mc3301

Some of the health tests in Japan that elderly people take include a "standing to sitting on the floor and getting back up all unsupported" test. Scores are based on time, effort, emitted sounds (like grunts), hands-on-ground and whatnot. I don't know the specifics, but it is used as a "health measure."

I live here, but some of the online places are fairly gatekept, such as r/japanlife where non-residents can't post.

It might be worth checking out some travel discords (https://discord.gg/uwTxWekyS) or subreddits do get some initial traction?

And the Shindo system is best described as "what it feels like at the specific location"

So an earthquake can be a 4 at the epicenter, a 3 a little further away, a 2 even further away, and so on.

Common online conversation with a friend in a different prefecture may be something like, "Last night's earthquake was a 3 here, how about you?"

I wonder if they can feel the air pressure change while submerged.

I've been commuting with a mirror for 5 years; it feels SO dangerous the odd time I commute with my non-mirrored mountain bike.

I don't have strava or anything. I don't even know how long my rides are, my best times, my altitude. I just go for a ride; successfully capturing the exact feeling of riding since I was a teenager.

Kei cars can comfortably go up to about 60mph. Not great for an 8 hour drive, but I regularly do 3-hour-drives with a loaded kei-van. Yep, same 660cc three-cylinder engine that those kei-trucks have. It'll hit 70mph, but not comfortably. 50mph is easy.

And on the highway, I see tons of other kei cars, too. Light weight class cars even get a toll discount!

Those were hobbyists, audiophiles, professionals, artists (recording, performing, etc.).

They are talking about a much larger group of people.

By all means, it is fun to play with a language. And every person's brain works differently.

I like to use this metaphor, though. You're hiking a mountain, this journey to the "peak" is reaching some goal of fluency.

It's fun to stop and look at rocks, examining, comparing and whatnot. But it doesn't necessarily get you closer to the peak. I mean, it might, because you'll better understand your footing every-so-slightly. Not a perfect metaphor.

A creative solution! What if we rethought what "retirement savings" is and should be?

One of the cool things about LLM-assisted language learning that I have found is this:

Language is (for almost every adult) deeply personal. Even the best of teachers must be so nuanced for every error correction, repetition request, nudging, encouraging, etc. Why? Because the adult student is greatly affected by human feedback in this context.

This is one of the (many!) reasons why children learn languages (their first included) kinda fast. Their ego isn't involved.

Learning with a non-human, at least for me, is kinda cool as I don't feel bad telling it "look, I get it, don't ask me that again" and I don't take it personally when it says "that's not quite right."

I've got tons of experience as both a language student and a teacher, btw.

Clearly the whole gun thing is working, though. Regular citizens can all feel safe in public areas and schools, while the potential of a fascist government greed-fueled rise is kept well-at-bay by the fact that the general populace has the right to bear arms.

Yeah.... So many bad tenants. So many bad landlords... So many weird laws protecting and hurting both.

What if we shifted to a different system?

Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to the last detail was nowhere near as effective as some speaking and reading drills.

It is definitely well written and presented.

Oh, I have one laying around here somewhere.

It was a tough time, indeed. But I feel that had I used an "all unknowing and answering" LLM, my retention and understanding of the class material would have been significantly lower. But I didn't have any choice as to having anyone to actually chat with back and forth. So it worked for me.

real pixel art or not, it looks cooler and better than bad news baseball: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_News_Baseball

For superbowl, I'd love to go to a sports bar, and on one of the 35 screens, this 8-bit version of the same game is playing. Maybe with hilarious "Mutant League Hockey" style animations on tackles or something.

We'd all be cheering at the same time, at similar things.

I've seen a few 3d printed projects that did similar, displaying some live API-received number on a 3d-printed split-flap board.

I can't really explain it; it's simply a preference. It may not actually be optimal efficiency. But I like the pen and paper.

I'd like to see a study on the threshold of projectiles versus safety squints. I searched around, but couldn't find a paper.

Harvard's cs50 had a "Rubber Duck debugger" which was an LLM trained on all their educational content with specific guardrails in place to not give any answers. It would chat back with you planting little ideas to help push your understanding just a little bit.

I loved it so much, because I was learning programming completely by myself usually after midnight while taking care of a new-born. I had nobody to pair-program with, no lead dev nor teacher to speak with.

It was years ago, but such an amazing implementation of an LLM for education.

Fellows devs at my company think I'm strange, but I always have a cheap coil-notebook. It has diagrams, notes, doodles, minutes, checklists, mostly not even in order. I try to remember to write the date at the top of each page.

I just counted, 11 notebooks (b5, 60 pages) in two years, so just about a new notebook every 2 months.

Funny thing is, coworkers will now ask to use my pen and paper to flesh-out something together, as I'm certain it's the only paper and writing utensil in the building.

And yeah, draw.io or even an ipad with a whiteboard app aren't good replacements for me.

Oh, recent sightings in the area I go mountain biking solo... every weekend.

I 3d printed a coffee can holder for bicycles with the braille "coffee", so when you're riding and you reach down for a drink, you know which one is coffee.

The product didn't sell well, but it made good gifts!

slipons, loafers, crocs, sandals for 90% of my life.

BOA for bikes.

Occasionally I have "traditional" lace-up shoes, and replace the laces with those elastic pull-string shoes.

Was gonna teach my kid how to tie shoes only to realize, they also have no shoes with laces.

I just noted that I probably haven't tied laces in over a decade.

"fewer old people" will actually, spoiler alert, happen. Just wait about 20 years. Certain parts of Japan are gonna be completely empty.

Where is this?

In Japan, at least in primary school, boys can get away with anything, as "boys will be boys." Girls must take care of others (first) and themselves (second). If girls misbehave, write sloppily, forget things, and so on, it is much more addressed than if a a boy does the same.

That's, like, 70% of all meals in Japan, both in and out of the home. Maybe with an additional tiny side of pickles.

It's what kyushoku (school lunches) basically is, every day, at every school across Japan.

If a meal, especially a dinner, is lacking soup or rice, it isn't uncommon to hear criticism.

Agreed with all of the above, except the "100s of apps."

Turning notifications off of most apps solves a bunch of little problems.

The big problems need to be forcibly named at every chance. In no particular order, youtube, tiktok, insta, facebook (or meta?), are all guilty of making the world a worse place. Reddit and twitter's endless scroll is bad, too, but it seems their content got so bad the addiction is less strong there, like poop-flavored cigarettes.