laurieg

In my mind video games are absolutely literature.

My personal favorite example is Sam Barlow's "Her Story". It's a video based detective games where you sift through archive clips of a woman's police interviews. The questions are all lost. You have only answers to piece together the story. Without giving too much away, the game allows you to figure out what happened and come to your own conclusions without excessive handholding or explanation. You become the detective in the truest sense. I urge anyone with an interest in mystery or detective stories to try it.

Her Story is also interesting because it doesn't require any particular technology. It could have been made in video form 20 years ago, or in text form even earlier. It is a work of pure creativity and shows how there are vast depths to explore in the world of video game story telling, away from the bright lights and big budgets of AAA titles.

There's a local weightlifting gym near me that has a website line this. Checking the source it looks like it was produced with done obscure site builder and it's hosted on the owner's ISP hosting.

The html is simple but functional. The color choice is a bit garish. But I love it. It loads quickly, it's always up to date and tells you exactly what you need to know. When is the gym open, where is the gym, how much does it cost. Done.

I feel we've lost this kind of experience on the modern web.

You'd be surprised just how much effort people put into using a message board to cause harm to others.

I was a mod on a reasonably large subreddit. One day, someone decides to post links to extreme and shocking images but make them look like regular posts. Delete, ban, move on. They come back with a new account. Delete, ban, move on, implement limits on new accounts. They would then spend months warming up new accounts, using them to write regular posts and messages, before doing the same thing. This was a thankless task and most regular users never realized it was even going on.

Then, on the other side, there were people who absolutely lost it when they felt you made a bad decision. I deleted a post asking for cash under the table work in a local sub, combined with multiple people offering what looked like clearly illegal work. Multiple regular members of the community went absolutely crazy, as if I had personally wronged them.

I enjoyed running the subreddit but I had to give up. The person who took over after definitely enjoys the power a little bit too much. That's what you get when it's a volunteer gig.

Japan.

Housing is affordable here. There's plenty of supply of single person apartments. Regular people can buy houses. Often the statistics hide this fact by comparing price per square foot, but the average apartment or house here is a lot smaller than in other places.

I always think back to this radio 4 interview [1] on the same topic when I think of Ross Anderson. Muttering "porky pies" at the end of the interview as it is claimed that this fraud has never actually been used.

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/mp3s/ukca.mp3

At least in Japan, not important. Japanese is written vertically in novels, comics, newspapers and some writing in school, but almost everything else is written horizontally. Textbooks, manuals, letters from the bank, websites. Restaurant menus often go vertical for a more Japanese feel or horizontal for a more western one.

That said, I think it's great to see this support added to webkit. A diverse web is good for everyone.

Cash is still king in Japan. I only know of 1 restaurant that is cashless in my town, and you're much more likely to find somewhere that is cash only.

Even though cash is king, there are some real oddities. The new 500 yen coin that is hard to use is in machines is one. The other being the 2000 yen note. The normal denominations are 1000, 5000, 10,000. 2000 yen notes are very rare. For some reason, they seem to hand them out almost exclusively to tourists as they enter the country. Imagine if you gave Scottish five pound notes to everyone coming into the UK in Dover?

This story has finally been getting the air it deserves.

If you want a summary and insight into the staggering scale of the injustice, this article from Private Eye magazine is worth reading:

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi...

This BBC radio programme, started in 2020, also gives a lot of good information including details of how suspected sub-postmasters were questioned by the Post Office.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j

Here are the judge's instructions to the jury for one of the trials:

"There is no direct evidence of her taking any money [...] She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched." (The only evidence was a shortfall of cash compared to what the Post Office’s Horizon computer system said should have been in the branch.) "Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?"

My word against yours wouldn't be enough to meet the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the Post Office's word backed up by a computer system? It seems that was convincing enough for the jury. They gave a guilty verdict in the above case.

You're doing SRS right!

Geeks like us love to get into SRS algorithms and chase after the 1% improvements with a cleverer repetition algorithm or a better input method. The real failure mode is much more mundane: People give up.

I see it all the time. People cram thousands of cards into Anki in their first month learning something. After a month or two they are so overwhelmed with reviews and the reviews become such a chore that they just give up. (Of course, there are people who manage to add thousands of cards every month for years and years. These are the people who would probably do nearly as well with just a pen and paper. )

Two pieces of advice that make all the difference: Make your cards a little bit 'too' easy and be rather selective with your cards.

When you first make a card you're probably actively studying the subject of the card. You're very familiar with it and it's all in your head right now. The temptation is to make a card that is fun and challenging for you right now. Resist! Instead, make a card that feels slightly too easy, so that in a week or two it will be enough to tickle your memory rather than confuse you.

Also, people dump entire books worth of sentences into Anki. I like to use the metaphor of walking through an orchard: take your time, look around and grab one or two of the nicest apples you find. If you try to grab everything you're only going to slow yourself down. Also, if you pick up a rotten apple (uninteresting/too difficult card) it pollutes your entire deck. You start to resist review your flashcards.

The flakey firebase local emulator is the bane of my existence, and poorly documented to boot.

On top of the Googlized clickops, there's the whole Firebase vs Google cloud situation, where you end up having to drop down to "real" google cloud for certain specific features. The docs appear to be detailed but you often end up with more questions than answers.

If you are ever thinking about using firebase, give Supabase a try. The emulator works well, the dashboard is there for prototyping but you can just write SQL to clearly define your database and migrations. Since it's just postgres you have a clear route to leave Supabase if you should ever want to.

I hammered away for a while and the program was always around 50%. I wanted to be surprised at how accurate the prediction was but I simply felt let down. Funny how that works

Maybe this is obvious but in the original data, did they exclude rugby players, wrestlers, people with other kind of ear injuries?

Cauliflower ear can totally change the shape and size of your ear.

When I was in primary school a local TV company film the series in my school. I remember watching it seeing the characters walk into one building and then walk out of a completely different building. This both amused and shocked me as a child. I suddenly realized that all the things I saw on TV were not necessarily as they seem.

It's much more socially acceptable for a woman to live with her parents though her twenties than a man. It won't negatively affect her dating prospects etc.

So much of life is centered around work for salarymen. Being out of that loop means you have limited disposable income, limited social opportunities, limited dating prospects. When you're all out of options, staying in and playing games seems pretty rational.

Almost all houses in Japan are bought along with the land. Occasionally there are leasehold properties. I have seen 50 year residential leaseholds owned by a temple, but they are rare.

> According to Nomura, a brokerage, the value of the average Japanese house depreciates to zero in 22 years. (It is calculated separately from the land, which is more likely to hold its value.) Most are knocked down and rebuilt.

This is talking about the assessed value of the house. It also implies that when a house reaches 22 years it is instantly knocked down and rebuilt, which is not true.

> The frequency of earthquakes also plays a part. Large tremors tend to be followed by tougher building regulations.

Even without the regulations, the level of destruction is hard to understand. Walking through a suburb of Kumamoto after the big earthquake in 2016 it seemed like every third house had partially collapsed. Landslides and flooding are also common.

Housing in Japan seems a world apart from housing in the UK. In Japan, I have lived in the same rented apartment with no rent increases for a decade. This is unimaginable in the UK. Strong tenants rights mean that once you are in a place you can more or less expected to be in there until you want to leave. The letter of the law on rent increases is that they must be justified by the surrounding market, but the cultural trend is to wait until a tenant has moved out.

Articles about cheap or free houses in the countryside of Japan pop up every now and again but the reality is most of these houses are worthless. Unoccupied, it only takes a few years for a leak to spring in the roof and the wooden house will rot away to nothing very quickly after that. They are located far from any kind of desirable jobs and services. Sometimes the owners, usually children who have moved to Tokyo for work, don't want to sell. I remember looking at one place, in a state of partial collapse, with the dates the family had come to visit written onto the wall by the front door. Yearly visits for over a decade but few repairs meant that the house probably wouldn't be around for much longer.

That is a fantastic book. It was very much written for magicians and gives away many of Derren Brown's famous routines so reader beware!

The aspects of showmanship and performance really stuck with me. I often remember snippets of the book even today.

One of my favourite stories is when Derren is having dinner with friends and their child says "Show me a magic trick!" So Derren asks the child to name a card. He then flips over, by pure coincidence, the card the child named. Of course, he was planning on doing a more elaborate routine but he was present enough to notice that he would not be able to top his accidental trick and put the cards away.

He talks a lot about taking risks in performance and being attentive to the energy in the room. Of course, you need some solid reliable tricks as well to back this up!

This reminds me of a contract I did. End users had complained that they were getting more spam after signing up for an account. I thought it must be a coincidence.

I jump into the firebase console and look at the security rules.

  allow read, write: if true;

Turns out that the whole customer database was wide open. After fixing it up, I tried to work out how things had ended up like this. The entire system had been written by an intern...

I'm not sure this taking pride in ignorance. It just seems like she has other things that occupy her time and thoughts.

Imagine if someone asked Linus Torvalds about the stitching pattern used on a shirt he wore in while giving a talk 10 years ago? If he said "I had no idea what you're talking about?" would that be taking pride in ignorance too?

I tried out the macOS version and really liked it. Some feedback:

* I couldn't get the "open url" button to work. * I'd really love a Japanese monolingual dictionary. Or the ability to bring your own in some way. * I turned furigana off but it was back on again when I opened another article. I had to turn it on and off to hide it again. Same with JLPT levels

Is there a way to say "I know every word in this article" so that high level people can get up and running faster?

Be acutely aware of your own knowledge level for all the concepts you're learning. There's a huge gap between knowing the name of something, being able to use something and being able to make something from scratch.

For example: When you start, you know what a compiler is: "It turns code into programs". Then you learn the actual nuts and bolts of using a compiler to do things. But you're still a long way from building one from scratch. Of course, building a toy compiler from scratch would be a very good project to work on as part of your studies.

This can apply to everything you're studying. As you learn more, you will learn the names of many many concepts, libraries, languages, techniques. Sometimes knowing the name and a 2 line summary will be enough, but don't confuse it with the other deeper knowledge. Make a conscious effort to pick up deeper knowledge in the areas that interest you.

Derren Brown goes even further sometimes. The cups and balls on his TV show feature emphasis on certain words: 'for' said a little louder and longer than other words to make someone pick number 4 etc. He never directly explains this as 'influence' but it is intended so a keen viewer will watch many times and come to the conclusion "Aha! Neuro linguistic programming! I've worked it out" and stop looking for the sleight of hand that actually does the trick.

I think it will be a long long time before we see an LLM generating a genuinely novel, interesting and fun to play mystery game.

Good mysteries involve providing just enough hints so that the player can make the fun leaps of logic and experience "Aha!" moments. People don't want to play the job of a real detective (collect endless witness statements, construct extremely detailed timelines) they want to be the hero in a detective story, making clever deductions.

LLMs might be able to generate characters and dialogue but they're going to struggle to come up with completely new ideas and mystery mechanics like Her Story

Teachers provide you with so much. Not only can they give you exactly the right knowledge at the right time, the good ones will keep your motivation topped up to get you through slumps and dips.

I started learning to sing 3 years ago. I've had two different teachers and I'm confident in saying I would have never learnt even a tenth of what I know without them. Teachers and coaches really come into their own when it comes to realtime skills. You just don't have the mental space to perform the learning task and assess your performance at the same time.

Sorry about what happened to you. I can't imagine how that feels.

I would first suggest learning to accept your limitations. This is the hardest thing in the world right now. All you want to do is fix things. You want to find that magic cure and set everything right. Of course, work with your doctors and do everything you reasonably can to improve your situation. But also realize that not accepting these new limitations is doubling up your anguish: once for the medical issue and then again for your reaction to it.

I suffer from working memory issues. It has affected my career, but I still do have a career. There are many useful assistive technologies. Smartphones, smart speakers and so it. It's easy to have reminders come up pretty much anywhere you are. Keep things in your visual field if you need to remember them (sticky notes on the monitor is a trope for a reason). Keep pen and paper (or tablet etc) and use it religiously. It will become second nature.

As for your career situation, you still have a lot of options. You say your chances at for getting into a top university are low. Of course it isn't easy to get into these great universities. And most people aren't dealing with missing 6 months of school!

I'll leave you with one thought:

> I had to drop an A level (further maths), which made my already infitesimal chance of Oxbridge zero

My rather small, rather ordinary school didn't offer further maths as an A-level. I applied and got an offer anyway. Maybe things aren't as dire as you think?

Absolute pitch is always held up as some kind of magical ideal but really this just gets in the way. I wish there was more information on training your relative pitch as a useful musical skill. After training I was able to do basic pitch related take like distinguish between major or minor and recognize the notes in a scale with fair accuracy. These skills are way more useful than plucking a Bb out of mid air

The advice that experiences are better than things is good, but most of my valued and cherished experiences were free or very cheap. I care more about the people around me than what we're actually doing. If you can spend some money to have more quality time with your friends and loved ones, do that.

When it comes to items, focus on things you use everyday. I bought a Brompton folding bicycle. It was a big purchase for me at the time but I use it every single day and get a lot of pleasure and enjoyment out of it. If you cook a lot, get a great chef's knife and so on.

Other hobby items are nice but even if you really love hiking you probably only manage to go once a week. But you wear shoes everyday, so spend money on the regular everyday shoes, not the hiking boots.

I did well in high school math. These days, when something involving algebra, trigonometry, geometry etc comes up I feel like I have a good understanding of it but my calculus seems weak to non-existent. I'm not sure if it's how I was taught, how I studied it or something else but calculus always seemed like a huge step change in difficulty.

That said, I love how this article gives practical hints on how to replicate the insight and solve the question, rather than just the insight itself.

When people start using spaced repetition and flashcard software they often end up throwing a big list of "Most common 1000 French words" into it and then promptly being swamped by reviews and giving up.

This is a bad idea for two reasons:

When it comes to spaced repetition, quality beats quantity. Only put in the perfect nuggets of knowledge. You're walking through an orchard and grabbing a single apple, not a whole trees worth.

Spaced repetition is to stop you forgetting, not for learning brand new things. When you study a topic and have an "aha" moment or you make a new connection, that's the thing you should put in. When you make the flashcard it should feel a little too easy. "I could never forget this, it seems so obvious now!". Doing this means your reviews are almost all easy and remind you of your learning experiences. The few things you forget are easily recalled and strengthened.

Joyful and fun review sessions are the most important thing. Maximising adherence (and therefore not giving up) is far more important than squeezing out a 1% more efficient SRS algorithm.