I only have one, and it is ‘Samurai Commando Mission 1549’

The japanese self defense force goes back in time to defend Japan against from… Also the japanese self defense force. The plot never makes any sense, nothing gets resolved. But it’s glorious.

It’s more a problem of economics. I’ve optimized my life to accomplish a single goal. There is no room for anything else. Time is the most expensive thing right now.

I had zero dollars and a company license 6 or 7 years ago, so my focus has been bootstrapping myself into land+home ownership, which is very expensive here. A home in Vietnam is much more expensive than what you’d expect considering the cost of everything else.

So I’ve spent 100% of my time studying whatever I think will make me the most money. This has typically been technology and programming languages, with some brief forays into economics, finance, law, and accounting. I studied the Vietnamese enough to deal with daily life only. I can’t really socialize in Vietnamese very well, but then again, I don’t have a social life in any language.

It’s intense, but going well. If I continue at this rate, I’ll be able to retire after a career of about 10 years (so a couple more years). Then I can learn Vietnamese. Maybe I’ll learn to paint too, or run a machine shop, or help students build their careers!

I work with a lot of people from HK. It seems tough over there.

On one hand, we receive a lot of work from HK companies looking to move jobs elsewhere. It’s one of the things making the economy a bit less bad than elsewhere presently.

On the other hand, I really wish you all the best and hope things improve.

Ack, my long response got eaten.

I guess in North America, people I know seem to think that developing countries in Asia are these oppressive, miserable places.

While I do technically live in a slum, it’s safer and the residents are happier than any place I’ve been in Canada. The people here have so much freedom to do the things that matter! The barrier to starting a business is very close to zero, zoning and tax laws are not prohibitive either. You can do whatever you want with your home – no home owner’s association. Raise chickens on your roof, if that’s what you want to do. Anything not dangerous is OK – maybe talk to your neighbors first if it’s something unusual.

Going back to North America is something I do for family. It’s inconvenient, everything is far apart and empty, it feels dead. The food is less good. People are angry and divided about politics. There’s some low-but-everpresent degree of hostility towards people who look like foreigners, and overall it seems people have somewhat strange ideas about Asia. It’s not terrible, and there are many good things there too (it is clean and many forests!), but I feel woefully out of place.

Interacting with people from North America who visit Vietnam has always been the biggest cultural shock though. Often, they outright ask me how to commit crimes (I maintain a presence online to answer questions for confused tourists – Vietnam is not that accessible sometimes). Work permit compliance is low, also many fake university degrees and fake passports. Lots of people running MLM and crypto scams. Many drive without any valid license, and if they hit someone they flee back home. I met many selling drugs illegally (I wasn’t looking for them, either). It used to be shockingly bad. On the bright side, it drove me to integrate culturally and pay careful attention to my immigration paperwork.

So I guess I consider myself culturally Asian now, which I suppose is a reasonable outcome after 10 years. The language is still hard for me though, I still speak like a child – running a business doesn’t leave so much time to study human languages.

Nowadays, we’re getting more qualified professionals and tourists that are decent people, so things are generally way better than they were 5 or 6 years ago. Overall the things I’ve seen make me ashamed though. I don’t think any amount of progress can really wash that feeling away. I try to assist tourists online as a way to prevent myself from turning that shame into prejudice.

I immigrated to Vietnam. That was ok.

Visiting north America again years later was quite a shock!

I’ve designed similar devices.

The epoxy blob likely plays factory-set chiptunes out the piezo element.

It’s unlikely to play voices, just tones. The ones that record arbitrary audio use specific ICs from China, none of which I see there. Also those work with small but standard speakers, not generally piezo elements.

As a small window into how these are designed, a lot of the engineering goes into reducing power consumption and parts count. The button might for example drop the pin of an MCU low to trigger an interrupt that wakes it from deep sleep. Then it plays a tune stored in eeprom (more common) or internal flash (less common). Usually the chips are one-time-programmable and cost under 0.10$!

In Canada I don’t boil it.

In Vietnam, I do. Although more because I’m always making tea than anything else. Unless it’s well water, in which case that’s only for doing dishes, I won’t drink that.

I did nearly die from cholera some years back, but it was probably not from the tap water specifically. Sanitation and food safety has really improved here in the last decade, I’m happy to say.

I’m in the habit of being consistently unsatisfied with my own work. Even by achieving my initial goals, I learn new ways it could have been better, and it instantly becomes mediocre in my eyes.

I think this is a good habit of mine, but it requires that I attempt to accomplish meaningful work constantly. It doesn’t matter too much to me exactly what I make, as long as it’s something (sometimes it’s code, but sometimes it’s a nightmare of brass and iron and science).

Coding is not the only thing software needs. It needs bug reports, documentation, graphical designers, funding, how-to videos, and so on. There are many problems to solve and many ways to contribute, requiring a diverse set of skills!

There’s a neat math proof that proves you can code if you can follow a flowchart. However, if you don’t like coding, it’s unlikely to be of particular interest and perhaps those other methods of contribution would bear more fruit!

Creating new content to share on Lemmy is another way to help it grow! Tell us worthy tales, share your best thoughts!

I live in Asia. It already is like that here.

No room to live, and no room to die. Hell is a kettle with a concrete sky.

I have the opposite problem where people think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. Is there a tag for that?

The most painful lessons in life concern trusting the wrong person.