SenHeng

There's an anime called Snowball Earth being aired right now.

This article is not about that.

Small, mountainous, resource-poor island at the far end of the world meant few were interested in conquering it. That meant Japan had the luxury of maintaining their culture unhindered for a very long period of time.

The Japanese royal family is the longest continuous royal bloodline on record. Oral records say its 2600 years old while archives exist from the 6th century.

For the past hour, the PR or Issues pages would load with 0 items. Occasionally, there’s an error toast mentioning ‘failure to fetch data’.

Many banks don’t even provide bank books anymore.

The only physical thing I’ve got from my bank is an ATM card.

Property taxes on land zoned for residential use are 6x more expensive if left bare. That’s why Japan has an akiya plague, because even a dilapidated building will keep taxes down.

I couldn’t find a more general article so here’s an example from a generic small town council.

https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp/en/faq/kurashi/1001633/10016...

A problem with privatising the railways is that unprofitable routes, ie rural villages, are deprioritised or simply shut down.

My village gets 1 train every 1.5 hours, and none between 3pm and 7pm. For several years now, there has been discussion of shutting down the upper half of the route.

So every household has 2 or more cars.

The web client has a select all option, and when one or more emails is selected, two buttons pop up. Delete forever, mark as not spam.

I check my spam folder regularly and it has been this way for as far as I can remember.

I read it multiple times, read your comment and clicked on the article and I still got it wrong.

I saw Robot ear cats and couldn’t make sense of it. But clicking in the article and seeing the title in huge whatever sizes fonts made it click.

I think it’s the small font sizes in HN causing our brains to ‘fill in the blanks’.

Agree. My neighbour is too old to farm and his descendants aren't interested. He has offered to let me use his land for free but I just can’t get interested. Even just taking care of a few potted plants is too much for me.

Could also be Singapore or Taiwan.

Singapore has a similar requirement called an Exit Permit. It may have changed, I don’t really know or care anymore. But the conscription was a huge driver for me to emigrate as soon as I could. I left the country 2 weeks after finishing my military service.

My wife's wordpress blog has at least 5 different plug-ins for publishing an article without a header. Every time I fix it for her by removing all but 1 plug-in, she'll install a million others because that's what ChatGPT told her to do.

I have no hope nor expectations of non-technical people performing technical tasks no matter how advanced AI becomes. The only solution is a platform/CMS that already has the all bells and whistles included.

I switched from an 11 to a 15 because my friend got the 14 and it took amazingly stabilised videos while snowboarding.

Photos taken in the dark also became much better.

The default photos app can find words inside photos and translate without going on the internet. My wife’s 13 couldn’t even though we had the same OS.

I’m sure there’s more that I don’t even know about.

How about a Cybersecurity minister who has never used a computer before, in 2018?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026

I once had food poisoning after having sushi with colleagues. They very seriously wanted to have a debate about how we can prevent it from happening again. What? Am I suppose to never eat sushi ever again?

Avoid possibly volatile foods before an important presentation? Understandable.

Avoid sushi for as long as you're employed in this team? Fuck off.

I’ve always wondered about this, does it stop downloading the video when it stops playing?

My guess is no.

Like a god? No.

Or like some ancient alien species that travelled the stars but found it was alone, like in the ST:TNG episode[0]? No too.

Even if these ancient aliens thought it would be fun to spread their sperm all over asteroids and fling them out into the universe, there wouldn't be enough time for those rocks to get anywhere.

The more logical conclusion is that abiogenesis happens everywhere in the universe under the right conditions.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...

If we get into an actual shooting war with China, I don't think there's enough hydrogen generating facilities to make much of a difference. If maybe 20% of vehicles on the road were using hydrogen, maybe?

Considering how much money and effort both Toyota and Honda have poured into trying to kick start a hydrogen economy over the past decade and a half, and how much EV technology was evolved over the same time span, would it not make more sense to switch to the technology that actually is proven and actually has consumer demand for?

It's not like they're switching all that military hardware to hydrogen too.

Japan can't solve all of its energy woes, but it can ease it a lot by restarting all the nuclear reactors they shut down after Fukushima, and to be fair, they've been trying [0], but stuff breaks after not having been used in over a decade.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6v0v32rg1o

It really shows the bias in Honda’s management here. They’ve also spent years trying to develop and promote their hydrogen fuel cell cars and it’s just as much of a failure as their EV division yet they aren’t axing that golden child.

I built an internal dashboard once that displayed thumbnails of building plans. Actually no, I built the dashboard, then the new guy added the thumbnails, but anyway. We didn't actually have a thumbnail generator because the sprint for that was skipped. Most of our users had only a couple of projects so even if each image was several mbs large, it wasn't that huge of an issue for them. The internal dashboard though, loaded a thousand projects per page.

I chewed through 7Gb of data in about 30 minutes while working tethered to my phone.

That's so weird. Employers have always paid for employees' commuting expenses here in Japan [0]. It's not even mandated by law and there's a legal limit of 150k yen / month, roughly $1000 though most companies limit it to 25k (~$200). Still it's enough that commuting by bullet train is a thing [1].

Even part timers get reimbursed.

[0]: https://japan-dev.com/blog/employee-benefits-in-japan

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/y1nurn/places_outsid...

You could buy a pardon from Trump and still have almost a trillion leftover.

My friend wrote her bachelor’s thesis on her iPhone. There’s an entire generation of ‘digital natives’ that are computer illiterate.

It was since at least the iPhone 4. I still have the old digital AV connector from before they switched to lightning. It came with a hdmi port and a usb port. You could plug an SD card reader into the usb port and use it as an external HDD for transferring files.

I don’t know. I still fire up FF14 every couple of weeks for a few dungeon runs. No more social interactions with the various channels, I barely talk to my party even.

I think it’s just familiarity and not wanting to learn a whole new system when I’m looking to shut my brain down for a couple hours.

If we’re trading war stories, one of my first software jobs was developing an electronic medical records system. We didn’t use VCS. At the end of the day/task, you send the director the file you’ve changed with a txt file of which lines were changed.

The director made sure things compiled, then we would drive down to the hospitals and copy the dlls into each PC one by one. And because hospitals can’t shut down their computers willy nilly, we could only deploy on weekends or public holidays. Not weekday nights because the directors have to be home for the kids.

That was in 2014. They’ve worked that way since the late 90s and ‘no point changing what works’.

I always forgot where I parked my boats. Or that I even had one.

Was it actually that hard?

I played on the JP/KR asian servers in a PK/APK/PVP guild so maybe it was just my bubble but it was pretty common to see players with 7 skills maxed out. If I remember correctly

- sparring

- swordsman or fencing

- magic

- magic resistance

I don't remember the rest. It's not quick or easy like modern games, but we would regularly power level each other's alts and it took maybe 2 weeks to max out all 7 skills? We had a bear trapped in the guild house so we could power level wrestling and other combat skills.

I've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.

I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.

It's been possible since the iPad 2.

I used to code HTML/CSS that way back in... 2011?