presentation

Agreed - my social life has frequent gatherings only because my wife is, despite working and having kids, extremely motivated to meet up with friends. If she didn’t have that motivation we probably wouldn’t be seeing anyone, and if she weren’t working then that could compensate.

Surely you could still meet people outside of home while living in a small apartment? At least that’s what everyone here in Japan does.

I think the point of the article is more about meeting with others at all, as opposed to it specifically being at home. So hang out with friends outside!

I did debate in the 00s though and my experience differed - it was already a highly technical affair that didn’t really require strong communication skills, but rather was more about playing logic tricks to be technically “correct” and saying so much that your opponent couldn’t counter all of it during rebuttals. That was enough to get me into the final playoffs at the national championships, and to this day I’ve been told that I focus too much on being “right” rather than being empathetic or persuasive, so debate was not the social panacea that it might have once been.

Just want to chime in that I have had the same experience and am similarly appreciative!

Dinners don’t necessarily have to be big though. My wife hosts friends over all the time but usually it’s still small intimate affairs, like average 1-2 people (and their kids if they have any) - don’t need to invite everyone at once. Maybe it’s more normal here in Japan to do small groups - when my American friends come visit they always come in giant groups and it makes everything logistically challenging (which my wife also complains about, alongside the fact that it’s impossible to have a deep conversation when 12 people are in the room).

Plus they also don’t have to be polished. Don’t bother cleaning up the house and order a pizza, and everyone will still have a good time. Or just go out to a restaurant and not worry about any of that.

Same here in Japan

Basically only true in the Silicon Valley bubble. Professional services are Microsoft Office/SharePoint all in.

Surprisingly if you're into marathons, the On Cloudboom Strike 2 is unusually roomy in the toebox for a big sports brand.

Yeah, and the way to change US culture/laws around guns probably isn’t to break the windows of random gun shops.

Honestly I just want a folding phone so that I can review split code diffs on the go. Paired with agentic coding I feel close to being able to develop software almost entirely without a laptop now.

To me, that’s a problem of oversight, audit trails, consequences, and the relationship of police with their communities; not of Flock itself. And based on what I’m reading, they are reacting - criminal case IDs will be required to do searches and automated monitoring of misuse will be mandatory by default soon. So the anger against Flock itself seems misplaced.

Putting aside how disproportionately noisy some activist types are, it probably has to do with Americans having practically no trust in one another, corporations in particular, and their government by extension. At the same time, Americans tend to value some positive forms of liberty - like the ability to say and do what you want in one moment - far more than other forms of liberty - like the ability for all people to feel safe enough to be able to do the things they want.

I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.

The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…

Another thing that comes to mind – education, this has been covered a lot in the media recently. While lefty progressive cities got rid of standardized testing and basic stuff like phonics education in the name of equity (you get more equality if you just don’t teach your kids anything!), other states like Mississippi are seeing great strides in educational attainment by doing the opposite. I just see a consistent pattern of progressive leaders doing incompetent things.

Thanks for dismissing a contrary opinion just because you don't like that I disagree with you.

The classic obvious example is cost of living. All of the blue cities have awful zoning and development restrictions that cause them to fail consistently to actually produce new housing that comes even close to demand. The oft repeated success stories are how cities like Houston, despite being not the kind of city I want to live in, are much much more affordable since they actually allow the market to function. Progressives go on and on about how supply and demand doesn't actually apply to them, and how they need to demand 100% affordable housing with absolutely no explanation of how that will pencil out for developers, digging themselves even deeper into the hole.

More examples include how crime has gained San Francisco an image something like the land of the walking dead, where progressive governance treated homelessness and mental addiction as a problem of equity of opportunity - which in the super long run is perhaps true, but doesn't lead to any good short term outcomes. It's only now that some blue city mayors realize that, actually, order might be kinda important.

As well as the inability for these cities to maintain and improve their transit systems, usually because they can’t focus on cost and service quality and instead try to make their transit projects be about irrelevant things like income inequality, protecting obsolete jobs, saving random endangered species or whatever, so you end up with the NYC MTA being unreliable, filthy, and hopeless to expect anything positive to come out of it. Red cities just sidestepped it by organizing around the car, I don't love it but at least you can get around places instead of relying on the worst transit systems on earth.

American progressives seem to have a hopeless zero-sum mentality, where the only way the common man can experience a better life is at the expense of some rich person, and perhaps that is related to the fact that many live in American cities, for which daily life continually has gotten worse because of how incompetent their governance has been.

I can't really talk though. I just gave up on the USA and moved abroad since it was too hopeless for me.

Healthcare - rather than just assuming that the most maximalist possible universal healthcare strategy is the best solution, actually consider how different healthcare strategies balance the cost of long-term solvency, cost control, speed and quality of service, and so on. For example, I am partial to the Japanese system, which unlike the Canadian system (which has crazy wait times), people pay 30% of costs so they still have skin in the game while the national healthcare system mandates fee schedules for common procedures to control costs. No blocking access to specialists behind primary care doctors, no banning private insurers. You get fast healthcare with a more sustainable fiscal basis, and less frivolous use of limited healthcare capacity than e.g. a system where there are no copays. The problem there though is that they have not enough supply of doctors (read: US should think about significantly increasing the supply of medical education and reducing the cost of medical training) and too much incentive for churning people through the system extremely quickly (read: US should have pricing not just be flat fee so that you aren't incentivized purely for speed).

The progressive wing seem irrationally tied to whatever Bernie Sanders claims is the best healthcare arrangement, and think that insurers are the source of all problems, when they actually are terrible from a business standpoint, they barely make money, and the cost of healthcare isn't from them but rather from other fundamental issues that have little to do with them. The result of this is that they land on a policy that half of America doesn’t want, and are too stubborn to budge on it, which means the United States will never get a rational healthcare system.

Housing & transportation - get rid of restrictions that reduce the ability of developers to actually build housing, from zoning restrictions to environmental legislation that is weaponized by NIMBYs to block development, to union labor requirements that send costs of building transit and housing through the roof, to affordable housing requirements that make projects not pencil out. Commercialize and densify areas in and around train stations as much as possible, specifically with for-profit developments, not trying to turn prime real estate into low-income enclaves because they hate gentrification more than they like progress (failing to think critically about what would likely happen if a poor and dangerous place became less poor and dangerous, or the people within such a place made some money to have the option of living elsewhere...).

I am partial again to the Japanese model where the available zones are set nationally, the rules for whether or not you get a permit is basically a checklist, if you check all the boxes you can build what you want, it doesn't discriminate on who's doing it, and for transit in particular, the train companies are literally private real estate companies that develop stations to the maximal extent possible because they make money from it. If you've visited Japan, did you think Shibuya felt awful because it was largely developed by Tokyu Corporation? Or that neighborhoods lack character and energy because the architecture is designed by a small handful of mass-manufactured modular home developer companies?

Progressives seem to think that supply and demand doesn't apply to their beloved cities, corporate landlords are the source of all evil when it comes to housing problems, and that private transit companies are not even a possible option because capitalists are greedy (when in reality they're more motivated than any of these activists are to actually do things that affect change on communities). My lived experience tells me that what I consider to be the greatest housing and transit successes in the world often come from large private developers who are incentivized well, because I've been places and observed how they function.

Also, we should be switching to land value taxes to incentivize efficient use of land, by making vacant lots expensive to hold, while also raising huge amounts of money, because the logic is simple enough for a 3 year old to understand - we have a lot of land and it is expensive. I haven't heard a single progressive even mention the idea despite being a great way to tax the wealthy while providing a strong incentive for better outcomes in cities, because they haven't thought about the root causes of why their cities feel like dumpsters long enough to care, and instead want to protect the historic laundromat and parking lot. Instead they harp on about wealth taxes that will mostly be evaded, and in the end net out tiny amounts of money that don't affect the economy as a whole and have no effect on the quality of their communities besides driving out economically ambitious and successful people.

I can keep going. I'm not a Republican, I'd much rather have the moderate Dems who actually think about the causes of issues to win primaries rather than populists who just try to get everyone pissed off (and probably are lying to their constituents anyway once they moderate as soon as the primaries end because they realize how unpopular and irrational their ideas are), but that isn't where the country is going these days. People are more interested in ideological purity tests than they are about substantive argument, in this sense the leftists aren’t any different than the MAGA people. Instead people like you already decided that people like me have no substantive opinions - very in line with the political zeitgeist these days where everyone's angry all the time and can't have rational conversations or learn from anyone else's experiences in the world. So, idk, enjoy your life.

That's just, like, your opinion, man.

Personally I think the USA's problems go much deeper than some vague sense that rich people are the source of all problems. Compared the whole US economy, they're a drop in the bucket, and they're not the reason that American institutions are dysfunctional; those dysfunctions were present long before Trump took power and Google got rich.

My opinion is that progressive populists don't know how to fix our problems, let alone have they even come close to identifying them, so they just focus on everything as "us vs the elites." You can see this simply by observing that the actual places that are progressive controlled - major blue cities - are the most dysfunctional places in the country. The solution? Wealth taxes that will cover a tiny percent of expenditures for a year or two tops, and no mention of why things are so expensive and slow in the first place, which has almost nothing to do with those rich guys, and have a lot more to do with dumb bureaucratic requirements; irrational procurement processes; capture from groups that sometimes are tied to wealthy interests but also come from the people like unions, neighborhood and environmental organizations; watering down every project by lacking focus on what they're actually meant to solve; procedural issues that allow cynical political actors to selectively interpret and enforce laws; and so on.

I'm sympathetic to the feeling of unfairness, but I want actual solutions, most of which are too boring for the populists on either side to stay focused on.

I live in Japan and see signs for hiring restaurant staff at restaurants pretty often, because they’re always hiring since there’s always a shortage of labor, and the posted wages are usually at or slightly above minimum wage. In Tokyo that’s 1226 yen/hour (US$7.70 as of now) which is not much to live on. They’re not paid below minimum wage so that puts them ahead of US wait staff in one sense, but I expect that when taking into account tips, US wait staff probably come out ahead.

Which makes it clear that service is not necessarily a function of compensation, and that eradicating tips does not necessarily make wait staff economically better off.

I don’t get in flow but I do feel like it’s similarly productive though. Right where I would lull in energy or lack the motivation to think through something difficult I can unload some of that on the other person and feel like as a pair we are keeping each other accountable. Can be productive this way even without the same flow state.

I’ve done lightweight backpacking in the past and usually check in luggage now. I’ve come to the conclusion that for how I usually travel these days - long amounts of time in single places, not trying to cram in many destinations in a single trip - there isn’t a major benefit to keeping it light. Usually I’ll just keep one change of clothes in a small backpack and check everything else. So I don’t need to carry anything until I reach the destination and have a backup in case of delays etc. Unless you’re traveling to the absolute middle of nowhere, if your bag gets lost you can get compensated for that, and buy whatever you need at your destination. Then on arrival I take a cab to wherever I’m staying, where I just have to roll the roller suitcase from the baggage claim to the cab (like 5 minutes of flat walking with ample elevators etc). Make sure that wherever I reserve isn’t up 10 flights of stairs (it usually isn’t a problem). Then that bag will just sit for the entire time I’m on vacation. Finally repeat in reverse.

I find the benefits of lightweight backpacking type optimization overblown for my travel style. Maybe it’s important if you’re speed running 20 destinations in a single trip or are incredibly unlucky with checked bags getting lost, but especially with kids now I just don’t really see much benefit.

I don’t do the whole minimalist packing thing but my super warm down jacket from montbell fits in a tiny stuff sack and I often wear that inside of other not so warm layers to stay comfy in the winter, so it probably depends on what you’re using for warmth.

I think also that anyone who's spoken Japanese for a while already has internalized that "si" === "shi" because there literally isn't the sound "si" in modern Japanese, as the other commenters mentioned it's often romanized both as "si" and "shi" in daily life, if you typed "si" into a keyboard it renders し, it goes on. The original comment on this thread includes one such person who literally didn't follow why "si" is wrong, and I felt the same way too as a long-time Japanese learner. It's a very "copy paste Western language concepts onto Japanese" way of conceptualizing the language, which is IMO a great way to set oneself up for great struggles when trying to learn a language that is structurally different, because it's not the right mental model.

So does that imply that there is a Goldilocks zone of prosperity where society are wealthy enough to afford good infrastructure but not too wealthy so as to become unable to build infrastructure cost effectively? Interesting that too much prosperity would actually lower living standards.

Curious, what do you dislike about him? I find many of his takes to be pretty reasonable, though he gets temperamental and snarky sometimes.

I primarily use Cursor, compared against Claude and haven't used Codex before - to me the benefits:

- Composer 2.5 is cheap, fast, and very effective; I don't even use other models that much anymore, as it's usually marginally better for way more cost, though sometimes I do for specific things like making better translations for our app than a coding-specific model could normally output

- It makes setting up and maintaining Cloud Agents super easy, the agent can basically set up itself and if anything changes that makes it not update properly, then it tells you and can fix itself easily

- Easy to move agents from remotely in the cloud to local and vice versa

- Easy to work with agents via either comments on GitHub, or via the web app on my phone (though it is relatively constrained relative to the actual desktop UI, which is a bummer)

- Code reviews with Bugbot is surprisingly good now vs when it first came out, as is the Security Agent, while being an order of magnitude cheaper than stuff like Claude reviews

- Automations are easy to configure and manage - crons, in response to repo events, etc. For example I don't use Renovate or Dependabot much anymore since LLMs can update deps and investigate subtle breaking changes much better than a dumb version bump script can

- Limits are obvious rather than Anthropic's mysterious quota amount that they don't explain at all

- Queueing up messages rather than the agent taking in new messages mid-work and then trying to mesh them together somehow - I find queueing much more predictable and easier to work with

- Plan mode is good too, but not particularly different than any other agent

- Easy to jump into the Editor view and actually go in and manually code things or interactively code with the LLM when you need to, since sometimes LLMs just suck at doing certain things autonomously. I'm not in the "stop coding bro" camp, I still like to take the wheel fairly often.

I think it’s been banging it’s head against the wall for many months now lol

I ran into this earlier, the commit history is the one maintainer and Claude pumping out like hundreds of commits 24 hours a day. Aside from the token cost, I’m wondering how this will turn out relative to the official tsgo native push.

What about both? Artists want money, fans want entry, reserve a portion for hardcore fans and the remainder by auction. Artists get to sell their $10k seats to the rich while looking like they’re giving an amazing discount to their fans.

Tried that, it just seemed way dumber this way unfortunately. And the zed UI provided 0 visibility whenever it was doing tool calls, and for some reason it kept running sleep 30 calls because it couldn’t figure out how to see the results of its own tool calls for some reason.