Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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5

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

As the most fortunate of us, I would offer what comfort I could.

I think about this often. I keep a memento mori to remind me: since life is finite, we are all living our final days, it is only a matter of degree.

The best conclusion I've managed is not to spend final moments in regret (there are always more things to do, I would try to let go of that). I've never met anyone who, in their final days, regretted not working more. I've seen people regret not spending more time with people they care about, not developing their own talents, not experiencing (travel, food, cultures, etc.), and things left unsaid (apologies,admissions, etc.).

So I try to do my best at those things, as if living my final days. The first and last things are relatively easy -- don't leave things unsaid, and spend time with people you care about. I guess those are the biggest two I'd spend effort on. I'd perhaps write these things in letters, if it was more practical (although I would make sure they are kind letters -- if we leave behind something, why not kindness? All my bitterness can die with me.).

All that being said, an old friend of mine had similar symptoms as you, and it also took a long time to diagnose. Eventually they were diagnosed with idiopathic dystonia, received treatment, and mostly recovered (I'm not attempting a diagnosis here, only telling a story). The medical system can be slow and diagnosing the many things that can go wrong with our bodies is hard. As long as you're alive, and have not received a terminal diagnosis, a positive outcome remains possible.

I occasionally replay Alien Legacy (1994). A flawed, but ambitious game of surprising scope. The original Civilization or Civ2. The original Deus Ex.

More recently? Sunless Sea is usually a fun replay.

Ah, I haven't read that one yet, but it's on my list! I got through Romance of the 3 Kingdoms though, it was really enjoyable.

Ah yeah, I remember that! That comedy show during Tet used to do that a lot, right?

Ah, sorry -- I was joking. The French prefix 'bureau' (having to do with offices, desks, writing) coupled with the ancient Greek suffix "cratos" (power, might) would be a good name for some god of bureaucracy -- but there is no such god in the ancient Greek pantheon. A better comparison would be the Celestial Bureaucracy, I guess!

Yeah, I've got some relatives who are into the shaman healing stuff. We've got to keep on eye on it so they don't give away all their money to fraudsters.

I did learn some feng shui though, it was super useful when buying land. I bought the most cursed, haunted land possible according to feng shui, to get the best price. Since I plan to live there, not sell, this was fine and saved me about 200-400 trieu.

It makes them funnier the next time I hear them, in a new context though :)

Ah, missing the 7th panel:

"Wait, why are you in my house? You laid me off last month."

Interesting, in Quebec I've never heard the conjugations to the left!

When we need to strategically indicate this kind of thing, we just curse excessively. Often they are strung together into a profane litany that continues on for some time! I always thought it was quite artful.

I am a non-native speaker of Vietnamese. There are some pretty horrible mistakes you can make, honestly. I'll go through a few of them.

In Vietnamese, non-native speakers often confuse the word for 'mother in law' with the word for the male genitalia.

Also the word for "large" with the word for the female genitalia. So when ordering e.g. a large meal, if in doubt, just use the word for L ("luh") instead of lớn.

When referring to your mother-in-law, practice with your partner before the first meeting. Then, quickly ask for permission to call her "mother", which is easier for non-native speakers to pronounce.

Finally, the word for 'martial arts' and 'Vietnamese wife' differs only by a single tone. If you make the mistakes above, you may perhaps find out why that is -- usually via the medium of a flung sandal :P

Funny story, when I wanted to learn how something works, I'd just... follow one of the middlemen. Learned how to use the UBNQ, repair televisions (one shop in Q5 is the best, the rest just buy from it), legalize documents, and many other things this way :D

It's weird how it's just some weird secular superstition too! There's literally no difference between what they do and the obvious thing (fill out the form and hand it in). Yet everyone pays them like they are priests performing rituals to win the favor of some Greek god. Who would be I guess... Bureaucratos?

Also /r/Vietnam can be a bit of a... cesspool of inequity. I mean 'how do I commit crimes' is a pretty common line of inquiry there. I try not to worry too much because those people won't have a place in the future the rest of us are building :)

No, they just outright didn't pay me most months. My visa status depended on my employment, so there was not much I could immediately do. So I kept my head down, got paid as much as I could, and started my own company to decouple my employment from my visa status as soon as reasonably possible. The director openly mocked me for doing so, but I'm the one still in business.

It's OK, we can talk frankly about bribes. Early on, I decided not to pay bribes. It's been twelve years or so, no problems have arisen so far. All paperwork I've submitted has been processed within a reasonable amount of time, although I am quite good at bureaucracy. The one time it wasn't due to a glitch (registering to receive Covid vaccination), I called my Party representative and she sorted it out within a day. They were really trying to get the vaccination numbers up, so it was not very difficult.

To provide some context, labor / immigration law compliance of foreign workers in Vietnam has typically been poor. So a lot of people say "oh, you have to pay bribes", when what they are actually doing is trying to rationalize away the fact that they are breaking the law, e.g. driving without a license or working on a tourist visa, and then searching for someone to bribe to try and escape consequences.

I'm not going to claim that every government official is honest, but I do feel that we get a distorted view of the situation -- these are mostly just people finding what they are looking for. Most of the stories I hear online are from the people paying bribes making themselves out to be a victim -- "on the ground" what I see is people bragging about being above the law.

It's gotten better in recent years though. More people are coming to Vietnam to work honestly than before, and they are more qualified. On our side of things, more government systems are becoming digitized and online. I'm hopeful that it will continue getting better.

Growth potential. Relatively clear laws on immigration and foreign business. The language doesn't leave me functionally illiterate (it uses Latin-ish characters). The lack of other immigrants, and general brain drain to Western economies gave me a competitive advantage. Maybe a standard rule of business is "don't do what everyone else is doing".

It was clear a lot of growth was about to happen, and anyone who could reach out and grab a bit of it would do well. Also: why sell tech where tech is common and everyone has it already?

Of course that was good on paper, but the first three years were a disaster. Tried working for a foreign company as an employee, got cheated badly, lost most of my assets, didn't know what to do. The five year plan just came out about then, figured I'd RTFM. It encouraged me to start a tech company, and I am good at tech, so I put every dime in.

Next three years were a disaster too, lost everything. I got wiser though, and things improved after that. The rest is just reliably grinding out work for clients.

I find the quality of life here quite good overall. I used to cough blood in winter. None of that nonsense anymore! Health care is OK. Food and weather are nice, and my neighbors are decent. It's very safe, by far the safest place I've ever lived. Interactions with government have been efficient and cordial. Air pollution and traffic are becoming a bit of a problem, but can't have everything I guess.

Tools from China and reasonably priced local factories mean I have more access to advanced technology than I had in the West. By a lot! I can now access the means of production, and it's pretty amazing!

Ah, bad luck -- I'm the philosophical zombie everyone's been looking for: intelligence without consciousness.

It's true that I emphasize industry in my life (a bit of an understatement perhaps). I find it essential to know exactly who I am and what I need to be doing. So that narrow focus works well right now.

Perhaps one day, I'll think about experiencing things more passively. There's nothing wrong with it. On the other hand, I really do enjoy doing things. An alarming amount of things! So maybe I won't really slow down later in life after all. It keeps me fit if nothing else!

I have to do cost-effective all week. Weekends, I get to do "ridiculous" :)

There's a detailed description on my home instance, along with other stuff.

The short version is it uses a pair of BJT transistors to produce and amplify diode breakdown noise. That's amplified to TTL levels by some hex inverters. Then an 8-bit microcontroller passes it through a Von Neumann whitewashing algorithm (clock-cycle balanced in assembly language) to produce unbiased bits, which it accumulates into bytes. It's not a 'safe' way to use transistors and they will fail one day, but it will be fine for quite some time still.

Then an ESP32 samples the bytes from the 8-bit MCU. It connects to Wi-Fi and pushes it to the cloud over MQTT. A server listens for the random bytes, and uses them with the traditional I-Ching algorithm (yarrow-stick probabilities). Coding the yarrow-stick probabilities into an algorithm was a pain compared to the newer method that uses coin tosses :D

Also I had to convert the I-Ching to JSON, so I could programmatically pull the correct divination from it. The whole thing is gloriously absurd.

I have build a few particle detectors so I can use quantum-tunneling to produce the entropy instead (so an upgrade from a hardware RNG to a quantum RNG), but the radiation sources I have access to are a bit too weak to generate sufficient entropy.

I can't imagine any of this has any practical application, unless you happen to be a time traveler. In that case have work to do, meet me last week and we'll talk about it :P

Oh incidentally if the bot is down, let me know and I'll gently beat it into submission so it works again.

I am perhaps strange, it's true.

It's my habit to sometimes build wildly improbable things, just to push myself and see if I can do it -- the world is filled with too many boring and lifeless inventions. Often clients want me to build very boring things -- e.g. they must stoop, who gather gold. So I dedicate some time to building absurd things too, in which I hope strangers find entertainment.

Wouldn't that... just make me stop visiting YouTube instead of making me stop using Firefox?

I mean, my first reaction when a website is slow is not exactly "maybe I should change browsers". It's closer to "maybe I'll visit a different website".

Hey have you read about Boltzmann brains? You might get a kick out of it, it's an idea that amuses me a lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain