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In the same spirit, we should once a year spend a day with ourselves blindfolded, or use a wheelchair to understand what is like to be a disabled person.

"I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they’re just people." - Richard Feynmann

This article reminds me of my father. After my mother died, he's living alone in my home town. He spend most of his days without talking to anyone, but I know he's keeping a diary. And I'm sure he has a lot of story to tell, but the problem is how. As a shy Japanese man who's born in 1940s' he isn't a very talkative type, especially to his son. I think I should go back seeing him occassionaly, but I might still miss the opportunity of listening. I'm just writing here to remind myself. I should do something about it. Probably.

This. I'm always amazed by a skilled taxi driver maneuvering their car at a busy street in Tokyo with bustling pedestrians and bikes, some of them are old and slow and others ignoring traffic lights, just passing them by centimeters. It's like as if the car is a part of their body and they're threading though a crowd. They have to anticipate everyone else's move. The cars really look like people here and others treat them as ones.

Aside from jQuery, I'm just amazed at how good the gov.uk is. They're comprehensive and accessible. Isn't this the pinnacle of government websites? I only wish that our government site (Japan) is half as good.

Hate to be negative, but this new site design of IEEE Spectrum is just abhorrent. It's ad-ridden and there's an infinite scrolling thing. I use reader mode, but I miss the old design. Sigh

Not to confuse with SDL_mixer (which is to output sound to audio devices). This is a module for decoding sound files in various formats.

Looks like that the project has changed its name from "rmc" (Rust Model Checker) to this. Various sources point to rmc as https://github.com/model-checking/rmc (redirected to https://github.com/model-checking/kani) and https://model-checking.github.io/rmc/ (404). Anyone knows why?

I'm curious of the eventual consequence of emoji development. Early Chinese characters were pretty much like pictograms. They have developed into a highly sophisticated abstract language / writing system, but its emoji-like aspects still remain today. The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable. It's interesting that the world is basically reinventing the same thing a few millenniums later.

I feel that the study is dated. Nowadays (at least on iOS) VoiceOver is pretty good: they can read almost all parts of the contents, maps, and even texts on pictures. Not sure how much of it is designed with illiterate people in mind, but wouldn't be surprised if they are. Mobile phones are truly becoming a device of empowerment now.

A university teacher. I work from the office for now but without student. I understand the appeal of online classes but man do I miss in-person teaching. In an online class, there's virtually no reaction from students (as most students here prefer to turn the camera off) and I feel like I'm a YouTuber who's constantly talking to an empty camera.

Sadly this kind of small sexualization is very common in most manga media. I grew up in Japan and thought this is normal, only finding out later in a Western country this is appalling. Once you have a more global perspective, I see this is certainly a concern, as Japan's gender gap in the STEM area is worse than any developed country (can't quote the number for now, but take a look at the World Gender Gap Index). The problem is compounded when some people (like ones in this very thread) brush this off as "oh this is just a drawing why so serious haha" when modern-day sexism is just a collection of many, many small things.

The discussions around web3 reminds me of the days when people were looking for a "killer app" for Web 2.0. Was there any? I don't remember much, but I don't think there was a single thing that stood out as "the" Web 2.0 app. I expect web3 to be more or less the same. A lot of buzz, not much material.

FWIW, the rest of the world where Christianity isn't a major religion, Christmas isn't special either. In Japan, people perceive this as a fancy Western festive event, just like Valentine's Day but there's no holiday. Our real seasonal holiday is a New Year Day and it's common that people work at late night in Christmas to prepare for it.

I wonder who would be actually interested in the decentralization part if there was no Bitcoin/NFT bubble? My guess is "not many".

I mean, those people exist, but it's probably the same number of people who are into Mastodon, etc. They are not the mainstream. The majority of people seem happy with the current model.

So, while the concept of Web3 looks interesting, after this initial frenzy dies down, I bet there will be a long winter coming to Web3 town.

In Japan, there were a couple of ski lifts that make almost 90-degree turn, called "bending lift (屈曲リフト)". Near the turning point they put up a warning sign like "please hold tight or you might be thrown off". As a kid I always enjoyed the experience though. Sadly all of them have been torn down by about a decade ago, due to its high maintenance cost.

cf. http://cable.cocolog-nifty.com/sakudo/2006/02/post_d5e1.html

Maybe they are good books, but I found that most of these summaries are bland and generic, as in these phrases:

"The book is strictly about career development and it has a lot of insights ..."

"The book is filled with classic and fresh anecdotes, thoughtful examples, ..."

"This book is amazing to understand the corporate structure and how you should behave ..."

These generic praises aren't good enough to overcome my threshold of interest, so to speak. A better way, if I'd suggest, is to pick a choice quote from the books. Quotes can be hit and miss, but when they click, it can pique the reader's interest in a much more acute way.

Just FYI: this page doesn't load when you set Firefox's privacy protection to "strict".

Every time I read about decentralization, I remember this episode from NPR Planet Money (one of the best podcasts, btw). It's about Libertarian Summer Camp where they tried to spend a day without fiat money. Gold standard everything. Turned out it's actually pretty hard because you have to get gold, and make sure the gold isn't fake, all by yourself. You bought a hotdog with the gold and now you have to worry about if it contains anything FDA-banned substances, etc etc.

cf. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/28/534735727/epis...

Being decentralized means that all the efforts that a central government is currently taking will be distributed to everyone, and now everyone has to worry about things that were taken granted before: basic safety, security and trust. This is why there aren't many decentralized systems that caught on because their usability is pretty bad for most people.

Math is the closest thing to magic that actually exists (and we can work on).

I just found that this applies to Python too.

    >>> 'Straße'.upper()
    'STRASSE'

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." - Theodore Roosevelt

After reading your post, this quote just came to mind.

I used to use cdb a lot for random access of small key/value pairs (~100k entries, 10kb per entry). It's effectively a hashtable on disk.

https://cr.yp.to/cdb.html

Ehh, as a person who lived in Tokyo and NYC for a while, I can say that the difference isn't as big. It's true that Tokyo is way cleaner and the trains are much better, but Tokyo streets are harder to navigate (as it's not grid based) compared to NYC or Kyoto/Osaka, and the article misses one big potential factor about its livablity: Tokyo's earthquake readiness is pretty sketchy and it hasn't been tested for about 100 years (the 2011 earthquake affected a different part of Japan; it was a blip to Tokyo). The city requires huge influx of daily goods from all over Japan, and we are all not sure what's really going to happen if it's disrupted. It is a convenient city to live for now, but I'd say it's kinda short-sighted view.

I hope that the app makes it clear which country/culture it applies to. (I assume it's for a European-origin family in the US?)

We recently had a kid, and in case of our native culture (Japan), people want to pick a name that not only sounds good, but also carries "good fortune" in its characters... based on ancient literature or something (it's kind of feng shui, I guess). The shape of the letters also kind of matters. Note that Chinese characters not only carry sounds but also represent a meaning (ideogram) that adds to the complexity. Also in Japanese many characters tend to have multiple readings. So there are tons of websites where you can search kids name with various conditions (sound, meaning, shape, strokes, popularity, etc), and they look pretty popular.

My point is that, the requirements and restrictions of names differ vastly between cultures, and the app can be clear about it.

I just found out that you can search "covfefe" on this. It's not even on most dictionaries!

I was about to write that "one downside of this is that you can only search a word that can be speech recognized"... then I've seen this which kinda blew my mind.

Keyence is well known among tech students in Japan for their high wages (compare to the average) and its cutthroat environment. I hear that they tend to let young engineers do a rather advanced task.

This is the reason why Adobe PDF isn't relying on Unicode. Adobe products has a huge presence in Japan since 90s and they had to appeal to the printing industry, which is very anal to this kind of issues. So they ended up using a separate encoding for every language. Today, CJK letters in PDF are encoded in Adobe-GB1 (mainland China), Adobe-CNS1 (Hong Kong), Adobe-Japan1 and Adobe-Korea1 respectively. Not the cleanest way, but it gets the job done.

Here's a half serious answer: do not design it as a static object that can withstand the erosion. Design it as a dynamic process that can change itself and adapt to the environment.

Establish some kind of religion or cult or fraternity. Give them your personal webpage as a sacred document that can be passed down with some secret ritual. Develop a community of the admirers.

One example: a shrine in Japan kept the records of ice ridge forming in a certain lake (which they considered sacred). The tradition started around 15c and still continues today. It's one of the oldest climate record at a specific location.

I actually think that defining the metrics is half of the game for productivity. Once you define the metrics, it's relatively easy to game it.

That said, I think software development is a relatively well defined task. There's typically some clear need from clients, and there's some restriction. Your problem space is somewhat confined.

Now, corollary is this: the more restriction you have, the easier you can be productive (or invent a way to be productive). Specialists can be generally more productive than generalists because they can have a more precise definition of "being productive".