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sdrothrock

3,463 karma · joined March 3, 2014

I am a mostly-deaf American living and working in Japan.

If you're thinking about moving to Japan or Tokyo and want to hear from someone on the ground, please feel free to e-mail me at scott at blackwhitedog dot com.

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sdrothrock··on Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
Two human editors. I'm one of them and I absolutely do not use AI tools when I edit.

If you're going off the use of emdashes and endashes, I've been using them for over 25 years.

sdrothrock··on Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
Pretty high on the RPF, actually! Especially in the early days, a lot of film, prop, and design industry professionals would congregate there and exchange information or big shop folklore. It was a pretty cool place (not saying it hasn't continued to be one, but I haven't been a regular in probably 20 years).
sdrothrock··on The forgotten meaning of "jerk"
The evolution of "jerk" makes me also think of "nimrod" and how it referred to the biblical hunter and meant someone with great skills in hunting, until it was used to refer to Elmer Fudd, at which point the meaning changed to mean a complete idiot.

https://thehabit.co/nimrod-hectoring-maudlin-eponymns-and-pe...

sdrothrock··on What went wrong for Yahoo
I wonder what went right with Yahoo Japan, and how it was so successful here that it's still a mainstay for many to this day

Related post I saw an hour after writing this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-jap...

sdrothrock··on Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?
Thank you for answering! I'll be giving this a shot sometime :)
sdrothrock··on Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?
Does Folio actually copy the content (i.e. if the original article is removed, Folio still has it) or does it function as a collection of bookmarks that it changes the presentation of?
sdrothrock··on The Miyawaki Method of micro-forestry
Separate from the forestry philosophy in the headlines article, Japan also famously made a decision in the 1960s that resulted in monoculturing the country into seasonal allergies for the timber industry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay_fever_in_Japan
sdrothrock··on Terpstra Keyboard
Have you seen Electones?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electone

sdrothrock··on Mac Themes Garden
In the 00s, I remember leaning on LiteStep and Stardock (I think?) for theming rather than anything specific to windows
sdrothrock··on Don't force your kids to do math
I read this as remembering to set aside time specifically for play and not just for day-to-day parenting and discipline
sdrothrock··on Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data

I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure that people with disabilities were represented, and how those representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It really blew my mind.

sdrothrock··on I Paid $70 for an AI Boyfriend. It Was So Worth It
> When that problem was mainly contained to just some drugs, overeating and laziness it was a less pressing issue. Don't do drugs, basically. Exercise sometimes. But once it starts to link itself into the economy like AI does

I'm a little confused here -- we have entire economies around drugs (uppers, downers, enhancers, etc.), eating (eat more, eat less, want to eat more, want to eat less, gorge, fast, ultranutritious), and vanity (clothes, makeup, surgical procedures, gyms, etc.) and have shown that we're willing to build up and support industries to chase the impulses to "the full spectrum of options" in any of these areas.

I think most people are dissatisfied or easily made to be dissatisfied with the state of their affairs, and this is something that's gone on for a long time and will likely never stop. What makes AI psychological companionship different from under/overindulging in these other aspects?

sdrothrock··on Show HN: Ricotta – Language Learning to Replace Anki
Just dropped in my email to try out the Japanese. I'll let you know.

I'm not really sure what to do with this -- I thought you wanted someone to take a look at some Japanese content, but I can't find any in the app/tutorial.

sdrothrock··on New York claims a small victory in 'forever war on rats'
Many businesses and residences typically bag their trash and leave it on the street curb.

The main exception is when a building has a managed trash facility, which is a room that people leave their bags in instead of on the curb.

sdrothrock··on Show HN: Counting Tap Toy
This is fantastic and just the kind of thing my nephew enjoys! Thank you for sharing. :)
sdrothrock··on Slouch: Posture panic in modern America
the showers here especially have always made me slouch and I'm not especially tall at 175 cm! It was only after getting a shower where I could stand straight that I realized how much I'd been slouching over the last 17 years due to low shower heads.
sdrothrock··on The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
They'll look for external options whether they're paid lessons somewhere, English-related events, or online chances to talk to native speakers. Many will also go on to look for jobs in companies that involve English.

It's also worth noting that most public schools have (short) study abroad programs that will allow excellent students to apply for a few weeks in Australia or New Zealand as well.

One other interesting part of the uniformity is that perhaps because of the English focus, there's no real exposure to other foreign languages in public schools before the high school level (and sometimes not even then). Whereas in the US, I think most people have the option to study something from middle school or junior high.

I'm excluding Mandarin from this discussion, which is sometimes touched on superficially in Classical Japanese.

sdrothrock··on Things to know about the Great Wave
Novels are often written vertically as well, so it's fairly common still.
sdrothrock··on Python’s Preprocessor
Literally: it's difficult to avoid pain, but suffering is optional
sdrothrock··on Our Founder – Momofuku Ando
The best part of the museum is the chicken ramen factory, which you need to make a reservation for in advance. It is NOT the cup noodle factory.

Cup noodle factory: no reservations, draw on your cup, specify what toppings to put in

Chicken ramen factory: make ramen noodles from SCRATCH, send them off to be fried in front of you, draw the packaging

It's really worth the price of admission (1000 yen, maybe $6 USD) for the experience of making ramen noodles from scratch

sdrothrock··on Japanese words and names sound African (2022)
It may be "broken" in the sense that it's not accurate to the original language in orthography or pronunciation, but it's great because it's internally consistent for speakers of Japanese. I can look at any foreign word in katakana and instantly know how to pronounce it in a way that is intelligible to other people in the language I'm speaking: Japanese.

Even with the way English does it for other languages that use the same alphabet, while the orthography may be similar, the pronunciation is generally just left to luck and the speaker's/listener's perception of the word's original language.

sdrothrock··on Japan's clothes-drying bathrooms
They're almost always Rinnai, specifically 乾太くん (kanta-kun).
sdrothrock··on The Star Destroyer and Imperial Military Doctrine
Very well stated! I completely agree with this and this is why I feel like the rebels don't actually have a carrier doctrine as proposed by the article.
sdrothrock··on The Star Destroyer and Imperial Military Doctrine
I agree with the bases -- we do see that multiple times, but we don't really see as much scrambling from carriers in the same way that we see them scrambling from planetary/lunar bases, which is what makes me hesitate about characterizing this as a fast carrier DOCTRINE.

I definitely remember gunships and troop transports, but my memory is just failing me when I try to think of carriers. I guess this is left over in the legends canon now, but much of the rebellion's fleet having been repurposed from civilian transports/cruise liners also serves as a good explanation as to why they wouldn't have many carriers as well.

sdrothrock··on The Star Destroyer and Imperial Military Doctrine
I'm a little confused by the characterization of the rebellion as a continuation of the Old Republic fast carrier philosophy as, as far as I can recall in the current canon, there is no emphasis on carriers at all but rather on individual fighters that are independent of carriers due to their hyperdrives (which, along with shields, have been the primary distinguishing factors between the rebellion and Imperial starfighter forces).
sdrothrock··on The Canadian government's plan to plant two billion trees
I hope they do research and plant a variety of trees in sustainable ways that do not affect people negatively.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay_fever_in_Japan

sdrothrock··on Show HN: BewCloud is a simpler alternative to Nextcloud written in TypeScript
In Japanese, it's ノード, which is no-do.
sdrothrock··on Akira Toriyama has died
The Japanese is more like "he probably had many more things he wanted to do", no nuance of "there were tasks for us that were left unhandled by his passing".
sdrothrock··on I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)
If the author also used the checked/unchecked disabled states, that might open up more possibilities with four values to with rather than just two. :)
sdrothrock··on Sora: Creating video from text
> Musicians could automate all the instruments with incredible accuracy since a long time. But they never do that. For some reason, they still want a person behind the piano / guitar / drums.

This actually happened on a recent hit, too -- Dua Lipa's Break My Heart. They originally had a drum machine, but then brought in Chad Smith to actually play the drums for it.

Edit: I'm not claiming this was new or unusual, just providing a recent example.

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