justusw

I read this, and this article has a lot of words that I don’t know, and that make me feel intimidated for having missed out on something important for the last ten years of my professional career.

The first time someone told me about EDA was when I told them I had problems optimizing a certain SQL query, to which their answer was whether I have considered using event sourcing or storming.

Yes, and who else is annoyed by random Japanese words being used to say the thing English but make it sound exotic and sophisticated? From the article: “Jidoka: the harmonization of people and machines” (jidoka/自動化 which literally means automation), or random TED talks about Muda, Ikigai, or Mottainai (sprinkle in Konmari for good measure). People here in JP think, what’s so special about these words? Kanban in the end just means signboard.

I get that adding memorable words to things sometimes gets the point across extremely well, but all those other times, just say the thing you would like to say, heh.

Unfortunately that means for me that we are still a few years away from the year of the Linux desktop. /s

I am surprised to see a post from this month linked there on the Debian wiki discussing future plans to add telemetry to Go (https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-intro)

The author in there tries very hard to convince the reader that this is necessary and that the way Go would do it protects your privacy. To me it’s never been about what information they collect or what the motivation is.

The fact that apps and tools repeatedly introduce a) sudden and b) non-reversible (unless you fork) changes to their software. Heck, as far as I can tell Netlify CLI even sends a ping when you opt out, that you have opted out.

My personal gripe lies in the coerciveness of it. Yes, I can always use another tool, but say that to someone who built their whole workflow and platform on something that suddenly decides to alienate their users.

Again, yes, it’s open source, so why not fork? And forks do happen, see Audacity. But bit by bit, our confidence in tools we use to stay productive erodes. What if their analytics servers go down? Will the tool start to fail? (A surprising amount of websites break when you disallow Google Tag Manager). Will the tool be slowed down? Will it have bugs introduced by tracking?

The aw-shucks mentality about including invasive tracking is hilarious.

Even more so in sensitive environments, where tools that you depend on doing unexpected network calls can make some people really nervous.

Don’t alienate your users should be one of the core values of any software, and even more so when your users use it in a professional capacity.

I really support sneak’s efforts here.

It would certainly be better if this had been opt-in in the first place. It’s sneaky and destroys the good will of your users if you add tracking and the only way you find out is by seeing your Layer 7 firewall asking you about HTTP requests to analytics.api.* and so on.

It’s no wonder that cookie consent banners make the reject all so hard to find. If it were the easiest choice, I bet you most of the users would just press it! Collecting my private data and having me read pages of privacy policy is yuck.

Chiming in here, even if he was not being paid for performing this song here, the tweet and publicity still serve to market his work, right? How is that not commercial? I mean, this is to sell more tickets in the future, one would assume.

Thank you for the Wiktionary here. We can see that the Kanji for baka (馬鹿) are horse and reindeer. Non-sequitur combinations in Japanese usually tend to hint at „ateji“, or a phonetic approximation using Kanji. Chinese has a word for the same Kanji as well, but it does not mean idiot as far as I can tell.

Boke can mean either 惚, which is often used to describe someone who has gone senile (ぼけている). Sometimes also for stupor-like situations such as a heavy jet lag. Or, as 暈け, describing something not-sharp and out of focus.

Funnily enough, in English we use sharpness for intellect as well, so ESL learners might think that natives think of their brains as swords? There are enough blade-like metaphors for our intellect, come to think of it.

In more common Japanese, when something has gone out of focus such as the TV, ぼやける is used. One could think that this is related to ぼけ? But one can never be so sure. Unique two-syllable combinations in Japanese are not so numerous and factoring in sound shifts over time, different potential etymologies, one really needs to investigate this for quite a while and maybe never get to the truth. This warrants more investigation!

It is funny to see how many people in the comments here seem to be personally angered by this article. What is at stake for them, I wonder?

Also, unionization, good choice as always. And doing exactly the work you are being paid for, not more, not less.

It would have a hard time meeting the open source definition, if that is the intention here, which I assume.

> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups > The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

https://opensource.org/osd

When you consider that alternatives like freee are still quite clunky in the browser, you don't have a lot of choice. I haven't tried Yayoi yet, but I don't expect much.

Kaikeio doesn't support HiDPI / 150 % fractional scaling either, so it looks really weird on my machine.

Recently the maker (Sorimachi) has announced that you can download their newest edition. Too late! They have already sent me the CD.

Anyway, you know it's completely wild when their official help site points you to switch to Shift-JIS compatiblity mode on a fresh install of Windows 11 :) (https://qa.sorimachi.co.jp/hc/ja/articles/360054408631-%EF%B...)

I just resort to editing everything in GnuCash and then importing into Kaikeio using a custom sql -> csv script. I hate the idea of my accounting journal being trapped in proprietary software.

Too bad that Japanese lawmakers have further decided to decrease software freedom by prescribing the use of digital time stamping by next year.

Hey! A fellow accountant :)

Yeah, 読込 is a common way of saying importing too. The particular offender I am using here is called 会計王22 ;)

Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s

Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services.

One should keep in mind here that IT Japanese uses Japanese in places you won’t expect, and when you expect it even less, it will switch back to English.

I was working on an import/data conversion task for a Japanese accounting software. I always assumed importing was じゅにゅう, but it is actually うけいれ (受入). Much to my amusement I found out I have been saying breastfeeding (授乳) instead of importing. Theoretically both are readings for the same Kanji, but by convention, a lot of compound verbs are read using kun-yomi instead. Anyway, I hope my tax lawyer still was able to understand what I was trying to communicate? Prepare for people being too polite to point out mistakes.

Also sometimes 受入 is written 受け入れ instead! And 支払い can be 支払. It is really confusing.

Knowing all these nuances is difficult if you are looking to just use simple rules here and there.

If this was anything but highly paid jobs in the tech industry, letting “the market figure it out” will not go well.

Salary lower than minimum wage? No legal minimum parental leave granted? Hazardous work environment? Just quit and apply somewhere else!

I just read all 4 parts and I have thoroughly enjoyed them. I am curious to hear if the debug console (TEPPOU, or gun in Japanese) works. Please keep us posted!

I don’t know many great alternatives, but usually people will point to email in this case. And great documentation (wiki/FAQ/Readme) to preempt a lot of potential questions. I find those work well for me and it’s what a lot of people like because it reduces the amount of urgent but non-important interruptions in their work.

Yes, I should have mentioned I have only worked in Japan and Germany so far.

Labor law supersedes the contract freedom guaranteed by the civil code here in JP. And the conditions for demotion are strict here, e.g. maximum ~40 % reduction of salary, new role must be related to previous role, etc.

The burden of evidence lies with the employer, but some try to construct a fictitious narrative. Nothing that holds up in a court of law if you remember to CYA.

It’s especially frustrating if your visa is tied to doing a certain type of job and having a certain amount of salary!

The word unlawful I am using here is 不法 (fuhō) in Japanese which I believe is used a lot in tort law.

Either way, long story short, there is no at-will employment in Japan.

I was unlawfully demoted once at a job and that was the defense my employer used as well:

1) what we are paying you now is still great money

2) by keeping coming to work you agree to being OK with the demotion (same as in the article)

Too bad it didn’t hold up once lawyers got involved. Some corporations really believe they can get away with anything. To their detriment, labor laws exist.

Here in Japan you can hear someone calling themselves a software engineer, fresh out of a bootcamp. The original meaning of engineering has gotten lost over the time, diluted by a sense of self-importance.

Imagine a world in which we let the bootcamp grads build our bridges and medical devices (Therac anyone?).

I don’t mean to be a gatekeeper. Keeping someone from practicing medicine if they won’t get a degree is not gatekeeping by anyone’s definition.

„Trust me, I am a software engineer“ just doesn’t have the same ring as „trust me, I’m a doctor“

The risk of criminal liability in many countries is most likely low, as long as you keep the anglicized term and not call yourself Ingenieur (engineer) in Germany or for example 工学者 (こうがくしゃ, kougakusha) in Japan, both of which imply that you have a degree in engineering.

To make things more confusing, the information technology qualification I possess in Japan called 基本情報技術者試験, loosely translated as fundamental information technician, is often translated using engineer instead of technician.

Some countries do over software or information engineering degrees, with a professional body regulating them, but I find that to be the exception.

The battle is already lost.

I appreciate it! Mscgen also supports EPS, but I realize D2 is way, way more general, so having one tool and one syntax for everything would be great.

I think one advantage in GraphViz is the ability to output EPS. I use this often for embedding into PDF via XeLaTeX and Pandoc filters. I also saw that D2 offers some kind of LaTeX output, but was not able to dig into the docs there further.

Agreed. Admitting mistakes and showing vulnerability works best when you have nothing to lose, not because you have nothing but because you are untouchable. A good example would be a CEO who neither takes a pay cut nor resigns after laying off 20 % of their workforce. It is usually accompanied by a press release saying that they have seen the errors in their way, but as a consequence other heads have to roll, mine still stays attached (and then blame inflation or something). An upside down world, really.

This program is extremely useful. I have recently performed a recovery on a bricked Microsoft Surface and was able to extract all the useful files from a Windows home directory and quickly discard all the libraries, caches, and so on. By seeing the folders that take up the most space you can easily determine what the juicy bits in a folder hierarchy are. Huge time saver.

Using GrandPerspective on macOS was a similar revelation, but ncdu being keyboard driven and allowing you to quickly launch a shell inside each folder and then apply find -exec there quickly is a productivity boost on yet another level.

Yep, they come with the whole shebang of self-issuing passports for their empire, and hoarding weapons for the next insurrection. Their fervor for the German Reich is absolutely comedic to Germans, especially the insistence on it having never ceased to exist. On the other hand their readiness to commit violent crimes (including readily assaulting city officials and law enforcement officers) is justifiably causing concern.

These people behave as though grandpa woke up after a 60 year sleep and he doesn’t know yet that Germany lost the war or that the wall has fallen (like that Germany movie Good Bye Lenin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin! )

It’s the old trope of a family dinner where the eldest suddenly starts reminiscing how great things in the “3rd Reich” were. If I may draw comparisons then I hear that over in the US the Americans then I hear that similar situations are experienced during a thanksgiving dinner, when a certain relative shows up.

Relics from the past that refuse to disappear.

If I may, I would also like to recommend Richmond and Route Inn here. I have been to the Richmond in Sendai and Morioka in Tohoku on three different occasions. The best thing is that no one wants to take a copy of my residence card, which to the best of my knowledge (statement from the MHLW) they are not supposed to ask you for anyway, but a lot of hotels do ask and then suggest you go find another place if you don’t want to comply.

Having accidentally stayed there before, I can confirm that they have their weird in-house magazine, even translated to English, in every hotel room. Even more obnoxious than the Gideon bible.

Is this some kind of satire? I really can’t tell. Did they not make an episode about this on Silicon Valley?

To clarify, when I first think of new package management I think of something that does reproducible cross platform builds, and something that sounds like rent seeking crypto, is the last thing I will think of.

That clears it up! Thanks!

I was using a Win 11 Pro installer stick on a Surface 4 the other day paired with a USB Ethernet interface. Aside from the fact that keyboard and mouse don’t work, because Windows doesn’t have drivers for a Microsoft Surface during install, I was able to convince Microsoft that I have no connection by unplugging the Ethernet cable right before the Microsoft account login prompt. Maybe I was lucky? Or really old installer? (Got it from Amazon Japan)

It’s definitely not an OS I would like to make my daily driver. I just hope Apple won’t go down that road with macOS.

Was this already satire at the time of writing? This whole effective altruism community has to be some kind of joke, right? Heal with your left hand what you destroy with your right hand?

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.