJ simulator rhythm game released by Konami in 1998 that was an inspiration for a lot of music games in the future. The Be-Music Source file format was developed for a community simulator of Beatmania. Later, BMS evolved into essentially its own rhythm game (which anyone can play btw, beatoraja is even available on AUR), and the community forbade players from playing official Konami charts (referred to as "illegal charts")

    In order to increase the amounts of content available for BMS, the community decided to host BMS creation competitions to encourage players to make more BMS... the flagship event is called "BMS of Fighters" (BOF), hosted annually starting from 2004. All music from the events are completely free and libre: as in, free as in both freedom and free beer. And the competition is fierce; a quick search on YouTube will show some top-ranking songs and their production values tend to be very high (... and there are some shitposts too, we don't talk about Mopemope or that stupid Kirby song)

    Obviously because of the libre nature of these competitions, a lot of these songs end up getting picked up by various rhythm games that are not BMS at all. The most popular rhythm games (like DDR, maimai) tend to have a generous collection of the top ranking BOF charts. The low-budget games even more so: when I was in China for two months and saw a lot of local arcade games (basically Chinese clones of maimai, DDR/PIU and Dancerush), guess what songs they have the most! Muse Dash which also started as a Chinese indie game also has a ton of BOF songs; in fact, Blackest Luxury Car, a song which I strongly associate with Muse Dash's entire identity (they even have a stage modeled after the song), was in fact... a song from BOFU2017

    It's hard to tell but I wouldn't be surprised if BMS have a wider societal impact on rhythm game music and even the entire Japanese music genre as a whole. A lot of the artists behind top-ranking charts probably got contracts with various rhythm games... or maybe even beyond those. One funny example I know is that one artist became the lead composer of a gacha game that grossed $18M last month; the game in question is almost universally praised for their good soundtracks

    As for the BMS themselves... distribution is not centralized whatsoever, especially for less popular songs. Some are on Google Drive, some on OneDrive, some on certain hosting websites, some only in packaged archives that some people are thanklessly maintaining... but anyways it is rather fascinating

    Also the 2025 BOF started on October 3rd and is ongoing now. The portal for all BOF events are here: https://bmsoffighters.net/

  • Good morning Mr. President! You wake up after a snap election in the US to find out that you are the new POTUS, what are the five first things that you focus on to reverse the current course of the US

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  • My zeroth thing would be to yell at the top of my lungs What the actual fuck

    1. Increase security personnel for myself and the White House. Sadly this will have to be necessary given the hostile nature of the US at the moment... hopefully this is temporary
    2. Reverse every policy Trump and the MAGA team have been doing (if that even counts as one thing)
    3. Convert the US voting system to ranked choice voting
    4. Add a wage indexing scheme: governmental salaries, minimum wage, and private market wage guidelines will be pegged to inflation
    5. Increase governmental budget especially in areas like health, science

    I'd probably be voted out by the time my term ends, but I hope at least some of the changes are permanent

  • People who have permanently moved to another country, what gave you the opportunity and was it worth it?

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  • Don't mind me I'm also looking through the replies, I'm not qualified to answer this question... I basically followed the trend and drifted from China to the US for education & thought I would have stayed permanently, but wow things went down the drain quickly (left before the ICE did their thing in Chicago...). I am still trying to figure out the new country (Belgium) I found a job and relocated to at the moment

  • You're going on a road trip! What's the first place you wanna hit up and why?

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  • The country I live in now is quite well-served by railway lines so it would be hard to imagine going on a road trip... If I have the opportunity however, maybe to the Ardennes mountains since it'd be nice to explore the whole area

    The ironic answer would be the local pothole(s)

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Important additional context on this... TLDR is that the post is only a "feel-good" post and misrepresented reality; real life is a lot more nuanced and fucked up

    Mary E Brunkow solely worked in industry (a.k.a. the scientific slang for working in something like a pharmaceuticals cpmpany) after her PhD, instead of in academia like most Nobel Prize laureates. Industry researchers rarely publish. And 34 published papers may seem low by Nobel standards but is a lot. I don't think I personally know any industry researchers that are this prolific; some full professors even don't have this many papers

    The bigger takeaway from this story is not "anyone can make it" if they have a good idea... Brunkow was extremely prolific as a researcher. A better takeaway may be instead of focusing on an individual solution, systematically why academia has such an excessive focus on publication metrics; people are trying to move away from it which is good. Another thing: her old company (Celltech) went defunct in 2004 and Brunkow was allegedly laid off (and no one at the time realized the importance of her discovery) which is probably a better take home message

    Her Wikipedia page as reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_E._Brunkow.

    Also some discussion about this on r/labrats if anyone wants to go over to the forbidden site: https://reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/1o1pgo1/mary_e_brunkow_one_of_this_years_nobel_prize

  • Do languages that use non-Latin alphabets (Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew) have upper and lower case letters? What about serif or sans-serif? How do they show emphasis?

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  • Hiragana is the standard Japanese alphabet basically... But in everyday language, Hiragana is used to construct Kanji, so you would rarely encounter actual written Hiragana unless 1) in some commonly used terms and/or grammatical constructs, 2) someone is pointing out the pronunciation of a Kanji, or 3) in materials for younger audiences

    Katagana is used for "borrowed words" from non-Asian languages like say ice cream. These words never have associated Kanjis to begin with, so that's why you see them more often

    Edit: I correct myself, I was a bit too exaggerating... Hiragana isn't that rare, just less prominent than Katagana. But it is a bit strange if someone lives in Japan in a long time and never know they exist... They are the basic alphabet after all

  • Do languages that use non-Latin alphabets (Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew) have upper and lower case letters? What about serif or sans-serif? How do they show emphasis?

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  • I can only answer for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. Others have answered the first point, but on "showing emphasis":

    I can confirm that in modern, information-age CJK languages, people also use things like italic, boldface, and other equivalents not too different from English. Notably though the punctuation marks are distinct Unicode letters (they are all full-length instead of half-length) different from their Germanic/Romance counterparts; the Japanese quotation marks are probably the most fun example. As for font type... Chinese has a long evolution history so there are in fact a variety of fonts baked into its history, some of which are very cursed

    If you are referring to pre-information-age... there is the concept of Isochrony on Wikipedia but I think it's more for individual words. Emphasis can be shown by how you speak a language and stress certain words... but then CJK are all high-context languages so there are lots of nuances

  • Do you spend more time on lemmy than you did on reddit?

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  • Yes, because I was primarily a lurker while I was on Reddit... Lurked on Lemmy for a year too but not anymore, so I spend more time on here

  • What's an uplifting fact that might counter the doom of our current reality?

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  • A few somewhat recent ones of different magnitudes: