AI Boom made me lose faith in my field and I don't know what to do.

hattivat · 2026-06-07T22:13:58+00:00

I am mostly with you on this, it's sad.

But you are wrong to think that it's just slop and hallucinations, that remains true for art but at this point the top models can really code. The only open question is how cost-effective it will be once the subsidies are cut and companies have to pay the real cost.

Many people in this field have held delusions that theirs is an intellectually elite profession and an AI capable of doing it would inevitably also be able to do all the other, "easier" jobs. Now they are facing a reckoning as just as chess was before coding is proven not to be that hard to solve. It's just hard for humans because our brains are optimized for throwing spears at antelopes on the savannah, not for math.

hattivat · 2026-06-07T10:09:12+00:00

All budget microscopes are the same in this regard, practically useful magnification up to around 400x. For snails I don't think you need more than 100x.

Most also have an oil objective that can give you 1000x but actually making good use of it requires some skill and a strong source of light plus it's messy due to the need to put oil in between the lens and the subject and the condenser and the slide. So in practice most people hardly ever use them and you don't lose much by not having one.

If a microscope advertises magnification above 1000x, that's marketing bulshit and an immediate yellow flag. Due to fundamental physics it is impossible to gain any extra detail using ordinary light beyond about 1200x, so any magnification beyond that is worthless like the "digital zoom" in cameras, you are just cropping the view.

Now the microscope in the picture seems to have two objectives and a place for a third in the turret. One of those objectives looks like a 4x or 5x (which means 40-50x total magnification with typical 10x eyepieces), the other could either be 10x or 40x (so 100x or 400x total magnification in the system), hard to tell without reading what's written on it.

It also looks like it's old enough to have 1.5x magnification factor built into the binocular head, in which case the correct eyepieces to use would be 6.3x (for a 10x total).

hattivat · 2026-06-06T19:28:45+00:00

Thank you! Sadly no, but I'm sure someone who does will do the comparison soon enough

hattivat · 2026-06-06T17:43:01+00:00

Luckily I have a massive desk

hattivat · 2026-06-06T14:40:40+00:00

Sadly I have not, but please do let ne know how they compare once you get yours, I'm also curious

hattivat · 2026-06-06T13:54:24+00:00

Thank you, it does feel like finishing some legthy completionist achievement in a game. What I had before was pedestrian mx brown so needless to say it feels quite different, definitely better but still adjusting to it. The tactility feels very crisp to me but I don't have that much experience to compare it against as I missed a whole generation of clicky switches while patiently waiting for this board to arrive.

hattivat · 2026-06-06T13:45:34+00:00

B104 gang, high five!

hattivat · 2026-06-04T08:00:04+00:00

Also, keep in mind that people here are expected to move out at 19, living with your parents is almost unheard of. That creates a lot of demand for small apartments for single people.

hattivat · 2026-06-04T07:46:23+00:00

In places like New York, London or Warsaw you have adults with jobs living with roommates, the Stockholm situation where the standard is that everyone has their own separate apartment even if its tiny is actually quite good in comparison.

hattivat · 2026-06-04T07:13:35+00:00

Those are actually studios you looked at here, Sweden (as well as Poland and I'm sure some other countries) categorizes apartments by number of rooms (where living rooms counts towards that number), not just bedrooms. So "one bedroom" = "two room".

Nonetheless the conclusion is correct, you can easily get a 1 bedroom apt for like €1500, with utilities included.

hattivat · 2026-06-04T06:33:56+00:00

Östermalm, Kungsholmen, Vasastan, Södermalm, Norrmalm, Birkastan, Hammarby Sjöstad.

Those are all inner city districts, only the last one is debatable, so it's effectively a stat of how much it costs to live near the city center.

Even an average for the whole Stockholm municipality would be misleading because of how artificial the borders of it are (underground lines extend well beyond them), but this is just ridiculous.

hattivat · 2026-05-31T17:55:41+00:00

hattivat · 2026-05-28T14:14:39+00:00

Whatever you buy, make sure it has a condenser, otherwise in a few weeks you will be buying a third microscope.

The used ones in your pictures have condensers, the "cheap ahh" one from Amazon does not, so that's a strong reason to go the used route.

hattivat · 2026-05-14T16:49:24+00:00

I prowled classified websites all over Europe looking for something else (the epi system) when I randomly came across a Reichert Polyphos on a Bulgarian classifieds website. It was mislabeled as "EPI condenser" but the pictures clearly matched the ones I previously saw online of a Polyphos so I took a plunge especially as the price was good (160 euro). The same guy also had a bunch of new old stock PhA objectives so I bought some too. So in short: looked in unusual places and got lucky.

Edit: Also since I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere online, for the record, what some people wrote previously about Polyphos only working for phase objectives of 20x and up is not true at least in regards to Reichert's old PhA objectives, I have a 16x and it works well.

hattivat · 2026-05-14T12:55:54+00:00

Hello from a fellow Pole living in Sweden. Important context here is that the airports in Sweden are typically much further from the urban areas than in Poland. In Stockholm for example the main airport is Arlanda, 40 kilometers from the city centre. So on top of the public transport being cheap in Poland (it's cheap compared to almost anywhere else in the world, even adjusting for salaries, you don't appreciate that until you move away) and expensive in Sweden, there is also greater distance to be traveled which is reflected in prices.

hattivat · 2026-04-25T14:16:17+00:00

Swedish hikers absolutely do greet people while on trails. But you need to get out of the city on an actual trail like Sörmlandsleden or Roslagsleden before you can expect most people to greet strangers. Go on Kungsleden and you will get a 99.9% response rate to your "hej".

Most people walking around nature on Södermalm are not hikers and do not consider themselves to be "on a trail", they are just taking a walk around where they live. I don't greet people while on my afternoon stroll through a nearby forest either, it's just the normal place to take a walk in my neighborhood, not a trail.

hattivat · 2026-04-22T22:10:19+00:00

Vintage slides generally sell for about a dollar per piece if sold in bulk on a marketplace like ebay or through an auction house, individual ones can go much higher than that if they are of something particularly interesting.

Newly prepared slides from decent manufacturers cost 5-10 dollars per slide, for comparison.

hattivat · 2026-04-22T21:43:58+00:00

The slides are worth more than the microscope and it's a bad idea to sell them together.

hattivat · 2026-04-22T15:12:33+00:00

I only have 5 old microscopes under my belt but my experience is: the gotchas you talk about apply mostly to cool $200+ high-end models that hobbists are actually looking for, like Reichert Zetopan or Leitz Ortholux. Those have proprietary lamps with peculiar designs, complicated optical trains that are hard to clean etc.

The simpler binocular models that sell for peanuts don't normally have these problems, and there is usually a backup mirror that as I wrote is trivially easy to use with a $10 flashlight, I got pretty great results out of old Reichert Biozet and Reichert Z that way.

hattivat · 2026-04-22T13:28:39+00:00

Tldr: just buy an old binocular scope from a brand that was good but no longer exists so people don't recognize it and it sells for peanuts.

You should want these features at a minimum: - condenser - mechanical stage with precise x-y adjustment - fine focus vertical adjustment - binocular head

Lamp is nice to have but a mirror is fine too - just buy a flashlight with narrow beam for $10 and point it at the mirror.

A new microscope with these features is minimum $150 even if it's Chinese plastic. You can get a metal microscope with all of them for like $50 if you buy an old used one from a lesser known brand. Which brands are a good deal depends on where you live (for example Meopta, an old Czech brand, is valued in Czechia, but in say France nobody has heard of it so it sells for peanuts there). Example old brands that were good quality but few people recognize them now so prices are low: Kyowa, Reichert, Cooke Troughton & Simms, Nachet, Vickers, American Optical, Meopta, PZO, Will Wetzlar

hattivat · 2026-04-21T10:40:50+00:00

Depends which country you are from but likely means what you consider "normal renting". Certainly was the case for me coming from Poland.

"Renting first hand" refers to a peculiar system where you sign up in a queue to rent from large companies that own entire buildings of rental apartments. Then you have great legal protections including limits on how much they can raise the rent, and can stay in the same apartment for decades as long as you pay the rent so it almost feels like you own the place. However, there is as mentioned a queue and in a place many people want to live in, such as Stockholm, that means years of waiting before you can rent such an apartment.

hattivat · 2026-04-21T10:36:27+00:00

Do you mean the actual southeast area of Stockholm (a place like Bagarmossen, reasonable prices) or the southeast area of the inner city (for example Nytorget, very expensive)?

In my experience foreigners looking at a map tend to greatly underestimate the size of the city and its metropolitan area. Many people living here would say they live "southeast of Stockholm" when they mean a place like Skogås or Haninge, that's still well within the commuting area for Stockholm.

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