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

  • 22 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 15th, 2024
  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtoGaming@lemmy.world•What game changed your life?English
    7·
    3 months ago

    Osu!, but not in the good direction… the game might have deleted what little confidence I have left in myself and gave me crippling perfectionism issues. Also permanently changed my music taste. May or may not have set me up on a hyper-competitive career path as well so there is that. Upside is… I’m fun at the club and the arcade maybe??

  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•Trump to attach $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applicants
    17·
    3 months ago

    Yeah no joke. STEM research is already ~50% (usually more) foreign; I don’t have the numbers but I would wager that there are more academic H1Bs than industry ones (since academic has no cap) and they are the main victims of this policy

    Even before Trump I’ve heard anecdotes of ppl fighting tooth and nails with their uni/institute for H1B sponsorship because it would cost the employers a few thousand extra per year. This ends up with a lot of international postdocs on the highly temporary and sometimes predatory J1/OPT statuses… Slapping a $100k fee on H1B would just kill the field lol. Not that this administration cares about STEM to begin with

    Speaking of which… I was the one warning my colleagues that Trump would come for the H1Bs and no one listened. Guess I was right after all…

  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•There is no good reason why there is still homelessness and poverty
    191·
    4 months ago

    Everyone else already mentioned this… Methinks the fundamental issue is wealth distribution, so yes it is capitalism. I would say it is a “good” reason as it is a major target for sociology research and politicians, and there are active efforts in some countries to reduce inequality so…

    I think I was radicated by this back in second year of college… Professor mentioned something like “The US Midwest has enough production capacity to feed the entire world” when a lot of the crops went to beef production, sweeteners, or just waste

    This has been an issue for a while and I think Cory Doctorow mentioned it in one of his blog posts? About the Luddites; they were not anti-technology, but saw how the productivity increases would only benefit the rich and wealthy. I suspect the current AI issue is the same, “robots replacing your job” will be a lot more positive if the replaced worker still makes the same amount via basic income/stipend by the government instead of the money being concentrated into OpenAI or Meta or somewhere

    … I’ve wanted to talk about these for a while

  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•VTuber CEO Admits To Spending Charity Money As Agency Implodes
    16·
    5 months ago

    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

  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess.
    8·
    9 months ago

    So… disclaimer first! I have played chess but only a year or so; I got into chess during the pandemic and had a peak ELO of ~1600+ on chess.com and 1900+ on Lichess; probably translates to a classical ELO of ~1200 (competition is tough in classical…). Obviously I’m not remotely a good player, but I can hold my ground. I also had to do a neuropsych evaluation recently for mental health reasons, so I spent the last month of my free time looking into research of intelligence (g factor, IQ tests, the disturbing history, etc…) for my own curiosity. So I might have a bit of knowledge on this… but:

    For the most part chess is its own unique skills and is unrelated to “smartness”. Nevertheless, I think chess might be related to probably just one or two specific narrow fields of intelligence. Being good at chess requires one to be knowledgeable of various chess openings (memorization, working memory), extremely strong pattern recognition (Magnus Carlsen is really good at this; AlphaZero was literally all pattern recognition due to the way it works), and being able to see 5, 10, or even 15 steps ahead and consider all the rational options (again, working memory)

    I just took the WAIS-V test two weeks ago for my psych eval, and they do indeed test for working memory and pattern recognition in specific sub-tasks. However the difference is… IQ tests are never meant to be practiced as they measure a type of “potential” if you may, but chess is all about what you actually play on the board. Sure maybe if ppl were literally just given the rules and had no prior exposure then a smarter person might spot a forced checkmate faster, but ppl do pratice for the game… In fact, the advice people used to give to get better at chess is… to do more puzzles

    Sooo… methinks an intelligent person might have a slight edge training themselves to do the above, but there is probably otherwise very little association. After a certain point intelligence itself probably has no influence on chess performance whatsoever, and realistically it’s more about “grit”, or how much time/effort someone puts into the game

    Aaand… case in point. Apparently Kasparov went through a 3-day intensive intelligence test, but had a really “spiky” profile that is more commonly seen in neurodivergent individuals; scored really high on some categories and abysmally low on others. I saw this random Reddit post which says that Carlsen scored 115(+1SD) on AGCT (a fairly quick and accurate online test), which is not low but not impressive by any means either. Nakamura allegedly got 102 on Mensa Norway’s trial test, which is not as accurate as AGCT but should be fairly good too; 102 is like dead-average

  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    26·
    9 months ago

    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

  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Which game is it?
    1·
    10 months ago
    Get ready for Autistic infodump

    Osu (stylized as osu!) is a rhythm game… Developed by an Australian group, wiki says it first released in 2007. Probably by far the most popular rhythm game out there, and probably the only one that can rival DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) and DDR-clones/lookalikes. And unlike DDR which requires a ridiculously expensive setup (a reliable DDR pad would cost close to $1k and is extremely loud) or being a regular at your local Japanese arcade to play, osu can be played by anyone with a PC, a mouse/trackpad, and a lot of hopes & dreams

    Osu was inspired by the Nintendo Ouendan series on the NDS; in that game you use the little pen provided by NDS to click circles/drag sliders/etc on the bottom screen; obviously works well with the NDS form factor. The osu team decided to translate this into PC gameplay where you need to control stuff with keyboard/mouse… and somehow it worked quite well!

    Since osu is completely free (I believe it is still very much free-to-play, no idea how they monetize), relatively accessible (see counter-example of DDR above), and is a legitimate & very serious rhythm game, I think it quickly gained a sizable and very passionate player base. And unlike lots of other rhythm games where the charts are curated by a company, osu’s charts are created by players & “peer-reviewed” by mods, so there are a LOT of charts, basically any anime/game-related song you could think of is in the game as an approved chart, which further helps grow the popularity. Needless to say it just kept growing from there… I think even back when it was the 2010s and I was playing the game actively, there were already a bunch of community groups, and ppl literally had names for different play styles. I think my style of primarily using mouse but mashing keyboard Z/X key for combos was called the Seiiryu (blue dragon) style or something… I forgot sorry

    As for the gameplay itself… Osu’s gameplay is actually quite unique in terms of rhythm games especially back then. Back then the gold standard of rhythm games I believe are DDR and IIDX, both of which are vertical fixed-screen drop-down notes where you have to time the fixed buttons to the notes. Osu on the other hand has dynamic notes where circles fly all over the screen. However, this also means that at higher level gameplay, osu relies less on your “sense of rhythm” and more on… precise mouse movements, almost like an FPS. I think nowadays games like maimai/WACCA/Chrono Circle might be similar to osu’s playstyle. They did add more game modes though; they have a taiko clone, a “catch the fruit” game which is even more unique than their base game, and a djmax/iidx clone.

    And… yeah. In short I think osu could be seen as the gateway drug into rhythm games due to it being free, having charts for just about any song you could think of, and having a passionate community. Now that you’ve sunk yourself in the rabbit hole, grab your wallet and pay for that $1000 DDR setup you have always wanted, $2000 maimai ADX controller setup, and mortgage on the suburban single-family home to play it in so you don’t get complaints from neighbors. You know you want it. Do it. DO IT (/s obviously)

  • zlatiah@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•Thousands “Stand Up for Science” Across the Country
    201·
    10 months ago

    I was at one of the local rallies. I think the organizers also know that this event alone won’t be effective & is only the beginning; there will be more to come. A lot more if (and most likely, when) the administration doesn’t comply with the demands.

    Fun fact… My local rally literally featured a startup founder who scaled their company & attracted investors using NIH funding as seed money, and a community college student from a nearby red state. I would imagine that even the most die-hard traditional conservatives would find such stories inspiring/good use of tax payer money… Science support has traditionally been bipartisan too.

    Again, if they don’t comply, more actions would come