I find a lot of the media (here in Japan anyways) call literally every automation by computers or machines AI. Example, there’s an automated gate that only opens if a scanner finds your body temperature is not too high. AI Gate. The other day was something related to automatic checkout at shops or something where it all boiled down to some computer reading QR codes
Oh interesting, I didn't know. A lot must have changed in the last couple years. I was just there this month and didn't notice any credit card logos at the checkouts and just assumed they still weren't accepted.
Really? I use my credit card for maybe 70% of my spendings. It's true you absolutely need to have cash on you for the occasions when you can't use it but I can buy a 30 yen chocolate bar in every convenience store here. Compare that to Germany where I think no supermarket takes credit cards and even to use electronic cash you have to spend a minimum amount.
You may me right that there might have to be third parties for scalability. But depending on how this is done, you might not have to trust them in order to use them (in the worst case, they could refuse your transactions or delay them but not steal your money). So you might give up some privacy and rely a little on third parties for lower transaction fees or speed, but as long as everything is still using the blockchain you'd still have the choice to transact without a third party if you're willing to pay the premium for it (perhaps large or international remittances).
I wouldn't say near impossible but I think it's definitely much more inconvenient than in other countries. Just the other day I had to move some money between my bank accounts and did exactly that with the ATMs. Because online banking here is a atrocious and I didn't want to deal with any transfer fees.
I hate it when sites like this change the normal scrolling behaviour. I use the trackpad on my MBP and on sites like this scrolling accelerates too quickly and gestures like going back don't work in chrome.
I used MySQL until recently just because lots of people around me seemed to be using it. Over time I ran into too many issues with it (for example their default UTF-8 isn't actually UTF-8 but a subset that doesn't accept emoji for example), so I switched to Postgres and only then realised that suddenly everybody else around me seems to be using Postgres now. Definitely feels like there is a movement towards Postgres.