zlatiah, zlatiah@lemmy.world

Bruh the cancer lab (prostate cancer out of all things) I worked in as an undergrad was studying JQ1. Couldn’t believe I’d ever hear this drug name again. Really hope this can go somewhere, reversible contraceptive sounds exciting

Working on more immersion. Started watching France 24 YouTube videos this week… Which is hard AF lol, sucks to be me that I’m more interested in current politics than gaming Ytb channels… at least the upside is that everyone seems to be speaking in standard French. But yeah if anyone has good French-speaking YouTube channels (not “for learning”, but what locals watch) please share them my way

Anki is a bit slow but still going, slacked off on learning new words a bit but revision is going well. Good news is that I’m almost completely done with the first 500 words of the 5000 deck, so I should be able to delete it soon

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…

Day was alright!

But I legitimately only found this out via Reddit (and now Lemmy). For an event organized by the UN it feels so anticlimatic that I didn’t see any mention of it where I live throughout the entire day 😭

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

Glad you liked it! I heard from my colleagues that they liked Project Hail Mary too

I… am one of the only people I know who basically don’t watch movies at all. When I was younger I’d get a fever if I had to concentrate & watch a 2-3 hrs long movie (some weird Autism thing I think), so I didn’t watch movies… The habit stuck

I am a much bigger fan of nonfiction and don’t generally care that much for visuals, so whenever I want to watch something (mostly YouTube) it’s just on my laptop or phone lol

… 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

Gotcha. So I work at a French-speaking university (yes I have my regrets of taking this job) where just about everything & anything is done in French… Which would explain why they would offer a course like that, since some international students might need some help, & I assume retaining the info won’t be hard if you’re forced to do everything in French afterwards

Thanks for the info btw. I’ll contact my professeur and see if that’s actually an option

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

It’s not going well going fantastic

Jk I think I’m being a bit too tough on myself… but French is kicking my ass as usual. Thankfully the Anki vocabulary training is getting easier now that I’m pass the complete beginner stage, since everything is looking more and more anglaise

Tried picking up the online course again yesterday, and got bodied with all the verb conjugation questions (at A1 level 😂)! But I think I might have to do more proper coursework at this point to improve my grammar. Also more reading and listening, I should probably go watch some old Tintin cartoons… and hopefully in a month or two I can go back to the French language speaking meetup again and properly speak this time around

On related topic, my employer does offer a 2-3 weeks intensive course thing, where they’d teach French the entire work-week. I’ll try to ask my professeur (in French all teachers are called professors actually… which I found rather interesting) about this later, but if anyone has experience with such intensive courses I’m all ears

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

Tough week at work. New major assignment came in on Tue, so I’ll have to deal with that for the next… 3-4 weeks I presume? So a lot of stress from that. Also bossman scheduled two interviews this week, and postdoc interviews are almost always a full-day commitment for the entire lab so… very excited for the weekend to come

Health-wise still feeling a bit unwell from last week. I’m really hoping I could get better over the weekend since I have a short trip scheduled next week

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