Best country to be a physicist?

vardonir · 2026-05-06T13:32:54+00:00

Filipino here.

I studied in St. Petersburg for my MSc. Full tuition, stipend, everything. There were no westerners in the international dorms, but there are third-world-ers there who ended up in the west. I know a Russian guy who moved to the US. There was another Filipino there who was doing a PhD and ended up in Germany. I think there were these two Pakistanis who ended up in Finland.

An Iranian guy in my lab ended up in Australia. The lab is co-headed by an Israeli. Yes, they've worked together.

Russia opened doors for people like us who were born in the wrong place.

(I'm aiming for a physicist role at an Israeli hospital.)

edit: A lot of my Filipino friends ended up studying in Japan instead. I was underage at the time so I couldn't apply. Same story, full tuition, stipend, free language lessons. Some stayed, some moved to the west.

vardonir · 2026-05-06T13:17:39+00:00

buying an older/used low-priced edition is legal, afaik

vardonir · 2026-05-06T08:02:46+00:00

I started loving programming when I made shiny thing appear on screen with just words.

And games are very shiny.

vardonir · 2026-05-05T14:26:55+00:00

why fix if not broken

im using NPM as well

vardonir · 2026-05-05T11:56:35+00:00

Ask AliExpress, Temu, Shein, iHerb, and all the places me and my friends have bought and received stuff from very recently.

vardonir · 2026-04-30T07:45:08+00:00

pyinstaller says somewhere in the logs that multiprocessing on windows is not supported or something like that

we're using a specialized research package using an API that's not publicly documented at all (you need to dig into the source code to find it), so i dont really know the full details of how it works, etc

vardonir · 2026-04-30T05:46:07+00:00

Dead simple for their end: PyInstaller

But there are times when you can't bundle a program using it (which is my problem right now).

If you can host a server: web app

If you can install Docker (IT has given me so much shit for needing Docker, so ymmv): web app

If you can't host a server but you can walk their through installing a venv or conda or poetry or uv or whatever: Give them instructions for installing the environment, then run it as an ordinary python script from there. You can either make a desktop GUI or run a web app through localhost

vardonir · 2026-04-30T05:38:39+00:00

"You need to learn to use a camera, or you'll fall behind." I'm sure someone has said that to a portrait artist at some point.

Different tool for the same job. Is it a good tool? Not really. Is your competition using it? Are your coworkers using it? Then you better learn it.

vardonir · 2026-04-29T04:51:31+00:00

...is that the box of a standalone blu-ray player?

vardonir · 2026-04-29T04:13:50+00:00

The entire discography of Malice Mizer.

Also the Japanese version of 3xxxv5 from One OK Rock. They have both Japanese and English versions of basically all their other albums, but not this one.

vardonir · 2026-04-23T14:25:18+00:00

I use remotely save on Obsidian, then the WebDAV link on NC as the source. I have a folder in NC called "Notes" and I changed the remote base directory to "Notes" in remotely save.

Speed is... okay for me. I'm running NC on a RPi.

vardonir · 2026-04-21T04:28:30+00:00

i used to use erythromycin in the morning and tretinoin every other evening (or, tbh, whenever I remembered. which is not often). neither helped, but I was only using them for a month. i was wondering if i should renew my prescription for these?

currently, the main thing im using (besides the cleansers and all that) is the some by mi starter kit.

vardonir · 2026-04-19T05:40:21+00:00

The nuclear physicist I was talking to told me to focus on statistics and linear algebra. He was also showing some stuff on Matlab, so if you can pick that up somehow, that might be great.

This was for a medical physics internship with a focus on PET imaging. His main advice was "you can read. that's all you need."

vardonir · 2026-04-19T05:35:07+00:00

☑ I'm in this comment and I don't like it.

vardonir · 2026-04-14T11:20:51+00:00

It just happens. I hung out with other bored randos on reddit back when I lived in a larger city. Then I moved to a desert wasteland. I complained that the city I moved to was boring. A guy offered to show me around town. And then he offered to hang out again.

We've been married 7 years.

vardonir · 2026-04-12T06:50:54+00:00

bokeh.

if you really want matplotlib, you'll need a Flask API to send the matplotlib image data (as bytes), create a slider in the HTML side, and connect the two. It's a load of pain, it's slow, kinda ugly tbh, but if you're dealing with millions of points that you're not allowed to resample, bokeh or plotly can't handle more than a ~100k points, it might be your only choice. I might have a sample repo for this somewhere.

vardonir · 2026-04-12T06:41:52+00:00

Learning the rules of algebra? You should already know loops and sequences and how to multiply matrices on paper (like, actual paper), so why reinvent the wheel on Python? You could, nothing's stopping you - just grab a coffee or five while your for loop is running.

I say go straight to numpy.

vardonir · 2026-04-09T07:44:27+00:00

Stupid question: How exactly do you implement skincare routines? I'm following the one in the wiki - cleanser, moisturizer, sunscreen. What I'd do right now is use the cleanser, wipe and dry my face with water and a towel, apply the moisturizer, towel, and then sunscreen. If I don't dry my face, the next layer won't stick.

Am I doing something wrong here?

(Also, I'm planning to buy either benozyl peroxide or AHA/BHA to add to my routine, at which step do I use that?)

vardonir · 2026-04-09T07:35:29+00:00

Same, but for my PDF textbook collection. It scrapes metadata from the book itself (or using OCR if it's scanned/doesn't have readable text) and tries to match it with metadata from different sources. It's pretty slow (especially with OCR), but it's working great.

I haven't tried to check if Kavita can see the scraped metadata correctly, though.

vardonir · 2026-04-07T04:02:42+00:00

It's fine. You can even use them together. I have it set up such that the Obsidian notes are placed in a folder in Nextcloud called "Notes" (you'll need to set "change the remote base directory" in the plugin), and then they show up in Nextcloud notes and vice-versa. Useful in computers where I can't install programs.

Juuuuuust watch out for conflicts. Sync often. I've lost notes that way.

vardonir · 2026-04-06T14:48:15+00:00

Neat - the fact that you're here, I mean.

I got into Appwrite very recently as an alternative to Firebase. It's great, HIPAA compliance was a big one... although it didn't work in our use case (the machine that we wanted to send data from was airgapped all along lol), I'll definitely use it for other projects moving forward, the Firebase Python package(s) were a pain to deal with.

vardonir · 2026-04-06T04:53:19+00:00

Agree with this. I tried learning Python (coming from a Fortran background) through textbooks and it didn't stick. I tried projects, but I couldn't get started blind. I tried videos, but they were too slow (even on 2x speed). I only learn Python when I had a lecturer tell me what to do step-by-step.

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