Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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5

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

Haha I'm another atheist with an altar at home! Instead of religious symbols, there are framed pictures of ancestors.

Normally in Asia we worship at these altars (usually involving serving food and drinks), but I don't do that. I just see it as a nice reminder of the memories I've had with all those people, and a connection to the past.

...although the idea you can crack open a beer with your ancestors from time to time is sort of neat.

I have been described as the least spiritual person various people have ever met. I think that's accurate. I just don't have a spiritual side.

Some people have treated me less than excellently as a result, with the notable exception of Buddhists (I immigrated to a predominantly Buddhist country).

I don't believe any of their stuff, I find a lot of it superficial and against the core principles they preach... and they don't seem to mind at all. I don't have to hide what I think -- I'm also free to discuss these matters (politely). Even with the monks.

Anyway, I'm a practical person. When the floods come, we fill sandbags together. I'm OK to volunteer at their events, and so on. The support is mutual and practical in nature.

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/2677/

So looking at their FAQ, their "DNS" is just a key-value pair (you can build this system yourself in an afternoon!). It looks like you can just enter an IP address as the value. So just enter the IP address of your VPS.

This would make your VPS not-censorship resistant or anonymous (the IP address is public and I can reach out to your provider among other things). Additionally, it would not be accessible by default on most browsers, because it's not a "real" DNS system.

Moreover, HTTPS would not work, and contrary to what you may believe from the project documentation, you are not protected from man-in-the-middle attacks. The arguments they make do not apply to your situation.

There may be other problems but that's all that comes to mind immediately. Hope that satisfies your curiosity!

I'm the only person I've ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I'm not qualified to be a proper communist though -- I've read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I'm basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.

I'm am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.

Hey if you ever want to roast your own oolong, and can get fresh tea leaves, ping me and I'll share notes.

I make red tea in a gaiwan. I find it tastes better that way once you learn to use it. I like the really sweet smelling, perfumy kinds. Like used to make the good kind of milk tea here (except without the milk and sugar). I drink it mostly because it tastes good.

What we call 'red tea' you call 'black tea' in the West I think. What we call 'black tea' is usually pu erh or sometimes lapsang souchong. Both of those are very interesting -- the former very earthy, and the latter very smoky, like drinking BBQ smoke. I like those too -- the former with dimsum, the latter maybe in the evenings.

Sometimes if I get fresh green tea leaves in the market or a farm, I'll clean them, bruise them, let them oxidize, then stir fry them, and roast them in the oven to make oolong tea. It's pretty good, but I don't have the time these days.

That's a bitter pill. I was lucky in that regard -- my disabilities might be mild problems in the big picture, but give me a significant advantage in specific contexts like cram-studying. Surviving out of pure spite I am also quite good at too.

If we're being honest, I don't even know what I'd do if I had to deal with racism and armed police in my daily life. My biggest challenges were smaller things like poverty, bureaucracy, and hunger. Overcoming them made me stronger, sure -- but strong enough to deal with that? I think I'd fall apart.

Integrating here was a strange thing. I more or less consider myself Vietnamese (if this isn't my home and my culture, I don't know what would be) but I was born white in Canada, and that's what people see. It's a weird mix of undeserved privilege and inconvenience. What's really screwed up, is when other white people in Asia just start casually telling me about their crimes as if it's a normal thing to talk about when there's only white people in the room. Most people are not like that of course, but when it happens, it's so fucked up. I don't even know how to respond.

It's actually just immigration (or, well... technically emigration from where you're standing). Which is, in itself an absolutely miserable amount of work dealing with a bunch of systems that don't really want to deal with you, but at the same time, expect you to be an expert in how they function.

Also a bunch of employers looking to exploit you (so if that's a problem now, expect it to get worse until you learn the ropes), since your visa status depends on them in most cases and they know it. Everything about immigration is harrowing -- but if you don't like where you are, leaving to be somewhere else is a solution that is occasionally not insane! Asia is very hard to immigrate to though.

I knew around 30 other people that tried to immigrate here. ~22 got kicked out for non-compliance, ~6 died (mostly from alcohol or drugs). Of that group, some rich guy that doesn't have to work, and myself are left. I don't remember their names or faces, only their misplaced optimism.

If you're interested in how the legal paperwork gets done, I'm happy to share! I just don't want to misrepresent how miserable the first few years will be -- I've been run over, exploded, robbed, bankrupt, severely poisoned with neurotoxins, and I nearly died of cholera. While working 70-80 hour weeks and getting paid only about half the time. I also got shipped into a literal civil war to do accounting of all things. The building next to me blew up, and I shared the streets with insurgents with machine guns. I was so dead inside by that point, I just shrugged and bought a t-shirt. Because of course they were selling t-shirts.

If you've got a couple hundred thou saved up, the process is probably less terrible. I came here with 30k and just barely bootstrapped myself to Vietnamese middle class over the course of 10 years or so. Overall I'm glad I did it, but a lot of the stuff I've survived haunts me. So in other words, I fit right in with most Vietnamese people about my age.

I did this thing, stretching decades back, where I would publish every project under a different name, then throw away the password.

Even I don't know everything I've done, or all the names I've gone by.

Sadly, my irritation with YouTube is fathomless and eternal :P

I can clue you in the the first case though -- A faulty motor was unable to eject the drive, and a magnet held it in place. So I used the Curie effect to weaken the magnet by roasting it for a short time and putting it back in. I was very poor in those days so knowing these things was pretty useful.

Haha, I love it! What a fun thing that is, maybe I'll make one for my partner!

Haha yes! I love engineering and own an engineering company.

I'm lucky if I can spend 20% of my time doing anything even engineering-adjacent. The rest is figuring out tax law, calling to yell at people to pay their bills, or writing contracts.

Electronics repair and manufacture. I do this sometimes professionally -- however my special talent is doing it with none of the right tools or parts. It's mostly hilarious and not useful at work, where I need to use the right parts so you can scale to manufacture.

I once fixed a DVD drive using a gas stove. A graphics card with a tube of toothpaste and some rubber bands. A Macbook with half a cardboard box. Today I built a microphone amplifier from a broken Android development board, a IC from a particle detector, and surface-mount resistors and capacitors from a dozen different things. I could probably work as an engineer in Kerbal Space Program :D

That would be 12 years ago! I didn't see any acceptable future for me in North America, and immigrated to Vietnam. I integrated reasonably well, and this is my culture now. You could say my last vote was with my feet, labor, and wallet :D

I don't hate the West or anything, in fact I wish you all the best! However I am fully invested in working towards the success of my new country and this part of the world in general.

It's pretty normal tasting. If you're a bit leery of it, try getting the quail version, you may find them easier to start with. We call them cút lộn. Watch your tonal pronunciation or you'll ask for a "large feces".

Never tried the horseshoe crab here, I actually forgot that we eat that.

Oh yeah, abalone is great. The Chinese way of serving the large sliced ones in golden sauce is quite good.

In Da Nang, I order small ones grilled, but availability is random. Depends on what that family finds on a particular week.

I live in Vietnam. So, many things we eat would be unusual from the standpoint of someone on a North American or European diet. Mouse, alligator (called 'ugly fish'), frog, duck embryo, organ meats, and various insects are just 'normal food'. They're all quite good.

I suppose weasel comes to mind? That's something I've had that's not common locally. It's boiled with ginger until it just tastes like... mostly bones with ginger and very little meat. Not impressed.

A lot of people turn away from duck embryo, but it actually tastes pretty normal.

We used to eat a fair amount of dog here, especially in the North, but the new generation considers this fairly old-fashioned. I've had what's called "fake dog dish", which is the same dish made with pork. It's good. I've never bothered with actual dog meat as I'm concerned it might not be fresh -- it's expensive and not common anymore. So I'm worried someone might try to sell me meat that's spoiled to recover losses or something.

In neighboring Cambodia, you can get large roasted spiders. They look like black crabs, and people seem to eat them that way. It didn't look that good so I passed.

All tools for work, but:

Siglent oscilloscope. STK500 AVR development board Huawei D15 laptop A corporation

Yeah, that's what makes it optimal for testing code where the username isn't important.

Good old Slartibartfast has caught many a bug.