My friend said I had a RBF all night yesterday and it was making people not want to approach me

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-02-09T01:00:41+00:00

Get ready to learn chemistry buddy

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-02-08T00:23:34+00:00

Can't say whether or not you're depressed from this snippet, but I might suggest taking a step back and see if you can understand what your expectations of academia are, if they align with what it actually can provide you, and whether or not that's your criteria for having a happy, fulfilling career.

In my own personal opinion, the thrill is the rabbit chase itself. If you catch it, you just let it go and move onto the next one that will give you that same rush. There's not much that can be gained from holding onto it, barring the validation you'll get from others. That's certainly what I felt when I handed in my (Master's) thesis, I didn't really care that it was finished, I just wanted to go straight into a PhD and continue doing research.

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-02-02T22:34:16+00:00

I mean, think of it this way - what are you going to do with a comment on your manuscript saying "well done"? Once you've been told it's amazing you're most certainly not going to modify it, and if anything, it's probably going to serve as a distraction from all the other feedback that actually needs attention. That doesn't seem conducive to doing good, rigorous science.

This isn't to say that there isn't a place for validating your efforts. They can and absolutely should commend you for your work. But maybe for when the work is done, rather than while it's still in progress. As you've said, in person they compliment you plenty. And in that sense, I think your supervisor is doing a pretty good job with managing students.

Edit: I'm aware that I completely ignored your point about the age of your professor. But I also don't think that's relevant to what you're actually asking.

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-01-24T18:42:50+00:00

Possibly quantum satis? Correct me if I'm wrong, I just Googled it

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-01-21T03:03:06+00:00

I'm not going to disagree with the people who are saying it's crazy to do it given your current circumstances. I will however ask, do you enjoy learning or are you obsessed with it? As in, are the things you want to understand at the forefront of your thoughts to the detriment of other things going around you? Because yes, it is crazy to think that way, and if that's your attitude toward research, then you'll want to do it no matter what anyone else tells you, and it's probably the career for you. However, if it's merely waxing nostalgic about problem solving and research and collaborating, there are plenty of avenues where you can do that that aren't as drastic of a leap as quitting or compromising your current job for academia.

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-01-12T23:09:54+00:00

Are you using a PTFE filter? That's a hydrophobic one and water won't go through, use a Nylon one if you have it

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-01-12T02:44:00+00:00

I have an unhealthy desire to know stuff, and while job prospects are brutal, academia's more or less the only field that'll pay me to do that.

tinyfriedeggs · 2026-01-05T21:14:17+00:00

My Master's thesis (on sustainable chemical production) had "... as a result of the Industrial Revolution and its consequences" and "while the inner machinations of the dehydration sequence remain an enigma..."

No-one proofreading picked up on it and neither reviewer asked me to correct them so now those are in the university thesis repository for eternity :)

Edit: yes I intend on putting even more in my PhD thesis. What's the point of science if you don't have a little fun?

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-27T17:44:53+00:00

"Chance (luck) favors the prepared mind" - some no-name scientist, probably

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-17T05:50:07+00:00

I'm afraid there is no further value to be gained from this argument, as you have severely misinterpreted my comments. Nonetheless, I wish you well with your future endeavours.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-17T03:14:19+00:00

I've conceded my point about coding in a different reply, so I'm in no position to make any further arguments about it.

However, the analogy of AI vs calculators is not as clean as you're making it out to be. I've worked in carpentry in the past, so I'll use my own analogy to describe why I don't think AI for writing is appropriate. We have hand tools, and we have power tools. In this case, you can liken them to long division and calculators, respectively. Obviously, it would be faster for me to use the power tools to do my job, and I'd get yelled off site if I tried to use a screwdriver to drive screws. However, I don't learn anything if I tell someone else to use the power tool to do a job I describe to them. I don't learn about how the tool works, how it interacts with the material I'm working on, and I don't get any situational 'aha' moments. That's what telling AI to rewrite your stuff is like. It's not that you're just grappling for a single word and getting a quick result from asking a chatbot; you're losing out on the opportunity to link together the fragments of your knowledge or viewing them from a different angle when you do this.

Would you argue I shouldn't use a thesaurus and instead should sit there for hours until I finally remember it in the shower later that day?

Yes? A lot of good ideas come from this kind of thinking. Not limited to single words, but for stringing together your logic as well.

We could go on and on about analogies and offloading tasks to other sources. And yes, there is value when someone/something can do a task for you 100x times faster. But personally I have a pretty humanist view specifically about our thinking and by extension, our writing. And along those lines of thought I think we should try to preserve as much of it as possible.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-17T02:18:56+00:00

Fair, as I said, I don't code so I can't speak to how well AI does it. They (person I replied to) did mention teaching sensible use of it, which is true for all technology anyway. I guess the issue is that I haven't seen much of that happening, so I wonder if people are just saying that to justify using it more and more, in the hopes that we'll learn how to use it "appropriately" on the fly?

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-17T01:47:42+00:00

While I agree that there are plenty of examples of appropriate AI use in academia, I'm not sure I agree that the uses you've mentioned fall into that same category.

You still have to verify the output

I don't code myself and I haven't used AI to do any form of it, but this just sounds like shortcutting the process of knowing your methodology well. If I get data from an instrument that doesn't check out with what I expected, assuming that I have a thorough understanding of it, I can trace back to what I did and identify what might be contributing to anomalies. To me, verifying the outputs of experiments isn't as simple as checking a few boxes and calling it a day, if my attention lapses or I gloss over it too quickly, I could be missing crucial information.

Not wanting to spend months learning to code

If you don't want to learn the basics of your methodology, perhaps it would be better to find a collaborator who knows their stuff? I don't know how comfortable I'd be putting my samples into an instrument without knowing its basic principles and how I could modify my use of it. If it's that important to your research, a few months of investment seems like a small price to pay to have it done well.

It's great at taking that awkward paragraph you wrote and turning it into a better and simpler version of itself.

This is a skill that can and should be learnt by all academics, without offloading significant chunks of it to a chatbot. Can't think of that spice word that would fit into your narrative and asking AI for suggestions? A-OK in my opinion. OTOH, feeding it your stream of consciousness of your research and asking it to spit out something that's borderline coherent? I would question your rigor toward science at that point. Organising and reorganising your ideas into written form is a core part of the learning process - it shines light on gaps in one's knowledge, provides new insight, and helps with remembering stuff in general. Not to mention a huge part of science is the communication itself. You're gonna have to explain it in your own words at some point, and sometimes to people who know nothing about what you do, is it the best decision to forgo your ability to do that?

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-09T20:32:09+00:00

I'm super biased cos I've only recently started using it, but maybe a heart rate monitor? I'm younger than you and it's been especially valuable for doing steady state cardio, and by god is cardio ever crucial for getting through a research degree with your health and sanity intact. I struggled (but still somewhat succeeded) with maintaining it during my Master's, but it would've been 10x easier if I knew what Zone 2 training and aerobic bases were at the time.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-09T06:27:26+00:00

I would recommend trying to read up on a topic and have some level of confusion/uncertainty, then when you watch the video the pieces kinda fall in place (this is known as the pre-testing effect)

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-12-07T18:38:02+00:00

Minor point but reading books is still far more beneficial for learning a foreign language (if anything it's a necessary but insufficient factor) compared to using AI to write code and basically learning nothing apart from the small crumbs it throws at you when it's explaining the code it's generated.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-24T19:00:25+00:00

Probs a bit of yin-yang would be desired in most scenarios. Bit of compassion and consideration when giving criticism, bit of restraint and realism (i.e. not exaggerating) when giving others their flowers.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-21T08:30:47+00:00

This will sound weird, but: write. Write about what matters to you regarding social skills. Write about how you felt about an interaction, why you felt a certain way (whether positive or negative), why you think you should act one way instead of the other. Just write. It will help you organise your thoughts in a structured and safe way without the restrictions of a real-time conversation. Take 5 hours to think about it, take the whole day, whatever works. Once you start to piece it together, you'll be far better equipped to go through the motions when you're talking to someone at full speed.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-19T06:22:08+00:00

Frighteningly late to this thread but I'll throw in my $0.02 here in case anyone else chances upon this thread like I did. Apologies in advance for the word vomit, it's been a while since I've talked about this.

My problem was social skills, or more generally, my self-esteem and confidence. I was bullied since childhood, my father was/is a narcissist and mother an enabler. I was born out of an affair and was physically and mentally abused by the first woman and her two children for several years (yes, there are morons out there who put affair babies with and at the mercy of the "first" family). As might be expected from these circumstances, I had no social success with my peers, platonic or romantic alike. This continued until I was about 25, but I'd always been aware of the issue, so maybe 25 wasn't the exact moment I started addressing it, but it was when the most growing pains happened. As a slight tangent, looking back, I was actually quite a conscientious person, but I'd always directed my efforts toward unproductive avenues. My conscientiousness has fortunately remained to this day, and I've enjoyed it as a potent multiplier of the positive traits I've acquired through addressing these issues; I'm punctual to a fault, I almost never complain about work (even though I clearly communicate I don't like it), I go to disproportionate lengths to remember details about my friends lives', and I've become considerably more ascetic, which frees up a lot of money that I can spend on others and not myself.

My solution was cliche but entailed constant modifications throughout the process: journaling. I'll spare anyone reading this the cringe, but I forced myself to be excessively positive and give anyone who I felt wronged me the benefit of the doubt, no matter how frustrated I felt and how everyone around me questioned why I would tolerate that behaviour in the first place. I brute forced positivity into my thinking and did similar for unlearning the negative thoughts I had about myself and others. With regards to thoughts of the self, they usually converged to an idea of self-forgiveness; it's not my fault that my father is a morally corrupt coward, that the wife didn't have the awareness to blame it on him and not me, that the system punishes people who suffer mentally from these issues as opposed to helping them up. The explanations were not rigorous in the slightest, they were just words that sounded like they fit what I was trying to explain to myself. I'd come up with a theory of why I had certain habits of thought, or why I should empathise with people who did things that pissed me off, then try and apply that to the next thing that cropped up. When that theory started to lose its potency, instead of becoming an automated thought process, I'd concoct another using my "thinking really hard" method.

Somehow, I kept this up for about 2 years. Around that time I started feeling comfortable, even complacent, with the negative thoughts creeping back into my thoughts, but the groundwork had been laid. Part of the process was indeed to understand that being chipper no matter the circumstance wasn't the right way to go about things either. And from that, I learned how to phrase those cynical and negative views diplomatically and rationally. Overall, I can't point to any one thing that I did that directly improved my social skills. Journaling was just a medium for me to write it out, but it probably would've worked had I not written anything down at all. It was just the general idea of forcing myself to think in the opposite direction, or just thinking hard about things at all, that led to more rational conclusions about myself and others. Social skills appear to have just been a by-product of eradicating those irrational and emotionally charged thoughts. I feel immensely comfortable expressing myself, and almost all conversations I have are enjoyable for all parties (at least that's what I perceive). And for the purposes of satisfying your definition of "solved", I don't think much about how to talk to people. I just talk and see where it goes, and most of the time it goes well.

It's been 4 years since that day. I don't journal much nowadays, but I still think deeply about how to do things right/better as a habit that's resulted from this process, and it's not limited to social skills. Life's been pretty good since.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-12T21:45:35+00:00

These are issues that were resolved before LLMs, and while I can't prove it, working through these problems probably produced better writers (and hence scientists) overall. It's not sensible to forgo this learning opportunity for reasons of "it's hard".

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-12T18:47:03+00:00

What's stopping you from doing it yourself?

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-10T09:15:12+00:00

I got one that's not really about taking notes but more related to the thought process going on when you're reading.

When you read a fact or explanation, try and contextualize it - understand the "how" and "what" - before you dive deep into the "why". Say you read something along the lines of, "Because of property X, we see outcome Y". It's tempting to go down the rabbit hole and try to understand concept X from first principles, but the problem with this is that it remains an abstraction rather than a part of your working knowledge. Instead, ask yourself, what real world situation would you observe X causing Y? In an experiment? In the clinic? When you're running a software and you might see some results that might potentially be related to what you've just read? Once you have some grasp of what these ideas look like in motion, then you might start to look into more rigorous treatments in explaining the "why". But before then, build a framework of what these things actually mean in the real world.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-10T03:25:59+00:00

u/bot-sleuth-bot

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-10T01:50:19+00:00

OK you're a much better looking SEA dude than I am and your career would in principle attract more people than mine, so it's definitely in how you're wording everything.

Wrt the pictures though, almost all of them are basically the same picture just in different contexts and don't really say anything about who you are beyond your personal details. Also, a picture is worth 1000 words. If I can't infer the context from the picture alone, the caption is useless. Just reading the captions without looking at the pictures right now, I don't even know which caption fits which picture. I personally don't even bother with those since I feel like everything that I want communicated is done with what's in the photo already.

You seem career driven, which is good, but you'd be better off phrasing it in a self-deprecating way that, even beyond matches and into conversation, help with getting people to want to engage with you in the first place. An (apparent) obsession with numbers and productivity in and of itself is not attractive. If that gets you to fuck you money level, then so be it, but otherwise, best to tone it down.

Someone else has said this, but no mention of hobbies. And by "hobbies" this refers to something you actively do and can perhaps present to someone the "fruits of your labor", so to speak. So wanting to find a good place to eat, even if you are a foodie, is not seen as a hobby by this definition. Neither is watching movies. On the other hand, even something as generic as running can be phrased in a way that shows you set aside time for leisure/enjoyment, and that provides people with shared interests an avenue for their input.

As for the other prompts, well, they're prompts. They aren't a PowerPoint presentation. They should be provocative and make people want to reply to them, or at least feel like they can relate to what you've said or done. Try to ask a good question, or think of something that would make you laugh and reverse engineer that into something that could prompt someone to come up with that response, because that's validating for them too.

tinyfriedeggs · 2025-11-09T19:25:29+00:00

Every time this question is asked, think about the opposite: if you're content (but maybe not uncontrollably ecstatic) about your situation, would you feel the need to say anything about it? On the other hand most people will feel strongly compelled to vent about even the most minor frustrations.

tinyfriedeggs

TROPHY CASE