needle0

The replacement of “force touch on keyboard to move cursor” is “long-touch on space bar to move cursor”.

This works fine for western languages where the key to input a space is large and centered, but some keyboards like the Japanese flick input keyboard look more like phone numpads where the middle of the keyboard is taken by the “number keys” (each key represents a consonant). The space key is located on the right hand edge of the screen, and while the “long-press to move cursor” shortcut still works, it’s only useful for moving the cursor leftwards since your finger is already at the righthand edge of the screen when the shortcut triggers.

It’s quite an unfortunate casualty caught in the crossfire between i18n, feature discoverability, and hardware cost-cutting.

Elaborately worded error messages are also hostile against users who are not native speakers of the application's UI language.

They're already spending extra mental effort just using the software as-is; while native speakers may find a cutesy error message and just go "Huh", non-natives may not even understand that it's an error at all, wasting time.

There was a manga comic series called "20th Century Boys" which was a conspiracy thriller mixed with 1970s Japanese nostalgia. One of the story's scenes involved the protagonists rummaging through a library looking for a particular book. When they find the book and open it, a scrap of paper from decades ago falls out, which happens to be the vital clue to move the plot forward.

When you are reading the comic book, right as you come across the scene where the heroes open the book, when you turn to the next page the same scrap of paper seen in that scene falls out of the actual book you're holding. That sent chills down my spine when I first encountered it; pretty genius.

Meanwhile, Okinawa has consistently had some of the nation's lowest COVID vaccination rates and worst per-population infection numbers since the start of the pandemic.

CotEditor is great particularly for me because it's developed in Japan and thus handles all the relevant international text issues properly. Automatic encoding detection, mixed-script text, even vertical script!

It underestimated my age by 15 years. Not sure if this is due to the AI being biased or simply inaccurate in general. (I'm Asian, and from the experience of me and others, Asians tend to get their age greatly underestimated in the west.)

Losing a Sojourner medal streak in Ingress (due to being busy due to my own wedding!) made me quit playing the game regularly. Streaks can be effective in keeping the user returning, but once it's broken it can be a perfect moment for the user to churn. Hence, I can understand how the Duolingo devs made the streak less fragile than it would initially appear, but doing so (and having the cover blown) also makes returning to the app not as urgent...thus less effective in preventing churn. Huh.

Doubt we'll see any change soon. The consoles aren't being bought en masse by miners, but rather by scalpers.

Is the word "GPT-3" now being used like a a generic term, simply referring to a large-enough language model? From the article, Meta's OPT model seems to be intentionally designed to match the capabilities of OpenAI's original GPT-3, but doesn't say anywhere that it shares any code lineage.

The melody for Takadanobaba is the Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) theme, which is due to Astro Boy's in-universe background that states he was built in 2003 at the Ministry of Science, located in Takadanobaba.

The current office of Tezuka Productions is also located in Takadanobaba.

I liked how the Japanese translation of the page retains the two versions, but the language difference made the variants pretty much pointless, because there are hardly any "profane" words in Japanese that are offensive enough to warrant censoring by their utterance alone. (There do exist a group of offensive-enough words that relate to class/race discrimination, but no equivalent of a censor-worthy 'shit' nor 'fuck'.) The 2 Japanese translations are merely written as one mildly colloquial version vs another very-slightly-less-colloquial version.

Different cultures have different standards for ordering day, month, and year. Encountering one that you're not used to throws you off quite hard, especially regarding day & month since they're both often two digits.

Relying on input=date would probably abstract that away at the client side, but as people said, browser support for it still seems to be bad.

I've seen situations where the product code names become so publicly popular that the company uses yet another unrelated codename to refer to them in internal conversation and code (but even those internal names still leak out anyways). A bit silly if you ask me.

Early reviews said that even the base 8GB RAM models were snappy, despite the small amount of RAM. I went in believing that, but turns out it was anything but. Maybe it was my specific usage (Firefox with tons of tabs, Electron apps open all the time) but it feels much more sluggish than my previous 2013 iMac. Next one I get is definitely going to have 16GB minimum, maybe 24GB.

> It is not about who you are, what you are, what your background is, or where you live.

It IS, however, about what language you speak.

Them not mentioning it, despite mentioning it making their optics better, pretty much seem to point to the NDA not even letting them discuss the stuff you stated.

The overall feeling I get is that the community generally considers the author's will to be of highest priority, even if following it is detrimental to the long-term public cultural heritage.

Creators can and will occasionally use it as a weapon - when someone uses their art in a way they deem offensive, they may retaliate by pulling their art from the primary distribution site, and requesting anyone who has them to not re-upload them. The community will generally comply, and will berate the offensive-art-user (not the author) en masse for causing the loss to happen. The general distrust against danbooru et al I think stems from the lack of conformance to this "word of god overrules everything" mindset.

Not sure if it's related to the above, but Japanese copyright law protects moral rights (chosakusha jinkaku ken 著作者人格権) much stronger than the US does: they apply to all works, and cannot be transferred nor waived. The most you can do is sign a contract agreeing not to exercise them. There have been lawsuits in the past where selling a PlayStation memory card with a hacked save data of a game was ruled as a breach of the work's integrity. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%E3...

The Rakuten Hand 5G ( https://network.mobile.rakuten.co.jp/product/smartphone/raku... ) sounds like it fits the bill at 138 × 63 × 9.5mm vs iPhone 13 mini's 131.5 × 64.2 × 7.65mm, though it's only available in Japan from Rakuten Mobile.

So if Google services behave in a tone-deaf way regarding the culture and languages of non-western countries, now it's the fault of us the foreigners for not contributing enough to the AI?

Uh, I know. I am Japanese, I have tons of manga reading experience over decades. It's just that reading the same work both in the original Japanese and translated English made the difference in threshold more obvious.

Yahoo! Japan has the reputation of being used by the widest range of users in Japan, including a large demographic of people at the lowest end of the computer literacy spectrum. This is the group of (often elderly) people who may not even use any Google services at all but just kept using Yahoo! Japan ever since it became first available in 1996. It makes sense to stop forcing this crowd to self-manage their passwords (which, time after time they have proven, they can't) even at the expense of the techier demographic who are literate enough to take care of password managers and the like.

And hey, if you don't like SMS, you can just use FIDO instead and let Touch ID / Face ID / Windows Hello / etc do their thing.

I once read Dragon Ball translated into English, and noticed that the author frequently inserted short bursts of onomatopoeia into moments where there would be none if it was a work that originated in English (eg. when a person stepped down onto the ground after finishing levitating). It felt totally natural and unobtrusive while reading it in Japanese, but it suddenly stood out and felt jarring in English.

I guess Japanese has a much lower threshold for when an occurrence of something warrants an onomatopoeia. Western superhero comics would only insert written onomatopoeia upon the occurrence of a fairly loud and memorable sound (Creaak! Thud! Wham!); Manga, on the other hand, sprinkles them much more liberally, even with small insignificant sounds and (famously) ambient atmospheres that would make no audible sound.

They're indeed often said twice in a row, but not always.

That would be the adjective+verb form, as it would appear in regular prose. If written as an onomatopoeia it would be written じーっ (Jiii')

What a press release: the actual main message -- iPod touch is being discontinued -- has been weasel-worded out of the entire text, to the point that a non-native reader of English wouldn't even be able to decipher what it's trying to say.

I get that it's second nature for corporate marketing to try to dampen the message when they're taking something away, but this is on a whole new level.

> * 'Get Info' or CMD + I > * Select the icon in the top left of the dialogue box > * Copy it using the keyboard shortcut CMD + C

This sequence of steps to obtain the file's icon art has been consistent for a very long time, going far back as early as Macintosh System 7 (1991).

Sounds like a form of Parkinson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

"Ono-Sendai: in the book this is a Japanese corporation that manufactures cyberdecks. In Japanese “Ono” means ax and “Sendai” is the name of a prefecture in Japan."

Ono (斧) is indeed ax in Japanese, but is also a common surname. (The name is written differently, as 小野, no relation to axes.) Being a company name, it sounds more natural to interpret it as a surname rather than a weapon.

The proper notation would be "サラリーマン", with a bar between リ and マ which indicates an elongated sound. In fact, writing it as "サラリマン" actually evokes images of a "caricatured western-POV stereotype of a Japanese stereotype salaryman" due to westerners frequently making this mistake.

People in the west seem to have become oblivious to the fact that Konami still makes games (and yes, by that I mean traditional video games)-- just that most of their library has become invisible from the POV of the west. Games like Momotaro Dentetsu and Pawapuro are doing plenty well in Japan.