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methou

911 karma · joined May 14, 2014

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methou··on The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines
My high school years were plagued by anxiety. My cousin knew a psychiatrist and convinced my family to at least see what he had to say. After diagnosing me, the doctor prescribed lorazepam and an SSRI. According to the doctor, it was just like having a small cold and would eventually go away after a while. At his office, he also told me that lorazepam should only be taken as needed because it can lead to psychological dependence.

Many years have passed. Every time I feel I’m losing control because of anxiety, I imagine taking a lorazepam pill or having one within reach. Even these imaginings bring me some peace. But I still know it’s a bit dangerous, even though it’s not technically addictive.

That’s how “good” the stuff is. And you should be careful with it.

methou··on JMA Cancels Emergency Warning After Predicting M9.9; Rules Out Cyberattack
Sharing this because I thought this was the end.

When I heard the squealing dolphin sound from multiple phones, saying “earthquake” and “jishin” all the time, I wasn’t that worried.

I clicked into the alert in the NERV app, which gave more information, like the predicted intensity and time of arrival. I wasn’t able to comprehend what I saw:

The entire upper half of Japan was painted red. Does red mean affected?

The expected intensity is 7. That’s a huge one; I should seek shelter. Wait...

The time until arrival was three digits in seconds. That’s strange. But I still had time.

So I grabbed my mini getaway pouch (ID/passport, cash and cards), quickly went downstairs, and got out of my home.

I was on the street and still had a bit over 100 seconds. Should I avoid being next to the tall buildings and utility poles? I gave it a quick assessment and decided to trust reinforced concrete.

Next, I wasn’t sure where to go. There was a park across the road I could go to, and another park a bit further away that didn’t require crossing any roads. But in the end, I decided to walk to my friend’s home first and see if I could get him.

So I walked to his home. The countdown hit 0 halfway there. I was expecting strong shaking or a seasick feeling. Nothing happened.

I looked around. The sun was bright, and I was wearing black. The ojisan who was sitting in a car looked chill, listening to FM. A few people were on the street, but no one was in a hurry. No one showed any visible fear.

So I stood there, waited and waited. Nothing happened.

I pulled out my phone and opened X.com. It wasn’t helpful at all. I could see M9.9 trending among other earthquake-related keywords, but the server was really having difficulties returning anything.

I opened Telegram. Thank God it was still working. My friends were all chill: “They must be testing in production,” “Someone fat-fingered it,” “Data error.” I calmed down and walked back home.

Three minutes after I’d sat down, the dolphin on my phone squealed again. Same drill: I grabbed my pouch and phone, rushed out of my home, and started looking at the screen.

The Japanese version said the alert had been canceled.

The English version showed the same alert again.

And my friends said it must be really rare for things like this to happen. They must have forgotten how to properly cancel an alert.

I came back, sat down, and started waiting for my meeting with a recruiter.

methou··on The cost of getting a job today
> They can’t get a visa. They live in another city. The contract terms don’t work for them.

I have to share my stories. For a position I’m a really good fit for at a company I’m familiar with, I asked a guy to ask a guy, and they said they would only hire in the US because the team is in the US.

For another position, they reached out to me. They can’t hire in Japan but offered relocation.

In both cases, I’m super grateful that people are willing to help, but I could sense that times have changed since 2023. Globalization is no longer that strong; many, many jobs are restricted to certain locations, such as certain cities in the US or India. I don’t know about the EU, though.

This gives me some hope that if I’m willing to leave Japan, I can get a good job.

methou··on The cost of getting a job today
Exactly, I canceled my $20/mo Emby subscription the morning after I lost my job.
methou··on Creating a Garmin "MCP"
There’s an unofficial Garmin connect Home Assistant extension, playing along with Prometheus exporter you can get a quite impressive dashboard. That’s what I did.
methou··on China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024
This does not translate into better jobs, if you’re wondering. The main complaint inside China is still fair pay for fair hours.
methou··on Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic
> Their models have strict guardrails,

This is what bothers me most, and it's getting increasingly frustrating. With the recent development of PS4/5 emulation and game porting, it will only get worse (back snatching or lawsuits).

methou··on REA Reverse – Engineer Anything
I'm using IDA Pro's MCP (Well worth of money in the past), it may hit the infamous artificial cyber wall at any time.

Try GLM-5.3, it worked pretty for me. It also worked well with Radare2 or binary ninja if you don't have the muscle memory for idapro.

methou··on GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone
The interaction is beautiful, reminds me of Brilliant.
methou··on System-level ad-blocking in Android
That's a long article about just DNS.

I'd expect mentioning of the good old Xposed framework.

methou··on Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on August 20, 2025
A friend of mine tried, no signal.
methou··on 79% of OpenBSD kernel source is AMD DRM
For Mac and Windows users: Not to be confused with Digital Rights Management:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

methou··on Tom Lehrer has died
RIP

His songs helped me through so many difficult times.

methou··on Ten years of JSON Web Token and preparing for the future
JWTs are just too fat, and JS users often forgets encoding is not encryption.

I've seen some news site trackers send JWT in url/header to some 3rd party tracker. Content is no surprise, my full name, and email address, violates its own privacy policy.

Otherwise it's very open and handy, from inspecting a jwt token I can learn a lot about the architectural design of many sites.

methou··on Racket – the Language-Oriented Programming Language – 8.17 is now available
One of my ex asked me complete the exercises in SICP with her in chez scheme, every day I'm tempted to use Racket, it's like python in the language class (all batteries included). I see people did some wonderful work with Racket, but I'm not sure if toy lang or is also used in production.
methou··on What We Lose When We're Priced Out of Our Hobbies
My told a story that when they were college students and broke, they just went to a scrape yard for car parts. Today me and my homelab friends just scraping ebay and local industrial waste sites to get routers, switches, and server parts. We had a good luck with LTO-5 and LTO-6 tapes and tape libraries, also for NICs it's pretty easy to get connect-x 5 and 6 at an acceptable price, CPU/MEM are ok, motherboards are difficult. You just set a spec, buy whatever is available atm, then wait until you can get a whole server. It's often a long process, and itself can become a hobby. (took me 3mo, my friend 2 years to get an "ideal" server)

Well, pricing out is real, even the junk parts are now at least 20% pricier than pre-covid, and I really hated myself for not bidding for SN2010M at $700 ~ $1500 range. Those are beautiful beasts.

methou··on Microsoft blocks VSCode-derived editors (like Cursor) from using MS extensions
But the configuration is a whole new project in lua. Saying I’ve being using neovim for a while, have shot myself in the foot a couple of times
methou··on Why are credit card rates so high?
I feels weird that US businesses and affiliates usually don't welcome debit cards as much,
methou··on Show HN: Offline SOS signaling+recovery app for disasters/wars
There's LoRa runs on 450/900 MHz with complete stack for transmitting and relaying messages. There's even modern encrypted protocol (meshstatic) built on it.
methou··on OpenAI closes $40B funding round, startup now valued at $300B
WeWork 2.0
methou··on Cwtch – Privacy Preserving Messaging
Looks nice, but all my friends care about are stickers and gifs...
methou··on Dodge Chargers now have pop-up ads at every stoplight
Never bought a car, but can you request the dealer to remove SIM module from the vehicle? So you can selectively update the infotainment system only when you vetted/needed to?
methou··on Mozilla rewrites Firefox's Terms of Use after user backlash
The whole thing confuses me is that why would Firefox as an browser (user agent) need that legal jargon to work. Hopefully Legal Eagle or similar channels would cover this, but they are too busy with politics at the moment?
methou··on Linux laptop maker called me a Zombie
This is really fun to read. If someone fund me in my teenager years I would probably just act like the owner of Malibal.
methou··on Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after reneging on promises to not sell their data
You are right, quantum seems decent and based on Servo. However I can't edit the post already. Two less reasons to dump Firefox then.

Unlike Microsoft, Mozilla happens to be a smaller company than M$ with Firefox being their biggest offering, and they actually started trying to sell ads[0].

---- [0]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/

methou··on Wealthy Americans fuel half of U.S. economy consumer spending
Last time I called my mom who's in Beijing, she says that economics doesn't seem very good at the moment, many shops and restaurants has closed, but there are more luxury shops popping up. Looks like similar in the US.
methou··on A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub
https://openstreetmap.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.h...

There are actually a lot public information available on Layers -> ArcGIS Online.

I used to see ongoing Waterworks maintenance in there. In the area I live, there are also very up to date earthquake information from Government feed.

methou··on Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
It does not have to be the "pioneer days", just saying this from Japan...
methou··on UnitedHealth laying off 30-35k employees by May 1
reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/BccyQaNKXz8?t=1036
methou··on Deep Fake Detector Extension by Mozilla Firefox
I lost faith in this company, Mozilla has been distracted by chasing hypes, taking money from a major competitor, dropped servo development, the list goes on and on. I had to kagi for "Mozilla Foundation" NPO to confirm that it's still a nonprofit.

In today's view, I'm looking at a Ad Company depends on Google happens to own a browser. This contradicts one of it's main sale point: diversifying the browser market. For me what's left for Firefox is just uB0 support.

There's no remorse in switching to and strongly soliciting Firefox forks like LibreWolf or Waterfox.

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