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I've been doing something similar but in the pursuit of graphics assets. Typical ZX Spectrum game was usually one blob of bytes containing everything it needed to run. I'd load the main game block into memory and run small assembly routine displaying a fragment of code on screen in a form of a window with dynamically configurable width and height. You could "slide" the window throughout whole memory block, which was quite fast, and eventually you'd find out something resembling backgrounds, sprites, fonts. Often they were of different dimensions, hence the dynamic window size. After few tweaks you'd find the offset and the size of assets and you could replace them easily. I'll never forget the Rocky Horror Show play-through with all the characters replaced with their other, rather obscene, versions. Well, not so mature when you think about it, but quite funny it was back then. If anything I've learned quite a few tricks about fitting a lot of assets into very limited memory.

Final movie was not what he wanted from the very beginning. So it kind of make sense. At least in this case.

You could be interested in Erich von Däniken's books. Take them with a grain of salt, though.

Isn't it the problem of UI, though. If the user would be informed about the consequences (possibly with bold red font and with a confirmation checkbox) would they still click that button?

This! The most important thing I'm asking myself: What do I want to achieve? Does "yelling" at people rises my chances in achieving this? Later on, when my immediate goal is achieved, I can decide do I care enough to follow up or not. First things first - sort out your priority.

It's not weird. I played article version my whole life and never knew different ones existed. It could help you if you're lucky enough to hit it. But it also can help you if this is your last ship on the board, which happens quite often actually.

It's tangential but it reminded me of "lighght" poem by Aram Saroyan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aram_Saroyan#Minimalism_and_co...

I have rather different experience. Most people either don't care or don't know how to. Unless you're tech savvy you're watching ads. And if you're on mobile you're watching them anyway in many cases.

I do agree with you completely. But the problem here is as old as programming itself. It's not always easy to define function boundries.

If your function returns pizza, as mentioned in other comment, adding some toppings won't change the boundaries. It still returns pizza, with peperoni or not. It doesn't change how you make the pizza. You're just adding more data to it. You may solve it with syntax, language data structures, etc. Whatever you like to make it more readable to the caller. But probably you'd want to pass toppings in arguments.

On the other hand if you have a boolean param that changes how function works. That's questionable in my opinion. Say you want to return list of users from DB but omit interns, sometimes, and you need to call API (or query DB) to know if someone's intern. You could define `omitInterns` bool argument but it seems clunky to me.

I may be mistaken, though. As said: defining boundries is not easy.

This also touches other problem a bit. Should we strive to decrease `if` branching in our functions or not? I personally tend to branch very early on, so later I can follow straight path. That's not always possible, but if it is, it helps greatly. Makes code easier to follow.

Not advocating for being oblivious about modulo op, but you could use stepping in some languages. Example, in Kotlin: https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.ranges/s...

I will never forget characteristic screen loading method. A 256x192 resolution, 16384 - beginning of video memory, 6144 bytes of B&W pixel data in 3 blocks and 768 bytes for 8*2 color palette. Those visuals and numbers are imprinted in my memory...

Two people who changed my life forever - Sir Clive Sinclair and my Father who'd been bold enough to invest in Timex 2048 despite price and difficulties of life behind an iron curtain.

Thank you. Both of you.

This is great idea, but may be tricky as people often just mess around with the world. You would need to, somehow, decide which abandoned base is visually appealing and/or matches the environment.

This seems really cool. At least I think it is - I have Android. But how does it solve the problem of more complex bricks lying on the side and actually hiding their complexity? They may look like a standard simple bricks from certain angle.

Isn't there an misspelling in the official country name in this article? They copied from Guardian, I suppose, since they provide the reference link and Guardian has it wrong too. Or at least it seems wrong to me.

Quoting the article:

> Қазақстан Республикасы, will henceforth be rendered Qazaqstan Respy’blikasy.

But cyrilic "у" suppose to be latin "u". So it should be "Respu’blikasy". Wikipedia [1] seems to agree, too, according to table from January 2021.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets#Latin_script

It's worth to mention that fireworks have a special place in Japanese culture. Notably in summer time there are fireworks events happening around country, many of which are spectacular in size, visuals and musical choreography. Some people are booking trips in advance to visit multiple spots even at expense of paid holidays. Even if you're not willing to travel but live in or near by of bigger city you can visit at least couple of spots there. It's so deeply baked into the culture that last year, during lockdown, government decided to shot a single bomb from multiple spots around the country at designated time so everyone could see it through their own windows.

Those events are massive. Usually police force is involved to steer the crowds. Streets are closed. Disruption everywhere. But, oh boy, it is so worth to sacrifice convenience to see the show. I've had occasion to see three and that was fantastic experience. Show in Nagaoka, in Niigata prefecture was the biggest and the most colorful I've seen in my life (not that I've seen many, still) and the execution, sync with the music, was flawless. I must thank my Japanese friends who booked the trip for us all. Otherwise I would miss it for sure. The two others not worse a bit. One next to Sumida river - the biggest one in Tokyo - and the other in Tokyo too, next to Futakotamagawa station. Both spectacular.

One other aspect of any bigger events that always amazes me is how safe and organized they are. Everyone is drinking hard during many of those and still no one argues, no one is aggressive and no one steals. That's a digression, though.

I do get your point but... are you saying you have no reception in subway?

Just a nitpick. We all are playing the same game. Any society is a set of abstract rules and beliefs. We may agree or disagree about the rules on the other side of the globe, but nonetheless we all are bound by some rules.

Not sure about Yoshinoya, but I've heard that Sukiya is considered a "black" company. Means they run over people, understaff and, in general, it's not a place you want to work in unless you're desperate. That was few years ago, though, so not sure how is it, now.

The scale is different. In Japan those jobs can be seen everywhere.

You forget that there's an etos of work in Japan. Besides of getting some small amount of money, those people get a chance for being useful. That is a mental effect as well and should not be overlooked. Not to mention it reduces unemployment.

If you look around there's plenty of such a "pointless" jobs. The same with people steering the traffic at the parking lot entrances/exits at any bigger entertainment or shopping center. Sometimes with almost no pedestrians around and yet those people are standing there in sun or rain alike. Or people who's only job is to smile and open doors for you, less common, but happens as well.

To be honest, though, as a "consumer" of such jobs (pedestrian in this case) I do feel they took an extra mile to make it as safe and comfortable for me as possible. And I do feel better about it.

It may look pointless at the surface, but I think those jobs are extremely important for society at large.

Could anyone, please, share some light on the "low-key" introduction issue mentioned in the article?

I work quite a few years in IT and never, during any interview or meeting, I've been introduced as anything more than just an engineer. This must be cultural gap, no doubt, but I'd feel weird if someone would detailed my career in front of other participants. Of course I have nothing against filling some details in by myself but only if applicable in given situation. Truth to be told I've never worked in Australia or US, but I did some job in two EU countries and in Japan and, as said, never encountered detailed introduction.

Is this still a thing?

What do you mean "unpopular"? Weren't they the one and only just a year or two ago? When I've been shopping for my TKL keyboard, they were basically the only option.

It's much better to give a candidate a simplified version of your typical daily task. Give them enough time so they can google and learn if needed. That usually means very simple task that you could solve in hour or two at your leisure at home.

Now, I do get that there's a lot of people who don't like spending time at home for interview tasks but when you think about AND it's not skewed to extreme (say, big task 8 working hours worth) then, in terms of time wasted, it's not such a big difference. Interviewer can then see the code quality, can talk about it with candidate, clarify some missing pieces or pitfalls found, etc.

IMHO most important is not if the candidate knows how to solve some hard or even medium problem when I speak to them and they are stressed enough already. What is important is if they're willing to learn, if they know how to search for stuff they may not know and if they can produce performant enough, but excellent to read, code.

Works fine for me on the same setup.

You could pay consumer tax not by the place you live in but by the place where business is located. Any additional taxes could be added by independent institution. Something like customs, just on local scale.

Living in couple of countries In EU and Asia, I can't imagine not knowing total price up front. It's pushing legislation problems on the end customer.

Actually, there is. It is called language acquisition. It's not a tool, but a method. Trivially simple method, just require some basic material at the very beginning, say, first 3 months plus SRS like Anki. And a most importantly a will to practice every single day.

If you think about it, how well did you speak your native language at 4? How well at 7? Did you attend any classes to teach yourself? No, I assume not. So how come you are fluent?

Turns out, it is all about ingesting as much as possible. Even if you barely understand at the beginning. More of it - learning grammar is just a distraction. You can skim the book to have an overall grasp of it, but that's it. You weren't learning your native language grammar by the age of 7, did you?

The key is to ingest comprehensible input. If you can't understand the sentence, have a visual cues. Start simple by learning most frequent 1000 words (should take you 2-3 months max with Anki) and then you can easily switch to sentences. Just keep your senteces at the level that you understand almost everything but a word or two. One word ideally.

Read or watch only context you like, you are interested in and you have fun with. That's it. Do it long enough, every day, and you are set.

As an example, I've been learning Japanese in class for 2.5y and could not read nor speak as well as I'd like to. Not to mention I couldn't read kanji at all. Now after 9 months of trying language acquisition I can read children books (Winnie the Pooh) and comic books. If that's not a win, I don't know what is.

You should consider moving to Japan then. Theater stays dark until the last line of credits passes. Actually this is nice thing. You can still listen to the music, pay silent respects to the horde of people involved or just contemplate the movie.

I found out that usually happens when you have some constraints. The more constraints the more clever ways people find to achieve their goal.

> English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation

This is interesting observation which doesn't go in par with mine. From my experience, native English speakers have really bad pronunciation as the Japanese is full of "soft" sounds like shi, chi, ji. Those are missing in English. For example when you want to say Shibuya, the first two letters should not be pronounced the same as in word "shell." The same "j" in kanji should not be pronounced as in the word "jam." I find this quite common among native English speakers.

On the other hand, I find people of central and east Europe the most gifted. At least WTR pronunciation. They got used to the most of the sounds spoken by Japanese and some more. Some subtlety aside, of course - it's not 100% the same, but close enough.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work like that in the wild. In some countries people will choose to butcher your original name for the sake of politeness, even if there is ideal translation in their langiage. At least this is what's happening in the UK. Not sure if it's common elsewere. For this reason I'd rather choose the name with better pronounciation outlook in both countries.