• 31 Posts
  • 2.91K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle













  • Also, if you have a limited RAM smartphone and your VPN is operating in userspace, then all it takes is for one really large image to grace your smartphone screen for your OS to go into out-of-memory kill mode. What’s it going to kill? The foreground app you’re trying to use, or the background VPN app.

    In my experience, the VPN goes down before the browser does. Mounting a swap on your phone is not the worse solution against this, but the UI starts to get really unresponsive.


  • I was homeless in Brussels once. Someone stole my backpack with my passport in it, and just like that I was stateless. It was over a weekend, and the embassy to my home country was closed and wouldn’t open until Monday.

    No food, no money, no water, I had nothing to do. I walked all over that city, really got to see every interesting corner of it. It’s like 5 different countries smushed into one, and you can see french/german/british influence almost everywhere. There’s an overpass that cuts right through it at one point, occupying nothing underneath and that’s where the migrants gather on Saturday mornings to host their wares in this long unyielding impromptu market.

    I slept in their parks, talked with their police (who didn’t believe my story), and even struck up a conversation with a random Canadian I met at the train station, who fitted the stereotype to a T, and gave me money so I could get by another day, asking for nothing in return.

    When Monday rolled around, I took a nice leisurely stroll to the embassy and got an emergency visa, ready for the long bus trip home, and genuinely sadly bid farewell to that beautiful crazy mess of a city. It shares a special place in my heart, bureaucracy be damned.



  • You don’t need to be smart. Back in my uni, there were student initiatives to record the questions and answers of previous exams. The Math department itself gave out previous years exams to study from.

    The key to remember: exams aren’t written my professors, they’re written by the postdocs who have better things to do, and so they just rehash the same stuff from the year before.

    If you want to get a useless piece of paper that tells you that you are an expert in topic X, then don’t learn X, learn to pass the papers for the X exam, and learn X later in your free time if you’re still interested in it.