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sleepy_keita

375 karma · joined February 21, 2019

Software engineer located in Yakushima, Kagoshima, Japan. Working on geospatial solutions for the Japan market. Founder KotobaMedia: https://kotobamedia.com
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sleepy_keita··on Scion is back and is going to sell a kei truck in America
I was wondering why they'd keep the same 660cc engine, but it has a 25mph limiter, huh. Waste of an opportunity. 660cc is fine for going 100-120kph here in Japan. I love my kei truck, but speeds in the US are way too fast. I'd want at least a 1L engine.
sleepy_keita··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
This is done by default in Japan. Most long books are sold as different volumes, parts, etc. At first I didn't really like it (especially because you'd have to buy both Vol.1 and 2 for the whole thing), but it makes sense if you're going to be bringing books around with you.
sleepy_keita··on Qantas Airbus A380 engine failure in 2010 (2023)
They got a warning that the fuel transfer system was damaged, so they decided not to use it, I think.
sleepy_keita··on Use boring languages with LLMs
I think it's pretty simple - there's just so much more open source PHP code out there in the LLM's training dataset. Swift has been around for much less, and most Swift is closed-source - not that many years have passed since Swift has been able to run on non-Apple platforms, too.
sleepy_keita··on The MacBook Neo
I thought this too. If they're using the camera to do brightness, it needs to be on when the user isn't using it - if the activity LED is tied to the camera power rail (not sure if it is), it might look like there's something nefarious going on. No way Apple would let that go out the door.
sleepy_keita··on World-first gigabit laser link between aircraft and geostationary satellite
They say "error-free connection", which implies 2-way communication, right?
sleepy_keita··on Selling SaaS in Japan
I'm still pre-launch, but I've attended (and presented at) a couple conferences / industry events for my SaaS in Japan. You can get a lot of traction by getting out there and actually talking to people. Networking is important (probably this is the same anywhere?) and talking to other presenters is as important as talking to potential customers, because you can get that relationship going for mutual benefit.
sleepy_keita··on AI is forcing us to write good code
Humans can work with these cases better though because they have access to better memory. Next time you see "iteration_count", you'll know that it actually has a sum, while a new AI session will have to re-discover it from scratch. I think this will only get better as time goes on, though.
sleepy_keita··on It's Always TCP_NODELAY
Yeah, it's named after the person who wrote the RFC - John Nagle. Wild coincidence! https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc896
sleepy_keita··on Heroku Support for .NET 10
Yeah. It used to be the go-to for starting simple projects. We have quite a bit of other options in this space now, though - GH Pages, Cloudflare workers, Vercel, Netlify, etc etc...
sleepy_keita··on Why do some radio towers blink?
They're saying that you have 3 banks of lights, each connected to one phase of the 3 phase input. That way, when only 1 bank goes out, it's easy to see that one phase is out.
sleepy_keita··on Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
I was thinking more on the lines of "if marine life never found itself stranded on land, it wouldn't need to evolve to survive on the land"
sleepy_keita··on Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
Was just rereading - it was the radioactivity and the large natural satellite that was unique in his universe. Tides are interesting because once you have life in the oceans, it's a kind of forcing function to adapt to land conditions
sleepy_keita··on Rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool
Maybe - but in this case, Ruby is written in C, it uses C extensions when performance matters, but tooling for the Ruby language itself is all in Ruby. Rust isn't replacing the use of C in the core of Ruby (yet) - it's stepping in to the area where Ruby would have been traditionally used.
sleepy_keita··on Rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool
I find it interesting how Rust is gaining momentum in tooling like uv and now rv.
sleepy_keita··on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI
Simulated a RAG, and it still gets it pretty wrong.

> The tallest mountains on Earth, in descending order: 1. Mount Everest, 8849m 2. K2, 8611m 3. Kangchenjunga, 8586m

> Tell me the second tallest mountain on Earth.

The second tallest mountain on Earth is *Mount Everest*.

sleepy_keita··on Please Don't Promote Wayland
The IME problem was the only thing keeping me on "legacy" X11 a couple years ago. Is it still the same today?
sleepy_keita··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale
LISTEN/NOTIFY was always a bit of a puzzler for me. Using it means you can't use things like pgbouncer/pgpool and there are so many other ways to do this, polling included. I guess it could be handy for an application where you know it won't scale and you just want a simple, one-dependency database.
sleepy_keita··on Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket
No, it was just the name of the person who started the company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda Lots of Japanese companies are like this. See also Toyota.
sleepy_keita··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
Me too -- actually, I'd say that the LLMs I use these days (Sonnet 4 and GPT4.1, o4, etc) are pretty good at rust.
sleepy_keita··on Reverse geocoding is hard
Japan publishes new CRSes after large earthquakes to account for drift. The M9 earthquake in 2011 recorded a maximum shift of 5 meters!
sleepy_keita··on Reverse geocoding is hard
What were some other problems you ran in to when putting OSM in to ES? (I've had this thought before too, I'm curious why/how you did it)
sleepy_keita··on Google Maps Doesn't Know How Street Addresses Work
Adresses are notoriously hard, and it varies from country to country, and even within countries. I've been working on Japanese address data, and while you may be able to trust Google with an address in the city, there's a large probability that it'll send you somewhere else (sometimes > 10km) in rural areas.
sleepy_keita··on IPv6 Is Hard
Also the surface area of IPv6 is huge, it just takes so much time to scan everything. It's not security, but it's a deterrent.
sleepy_keita··on WASM will replace containers
I actually tried doing this a couple weeks ago. Rust on Cloudflare Workers. It didn't go well -- compiling to wasm disables a lot of Rust features, to the point where it just didn't make sense anymore. I gave up after trying to get some crypto stuff working. I eventually switched to using raw JS because Cloudflare Workers exposes the Web Crypto API, but next time I want to run Rust serverlessly, I'm just going to put it on Lambda, compiled to a regular binary.
sleepy_keita··on Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at end of Tokyo Chuo Rapid Line
A taxi from Otsuki (the station mentioned in the article) to even Hachioji (another station that's famous for being "the last stop") would take over an hour and cost >20,000JPY. At that point it's cheaper to get a hotel. Even if you have the money, the possibility of taxis just not being available at that time in a place like Otsuki is pretty high.
sleepy_keita··on GPON FTTH networks (in)security (2016)
PON uses passive splitters to allow multiple access -- you can't disconnect a fibre at the office without also taking down the neighborhood you're sharing the physical fibre with. The article, as I understand it, is how it's trivial to bruteforce other sessions once you have root in the ONU.
sleepy_keita··on Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
This reminds me of when I took my drivers' license test in Japan -- they'll do an eye exam including whether you can recognize the colors. The first color was this weird mix between blue and green, and when the administrator asked me what color was showing, it took me a moment to try to find a word to describe the color... then I realized, I'm at the DMV, they want "ao", so that's what I said.
sleepy_keita··on PostgreSQL Lock Conflicts
It looks like the site itself is a tool, to figure out what kind of lock you want to use / debug.
sleepy_keita··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://keita.blog/

Not sure how many people here read both Japanese and English, but it's mostly English with some Japanese posts here and there. It's mostly a collection of side projects that I've been working on and some memos for future me.

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