I… never learned how to cook properly. Parents did cook all meals at home but only knew how to cook things about as delicious as your average Northern Europe staple, so the only thing I was taught was how to cook rice… but I do not like rice 💀

Out of convenience I ended up just throwing everything in a pot and make sure they are well-cooked, do meal-prep, and eat the same food over and over again; personally don’t mind so it works for me. If it is not enough taste, just throw in some olive oil and spice, if not good enough more spice, if still not good enough add MORE spice, usually works out quite well & is quite healthy

deleted by creator

Yes. Parents made me learn touch-typing with QWERTY when I was growing up

I actually made the effort to switch to Colemak-DH less than a year ago. Because getting a properly labelled Colemak-DH keyboard is so difficult (my laptop keys are still QWERTY layout), I… basically forced myself to learn how to touch type in like 2-3 months. Still can’t do the multilingual symbols very well (I always forget where the ^/circumflex is…), but I think I have a >98% accuracy on everything else

Unfortunately I forgot how to touch type with QWERTY after learning the new setup…

Define “nobody”, because there are over 100 languages spoken at fluent level or above by at least a few ppl where I live

If we ignore the technicalities… Polish. Spoken by a lot of people, quite difficult to learn & would be a good priority target for magically learning it, and hopefully a good gateway to the rest of the Slavic languages

This legitimately happened to one of my former colleagues 🤣 Told them where the largest local shelter is, and next thing I knew boom they had 2 cats in their apartment one week later

I guess Japanese really doesn’t have in-your-face sarcasm now that I think about it…

Now that you mentioned it, Japanese also has a rather interesting quirk of not having what most people would consider as “swear words”. Read it somewhere that Japanese does have swear words, but they tend to be quite tame, and the words themselves aren’t “taboo” (as compared to just about any swear word in English)

For the average person it is probably Xiaomi: made in China, and even by Chinese phone standards it seems well known for its low cost and high build quality

However as a lemming and someone who has a Xiaomi gifted by parents and hated everything they crammed in the OS… How do you define a “best” brand of cell phone when there are barely 3 usable brands (Google Pixel for GrapheneOS, Fairphone, …)

I know this is not c/casualconversation but OP you gave me an opportunity to share the funniest dating story I have ever heard of, from first-hand experience unfortunately. This was in middle/late 2023

I… am not that great. Pretty mediocre looks, Asian guy (there’s research on this lol) in the US, and the Autism is very strong… so I only ever got 2 matches, neither of which worked out. One of them was particularly brutal because we talked on the app for a whole month, finally met in a coffee shop… and I immediately got ghosted afterwards. I think at that point (2 mo) Hinge started only showing me ppl I have already seen so I deleted the app. However

The person I talked for a month with mentioned a local arcade that I didn’t think much of. Later in 2023 I decided to visit, on 2023-12-09… and holy shit they have all my favorite games, and they even had a DDR (technically ITG) cab and a maimai cab that are basically workouts. I instantly signed up for the monthly membership (which was way cheaper than a gym) and started going there at least 3 times a week, probably for like 3-4 hours at once. That was literally what got me through the end of grad school

I still have a picture I took the first time I went of a Sound Voltex cab (6th gen, “EXCEED GEAR”) and how I got destroyed on a song I would now do as a warmup routine… which is why I knew the exact date I visited the arcade btw, the picture is timestamped

So what was I typing. No dating pool isn’t great

I play a lot of games over steam

If my main concern is playing game with Steam, most mainstream Linux OSes should be fine. If I have to pick one… Linux Mint is very beginner-friendly, and I’ve heard great things about Bazzite too. SteamOS works flawlessly with Steam out of the box (owns Steam Deck, can verify), but I don’t know how easy it is to set up by yourself

If you happen to also like non-Steam games: a lot of them can be added as a custom application/game via your Steam Library, which does most of the heavy-lifting: you only have to specify which compatibility layer to use & sometimes do keymapping. Setting up wine on its own is not for the faint-hearted

I personally use Arch because AUR (a user-uploaded repository, a lot of popular Linux OSes have their own versions) makes it easy to play a lot of FOSS games… but I can’t recommend Arch Linux for beginners

As a kid I dead-pan told my mom that I’d like to be a "white-collar office worker. Because I wanted somewhat of a predictable routine without too much unexpected things happening

Considering that this is already my second postdoc (somewhat of a scientist training… intern… thing) “job” (no employment contract btw) within 2 years of my graduation, during which I have moved twice including once across a continent, and once getting work-related anxiety so bad I got sick for a month… I think young me’s plan is preferable at this point

As a researcher doing data-stuff: there actually is a somewhat objective way to answer this! I don’t know the answer to the question itself though… and the method is quite boring

Usually how data scientists do this is to first collect a bunch of data… let’s say we have a 200~300 question comprehensive survey about ppl’s political beliefs. This survey would have a dimension of 200-300. We can include all of them but they would offer diminishing information (& is very confusing), so usually people trim it down to the most important dimensions only. We then apply dimensionality reduction/manifold method to reduce highly similar dimensions. I think in social sciences people call this factor analysis. Usually in my field people do PCA followed by UMAP, social scientists I think may do something differently but PCA is quite universal

Then researchers will be able to tell a few mathematically identified dimensions that contribute the most to the results. Say if the first dimension contributes 70% of the variation of people’s differences, and the second dimension another 25%… then we would have a 2-dimension model that can explain 95% of the differences and would be good enough. If the first dimension only 10%, second 8%… then a good model will need a lot more dimensions. This doesn’t tell what the dimensions are though, that’s up to the researchers to identify. If all of these work well, we’d have a simple, N-dimension model suggesting how people’s political beliefs are… and some of these might not map to what people would intuitively think of

Unless I’m mistaken, Big Five personality traits is developed this way for example… About politics, I found a 2013 research article that suggested two political dimensions: economic and social ideology

I guess this doesn’t quite answer the question… it just states how political dimensions (or any dimensions in data fields, really) came from, and the fact that there’s an old paper suggesting a two factor model of economic + social ideology. I don’t know how many dimensions are sufficient for politics, not to count for the fact that different countries/cultures treat this differently

In terms of absolute length in years? Minecraft. First played it in middle school when it was still in beta, a few months (or maybe a year?) before Nether even was a thing. Last played… maybe 1-2 years ago? If Luanti/Mineclone also counts then last month. Ironically I never liked Minecraft that much… only “gotten back” into it for like a week or two at a time

Second longest is probably Skyrim (honorary mention of The Binding of Issac, but rebirth is technically a new game so…), both of which I liked a lot. Played both quite a bit in high school, and still played a bit within the past year

My actual comfort game hasn’t even been developed until 7 years ago

It’s a small brand started by a few Chinese marathon runners, modelled exactly after HOKA. So it’s equally as comfortable at like 1/2-1/3 the price. Only available in China unfortunately…

The main annoyance is that this pair doesn’t have much sideways support, so it’s easier to slip sideways. Probably not a worthwhile concern for most people of course

Also… Durability isn’t a strong suit for HOKA shoes, so I’m not sure if I can really recommend them for daily drive regardless

I just realized that nearly all of my daily shoes were replaced by my dad… who is a semi-professional marathon runner and would go through shoes in months… So probably every 1-3 years, depending on when my parents visit I guess; I think their definition of wearing out is when there are a good amount of rips/holes

My last pair was a pair of HOKA that lasted a year and a half; they are designed for long-distance running and have massive toe boxes (which I need) but are not known for their durability… Dad basically urged me to get a pair of Chinese HOKA knockoff to replace it, got it half a year ago. It’s showing signs of wear but I think it can still go for at least another year

I’ve actually been looking into how music genres/subgenres are defined for the past few months due to the fact that my favorite genre “doesn’t exist” (I’m not joking someone wrote a research paper on this)

I think there are research articles on this if one wants to go into details… Like how certain genres separate. Sometimes there are strict definitions (most techno I think are quite well-defined). But practically I think most ppl tend to enjoy ranges of genres that are close to each other… There are also plenty of genre-blend songs too so there’s that

Also I second for Every Noise At Once, they have some really obscure genres too for detailed comparisons

1st to 2nd grade so this was what my parents relayed to me after I grew up a bit more

Apparently I was so aggressively autistic (and relatively smart) that I not only did close to perfect on all my exams, I once did the calligraphy/writing homework so well that my teacher had to talk to my parents to know if I cheated by having them do my homework for me… FYI: my handwriting now is as bad as a doctor’s

I am doing it… My local convenience store also sells tooth cleaners shaped like tiny brushes which I use. It does help a bit but not entirely

… This may sound a bit pessimistic, but I think the main thing to look for is whether there are viable ways for one to enter said new country in the first place

Using the Low Countries as an example… For non-EU (or a select few countries) citizens, these three only grant residency permits to people who have a really good reason to be there… I believe they allow things such as having a job, having family, going to university, and some other situations. NL has the DAFT visa, but that’s only for American citizens (I believe?) and is quite difficult to follow-through

Depending on how young… maybe uni would be a good bet? NL has some extremely strong universities. I’m not familiar with the system there though, from what I just looked up looks like they’re quite expensive for non-EU citizens

There are a ton of other things to consider too but at least for me the most difficult part is to get a job in the first place so… everything else (climate, culture, language, …) was an afterthought by that point

Wing it

I did worse than wing it actually… half of the groceries I got over the past few weeks were from Too Good To Go, so near-expired food that the grocery store winged-it for me💀

I’m usually a bit excessively modest, but if I’m reflecting on it… I left my precious job in the US & pulled off a successful cross-continental move with little to no outside help (even though there was a lot of stuff involved). Had a ton of fun traveling during the past year too as a result of that. I guess that would be the thing I’m most proud of