Wanna try NL? I heard they have pretty good mental health + neurodivergence support, and they are pretty open to all tech matters too. They seem to have a lot of cultural/hobby imports from all across the world too, so hopefully you will be able to find most of whatever strange fixations you may have (I go to NL all the time for my hobbies lol). Heads up though, I heard the language requirements are getting stricter, but that could just be temporary due to current job market…

Otherwise, I guess a brief stunt at whichever job pays the best/gives the most take-home pay would never be bad. EU citizenship grants a lot of residency freedom… so literal immigration might not even be necessary depending on the circumstances

Immigrating to any third country without a preferential agreement such as the EU would be astronomically more difficult, so you can certainly try… but might not be very easy to do, especially with only a Bachelor’s degree

I have only seen this matter from the other perspective, am scientist, not technically a CS person but I do programming/data analytics for work. I saw…

• A colleague of mine, who teaches a statistics course, mentioned that literally every student of his uses LLMs aggressively for homework assignments. Worse, a lot of his students would just plug the assignment into an LLM, and if he quizzes/asks them for reason, they don’t know why 💀

• It gets worse. So I have asked ChatGPT to make a powerpoint template once, but didn’t like it so I didn’t ever ask it again. However, after that exercise, I started to notice the exact template that Chat gave me for the slides to appear… in every scientific meeting I go to… among my coworkers slides… at startup/tech events… everywhere

• It gets even worse. Based on what me and my colleagues observe, my supervisor straight-up prefers slides and presentations with that distinct AI-generated style. The workloads we are given also basically more-or-less expects us to heavily use some type of agentic workflow. When I’m searching for jobs, a lot of data engineer/software job openings directly mention that they either want someone experienced in agentic/vibe coding, or want ppl who are not morally against AI

So yeah we are in strange times. I don’t know what schools/unis are supposed to do… probably give them long enough time and they can come up with a solution, similar to how high-schools treat graphics calculators. At least my hopium says that, from a learning/job training perspective, someone who is ok with agentic coding but not blinded by it probably has pretty good job prospects so

Got into Magic the Gathering (MtG) a few months ago because I have no other social hobbies lol. Surprisingly fun! Not the cheapest hobby… but good way to spend disposable income I guess. Had I known I’d enjoy it (should have figured from my Slay the Spire game hours…) I should have gotten into it quite a bit earlier, cards used to be cheaper back then. There’s a local game store which has weekly events so there’s that

Recently there was a new set (Star Trek) where I played the prerelease, and there was a guy at the prerelease who is a massive Trekkie and wanted to collect highly thematic cards (which I traded quite a few with him), so I was happy

Sounds a bit nuts but I have serious considered working as a handyman-type of guy at a really, really remote location. Like forest rangers, working at the South Pole, etc…

These are ridiculously competitive jobs that don’t pay that well, but I guess they do appeal to a certain group of ppl so…

January 2025 for a tax receipt; if you count deleted emails saved locally, probably a legal matter-related email in 2023. I delete almost everything as long as they are no longer useful so…

The “mouse scanner”

This is way too meta, and somewhat of an inside joke to my previous lab… explanation below