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!

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

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

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…)

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

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.

In response, the guidelines regulate the labeling of AI-generated online content throughout its production and dissemination processes, requiring providers to add visible marks to their content in appropriate locations.

My understanding is that this is meant more as a set of legal guidelines… I’m not a legal scholar, but since China has a history of enforcing certain information-related laws I’d assume they can “legally” enforce it

On the technical side… there is a subfield of LLM research that focuses on “watermarking” or ensuring that LLM-generated outputs can be clearly identified, so I guess in theory it might be enforceable

In practice as to whether it will actually be ensured… who knows (facepalm