296 karma · joined February 18, 2012
'New' and 'old' here are somewhat arbitrary/controversial ways of thinking of the fork. Proponents of Bitcoin cash might argue having no limit was closer to Satoshi's original intention - the block limit was originally added in as a temporary measure. Lots of politics going on around that.
I was saying something simpler: One Chinese-only character is enough to show it is not Japanese.
I think 絶 is the Japanese equivalent.
I'm saying that framing things in this way can be bad for the mental health of the person who says it.
The simplified version of there being eight permutations of being racially/nationally/culturally Japanese are lost on a lot of people. Here I was referring to the shorthand version where all those things are unquestionable ticked boxes.
In general aren't people only referred to as American in America when they have the nationality box ticked?
And in that context he could say "The British police are awful" vs "The police are awful"
To compare. And then, yes, when it becomes necessary then yes, prefix with the adjective. In some cases it does make sense and aid communication.
I'm saying the blanket prefixing with the adjective is the problematic part.
It's fine if you don't agree, it's just a communication pattern I have noticed that doesn't seem to benefit anyone.
It's probably not a great analogy but, I think that if you were in e.g. the USA and there was use of White American Judicial System, or White American Police Force or something along those lines it would really scream out at you.
I realise he is out of Japan now and the blog post is not necessarily targeting people in Japan, but a lot of foreigners in Japan will prefix Japanese things, people, institutions etc with the adjective Japanese, particularly when talking about negative experiences or encounters.
When really the adjective should be redundant in those environments.
And yes I agree that the Japanese penal system is terrible. But the problem is more the continual strong association and reinforcement with everything and everyone Japanese.
He could have explained why he chose to leave Japan and then stop the continual references. I'm positing that the continual references, throughout the article, to Japan and Japanese people etc are both overkill and could reflect inherent biases. I'm not saying they definitely do, but I think he'd have an easier time if he stopped associating the negative things in general with Japan and Japanese people and attributed them more to the specific situations, institutions and people.
Within context: "The police are awful" is better for your mental health than "The Japanese police are awful".
See bad thing - link to Japanese people as a whole or in general, rather than the individual.
It's an easy mistake to make. Especially if you do ever hear it in the inverse direction. "Foreigners do X or Y", etc.
If he aimed to replace generic instances of 'Japanese people' or 'in Japan' with specific reference to the instance or person, I think he'd have had a better time in life.
And yes, it's difficult to encounter any amount of racism and not feel that the group of people that the racist person came from, do not in fact as a whole demonstrate racist behaviours in general. Obviously not at a higher cognitive level, but at an emotional reacting to a certain way of having been dealt with or treat.
But it's absolutely necessary to stop the generalisation, even if only for one's personal mental health. It serves no purpose other than wiring our animal brains up more strongly, to think of us vs them.
And try and notice it more often in Western media too. Any time there is a mention of someone's race, see whether it would look out of place with Black or Latino or Asian replaced with white.
It's often a completely irrelevant piece of information.
As the use of the word Japanese is often irrelevant in this post.
Yep lot's of terrible people in lots of places in the world, and the fact that they were Japanese in this instance is more related to the fact that they were born and brought up in Japan than some inherent generic flaws with an entire country of people.
And yes Japan has problems that aren't in other parts of the world, and vice versa. It still doesn't befit using `X people do Y` type generalisations.
Or is this a similar class of problem to antibiotics becoming useless over time?
I.e. it's useful to do now so let's cross that bridge if we come to it?
Or is there something else I don't understand about this?
In Japan in winter (and summer) I wish that buildings had thicker walls and insulation. Damn earthquakes.
E.g. automatic domain concept detection and suggested refactorings around domain concepts.
Re-organizing file systems into virtual filesystems based on multiple views/perspectives on the project, etc.
Any ideas you have would be really good timing to hear about
Too many full-stack tests can easily lead to non-parallelized build times of an hour or so magnitude.
Apps that end up in this state are much harder to change even with parallelized builds. You may be waiting 20 minutes for feedback to know with confidence if a large refactor (or even small one) broke something.
Conversely, apps that start off with tons of unit tests and fully TDD may never make it to market. There's lots of perfect software making nobody any money, and tons of low-quality software making lots.
As with anything, it's a balance. Yes start off prototyping, if it's just you. Only do capybara specs. But be really sure that you have a good strategy for scaling up development and the test suite. You have to have people really in tune with the idea of not testing, because they know when to test/not test. And not just building a mentality of we don't do much (isolated) testing here.
Likelihood is they are not testing because they don't know how to, or don't see the benefits or are under too much pressure. It's a dangerous line to walk if you are trying to get away with minimum testing and trusting everyone else also understands when you need to and how you need to start having more test coverage.
Plus retro-fitting unit tests is normally a nightmare, because the devs never were forced to write uncoupled software.
I think my biggest takeaway from the USA was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.
They have dirty streets, but then keep their garbage tidy when throwing it away?!
On the one hand, they don't really have robots, on the other hand you can survive completely without cash by paying for absolutely anything by card.
Even ordinary little restaurants have free wifi, but nowhere did I see a pre-order machine. They hadn't even heard of them, and we've had those since at least the 70's.
It depends on the situation you are in as to whether that cost calculation works out in your favour.
It is not always that is has to always work in 100% of edge cases, all thought about up-front and with no possible bugs arising due to not 100% understanding every line of code in every library. Sometimes it makes more sense to fix a bug that happens every four years when it causes a problem. In this case the bug may manifest itself in a user potentially seeing a day off by one error on a subscription details page. In which case it may never make sense to fix that page. As the user may never look at that page, and even if they did, they may never care.
Have you asked somewhere else? Seems like you'd get a bias of things developers want here
Some things are just inappropriate to say, it's about sensitivity.
In general there's not really a time limit on at what point it is appropriate to start expecting Jewish people to forget about concentration camps. And in the same way I think that there should some reasonable level of education about the events here. Just so that people know about it and know when not to say hurtful things.
It's something that should be taught and remembered and learned from. And whilst it's also not appropriate to continually labour the point, I also don't think it's at all appropriate that the average Japanese person really knows little to nothing about what happened, to the extent of denying it in some cases. You don't really hear many justifications or downplaying of nazism from average German citizens, but you really do hear downplaying of it all here.
There are so many people in Japan absolutely incredulous that anyone in China or Korea should possibly still have any kind of problem with the war, whilst not being aware of the things that happened.
I cannot imagine hearing anyone from Germany say without ill intent that they still don't understand why the events of the war are such a big issue for people that actually experienced it.
I've yet to meet anyone that has studied in depth at school or remembers it. Most people if they remember or know about it at all, say they studied the "Nanking controversy" as a brief paragraph on one page.
In general people's responses are more of the downplaying or sweeping under the carpet type. I think this plays into worsening the relationship. No quiet contemplation, acceptance of what happened or pause for thought in general.
I've met the son of the rape of a Korean comfort woman forcibly brought to Japan, he grew up as Zainichi in Japan. He's lived a life as an outsider and has to hear people suggest that these things didn't happen. As if he shouldn't exist. So then instead he hears mention of financial reparations and lists of apologies. Which don't really count for much when it sounds like "I said sorry, why do you still care about this issue?"
I just wish people here were more compassionate.
This bit is probably the hardest part. I have spoken to many people here in Japan who downplay, or justify, or say it is so long ago, or say that Japan has forgiven America, so naturally Korea and China must forgive Japan. "We've apologised, what more do they want? They are all crazy." ad infinitum. Or simply people that deny anything happened or think that I must hate Japan to even mention things like this.
Then you have politicians stirring things up and denying it etc.
What I think anyone really wants is simple plain humble acceptance of what happened. It seems the apology carries so much weight in Japan that that should just be the end of it, and everything should be forgotten.
Except that seems to be a purely uniquely Japanese way of looking at the world, and doesn't really translate to other cultures. Germany and the US don't sweep under the carpet the Atom bomb or the concentration camps, and likewise Japanese people should be taught about Nanking, the POWs, Unit 731 etc.
Just so that the average Japanese citizen doesn't come across on the world stage as wilfully ignorant or incredibly crass and insensitive. Ideally it could lead to more than this and improved relations in the area, but at the very least it would be wonderful for Japanese people to not unintentionally be saying really hurtful things to still living victims of these events.
I really wish they would teach that stuff in incredible detail. _Then_ maybe not talk about it, or sweep it under the carpet or whatever.
This national pride combined with ignorance is such a toxic combination.
Edit:
Just to add to this. What I think is particularly tragic, is how specifically considerate and compassionate the average Japanese person is. It is terrible that on average, such compassionate, considerate people can end up seeming so wilfully ignorant or even hateful. When I don't believe this to be the case.
This code is definitely easier to parse visually for me. It's really satisfying. As a character set, it is much more information dense, it just requires a lot of upfront study making it less efficient in the short to medium term (~10 years or so).
However, I would hate to work on a codebase like this. It is a key press to switch between input methods (languages), or a key combination on different keyboards.
When combining this with vim I find it incredibly frustrating to type. You have to mentally keep track of which language you are in, as well as which vim mode you are in, 4 options instead of 2. Plus you have to be in English language mode for vim commands to work correctly.
Although it is true that you spend more time reading code than writing code, it would obviously exclude those that don't read Japanese.
It would be a nice-to-have to be able to have Japanese variables only for the reading phase of a project when you are getting up to speed. Then swapping them out for English words when editing. Can't see how it would work in practice and a really limited market too.
But yeah, it's satisfying to look at.