smukherjee19

I personally have a different name for the Marl-type of people: NPCs. Every time I get on the train I see them on their phones, mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and having the eyes of a dead fish. It's almost as if their brains are turned off.

It's really sad that all software has become like the article states...

Even though looks iOS-only, I'll maybe give it a spin. Thanks much!

Ah, I should have been more specific, yeah. I'll check out KeePassXC and FreeOTP, thank you!

This is my first time hearing Salesforce has an authenticator app. Very interesting! I especially like the fact that restoring actually works for you.

I'll check it out, thank you!

Very nice! I hadn't thought of a hardware token, but that does sound very alluring! Do you have any particular hardware ones you can recommend? :)

That's an interesting take on having books read to you!

I am genuinely curious though: what do you do with the information you absorb? Are you able to retain all of it and use it at will? If so, do you have any tips on how to do that?

Take the README.md, print to pdf and transfer to your reading device before leaving?

>For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool I hard agree on this.

I use my W11 22H2 as a daily driver because of that: it just works (TM).

Also, I don't see any kind of news or the likes on Windows, and it feels really close to Windows 7. Here are the things I've done so far:

- Bought a Windows 10 Education license from a shady website, and it's been working fine for the past 4? years. The upgrade to Windows 11 Education went smoothly as well.

- Local account only. No Sign in to Windows crap.

- (Most important imo) Installed OOSU Shutup10++ (it's for Windows 11) and turned almost everything off there.

- Bought a Start11 license for 5 USD and installed it, and switched to the Windows 7 start menu using it.

No ads anywhere in Windows, feels like Windows 7, talks much less to whatever 3rd party people MS have contracts with to get my data.

FWIW, I did try daily-driving Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is the best Linux for me imho. However, there is a show-stopping bug as follows:

I have 3 monitors, with the main one being a 4K over DP. My monitors are set to turn off after 5 minutes, and in Windows, they turn back on just fine when I move the mouse (minor annoyance: display scaling is not reflected across all application windows till I minimize and open the window again but no big deal). For Linux, the DP monitor won't get detected; it behaves as if my other 2 monitors are the only ones connected. I have to turn off the monitor switch and turn it on again for it to be detected. I looked around but didn't find any good way to solve it...

Second this.

There's also kind of an unspoken rule among the people here: if something is left on the road where it might be spoiled or destroyed, (and is not valuable of course), things are moved to the sidewalk so the owner can find them easily and/or are not destroyed by careless passers-by. I have seen a handkerchief that was tied to the railing at eye-level, so that the owner could find it easily when they came back to look for it.

If the thing in question is valuable (like wallets, cellphones), it will most likely be deposited to the nearest police box where they will hold on to it for a while.

>where would one suggest that most people don't experience theft?

Japan. Been here for over 5 years, zero theft.

Wow, this is so cool! 95 GB and I can browse the entire Wikipedia offline!? Thanks so much!

https://library.kiwix.org/?lang=eng

I was looking at what other sites are available, and seems there are quite a few. Are there any specific ones apart from Wikipedia that HN readers would recommend?

I first assume I cannot take for granted what I am reading, no matter how credible the source apparently is. It doesn't matter if it's a Hacker News comment or an article by a reputed organization.

Then I try to use my brain to think what the article is saying. I see the claims the article makes, and ask questions to verify and counter those claims. Just to give a hypothetical example:

"New vaccine developed for Covid-19 promising 100% effectiveness! Will we finally be living without Covid-19?"

I'll go like:

- Hmm, a bit clickbaity title. Should have some asterisk marks attached to it.

- The 100% effectiveness claim. Is it based on a research paper?

- If yes, is it peer-reviewed?

- If it is peer-reviewed, where is it published? Is it a source that has high reputation for being trustable?

- If yes, did they do randomized control trials?

- If yes, what's the sample size? Is it large enough to be credible?

And so on.

From here, the content actually might go beyond my level of expertise and knowledge (I am not a virologist, so I am not technically qualified to verify the claims or smell a rat if there is one), but much of the time, many claims will fail to live up to these simple questions that are very basic. The more "no"s I get from these questions, the lower it gets on my credibility list, and if it drops beyond a certain point, I conclude it's fake and move on. If it stays high up there multiple times, I tend to believe it to be "possibly true".

Note that I don't assign anything as "facts" that easily.

The thing I keep in mind is this: there is zero point in "keeping up-to-date" with news unless I am willing to analyze the content to the best of my abilities and draw conclusions from them. If anything, just gobbling up whatever news comes out is harmful to mental health. I don't want to be turned into an "information zombie" who doesn't ask questions.

Also, it's completely fine NOT to try to read every news. Like, I don't know anything about American football (sorry!) so analyzing tier lists for teams is something highly interesting for many, but is not something I'd prefer to give time to.

And now is, in my opinion, a great time to do this analysis. The world is in chaos, and these times brings out the worst in people. So now we get to see things that we wouldn't see in the best of times, and who knows, maybe the data we internalize on how people react might come handy at some point in the future. :)

Perhaps it's not well-known outside Japan but one (domestically?) famous website used to test slow internet here is the famous actor Abe (surname) Hiroshi's (first name) website: http://abehiroshi.la.coocan.jp/

I have no idea how it compares to the ones on the list here though.

Here's another angle: a LOT of common people out there don't even bother blocking ads, let alone even thinking about the possibility that it's possible to block ads without using Youtube Premium. They either:

a) Live with ads, thinking that's the norm or not giving it much thought, or, b) Subscribe to Youtube Premium without considering the possibility of ways around it.

So, realistically speaking, the probability of everyone starting to use Vance overnight is almost zero.

I also used to feel the same: why can't people just use adblockers!? Then I realized that me and the type of people I normally interact with != the general public, atleast in terms of tech-savviness and/or curiousity.

Looking around my room, I also seem to have around 80 or so books, and they take up more space in my house than most other stuff. :)

For books, I mostly go digital nowadays, but, I make exceptions for:

- "books I want on my bookshelf",

- "books that changed my life",

- books that I just found while looking around in a bookstore.

So far, my bookshelf has classics, novels I really liked, some nice reference books and textbooks, and a few nonfiction books. I am usually more reluctant to stack up on nonfiction physically; they usually get summarized and put into Evernote as points to be looked back at later.

Either way, I strongly feel that everyone has their own unique "bookshelf", collections of books they live by. So asking others would definitely be interesting. Looking forward to the other responses. :)

I had a very similar experience. Only two days ago, I tried looking for something related to a friend's phone not recognizing the correct lock pattern on Android (Asus Zenfone 7), the term was "zenfone 7 does not recognize lock pattern even when correct and it's locked", and the first two pages were, with the exception of an official Asus support page, ALL the results were crap ones going to generic tutorials...

Searching for the same phrase in DuckDuckGo, the 2nd result pointed to a Samsung forum thread [1] which, while pointing to doing things with a Samsung account, said it started working by itself in 1-2 days, which it did.

Setting aside the fact why Android would behave like that, the search results in Google were so low quality and awful... While this is just an anecdote, it seems for quite a few types of search results, their quality has dropped hugely. Is it due to people hijacking the results by using clever tricks? Or has Google's algorithm starting to hit some sort of limit in terms of the amount of content that needs to be indexed and ranked? I don't know. But something definitely seems off to me.

[1]: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pat...

Thanks for the detailed reply!

Going by the narrative, did you mean you switched from Protonmail to Fastmail?

Seems like Fastmail is extremely popular here, based on the other comments. What are its advantages compared to say, Protonmail?

I wonder if paying up money for this Google Workspace Individual[0] will make me more immune to possible lockouts like this... Or is it just more sensible to jump to another paid email provider like Fastmail?

[0]: https://workspace.google.com/individual/

DISCLAIMER: I am not the developer, nor am in any way involved with ImageGlass.

Wow, this thread is like 35 minutes old and people are already jumping to conclusions, bashing the developer, bringing out the torches to burn them at stake.

Really disappointed seeing this on HN...

Perhaps the title itself is insinuating, and people are not patient enough to dig any deeper. Perhaps someone can add [quickly reverted] or something to the title?

That being said, I really wonder why people 100% believe other people act in bad faith. Looking into that Github issue (https://github.com/d2phap/ImageGlass/issues/1252 ), it feels more like the dev was not aware of the issues with the bad actor in question, and was also very quick to revert the issue and pull the affected release from Github. This is the best someone can do under this situation, and I'm sure they must have felt quite stressful... Maybe they are, even now, feeling the stress if they stumble upon this thread.

If the dev reads this: You did a great job fixing the issue, congrats!

Toxicity like this kills many projects and dreams, by the way.

EDIT: My argument rests on the assumption that the dev was acting in good faith. If it is proven to be otherwise, I will gladly retract my statement and apologize.

The path is curved because that's the straight line over the surface of a sphere, and if you project that straight line over to the Earth on a flat screen, it'll look curved.

EDIT: Wait, didn't get the sarcasm, my bad. :P

From my experience, there are two "types" of arcades in Japan: one called "game centers" (ゲーセン, pronounced gay-sen), and another "pachinko" or "slot", also called パチスロ(pachisuro).

The former is actually really nice. FYI, if the place you went to is a SEGA or a Taito Station, then it's very likely a game center. It does have some machines that use "medals", which I assume is some sort of gambling thing, but it's just a small subset. The main focus is on fighting games, arcade games (well duh), rhythm games(like Ongeki, maimai Deluxe which I love), Densha de Go! (a realistic train driving simulator with the inside looking like a cockpit of a commuter railway train), some robot games, Dance Dance Revolution, Kantai Collection, Fate/Grand Order, zombie shooters and many more. I will admit that atleast one Taito Station in the Tokyo suburbs has the smoking smell in it, but otherwise they are pretty nice places.

The other type is well, the pachinko and slot machines shops/arcades. They are the gambling machines, and almost everyone I know has a negative impression of them. If someone tells me they go to pachisuro for fun, I will just be polite on the surface, but internally I would avoid associating with them any further than required. The way to tell these apart is that they will very likely be in front of, or within 2 minutes walk of a station, will have smoking allowed in it, will have something like "new machines!" or "renewed machines!" in their advertisements, won't allow anyone below 18 or 20 to enter, and will have slot machines and many old people spending away their life savings inside. I avoid those like the plague.

All in all, I love the game centers though. If you get a chance, do try one of the games I mentioned above in the 2nd paragraph. Maybe you will find something you will like. :)

Ah! Thanks for this comment. It reminded me of another case where someone speaks in third person: in business settings. For example, I have seen this in code reviews when someone is disagreeing with a change in a pull request in a company: " Since <<reason>>, ABC thinks this change is unnecessary."

However, do keep in mind this is anecdotal so I don't know how much it applies to more broad settings.

I see where you are coming from with that one. However, this acting doesn't often have that strong of a negative connotation as insincere seems to have. To me, it's a more light thing, a bit of playful acting, atleast for the scenario I mentioned in the previous comment.

Going between languages is hard. :)

It depends on how you define childish, and also the age of the person in question, but in general: Yes.

Also, in case of adult women, if they speak in third person, to me it sounds あざとい(azatoi). I am sorry, I don't know how to phrase it in English without ruining the nuance. It's a mix of calculating, cunning, and a bit flirtatious? Either way, you also need to consider the tone of their voice, body language, and the contents itself. (Maybe if they want you to carry the shopping bag because it's a bit heavy for them, they might use this way of speaking.)

That being said, I do not have any real-life examples to back this up so take it with a grain of salt.

Fun fact: in Japan, from what little I've seen, quite a few young kids (think till lower elementary school) tend to speak in third person, and is generally seen as "cute". However, it sounds just as much unnatural (or even annoying unless the person is known to have some sort of issue) to speak in the third person for other age groups, especially working adults.

Ah, I have heard of it! Unfortunately it seems the slots are filled so I am waiting for the final version.

Hope the iOS version fixes my itch!

One thing I have found that helps is "not finding my phone attractive". Weird phrasing, pardon my English.

Basically, I have a midrange phone that cannot play the latest games at 60fps, and has a crack on its tempered glass running through the middle. This functionality and appearance makes it much less appealing than say, a Kindle with no scratches to spend time on.

Due to this, I basically forget my phone is next to me on my bed, and it only serves to take calls if needed in the middle of the night and wake me up next morning with the alarm.

Good luck!

Posts like these are really helpful, thanks! Especially since, in my opinion, at least, a lot of the new English nonfiction books that come out nowadays are 90% fluff and 10% actual material. Many of them seem to be filled with anecdotes that often ramble on and on, making them a chore to read. Basically, 30 pages worth of material turned into a 300 page book. And worse, ALL of them are "best-sellers" with raving reviews from supposedly big media outlets adorning their back pages...

Even worse, a lot of them cannot be trusted... Atleast in Japan, I've seen many books on the bookshelves of big bookstores with clickbaity titles like "The Real Effects of the COVID-19 vaccine! Will you be safe after 2 years!?" written by "reputed doctors" who have a dubious history of peddling weird things.

I have, in principle, stopped buying and reading these nonfiction books unless and until they were written atleast 30 years ago, either written by people on the level of Richard Feynmann in their field, or have a reputable track record and enough (preferably decades) experience about the topic they're writing. This filters out 99.99% of the books flooding the market today. I still run into weird things though.

As a grad student, Zotero is a lifesaver! Thanks to the people developing it!

I use Google Drive for my pdf storage using some Zotfile acrobatics (awesome plugin btw) to manage my actual pdfs. I plan on switching to Zotero's cloud storage to support development as soon as I can.

That being said, I wish I had a nice workflow for reading papers on my iPad like I do on PC (Windows specifically, I know there are software for the Mac/iOS ecosystem but I don't have a Macbook so...): Open Zotero -> double-click on the paper -> Bam, the pdf opens in Acrobat where I can highlight and annotate, and save to pdf directly for future use.

The closest I got to this on iPad was to use the Zotfile plugin and use the Send to Tablet feature as described here [0], and opening and annotating the pdf on iPad.

Another interesting workflow seems to be using Obsidian to store the relationships between papers using annotations and highlights from them [1]. Another way to do this would be LiquidText but I paid 20+ USD separately for both the iPad and Windows Store versions, and it asks me to pay up again so I don't know what's up with them...

Still, I hope Zotero keeps being developed as it's the best, and perhaps the only open source research management software out there.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7novaC_O_Y

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fjhad-Z61o

EDIT: Added clarification of OS I am using.