upfrog

The author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.

I really don't like the idea of vertical tabs, but given how so many web pages these days work, I should probably give them a try. That said, the tree-based approach is fascinating - points to Zen (and related efforts) for trying such a different paradigm for arranging tabs.

I don't remember if that exactly is line-for-line what I did, but I was at least doing something similar, and not having success.

Two things that I noticed: - Firefox did crash on me more frequently. It wasn't a daily, or even a weekly thing, but it was more of a problem. - Firefox limits how small I can shrink my tabs in the tab bar. Chrome also has a limit, but it is much less restrictive.

That last one was the killer difference for me. Firefox wants me to be able to see (at least part of) the title of each tab, even if that means I can't see all my tabs at once. I want to see all of my tabs at once, and I don't care if I can see the title - the favicon is enough.

I did try configuring Firefox to let me shrink the tabs more, and even tried messing with its GTK configuration, but no luck.

So I do feel a bit bad for using Brave instead of Firefox, but after months of dealing with Firefox's UI I lost patience.

The listed flags do in fact have a great deal of variation, and are uniformly beautiful to look at. Yes, we probably need a moratorium on flags with a sun-like-object on the left, but even in that over-used motif, there is a lot of variety in the exact nature of the star. Ugly but kind of distinctive is significantly worse than attractive but kind of same-y - I would rather be represented by basically any flag on this list than my actual city/county flag.

Anecdotally, Grok is mostly not that anti-woke. It is coasting off of its reputation from Elon's marketing. That said, it does have meaningfully fewer guardrails, which is a real benefit.

If we find a way to make 4-6 years of language instruction reliably lead to a reasonable level of language competency, maybe. But until then, the student's underlying interest in the language is much more important than any abstract sense of usefulness. I took Spanish in highschool, and despite being moderately ambitious about it, never got very good, and never got much use out of it, despite living in Florida and Texas. I suspect (although alternate history is hard, so I can't guarantee) that I would have gotten a lot more out of Japanese, simply due to alignment of interest.

Jailbreaking is definitely an option, but there is value in spending money to provide a market signal instead.

You get invited by actually trying to play. Not everyone who tries will get in, but it's a lot more likely that you'll succeed if you work the problem, instead of throwing up your hands in disgust at the world.

Non-technical skills matter. People and organizations have multi-faceted incentives. If you think the incentives of the people making decisions are leading to bad outcomes, then learn how to make that heard to them. Learn the situation as they see it, and use your own, better-aligned(?) incentives to improve the organization. And if it's not worth trying, so be it. But you need to accept that much of the world is you live in will continue to be shaped by the people who care enough to see "that hustle life nonsense" as a worthwhile trade.

There are in fact civilian situations - many of them captured on camera - where the difference between carrying in condition 1/2 vs condition 3 is critical to the outcome. Active Self Protection on YouTube has thousands of examples of defensive incidents involving firearms, and the cost of the extra time and mechanical complexity to rack a round is a common theme.

For the benefit of people who come to the comments first: If you want a comprehensive debunking or substantiation of the claims about crypto debanking, then this is not the place to go.

If you want to read 23,000 words on banking regulation, its uses, abuses, the incentives faced by both the banks and their watchmen, and an explanation for how we ended up where we are, then go ahead and jump into it. Personally, I think the latter is far more useful than the former. I enjoyed it, at least.

Bear with me; the free market seems to think that history isn't a very useful area of study, and lots of people agree. At least some of this probably comes from bad experiences with history classes. I like to think of history instruction as having three levels. The lowest level - the one you'll hear people complaining the most about - is presenting history as a dry series of facts. At it's worst, the entire course can be reduced to a hashmap; event -> date. Rinse, repeat.

The second layer presents history as a narrative. Most people like stories, so this is much more compelling, and makes it a lot easier to enjoy history. But the highest level of teaching is about systems. It's not enough to colorfully explain that King so-and-so was furious at the offense given by King the-other-one. You have to try to make students understand the world that these two kings existed in; how things as small as calling 9th-century European polities "countries" can disastrously mis-callibrate our models. Once you understand the system that someone is working in, you can hope to understand them, and why they do the things they do. Once you have that, you can hope to pass reasonable judgement on their actions.

This article is all about systems and tradeoffs. It is aspiring to that third level. The title is arguably a little bit misleading, but I think it accomplishes it's goal, and personally, I feel like I've come away with a reasonable overall understanding of his thesis, and I think it matches the title.

For an alternative take on this, here is Patrick McKenzie (patio11)'s take on some similar issues: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...

A lot of people in this thread have been mentioning the importance of risk tolerance in Japan's (lack of a) software industry. He gives some good examples of just how omnipresent that risk aversion can be; from getting funding, to renting an apartment, to finding a significant other, running a startup makes your life much more difficult in Japan than in eg the SF Bay. He also gives a bit more context on the matter of overall software quality, and I think that's an important point: writing assembly for small-scale electronics or cars or industrial machines is just as much "software" as writing a modern web app.

Also, while I'm not universally endorsing Japanese web design; dense UIs for the win!

Don't assume that your history would be an immediate dealbreaker. With enough time, they are happy to ignore a lot of that stuff. Just be honest.

Of course, if you don't believe in any of the causes you might need a clearance for, it doesn't matter, but don't be too quick to make that assumption either. A lot of stuff gets classified by the government, and not all of it is morally noisome.

Is this an accurate representation of your meaning? Because technology has been relentlessly solving or making progress on solving human problems for thousands of years. Agriculture alone is a series of technological improvements which have solved an unfathomably number of instances of the "I have no food" problem, one of the most recurring and fundamental problems of all life. Avoiding diseases, healing injuries, trying to get three states over in a hurry because you heard your grandfather is about to die, communicating without being intercepted, satisfying wanderlust, making communication easier - all of these are very human problems which have been fully or partially solved by technology.

First off - we don't know why pressure against her increased recently. We just don't. We can make up stories about it, and try to assess their plausibility, but we don't know what really happened.

That said, I think that the evidence we have is against this being notably related to GPL and her defense of it. She published her complaint against MediaTek almost two years before she "got her wings clipped" - the timelines don't really support the GPL issue as being a notable part the matter. Also, the situation for IP protection in China is on an upwards trend (https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/16/china-s-record-on-i...), and part of that is government led. I have a difficult time seeing police give her so much trouble for this.

My preferred theory is that the straw which broke the camel's back was her minimally filtered commentary on the response to the June 2023 Plaza Hollywood Hotel stabbing. Naomi Wu feels strongly - and I believe, reasonably - that this was an anti-lesbian hate crime, and was furious that nobody in media was willing to acknowledge it as such. Male chauvinism and gendered violence, LGBT rights, public questioning of the results of a police investigation, and all in a venue which is easily accessible to foreigners - these are all things which are far more politically sensitive in China than IP compliance.

For some examples of what she was saying, scroll through her comments here: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3ARealSexyCyborg)%20until..., especially this thread: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/166501414504826880... (Twitter account required for both).