petterroea

> I have heard that Japan has a very negative connotation of foreigners (even more so than current form of America) so I am interested to hear your thoughts on that.

This is not true at all. It's rumors people spread on Twitter based on news articles about overtourism causing issues. I suspect it is somewhat caused by westerners trying to understand through their own worldview - foreigner hate is a hot topic in basically the entire west at the moment, so it is easy for us to make the connection that "Overtourism is bad so they hate us". Yes, some are exhausted. I lived in Kyoto for a while and some of them are fed up. Tokyo as well - golden gai (a bar area) has definitely changed. People turn their brain off when they are on holiday and don't behave, and this is just human nature. We have towns with overtourism issues in Norway as well, I have seen Norwegians crack and have meltdowns over it before.

Frankly most Japanese are just happy you care about their country. If you speak a bit, they love to show you stuff. They are proud of their country, but also happy to be recognized for it. Most are super kind, and I've had so many good experiences. The only time I had a bad experience, we were rejected from a completely empty restaurant. They thought we were American (we were in Nagasaki), and the second they heard European they called us back.

> I am able to see some similarities with Japan within my own country as well, namely the idea of everything being close. I can't speak about food but being vegetarian, and my country primarily being so too. I actually love our own cultural cuisine. (Anecdotally I watched I think JaidenAnimations where she had issues in japan about some vegan aspects but yeah)

Vegan food in _Tokyo_ is easier nowadays but still hard. You need to know your way around.

> [good, bad sides, work culture]

Yeah. I think it makes best sense to try living there if you have an interest in the culture you'd like to explore. The horror stories are real.

> [Sweden, Norway]

Great countries, but not much buying power. Everyone is expected to buy apartments as they are the best investment objects, and pay mortgages. But apartments are so expensive, you don't really have much left at the end of the month. I certainly feel wealthier than my friends, even though they earn much more than me, but I also don't have a mortgage (yet).

> A good job (work-culture) in Japan (South Asia in general?) >= Normalcy in Norway > Toxic job in Japan

Sounds about right. It depends on what you like. As I wrote, if you are family oriented Norway is probably good. A good wage in Norway will definitely give you a great life. But you end up spending all that money on simply getting to places with interesting things (UK, Europe), or importing the stuff to you.

The lifestyle I am describing definitely works best in Tokyo, but I have lived in Kyoto as well and while accessibility wasn't as good, I still had Osaka ~40 mins away for any Tokyo-scale market needs. Osaka has its own Akihabara I could buy electrics at, if I so didn't want to order online. Compared to Kyoto, I do notice that I feel a lot more integrated in Tokyo - people don't necessarily assume I am a tourist. They are definitely fed up in Kyoto and I found myself having to explain that I was not a tourist a lot.

> In all rich (non-micro-state) countries, outside of big cities, they are all driving nations

I think this is a key takeaway. Urban life is a city thing no matter where you live. Of course, if you lived in Tokyo, you could live an hour away from things and still live in a city with good public transport (Saitama, yokohama, chiba, etc). But then you could probably afford a house with a car as well. Seems like a nice life.

Yeah, I was considering noting that my description did sound a lot like "guy from the sticks discovers urban life" - many Norwegians already travel to London when they want to have fun. I'm sure other cities have some of these other qualities.

For me as a non-American, America isn't currently an option as a place to live due to safety and unstable political climate, but I have American friends who I use to compare Japan life to life in an urban part of the states. I have never lived in New York nor stepped outside JFK (skyline looked cool though!), so I wouldn't know, but seems like there is some good accessibility of cool places, at least in big financial centers.

I have a friend who _loves_ the US and has been trying to get a job there ever since he graduated, but he has been unsuccessful. He has been screwed over by COVID and the layoffs that followed, basically nobody was interested in sponsoring visas. In many ways we were in a similar situation, trying to escape our home country for something more interesting. I hope he succeeds.

Haha yeah rakuten gets thrown around a lot. It's a pretty infamous stepping stone for getting in at this point. It's definitely easier to be happy at a foreign company.

I think I'm relatively lucky. Some luck is required to get established in the IT industry I think, especially the smaller, foreign friendly one. I think the hardest problem facing people who want to move here is getting a foot inside the door. To me it seems most people who have lived here long enough have been able to establish a life they like.

Working conditions have changed, but slowly. It seems most of the change is in new companies, while the old still lag behind. But I've heard good things about certain game companies.

I'm strongest at spoken Japanese, more than good enough now to talk to people at the office and out in town, and good enough to do life admin in Japanese. Business Japanese is still a struggle, mostly because it is rarely necessary for me, but it's slowly getting there. I'm lucky enough that even though I'm working for a Japanese company my colleagues mostly speak English.

You are correct in that getting by without Japanese only works in big city bubbles. Even then, knowing some Japanese really unlocks a lot for you. Many get stuck in foreigner bubbles, even if they speak the language somewhat

- Nice things are within walkable distance living in a major city. In Norway we live mostly in suburbs. Living in the city is unaffordable. Zoning matters. Being able to just walk out of my apartment and do things spontaneously in my own area is a life changer. I can't describe how much the change in mindset from "I'll do a half day trip into town" to "I'll pop two train stops over" did for me

- private individuals can still afford to run their own stores and cafes. In Oslo it's all commercial "food concepts" and chains. Authentic is unwanted - a Japanese restaurant trying to be authentic was recently kicked out of their place recently for not cutting corners to make a good enough profit - the property owner took a % of every sale + alcohol sales and wasn't happy, so they fabricated reasons to cancel the contract. Eating out in Japan is affordable even on a Japanese salary and I have access to basically any cuisine you can imagine - and the foreign food is often made by immigrants from that country (with some exceptions). In Norway the biggest thing in tacos is currently a Swedish chain. In Japan I can befriend my local restaurant owners.

- niche interests are hard in Norway. Everyone in your circle shows up for the once a year interesting artist that isn't already a huge pop artist on a LiveNation tour. Tariffs are high (yes, watching the whole "who pays tariffs" debate has been mind numbing), effectively 25-50% including fees, so you feel punished for being interested in anything not local. Which is everything.

- public transport in Japan is generally great. public transport in Norway is horrible. The goal is to be rich enough to avoid it and just drive, even if parking in the city is easily 50$ for a few hours if you are unlucky. Delays all the time, but no fixes, just finger pointing. They stopped publishing statistics on how often trains were late, and didn't classify cancelled trains as delayed when they did publish stats. It's all just lies and deception to try to stop the public from being mad.

- I have access to basically all the culture I want, both Japanese and western. Everyone wants to stop by Japan. Not Norway. local culture in Norway is better than before but still pretty dead. Everyone just consumes American culture. There are cool Norwegian bands and a few good movies but that's about it. When I say this I am often asked "isn't Norway a heavy metal country" and yes sure, but it is still a small niche. I don't know anyone my age who partakes.

- the Norwegian hobby is football, walks in nature, or alcohol. I read somewhere that Norwegians drink as much Brits, but in a single weekend instead of averaged over a week. It makes sense to me. All my non tech friends' hobbies were basically going out and getting hammered. There are of course other hobbies and this is slight hyperbole to make a point, but in general everyone just gets drunk. 200 years ago there probably wasn't much better to do during winter, go figure. Alcohol is also a very big hobby in Japan, probably bigger than Norway. But there's more things outside alcohol as well.

- loads of crime in Oslo, recently a lot of youth violence, including random robberies with stabbing. Much less of that in Japan. In Japan I will frequently find myself walking streets at night with women I do but know when I'm heading home. In Norway female friends would often call me in those situations just so they could communicate to the stranger that someone would know if they tried to do something. Never seen that here.

- less individualism is good, to a certain degree. People consider others around them, and it makes things easier. In Norway, watching videos on speaker has almost become normalized on the train post-covid, especially among kids who had their formative years in quarantine.

- there is less enshittification, app-ism, and x-as-a-service in my everyday life. It doesn't feel like people are trying to cut corners to squeeze a larger profit from me. Japan is a very capitalistic country, but it doesn't feel as doomed as the west. Yet.

Most of these problems "fixed" by Japan are related to economy of scale. Some are policy related, and some is culture. In Japan I have any hobby I want at my fingertips because there are enough people to support anything. Ordering online doesn't cost a fortune in fees. Public transport is good for many reasons, and still affordable because there are many paying for it. Even when I was a student here I could afford to live in a relatively dingy but completely ok apartment where I could be most places I wanted to go within 30 min.

I feel fulfilled and that i have no excuse not to check out anything I'm curious about. Norwegians are told they live in the best country and are the best their entire life, and I suspect this is why if you complain many Norwegians ignore it assuming it can't get better than this. If anything my takeaway is that going abroad and seeing other cultures really made me see that the worldview I grew up with was incomplete and prone to make me satisfied with what I had.

Don't get me wrong, Norway is a great place to start a family or grow old. It's a good place to live a life that's centered around a family. The nature is beautiful, and frankly I like the snow and freezing weather - it's cozy! But Japan offers almost all of the same, only with all the benefits of scale :D.

Finally. Biases:

- IT job makes my life comfortable by Japanese standards, but not by much. I don't work at an international company. Japanese people also seem to generally live very fulfilling lives, although the rumours regarding black companies and similar are definitely true.

- I have a nice and mature work environment that doesn't make me hate waking up

- I have only lived in cities orders of magnitude bigger than Norways Capitol while in Japan

- I have put a lot of (mostly passive) effort into learning about the country I moved to, and I know people who didn't who have had nasty surprises. You also should do your best at adjusting to how things work here and embrace it. I have had 0 surprises since I moved here. It doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. I make tonnes.

- I was also somewhat into the culture, so it's not like I was transplanted into a completely foreign culture. I had things I wanted to see here. You can tell Japan has done a good job soft power-wise.

- my Japanese reading isn't as good as it should be and so I don't have a habit of following local news, which makes me blind to a lot of smaller issues that are a more more visible to me in Norway

The biggest thing I personally miss is Norwegian friends, and the European hacker culture. There are tinkerers and hackers here but it's not really the same.

I moved to Japan and have taken what is now almost a 50% wage decrease on account of the collapsing yen, but my life quality easily doubled compared to Norway. For every year I stay, finances will be more painful if I move back. But permanent residency sure sounds a lot more attractive. YMMV if you're from more interesting places

I think most feedback I've seen regarding automation of customer service labour has been along the lines of "no! Get it away from me! I want to speak to the human!". With approximately that level of frustration.

I thought it was well established that interacting with an actual human was generally preferred to whatever we have to use now.

The automation exists to save money on labour, not to make our lives more convenient

This. I've had so many projects where I wish someone who really cared about UX could just tell me "this sucks, if you want I can help"

As someone who has a strong background from hobby projects with five-digit users before going into work, I think one of the most interesting differences I experienced was that the problems you see at scale simply don't exist on small scale projects. Bit flips/bad memory is one of them.

What do you use it for?

Not happy with the lack of statistical testing, some of the smaller differences in % could probably be coincidence

8GB of unified memory, the fine print says. Hardly enough to multitask with today's bloated software. Maybe products like this, and the ram price hike, may finally push developers to care more about their memory budget.

My understanding is that AnonC is upset at Ars not taking the mature approach by allowing this to become a learning moment for the employee and using it to double down and confirm their stance on AI generated content. There's strength in maturity. But I am doing some reading between the lines, and I'm possibly reading a bit too much into "There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues"

Reminds me of a story I was told as an intern deploying infra changes to prod for the first time. Some guy had accidentally caused hours of downtime, and was expecting to be fired, only for his boss to say "Those hours of downtime is the price we pay to train our staff (you) to be careful. If we fire you, we throw the investment out the window"

It seemed to me like very hasty self defense, there's a lot of AI slop hate and Ars can't risk becoming known as slop when their readers are probably prone to be aware of the issue.

I don't think Ars thought they had a choice but to cut off the journalist who made the mistake, especially when it was regarding a very touchy subject. I don't think they had a choice, it's impossible for us readers to know if this was a single lapse of judgement or a bad habit. Regardless, the communication should have been better.

Nice. Got pretty depressed with the state of the world after the articles about police in Spain profiling Google Pixel users with Graphene as drug dealers [0]. Some proper "mainstream" recognition could do a lot here.

[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

I'd really like to understand why this happened. Is smuggling drugs in floppy disks common practice? Did someone consider it immoral goods and destroy it on purpose for that reason? Or did someone just have a bad day?

In some countries a lot of eroge is illegal to import, but surely this isn't how such a law would be enforced

That was fast

I have many friends and loved ones with ADHD. It's very common in the IT industry, and probably >50% of people in the hacker spaces I frequent are neurodivergent in some way.

What I wrote is my empirical experience, but also what friends and loved ones tell me. I have friends with ADHD who have gone through the exact "wow I'm getting a lot done" -> "wow this is actually wasting a lot of time in hindsight" thing I described. If you think others lived experience is degrading to you it may be hitting a sore spot. What if I had ADHD? My friends with ADHD have the same opinion. Would you then say you were degraded by another person with ADHD that were offering their lived experience?

Maybe we live in very different countries but help has been good for everyone I know who got it. More want it the problem is money. You basically have to be suicidal to get public help, and private costs a fortune. It is a psychologists whole job to use their knowledge to help you self reflect and then act on it. It is uncomfortable, and I can understand why you may experience it as degrading. I don't know about the kind of help you've tried, though.

I hope you get the help you want.

My empirical experience is that people with ADHD are more vulnerable to get addicted to LLMs due to the feeling of instant gratification. But when PRs take ages and 3 different people are reviewing, you are just making prompting a group effort. If you think meetings are a time waste multiplier you should watch LLM PRs.

For that reason, and my own experience with AI users being unaware of how bad of a job the LLM is doing (I've had to confront multiple people about their code quality suddenly dropping), if someone says they can rely on LLM I've learned to not trust them.

When I was younger if I had an idea for a project I would spend time thinking of a cool project name, creating a git repo, and designing an UI for my surely badass project. All easy stuff that gave me the feeling of progress. Then I would immediately lose interest when I realized the actual project idea was harder than that, and quit. This is the vibe I get from LLM use.

I pray you do not become the next HN user to be screwed over by over-trusting LLM when you have it fill out legal documents for you.

Side note: My empirical experience is that vanity domains are disliked by some enterprise security systems. I have a friend who owns a .homes domain which ended up being blocked by quad9 as well as the enterprise security system of a friend's work for ~half a year. The block cleared by itself.

I had the same experience while buying another TLD. For ~1 month, certain people whose ISP "helpfully" had "safe browsing" features, simply blocked us outright. For being new and different.

The learning for me was that new domains are no longer trusted, and seemingly some vanity domains get even more strict treatment.

The bar for working security at Meta doesn't seem that high

Am I understanding correctly that he is freaking out because his little hobby project that blew out of proportions is causing people harm?

China simply isn't interested in or understands privacy at the moment. I have some experience with cross border relations with them and getting them to sign and then care about data processing agreements we need for gdpr is something for sure...

My understanding is that there is no malice or incompetence, it's usually just "who cares"

Most educated people I know actively want to reduce technology in their kids' childhood, especially while they are young. I can't help but think this is like intentionally showing your kids the low quality videos made for kids on YouTube. It's depressing

Somehow copyright infringement has become the layman's best way of protesting the consumption system they are in, in lieu of proper regulation. Nobody gets directly hurt, and consumers are able to keep up to date with the media that they may depend on for common interests with friends.

It's also a great tool for disruption. YouTube music is superior to Spotify because they found a middle ground that allows them to host a reasonable amount of copyright infringing music. You don't need all licenses if your users can fill the holes

> Anyone who has led a class discussion — much less led students on a tour of Egypt or Okinawa, as my colleagues regularly do — knows that there is a huge gap between solo learning online and collective learning in meat space

One thing this author misses, which I fear, is that it may become less important in the eyes of stakeholders to educate the masses when they have LLMs to do jobs instead. That is, it is fully possible that one of the futures we may see is one where education goes down as it is perceived as not important for most. Yes, meat space education may be better, but who decides if it is necessary?

Maybe vocational schools become more important instead? Jobs where you for all intents and purposes build out the infrastructure for the tetriary industry, mostly automated by LLM.

You may disagree with this, but the key here is to realize that even if we disagree, others don't. Education is also power, there's a perverse incentive to avoid educating people and feeding them with your narrative of how the world works instead. We are very much possibly on the way towards a buy-n-large style future.

As a kid you are plenty more free time as well. This boy has GRINDED origami. Very impressive.

I bet red herrings are effective

Thank you for the explanation.