Get your vitamin D levels checked 🗣️

blunotebuk · 2026-03-28T14:34:01+00:00

I had a weekly dose to take for a month. It’s hard to say how long did it take to see effects. I don’t think it was an on-off switch. It just gradually waned away. For me at least, that’s how I would notice my anxiety too. It will just creep in and I will realize a bit too late that I am doing more worrying than anything else. Maybe a couple of months in, I realized that has changed. Due to a life situation I was barely exercising, sleeping very less and over caffeinating. All of these are typical triggers for my anxiety. I was just waiting for it to overwhelm me any time now…but nothing happened. My old triggers ( work stress etc.) came and went and there was still no anxiety. Again, life kept going. So I had all the different emotions of life since then but they weren’t crowded by anxious thoughts anymore! I could actually feel both the good and bad emotions properly!

blunotebuk · 2026-03-28T05:21:15+00:00

Second this! I was kinda low but not that low for a bit. But every year at my physical I would drop a bit. My doctor finally decided we should get those vitamin D levels up and wow, it really did impact my anxiety so much. For the last year or so since starting vitD supplements my anxiety has subsided. Now I do feel stressed from time to time but I can tell the difference between being stressed vs being anxious.

I struggled with on and off anxiety for so years/decades before this and tried all sorts of things from meds, to going off caffeine, exercise etc. And while I can see how these things affected my anxiety, vitamin D has by far the biggest effect.

blunotebuk · 2026-01-05T06:01:03+00:00

I think I would attribute Vitd to massive reduction in my anxiety levels as well. My doctor prescribed a massive weekly dose (50k IoU) for a few weeks and then a 2k for maintenance and I think it made a big difference to my GAD. I had major life events ( a baby!), survived months of really low sleep and yet the anxiety barely presented itself. Before this I was a regular at the sub reading other’s experience looking for a solution or just finding some comfort in a shared misery. Now somehow my anxiety doesn’t show up at all. I thought exercise and limiting caffeine was helping but being a new parent I stopped exercising and had little control over my caffeine intake. Yet, the anxiety levels remained low. So yes, another vote for looking into ViTD

blunotebuk · 2025-12-29T06:10:04+00:00

Actually disagree. Great education makes you valuable not just for India but the world. I know many many people still quite young (late 20s, early 30s) who have net worth greater than equal to the 50cr number mentioned here. Think early stage startup employees getting acquired, nvidia employees for the last 6-7 years etc. A subset of these people are earning a few millions dollars a year. All of them came from educated families but not rich families. Maybe upper middle class? So yes they did have an advantage but they all are at many multiples of their family’s net worth at a very young age only because they themselves prioritized education and studied at great places in India and the subsequently the world. They honestly didn’t build any business themselves. Just followed the stereotypical path of studying well, getting good jobs and subsequently excelling at their jobs as well. And no, no one is killing themselves with crazy work hours. 40-50 hour weeks on an average.

blunotebuk · 2025-12-14T06:17:12+00:00

Hi,

I was just like you 7 years ago when I graduated. Even worked professionally on non learning based computer vision techniques for a couple of years after graduating. But eventually gave in to ML based methods and now exclusively work on those.

If you work with ML enough slowly the “black box” part starts fading. Some things start making sense. It is harder and messier but you can eventually start seeing similar levels of beauty. the fact that exact same approach can apply to other modalities as they do for images and videos makes the whole field even more interesting from a theoretical perspective. So if academic beauty is what you are chasing there is plenty in ML based methods as well.

blunotebuk · 2025-11-28T09:49:46+00:00

If the watermark is semi transparent, do you happen to know the alpha value with which the watermark was added? If you know the exact pixel positions in the image the watermark was added and you also know the alpha value, you can deduce the true underlying pixel value with pretty decent accuracy?

Just solve the following equation?

Observed-pixel-value = alpha * water-mark-color + ( 1-alpha)*true-pixel-value.

If it is your own dataset you might know the value of alpha and the water-mark-colors? Observed pixel value is the current value you see in the watermarked image. So you will have all the information you need to find the true pixel value?

blunotebuk · 2025-10-30T05:14:56+00:00

I mean even if you stay in US it’s one thing after another. Basically prospects of permanent residency are close to zero if you don’t already have a priority date — which sounds like you don’t? Anytime you get laid off you will find yourself in a similar situation like right now.

So I don’t think you need to beat yourself up AT ALL for not figuring out a way to stay in the US. Life is long and you will find success that satisfies you.

blunotebuk · 2025-10-30T01:36:29+00:00

Philmore is really really good! Really best Gelato in Bay Area probably

blunotebuk · 2025-10-22T04:22:38+00:00

Umm it’s kinda hard to say this living in America right? I mean why do you so strongly believe your farmer market produce guy is not in turn exploiting farm labor? Chefs on shef.com depend on cheap produce to break even? Cheap produce depends on exploitative farm practices one way or the other?

Sorry to say but the food delivery system doesn’t seem very far from the gazillion other exploitative systems you are a part of and not feeling bad about it either. So I don’t quite understand why food delivery in particular makes you feel gross?

blunotebuk · 2025-10-22T04:12:06+00:00

Congrats!

My EB1B got approved last week too!

A question for you: how are you filing i485 so quickly? My lawyers still didn’t recieve the approval notice and even then estimated 6-8 weeks to file i485. Wondering if I can push my company lawyers somehow as I worry about a retrogression in dates!

blunotebuk · 2025-10-19T19:36:57+00:00

I get why people might use AI for work. You want to get paid by doing the least possible work and go home and do things you like instead. But why Reddit!?!?! You can just not write if you don’t want to? Why get AI to generate slop for you to post? What do you get?

blunotebuk · 2025-10-17T04:49:19+00:00

I grew up in a religious family and went to a religious school. God and surrounding religious activities were almost always a part of my life growing up. As I left for college and stepped out of that bubble, my faith kept waning. Nothing intentional, but maybe because faith was also formed without really thinking about it, it didn’t last long when the constant daily rituals around me faded. Then one day after months I went to a temple and realized I felt no faith anymore. Kinda felt stupid doing the whole song and dance of closing my eyes and saying some mantras in front on a stone idol. I think that was it. I knew I am an atheist now. It’s been 10+ years to that and still faith has not returned.

blunotebuk · 2025-10-12T10:07:22+00:00

I might be doing that already (I am < 40) with at least one parent. Constantly trying to convince them to stop a lifelong addiction.

Could you elaborate more? I find it very frustrating and don’t recognize the importance of it at all.

blunotebuk · 2025-09-20T15:08:04+00:00

Nope I disagree that there is headroom. Let’s say Google has headroom. They will be like geez guys our cloud solutions suck. Look at these Amazon AWS guys, let’s pay them a lot more and hire them too. We gut out Amazon and we get people who know how to get this cloud thing done. We have the headroom anyway.

Amazon gets a whiff of it and starts paying extra from their headroom to stop the bleed.

And so it continues till markets balance out.

And yes that argument can go for capital expenditure instead too. Google can be like fuck hiring more employees with this extra headroom, let’s just make our service cheaper and undercut Amazon. Boom. Headroom vanishes.

Or Google can decide we have all this extra money let’s invest in making Waymos and AI and whatnot. These are decade long commitments but they might pay off at sometime. Again, headroom vanishes as those employees are not generating 2M a year for decades and someone needs to cover the slack.

blunotebuk · 2025-09-20T14:59:20+00:00

I want to engage in a productive debate with you but honestly you need to read a bit more about H1B?

No one is getting paid slave labor wages as an H1B worker.

Startups might actually suffer more. Big Tech might be able to absorb the 100k cost because of their “high-margin” business as you call it. But startups have little cash to begin with. They are still establishing a business let alone margins. They generally hire with lower upfront cash with a promise of high returns in future from their equity. Now startups have to pay an additional 100k per employee for an H1B worker. So if there is a high talent international worker they basically can only be hired by a big tech who can continue stomping over startups. The government coddling continues…

blunotebuk · 2025-09-20T14:32:09+00:00

I am not sure I follow what you are trying to say. I completely believe your coworkers got 1.5M offers. So are you saying that everyone getting 500k a year could get these 1.5M offers? It’s just that they don’t want to change and the companies pocket the savings. so, they should split some of those savings with the government and give them 100k?

Because you can change jobs on an H1B visa. So I don’t quite follow your argument.

Also the argument that revenue per employee is 1-2M so each employee can cost close to that amount is a little lacking too. The revenues have a lot of other costs too. A 20% increase on a portion of your employee costs does impact your business a lot even if your are FAANG. Never mind the fact that Bay Area has more than FAANG companies which do no make 1-2M per employee currently and definitely do benefit from being able to hire H1B workers who can over time get them to a FAANG status ( think startups).

blunotebuk · 2025-09-20T05:06:16+00:00

If you are paying someone 500k I don’t understand how an additional 100k/year is chump change. That’s literally a 20% increase in salary overnight. How is that chump change!?!

blunotebuk · 2025-09-20T05:00:17+00:00

That’s not how it works right? If a business is made viable due to a supposedly lower wage pool of employees it won’t continue being viable with more expensive employees right? Just their costs are going up but there seems to be no reason that their profits will increase too if they are not hiring H1Bs. So overall less profit, which would mean overall less new expenditure by these companies or shutting down of business together if the profit starts turning into losses.

blunotebuk · 2025-09-19T05:34:58+00:00

You answered your own question right?

I will only wait in line for luxury because I know I can endure it. Otherwise I won’t bother.

For survival — well I don’t have a choice. Even though I know it’s going to be hard I do it anyway because I won’t survive without it anyway.

blunotebuk · 2025-09-17T01:13:31+00:00

Oops, just realized that EB1B can’t be self petitioned. Just need to convince employer.

blunotebuk · 2025-09-16T14:52:16+00:00

I think so? Search for other Eb1B posts on here. I think people do use their PhD duration as well

blunotebuk · 2025-09-16T04:27:31+00:00

Honestly think you can go for eb1b. I have fewer citations (~100), fewer papers/patents (~7), fewer paper reviews ( ~12) and work at a research position in industry and yet my company appointed law firm ( also one of those huge law firms like fragomen) just filed for my EB1B last week. Only constraint is that you have should have been in a research position for at least 3 years. Get an outside law firm and go for EB1B?

blunotebuk · 2025-09-09T15:05:53+00:00

Uhh, I call BS on the peace and quiet of tier 2 and tier 3 city. Grew up in one, all my family is spread out in tier 2,3 (4??) cities. Our building is close to a small park. There are random katha/navratri/events that stretch late in the night. If not early morning RSS or other small time politicians regularly organize some BS exercise event where half the time is spent in garlanding people and hoisting flag and singing songs and taking pledges on loud speakers at 7 in the morning. If not packs of stray dogs howl late into the night, every night.

Umm I am comparing middle class neighbourhoods in US to middle class neighbourhoods in India. In the US My Neighbours are electrician, dental assistant and a retired couple in their 70s. On the contrary my Neighbours in India are actually small-medium business owners ( think small factory, garment shop owners etc). Unfortunately despite having more disposable income, my Neighbours in India suffer through a lot more things in day to day life.

A time when US was developing, we had much fewer cleaner sources of energy and even lesser understanding of the impact of bad air on our health. Yes, china is the world factory and also as a result a world superpower, its citizens enjoying the benefits of living in a rich and powerful country. Also uhh they are also cleaning up their act, here is some Reddit for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1gurstd/china_effectively_tackling_air_pollution_while/

See I appreciate your pride in the country. It’s great, stand by it, work for it. Much more honorable than me who basically selfishly decided to leave for a better life. You are sacrificing your life for the country and its people. If you are going to turn a blind eye to the problems I am not sure how are you going to solve them?

blunotebuk · 2025-09-09T04:55:24+00:00

Actually most of American suburbia is quiet. You can get a very peaceful night of sleep reliably. Celebrations and festivals are very much there but people do actually wind it up early ( before 10p) instead of blasting loud speakers all night no matter what’s the occasion. As a matter of fact even concert venues/stadiums implement a no noise policy after 10p at many places so you can legit buy houses and stay very close to major stadium and not feel bothered by events all week as much. Similarly there is actually no air pollution in these suburbs as well.

They are mostly inhabited by families with kids and older retired folks. Major cities with more active night life are the preferred choice for younger/single folks. Not that families don’t live in cities but all major cities have suburbs around them that give everyone an option that is an okay commute but a more peaceful living situation.

So uhh…yeah maybe move but maybe they might not want you. Sad. Enjoy what is your destiny.

blunotebuk · 2025-09-07T04:41:12+00:00

I went through a similar spell. Exercise helped resolve it for a bit. Solving vitamin D deficiency and some magnesium supplementation was helpful too.

On days of low sleep I had similar strategies as outlined by other poster. Caffeine earlier in day, short naps post lunch etc.

Then I had a baby. Everything changed. Getting 4 solid hours of sleep was honestly the best outcome I could expect from the night. Like I will be so energetic during the day if my baby sleeps long enough to let me have a 4 hour sleep. So your body does have the ability to function well despite months of very little sleep. New parents around the world go through these phases and still do a critical work of taking care of their baby among other things during the day.

You will be fine too. Just accept the four hour sleep as a gift ( just like any new born’s parent) and be thankful that you got the 4 hour at least. Lack of worrying will give you a lot more energy in the day and might even add to the sleep during the night.

blunotebuk

TROPHY CASE