zlatiah

Cheats? Never tried these myself, but I was being told that some dating apps use their own ELO system for "rating" users, and they try to keep the best matches hidden, so allegedly you can try to game the ELO by rejecting more ppl than necessary and on Hinge you can cheat by leaving the age range completely open (18-99)...

... or I guess beg family/friends for help to completely bypass dating apps I guess

Disclaimer I have never even dated & my only "dates" from a dating app ended in complete disasters, so... I wouldn't trust what I have just wrote

I have been following this curious incident for the past 72 hours, it is... quite fascinating. Vshojo was the largest English vtuber company with a stellar reputation and had some of the most famous English-speaking talents (case in point, Ironmouse is probably the most watched female streamer at the moment?) and they essentially imploded in under 72 hours, probably less than 24 if you consider the cutoff point as when all the talents quit. I think the news article only scratched the surface and was probably too generous towards the founder

• Vshojo was a Silicon Valley startup (this gets important later on) founded in 2021. They are/were somewhere between a talent-management company and a typical vtuber "corpo" (think Hololive, where Gawr Gura worked at). They heavily advertised themselves in a way that made them "better than Hololive", such as talent freedom, generous payment splits, ...
• As the article stated, Vshojo gained $11M in series A funding... but no further VC funds. For the longest time, a lot of fans were confused about how they make money since their advertised rates for talents are extremely generous and "too good to be true". Turns out they were indeed too good to be true
• According to various sources, they employed somewhere around 25-30 ppl... company is private so no one knows their exact financials, but 30 * $100K/yr = $3M/yr, which alone would make the series A last no more than 4 years. And this is not factoring in their advertisement costs and stuff like custom rigged 3D models, performances, ... I think someone crunched the numbers that their annual revenue from the talents is probably $200-300K/yr. So they have been hemorrhaging money from the very beginning
• The company has a rather... unprofessional culture that has been exposed by all the talents. Stuff like their lawyer having an expired license, discouraging talents from discussing salary, slandering ex-talents who quit, having a C-suit being a sex predator, influencing opinions on 4chan's /vt/... yeah. Allegedly these issues have been around since the company's founding
• The company was in deep financial troubles a year ago (probably series A ran out) and have basically not paid any of their talents or artists/commissions since late 2024, as well as cut their Japan branch manager's salary by half (they probably did a lot more). This led to a lot of talents already consider quitting. Earlier in 2025 three talents either quit or were dismissed; also two C-suits quit
• Notably about the charity... the talent in question, Ironmouse, has severe CVID so she has been running donation events to the Immune Deficiency Foundation for a long time. Vshojo's CEO knows this, he even retweeted a lot of the past donation records. Last time Ironmouse received $515K which Vshojo was supposed to donate on her behalf... and the money never got delivered, likely got treated as regular revenue

There's way more but I think the community is now universally hating the CEO at the moment. Since the CEO also publicly announced embezzling charity funds... I'm wondering if he will be going to jail. Since most of the ppl involved have heavy YouTube/Twitter presence there are lots of primary evidence around if anyone is interested in more details

I know a good number of Japanese cultural stuff (including video game companies) do! Not sure specifically in cases like "hey let's give SEGA money so they can make the funny laundromat game more popular" though. Hence why it is my low-stakes conspiracy... Would be pretty cool if things like DDR really gets a subsidy though, it is genuinely a good means of cardio

Arcade rhythm games (DDR, Pump It Up, maimai, etc) are subsidized by the Japanese government to get Otakus/NEETs to go out, touch grass, and exercise

Have you ever wondered why you can have 10-15 minutes of game time for the same amount of money as one (sometimes half) a pull on a claw machine?? /puts on tinfoil hat

If I recall... I have gone on at least 7-10 days without any beyond-surface-level human interactions and fared just fine (if not better than normal), so yes

Is there a bright side?

To be fair I might have exaggerated a bit... I can navigate my way around pretty advanced statistics/machine learning stuff, it's just that I don't have enough fundamentals to call myself a programmer; I assume most of my classmates are similar. But on the positive end, there are a lot more advanced methods in biomedical research now. People used a lot of cutting-edge machine learning in biomedical research (case in point: IBM and DeepMind had biomedicine in mind when they are trying to diss chess champions with AI models). Also there are some very competent programmers/research groups who ended up building open source bioinformatics tools that everyone could use, even though it seems against the hyper-competitive trend of biomedical research. So even if individual labs couldn't do much, there are indeed better tools/pipelines available now

Are there jobs out there?

I... think a lot of research labs/pharmas are still pretty desperate for competent (or just any) bioinformaticians? Not in computational biology/methods development though, that field is too competitive even for me (and there are a surprisingly large amount of AI/ML/LLM slop)

~~Locked in my parents' basement~~Traveling in Thailand at the moment; Chiang Mai seems to only hit 90F/32C tops, which is... almost strange for a tropical area like this. A lot of places in China much more up North are way hotter than this at the moment

About those genomics stuff... most biomedical researchers still couldn't code worth shit. It is bad enough that there are even dedicated computational biology programs now (I was in one), and from personal experience I confirm that even comp bio graduates can barely code worth shit and are also somewhat bad with biology

Pay is still shit. So... yeah.

Second this, and I also agree that this comes with a lot of caveat...

Biology as a field has an issue with looking down on anyone without a PhD and sometimes people can get weird over it; there are also LLMs and machine learning bullshit (I've dealt with some personally); and frankly the most in-demand skill is bioinformatics, not traditional CS... but yeah it is not a bad field

Personally though... I might be giving bad advice here, but I find some bioinformatics tools rather poorly maintained. This is FastQC which is one of the more important tools in bioinformatics data processing, and... yeah its GitHub records look like that, most are way less maintained. I always wonder if some of these projects could use some help with maintenance

Chinese. I... don't think China accepts immigration, so I don't think it matters what most Chinese people think of Americans. Not that I think China would be an ideal expat destination for most Americans anyway... China also have most of the problems US have. Maybe for some highly accomplished scientists/business executives who can be offered a job (since China is spending a lot on R&D), but that's probably it

As someone who lived in the US for a long time and actively considered this?

• Northern European countries are nice for anyone who doesn't mind living like a vampire; there is basically no sunlight in winter, but they are probably the best in terms of providing what an "average person" wants and needs
• There are countries here and there which have low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life, assuming that I only want to be an "expat" who wants to live temporarily and am not trying to find work there (remote work, savings, or something else). My parents insist that Thailand fits this category; I believe several South American countries fit the bill as well
• Realistically, if I actually want to immigrate, it will probably end up being one of the random EU countries, whichever I can get in via ancestry or find a job in...

I don't hate income tax. But from my personal experience, when I was a young lad with no political leaning, seeing a quarter of my first paycheck just... disappear into the void (what I thought back then) definitely made me feel something not great

I mean right now I can see that an income tax system is at the very least a "necessary evil", but I could also see how ppl without a fuller perspective of things might interpret this as almost theft (the evil guvunment stole muh money!!!!)