annzabelle

> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.

I am much younger than Raymond Chen, but the generation of Lego Mindstorms I used in early elementary school had us load programs onto the robot using infrared. I'd never really thought about how that worked, or why it didn't just use a USB cable directly rather than a USB cable to infrared beacon to robot, until just now.

This has come up for me very recently with the multi-week AO3 outage. I'm not a huge user of that site, but it specifically existed as a comprehensive archive of fanworks and of many prior fanfiction sites that have gone offline. I really respected the Organization for Transformative Works as a non-profit with a very targeted mission of archiving these sorts of works and keeping them safe from linkrot and the algorithmic web. Now, after a security incident (which I am assuming is related to the recent LLM-driven discoveries of unpatched vulns in open source hosting software), the whole archive is offline for the next few weeks.

I'd always assumed that OTW would keep AO3 online until the end of time. It, somewhat like this site, was one remaining gasp of Web 2.0 before the algorithmic feeds took over.

Add Oceania to that. As long as I've been able to produce the proper passport(s) and visas for my journey I've been let on the plane, throughout all kinds of complex journeys.

I have had a round trip flight recently that involved two passports, a work visa, and an ETA, and a total of 5 layovers across 3 airlines. As long as I produced the correct identity documents at any given check in desk, I was allowed to board, without ever producing a credit card.

The way I heard it phrased is "Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980"

I guess I didn't make the distinction between "any job" and "any job in my field." It's very easy to get offers for "any job" in Wanaka on a working holiday visa, but to get a job that's even vaguely tech adjacent here, especially on a WHV, you really have to luck out, and even then it is much lower paid than it would be in the US.

Yes. I got laid off from Capital One at 3 years of experience in 2025 and I found myself either competing with laid off Amazon employees with 4+ years of experience or applying to junior roles and competing with new grads.

I ended up sidestepping the whole market and now I make $75k NZD, so I'm not sure who won in the end.

I heard a lot of doom and gloom about the economy before I came here, but finding a job proved to be straightforward. The pay leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm not intending to extend my visa because of that.

Caveat: I'm not living in a typical region of the country, I'm in Wānaka, which is easier to find a job in but also more expensive than most of the country.

This is all a bit out there, but I moved to New Zealand on a working holiday visa, and within two weeks of settling down in a particular spot (after a two month road trip), I had two job offers, one very relaxed retail, and one tech-adjacent for a small civil engineering firm. I'm making about a quarter the take home I did in the US, but I've cut my expenses a lot (bought my car in cash, carpool to work to save gas money, rent a room in a house instead of a whole apartment, no food delivery), and I'm using this time to reevaluate my values and work on building a lifestyle that does not rely on earning a six figure salary.

My plan when I return is to get my EMT and moonlight as an ER tech while doing prerequisites for PA school or maybe medical physics.

I'd say a mild benzo withdrawal and a severe SSRI withdrawal can overlap, but SSRI withdrawal doesn't give people seizures or last for years.

I moved from the US to New Zealand. I spend a lot of time hiking, and it is very unsettling for the sky to be so unfamiliar. Orion is the only constellation I'm good at picking out here, and it is upside down. No Polaris, obviously.

Tangentially related, but I'm curious. How does bilingualism in Montreal work out in practice? I know most of the rest of Quebec is very Francophone, but Montreal is more bilingual.

I've seen some interesting jobs pop up in Montreal and I'm starting to take French classes with the intent to possibly move there, but I'm not clear how much there's still the option to work in English in the city.

Sorry if it's a silly question, I'm Canadian by descent but have never lived in Canada, so I'm out of the loop on a lot of stuff.

Exact same setup here though I realize I didn't quite state it directly, the cottages are owned by individuals but all rented out through the agencies.

We got a much steeper discount, I'm assuming because we were solidly in shoulder season (a couple weeks after kids return to school in North Carolina, and during hurricane season), which the vacation rental company accounts for in their seasonal pricing, but VRBO didn't seem to. At this beach in particular, it is a summer vacation for families and you get a steep drop in prices if you don't have to schedule around school holidays, but VRBO didn't price that in in the same way that the local companies do.

My extended family rents a beach cottage for one week (saturday-saturday or sunday-sunday) every summer at a family oriented beach in North Carolina. We have done this at the same beach since the early 90s. There are local vacation rental agencies that have offered one week rentals with various packages of linens under similar terms and seasonal pricing for decades. Over the last few years, fewer and fewer houses are available directly from these rental companies and more and more are only listed on Airbnb or VRBO, with nightly pricing that is much higher than the weekly pricing from the local rental agencies.

The vacation rental companies offer very consistent cleaning services and local contacts for any issues with the house, and were relatively cheap because they were typically able to fill these houses with weeklong rentals all summer.

With Airbnb and VRBO, sometimes they are just a marketplace for the exact same rental companies that already existed, under the same terms and conditions, but a higher nightly price, and sometimes they are far less professional operations, and it's not easy to tell which is which when you are initially paying.

Last summer we rented a house directly through a vacation rental company that was also listed on VRBO for a third of the nightly price it was listed on VRBO for. We're dreading the day when the only option left is VRBO.

In the states part of doctor compensation is based on patient satisfaction surveys and rates of complaints. People are very quick to complain about not getting what they want out of an appointment (which is often pain or anxiety relief) and much slower to complain about the long term consequences of these prescriptions, which happen often, but not to most people who are initially prescribed these drugs.

I've been on klonopin for sleep and prescribed xanax or ativan for acute anxiety at a couple points over the years, and never had any trouble getting off them. I usually stayed at the lowest dose and often skipped doses, and I'm searching my brain for any memories of withdrawal symptoms, and I don't remember ever having any.

I would bet that more patients have my experience with these drugs than have the long term addiction and severe withdrawal, and doctors have often passed people on before the consequences start stacking up.

I still think they should be prescribed extremely sparingly, because even in my experience with them, they didn't really do too much that some running and yoga didn't do, and they come with much bigger risks.

There are other drugs since the 90s that are effective for anxiety, but they're either way more subtle and take longer to work than benzos (SSRIs, SNRIs, lavender pills, buspar and derivatives) or don't have the same withdrawal syndrome but come with a much worse package of side effects (quetiapine and other antipsychotics).

I have had clinically significant anxiety since I was a young child, and in the end, treating other mental illnesses effectively (I developed bipolar 1 in my late teens) and exercising very regularly seems to pull my baseline level of neuroticism down to within the normal range. If I get good cardio in, usually an outdoor run, 3 days a week, I feel normal.

It specifically said coastal southland before I edited it, it would've worked to change it from "tundra like climate in coastal southland" to "tundra like climate in apline regions of the south island" instead, you're right.

Japan is very interesting on that front, but I have heard a lot of negative things about what it's like to live there as a foreigner, especially if you have to work in the local economy.

Personally I'm excited about Taiwan.

I didn't really have to fight to edit it, but it had been in the article for many years, despite being blatantly false (tundras have mean temperatures below 0 C for 6+ months out of the year, while coastal Southland has a mean temperature of 5 C in July, the coldest month). My best guess is some kid thought that Southland was cold and knew that tundras were cold, and added a sentence to the article comparing Southland to a tundra.

Whenever I catch something like this, I wonder how many things like this are in there that I don't notice. And this one isn't even really touching anything that is controversial.

I was able to edit this to fix it, but the geography of New Zealand page had a reference to Southland having a "tundra like climate." Invercargill, which is in Southland, actually has a temperate oceanic climate and a record low of -9C or 15F.

I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gell-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it were true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors.

In the end, a year after the borderline sleep apnea test, we optimized my thyroid medication dosage (I had hypothyroidism the whole time but my dose was too low) and I went on a multivitamin, and after a couple of months, the sleep issues that were why I'd gotten that test in the first place went away. And, it's easier to lose weight when my thyroid is properly treated.

I was beating my head against those sleep issues for years, and had multiple doctors sit down and tell me that I probably "just had a high sleep need." In the end, I'm not sure whether it was the thyroid or some vitamin deficiency (before the multivitamin I was on iron, C, and D separately), but it turned out to be very treatable.

Honestly I was finding the last 15 lbs to be stubborn, and had a borderline mild sleep apnea test that meant my doctor offered it and my insurance would cover it. I also wanted to see what all the hype was about.

One thing that colors how I view it is that I am more in the "would like to lose 15 lbs" space than the "needs to lose 50 lbs" space at this point in my life. I have a BMI of 27 and ran a half marathon right when I first tried Wegovy, and I already weigh 30 lbs less than I did at my 2021 peak. My A1c is 4.6. I actually recently reached out to my doctor about trying a different GLP-1 and she told me that given my labs and that I haven't been gaining weight she doesn't feel right prescribing me one.

So I am a lot more picky about side effects than I would be if I seriously needed to lose weight or had diabetes.

Speaking of which, nicotine is another effective weight loss drug. I have to wonder if some portion of the increase in median BMI (ignoring the morbidly obese) in America over the last 50 years is it becoming less socially acceptable to chain smoke.

Looks like it's typical to gain 5-10lbs when quitting smoking.

Edit: pulled up the data and there's been a 30lb increase in median weight in America, so (loosely guessing) the smoking effect is probably somewhere between 5 and 10% of that change.

N of 1, but I had serious low drive/motivation side effects from Wegovy. Everything enjoyable became less enjoyable, from alcohol, to running, and after a couple of months, even getting out of bed. I lost weight slower than I had previously with old school calorie counting (most of which I have kept off to this day). Within a couple weeks of getting off it I was back to normal.

My conspiracy theory is that a lot of people must be getting this global lowered reward sensitivity from GLP-1s but are ignoring the negative sides of that effect because they like being skinny.

Thank you! I'm still in a very exploratory phase about what exactly I mean by switching into healthcare. I don't have prereqs done at all, and my current plan is to enroll in a second bachelor's next year and start working through bio and chem courses. I'm looking at a bunch of different options from nursing to PA school to medical physics, and I think I really need to start shadowing people in different professions.

Med school interests me, but I'm a woman in my late 20s who would like to have children, and if I started down the med school road now I wouldn't be done with training until my late 30s, where PA and nursing school don't have that problem. Medical physics is kind of in the middle.

I'm in what I think will be my last tech job before retraining into something else. The aspects I like about the work are gone, I'm coasting at a small company that's not a great fit, has a visa cliff, and is poorly paid, and the steps it would take to become competitive in an LLM driven tech job market are less appealing to me than the steps it would take to switch over to a different career (likely in healthcare).

Random nitpick, but there is evidence that there was contact between Polynesians and South Americans before western colonization (the sweet potatoes here in New Zealand are of South American origin and the Polynesian words for sweet potato are cognates to South American ones). It looks like Polynesians were the ones who brought coconuts to South America, not coconuts randomly floating.

There are a ton of ways, big and small, where the work environment is much more relaxed and chill. For example, sick leave and vacation are separate. Recently I had scheduled to take vacation on a Thursday to go skiing, and then I had a cold and had to take Wednesday off (after my coworkers glared at me for sneezing all day). I figured that my boss would expect me to work that Thursday since I hadn't accrued sick leave yet. Instead, his reply to my slack message letting him know I'd be out sick was "hope you feel better so you can ski tomorrow."

People take a lot more vacation and leave, the office shuts entirely for 2 weeks around Christmas, and deliverable deadlines are more flexible.

This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.

Macbook pros for a lot of us are effectively like daily driving a lifted Ford Raptor with a snorkel. Most of what I do on my personal device I easily could do on a Chromebook or tablet, and pretty much all of the rest is entirely possible on a Chromebook with the Linux subsystem setup (which is what I did pre-Macbook). It's like if I'd setup an expensive truck for off-roading, but in the end it turned out to be aspirational and I only take it somewhere that can't handle a Subaru Outback once or twice a year.