gwilkes

I disagree, the intended audience clearly isn't Japanese and splitting the word up gives it visual balance. And using the katakana here is really just for visual effect anyway, it almost doesn't matter what is written there, just that is is something in Japanese. The reverse of this is why we have the sometimes amusing "Engrish" on clothing in Japan. What the English says or is intended to say doesn't matter as much as the fact that it is English, just a stylistic choice.

I understand what you mean about the feel but lightning ports have a fundamental physical flaw that is part of its design. The pins are on the iOS device side so if they wear down or break that device needs to be repaired. With USBC, the pins are on the cable side so any damage to them is just a simple cable replacement.

One more alternative, buy used Pixels, I just bought a Pixel 2 yesterday for $325. Less than half what the Pixel 3 starts for. Sure, it is small risk but if you would prefer less risk you can get certified refurbished ones for just a bit more from Amazon or Best Buy. I live outside the US so I used ebay as they do international shipping. Lastly, you get 3 of OS and security updates (2 years from now of course since it is a year old), this is the first Google phone to get updates for this long, all previous devices were 2 years.

Contested yes, it seems they are downright detested. No one wants to talk about this. In the west because of how political anything related to IQ is, I doubt much will happen here. It's more likely China will take the lead in the area of research.

It's not clear but I think he's saying because you use gmail you are contributing one to these surveillance companies.

They never really went away. A web remake of LORD, Legend of the Green Dragon (LoGD), has at least 4000 monthly active users currently: https://github.com/lotgd/census

That census also contains some of the more popular servers you might play LoGD on. However, even LoGD is getting a bit old and development stopped a few years ago. There are two modern forks being worked on that I am aware of. The first gets rid of backward compatibility and is more ambitious: https://github.com/lotgd/core

The second is backwards compatible and allows all the many modules developed for LoGD to be used: https://github.com/stephenKise/Legend-of-the-Green-Dragon

Good news for anyone who is interested, it seems Microsoft is working on bringing the Bedrock (C++) version to Linux and Mac OS: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/769uli/confirmed...

I know what you mean but Bedrock just has much better performance. The ideal for me would be Bedrock on all the same platforms as Java (including Linux) with a supported way to make mods that didn't break on every version update

I realize that, actually EE is already on Mac OS, it was there even in the beta of EE. I would like to be able to use the Bedrock Edition on Mac OS but EE and being a school is the only way to do that.

That is good news, my only complaint now is that Education Edition has a Mac OS version which is the platform I prefer.

I stand corrected, i don't think that was the case sometime last year when I first checked out MakeCode, glad to see that has changed

Edit: I may also be misremembering, I primarily use Mac OS, and Education Edition has a Mac OS version. Plus Education Edition has some unique features that I would like to be able to use.

I really don't understand why Minecraft Education Edition (the only way to use MakeCode with Minecraft AFAIK) is only available to schools. I'm willing to pay for it but I'm not allowed to.

Not MakeCode's fault, this is great software. But clearly this is Microsoft's fault.

I have the mid 2012 model, it's okay. Definitely was never usable for me as a primary computer with 4GB of RAM. It was just something light that I can bring on the road. I find a Chromebook is better for this use case now. The keyboard is good, I will give the MBA that. But open Gmail in Chrome (with no other tabs or apps opened) and the MBA starts tapping out like that is some kind of big ask.

That's weird, I've heard that Tokyo cops do that but I've never been stopped once in eight years of living in Saitama (the prefecture just north of Tokyo). It's certainly not because I blend in, I'm cacausian and 188cm tall.

The fiscal year in Japan starts April 1st, no relation to April fool's day. I live in Japan and have seen ads for these kinds of services, this is very real.

The fiscal year in Japan starts April 1st. This is not fiction, there is several companies in Japan providing such services. Source: lived in Japan 8 years and currently living there, I've seen advertisements for these services several times.

Andrew, you're fine. I'm going to guess that you're American as America is the most happy-obsessed culture in the world in my experience.

Happiness as virtue is not universal, maybe you need some more time abroad. I know you said you visited 100 countries but visiting 100 countries and living in another country for many years is quite a different thing. Or maybe you just need different friends or perhaps a meditation practice, I don't know.

I'll leave you with this 2 minute video from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?": https://youtu.be/U88jj6PSD7w

There's quite a rabbit hole in this line of inquiry depending on how much you think about it.

Yes, games are all the things you mentioned and much more. It's a matter of perspective and the particular game. Some games are all those things and some are none of them.

One way that games can often differ from other forms of entertainment in that you can feel a sense of accomplishment from them. That makes the brain feel good. If you don't have much feelings of accomplishment in the rest of your life I suppose you could look at it as a kind of therapy or maybe just an escape or avoidance. Of course those brain rewards also have the potential to make it a bit addictive and self destructive in the worst cases. Yes and of course some games, like Clash of Clans, deliberately exploit this mechanism of games as much as possible in order to make more money.

This may all seem a bit obvious to some but it's just one more perspective on games that I have found helpful especially in the case of compulsive gaming. It can help to honestly ask yourself before playing a game, "why do I want to play this game?".

No, sorry it's not a fundamental skill in the least. It's a method for dividing on paper. In 37 years I've never used it outside of school as I have calculator in my pocket as does everyone else (smartphone obviously). Furthermore, "In the United States, long division has been especially targeted for de-emphasis, or even elimination from the school curriculum..." according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_division

I think this might have been more common than you would expect, particularly with devout Christian families. A good amount subscribed to newsletters that told them which media was Christian/family-friendly. Simpsons was definitely banned in our house along with MTV completely.

It was just for fun at first and also to air some real grievances about the school itself. It was supposed to be religious but it felt like the school was more about money, there were some other specific issues that felt like they were important at the time as well.

I really didn't mean to hurt my brother or family, still feel bad about it. I don't think the teachers took it too hard as I heard that some agreed with what was said and I don't think I said anything too hurtful about any of them, just honest really.

I'm certainly writing here in a somewhat detached manner as it does still bring up feelings and I could better explain with an entire blog post like the original story here. Maybe I'll do just that.

Oh, I had an anonymous email account listed on the website so people could leave feedback or submit additional teacher reviews. So, they didn't know who I was but they could contact me.

I fucked up by outing myself to the teacher impersonating a student, but with a legal threat I guess it could have turned out even worse if I didn't out myself.

Huge drama at the time, my parents were pretty religious so they actually took the values of the school seriously and were so upset that they told me they wouldn't let me go to college.

That was a pretty easy fight to win though as there is no way they could have stopped me.

Loved reading this, I have a very similar story. Same year, 1997, I made a Geocities site and had teacher report cards just like in this story. I put the site up on the library computers home page and then it spread around the school immediately, kids were talking about in the hallways, teachers mentioned in class that they would find who did did it.

I also critiqued the school itself, some of the hypocrisies I saw and notably since it was a Catholic school they had a school rule against pornography even when you were at home. So of course I put up a very soft core nude photo as a sort of fuck you.

However, unlike this story I actually was expelled, but it's not very difficult to get expelled from a Catholic school, it was a regular occurrence at our school. Knowing this I kept it very anonymous and didn't tell anyone.

I got an email from the school saying they would sue me for libel unless I came and turned myself in. That made me pretty nervous and pretty soon after that a student who I knew emailed me saying he loved the site and wanted to help. I then told him who I was and it turns out it was actually a teacher impersonating a student.

My brother and I were both expelled, my brother didn't do anything but contribute a few of the teacher reviews, so it sucked pretty bad for him. For me too of course but I was kicked out halfway through my senior year so I was mostly done with high school anyway. Plus I had already applied to colleges so it the expulsion didn't show up on any transcript the colleges received.

My brother wasn't so lucky since he was only a sophomore when this happened, when it came time to apply for college he got accepted to none of the colleges he applied for. He appealed hard and finally got into one.

You got patio11 to move to Tokyo? That's kind of amazing. Great podcast so far, still listening to it and congrats on the funding.

Ok, so you don't use so no one uses it.

Tech salaries suck almost everywhere in Tokyo.

Doesn't matter if their international subsidiaries don't have great traction because domestically they do pretty well, that's where the money is coming from.

Approximately a decade is close enough, it will be 9 years this October.

Seriously doubt this has changed, even now Japan sells millions of fax machines a year domestically, Japan loves paper.

I believe a lot of this is due to the US occupation of Japan after WWII which turned Japan in a democracy and gave it laws modeled after the American New Deal. More info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan#Outcomes_of...

I get the impression that most of patio11's high paying clients are not in Japan (please correct me if I'm wrong Patrick).

Yes, there is freelance work in Japan, but a look at any job board will show that tech salaries are not as high as US/UK jobs. In my experience that seems to affect freelance rates.

I do a mix of US and Japanese freelance work. Personal contacts are the big one for me. Without high level Japanese you may be limited to the foreign tech community.

That community is small but it still can take some time to build up a network. Took me about two years here until I started to get a good amount of Japanese freelance work.

You may both be aware of it already, but if not, the Hacker News Tokyo Meetup is as good a place as any to start: http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp

For me the biggest advantages of local work are working with people in person (I got tired of remote only work), and the untapped opportunities in web and software from the US/UK being ahead in those areas.

With the lawsuits, I think too much is made of this. I don't believe it really much affects their ability to make products one way or the other.

I don't know if it is still the case but a few years ago they were the most sued company in the world and prior to the iPhone they were getting hit with a ton of patent suits and trolls.

So, it seems that starting with the iPhone there was a shift in strategy when Apple realized they needed to patent everything possible as a defensive measure.

Perhaps it's lamentable that became a more offensive strategy, but it seems to be swinging back the other way under Tim Cook.

I also agree that it would be nice if they would step up their software game, but don't hold your breath. Apple makes decent OSes but their apps have never been known for their high quality.

There are some hopeful signs though. Although it gets plenty of hate, I think the the slow convergence of OS X and iOS is a good direction. Of course, with Ive now in charge of software design we can at least expect some more aesthetic polish in their software within the next year.

I think their biggest strength is providing a good platform (hardware and OS) for third party developers to shine. However, they seem to have a hard enough time just doing that (more on the OS side), so I wouldn't mind if they dumped more of their app development to focus even more of the quality of their OSes.