wirthjason

Speak the truth! If you have a white handle umbrella it’s a “give a penny, take a penny” situation. Countless times I’ve had a newish one taken and the only one left is some crappy junk that’s rusted out as half the spokes broke.

I get it though. They are all similar (even though they are not, some still have the plastic wrap or price tag on the handle). Mistakes are mistakes.

What really pisses me off is when you take a nicer one (those clear ones are crap) and it’s totally different from all the other umbrellas and it goes missing. No excusing “sorry I mixed up my clear umbrella with the white handle for your clear umbrella with the white handle”. I hope there’s a social place in hell for those people.

This article is obviously not talking about bicycles. :)

Is there some kind of HN Japanese article trend recently?

In any case I appreciate the culture of getting lost stuff returned in Japan much more than “magical” conbinis.

The article mentions money so I’ll add my anecdote. Many years ago as a student we had a going away party for some friends who were returning to the US. Someone had a “genius” plan to beat the jet lag. Since their flight was early in the morning we planned an all nighter so they would catch one of the first planes to the airport, board the plane and sleep the entire flight, waking up back in the US “refreshed”.

About half though the night and after way too many drinks I got sick. It was well past last train so my friends hailed me a cab back to my host family’s house about an hour away in suburban Kokobunji. The next thing I know I’m passed out in the back seat of the taxi and my parents wake me up, pay the $100 cab fare and help me into the house.

I wake up the next morning with a stiff hangover to find so much stuff missing, but most importantly my wallet. It had all the important stuff: a couple hundred in yen, my train pass, my ID cards, and most importantly, my residence card. My stomach sank thinking how I’d get it back.

Later that day as I was recovering the taxi driver came by the house and returned my wallet —- everything intact. I offered all the cash I had but he refused to take it. I cannot imagine he would make such a trip back out that far to return some stupid gaijin’s stuff. It left a permanent memory of people’s generosity.

On the flip side, a Japanese friend of mine and I would practice English. He was always interested in US slang, particularly swear words, which he never quite got right. I’ll always remember the day he nailed it.

He got $500 from his grandparents as a present for graduating high school and entering Waseda University. He called me up and says “I lost my wallet, I got the wallet back but fuuuck man, they took the money.”

That machine is cool but 7-11’s process was nothing like that. That machine is for individual servings at a restaurant. The one 7-11 used was more industrialized and made to produce pre-packaged food to be served frozen then heated up at home.

This is the best I could find. Sadly there’s no video clip.

https://dogatch.jp/news/tbs/tbstopics_69799/detail/

You’re totally right. I know exactly what I’m going to get and that’s the problem. It’s mildly annoying to see that nice looking sandwich and know that the first couple bites will be good but then rest are frauds.

That said, it’s mildly annoying to order fast food in the US and it comes out looking nothing like the picture on the menu. I’ve rarely been let down by JP fast food however. The food almost always looks like the picture.

You win some, you lose some.

These articles always make me conflicted. On one hand the Japanese convenience store is quite good but there’s so much fetishizing about them. In the end it’s just a sandwich, and if you eat enough of them you’ll realize there’s no “magic”.

That said the conbini is often the subject of many Japanese food TV shows and I enjoy seeing in-depth programs of how something is made and the creativity in their production. I learned that 7-11’s fried rice is made using real woks with an elaborate setup of robotic arms to toss the rice with the wok and spatula. The length they went though to get the flavor just right is very impressive.

On the sandwiches, one of my gripes is that they are often filled in a way that makes them look really plump and full of ingredients when cut in half. But everything is in the center so by by the time you make it to the edge it’s just bread. To me the sandwich is visually appealing but lacks balance and consistency from first bite to the last.

Did you take them up on it? Would be an interesting experiment.

The article was a relatively entertaining description of some psychological but for me there’s a more important reason I buy more than in planned for, IKEA’s design is quite good.

I fall into the “IKEA as Disneyland” camp. For me there’s tons of inspiration from their designs and layouts that I wouldn’t have thought about on my own —- this is particularly true for organization and maximizing utility in small spaces.

Most people are not professional interior designers so it helps to draw inspiration from professionals. If left on their own the things people “think they need” is far less than the things they actually need — people need more, and that’s not a bad thing. I’m not talking about over the top consumerism or aimlessly amassing stuff. I’m certain this is a lot of appeal to shows on HGTV. You see how they design something similar to your house then steal the ideas.

I’m also attracted to their minimalistic design. Simple designs and neutral colors never seems to go out of style and blend well with everything. Given IKEAs diversity the same products are sold around the world —- Europe, Japan, America —- so they need a timeless and borderless approach. I’ve probably bought far less from IKEA because I never feel the design is old.

I also like the little stories about they inspiration for design. The article mentions how cheap product make IKEA seems like a bargain but even the cheap stuff is well thought out. One designer commented that the plush toys don’t have plastic eyes, they are all stitched / embroidered. The designer realized this after seeing a child with a stuffed animal that only had one eye. The designer thought no child’s toy should eyeless and fixed try problem.

IKEA isn’t the only store where good design sells products. Muji is another. I almost always walk out of there buying more than planned. I think it’s easy to attribute this to psychological manipulation but sometimes making a better product and demonstrating how he utility is the real secret sauce.

For people interested in design, particularly the theory side, check out the work by Kenya Hara, the design director for Muji.

+1 I think this is a much more valuable exercise and much harder because it require knowledge of the domain.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a bag fail. Then again most of the duties are lugging a computer around. Usually I just get tired of the bag and want something new because there’s a slightly different use case where another bag is optimized for that.

But bags are like old friends. They all have personalities and are unique in their own way. I have an old Chrome messenger bag from college that’s 20 years old. It’s still going strong but I have a different bag now (still a Chrome though) which has an integrated laptop compartment. The bag is still going strong today and whenever I take it out to use it’s like talking to an old friend and retelling stories of the past.

Can these be serialized? One of my main uses for partial is passing things to multiprocessing pool.map. People often reach for lambda but it cannot be pickled/serialized so it fails.

I have a 2nd generation, which has the home button. (I got my wife the 1st generation when it was first introduced and it’s still functioning. The battery doesn’t charge well but it’s still good for surfing the web and playing games.)

Apple changed the pencil. I wouldn’t get any iPad that wouldn’t support the new pencil, which I think is from the 3rd generation when the removed the home button and introduced rounded corners.

The old pencil has a lightning connector and plugs into the iPad to charge. The new pencil magnetically attaches to the iPad and charges.

Apple should release the next generation soon. (Maybe in a couple weeks.) Hopefully you can get a used one at a good rate when that happens.

It depends what you are reading and why. Check out “How to Read A Book” by Mortimer Adler. The book is quite old but still extremely relevant. (He’s one of the best philosophers/thinkers I’ve ever read BTW. I suggest “How To Think About The Great Ideas”, but that’s for another topic.)

On the subject of note taking a professor once told me “don’t take notes, make notes”. Note taking is basically writing down what the author (lecturer) says. In college so many people would just blindly copy what the professor wrote on the board. That is note “taking”. Note “making” is adding you’re thoughts: what is the author saying (in my words) and do I agree with the ideas? What would other authors think, are there counter points, supporting examples, etc. Is this point elaborated elsewhere in the book? What terms, words, or concepts need more explanation?

I found this blog (https://fs.blog/how-to-read-a-book/) it has a good summary of Adler’s ideas. For example, on using the margins in a book:

    When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it— which comes to the same thing— is by writing in it.

    Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake— not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

    Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably, he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

For research work I prefer LiquidText on a 12.9” iPad with an Apple pencil. It’s critical for me to make notes and annotations.

It’s crazy how far pen computing has come. I was an early adopter of this as a college student back in the 2000’s. I had a Toshiba laptop which had a screen that would rotate around and fold on itself to become a tablet. It had a pen for writing and ran a special version of Windows designed for tablets. (https://the-gadgeteer.com/2006/04/27/toshiba_portege_m200/)

There weren’t many good sources of PDFs so I made my own. I would take my textbooks to Kinkos where they had an industrial paper cutter that was able to slice off the binding, leaving me with a bunch of loose pages. I would use a double sided auto-feed scanner to scan all the pages into searchable PDFs.

Sadly the technology wasn’t ready for prime time. The software wasn’t good enough, drawing was limited and not many apps took advantage of the pen. The hardware was heavy, bulky, and I always had to be around an outlet because the battery life was abysmal.

An iPad + pencil is a truly remarkable experience compared to that previous setup.

“What do you in think about skydiving?”

IOC: “too boring, viewers won’t want to watch that.”

“What about skydiving without a parachute?”

IOC: “Now that’s worth watching!”

    > The big problem is spoilers. If you are not very careful, if you go to the Peacock site you will get spoilers. For example, if the medal games are in your list, they change the title of the entry to be the names of the people playing -- spoiling the semi-finals for you.

I love sports but hate watching them delayed online because of design like this. I don’t know who created these designs but it’s terrible. The author is right, a local “dumb” DVR is the way to go for watching sports.

The UX for online sports is terrible. One example is soccer matches on ESPN, they will display highlight bars on the timeline when something exciting happens, like a goal or a penalty. It’s destroys the suspense for me because I see the markers and know something is going to happens.

They also show a progress bar with the length, which makes it easy to know if the game went into extra time. Eg. One team goes up 2 goals early but the recording time is longer then you know the other team comes back to force extra time.

This is one of my favorite laws!

It’s not clear what is meant by “to better understand Python”. Better understand CPython, e.g. and you want to hack on the interpreter, or better understand how to write more creative/abstract/safe Python?

In my experience Python programmers can be divided into two groups, those who write Python and those who write Python frameworks, aka Python for other Python programmers.

The latter group is trying to create an abstraction that helps solve a problem in an elegant way. Often to do that a deep understand of the language is needed such as the use of descriptors, higher order functions, the Python object model, metaclasses.

One of the best books for this is “Fluent Python”. It’s also a good to browse around significant projects and understand how they work and what patterns are used, eg Django, Flask, etc.

This reminds me when learning to write papers in college my professor would help proof my paper. I Had clarity in my thoughts but it didn’t translate to paper. We would evaluate the paper line by like. I would often use the phrase “X is better than Y”. He would stop me and ask, “why is X better?”, and I would give a more precise meaning.

I like how the author applies the same idea to “clean”. Rather than just blankety apply clean he suggested expounding on the reason why it’s cleaner.

+1. I use that SSH feature every day as my primary way of coding.

In my own experience my struggles come from not taking the time to properly understand indexes. When starting out many things are intuitive so it feels documentation isn’t that necessary. But then you hit a wall and things don’t work correctly. At this point I would just try everything brute force or search stack overflow until I got it to work so I could move on with other things. But it was just a quick fix. Once I took a few hours reading and trying examples to understand how the index works things made sense.

When you start with simple data frames it feels dict-like and very pythonic —- zero learning curve. But then multi-indexes are lists of tuples and things get tricky. It’s also important that data frames always have an index whether you realize it or not, the default being a RangeIndex.

This is why the “to_csv” bites people, there’s a numerical index. Once an index is set you no longer have to say “index=False”.

With the default RangeIndex “df.loc[0]” and “df.iloc[0]” will give the same result because the first record has both the position 0 and index value of 0. Once a “meaningful” index is set you need to start referring to it by value rather than position. This makes it much easier to manipulate data, for me at least.

I’m not sure about HBO but one thing I like about Netflix is they have a lot of multilingual content.

My wife is Japanese and we spent the pandemic year in Tokyo with our then 1-yr old daughter. Netflix worked there flawlessly and had both native JP content and a lot of US/English content.

Now that we’re back in the US Netflix provides a good amount of content with Japanese subtitles and audio tracks. It’s nice that we can have the audio for my daughter to listen to. She spoke only Japanese when we were in Tokyo and I’d like to keep her engaged with the language for as long as possible because I suspect once she goes to school she’ll give up Japanese in favor of English.

Ironic to see this today. I spent an hour debugging this very same issue this morning.

I was just doing some simple refactoring, changing a hard coded sting into a parameterized list of f-strings that’s filtered and joined back into a string.

I’m glad that I had unit tests that caught the problem! I couldn’t figure out why it was breaking, that comma is very devilish to spot with the naked eye. I’m surprised my linters didn’t catch it either. Maybe time to revisit them.

    My recent books can be downloaded for free (or optionally pay for them) at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson

This is really cool. Thank you!

I find Norvig’s style of Python a bit odd as it diverges from PEP-8ish style I’m accustomed to. Nothing wrong with it but he’ll redefine things, put functions on one line, etc. The good thing is that I challenges my understanding of what you can do with the language and how simple and expressive it can be.

For example I found this line of code cute. So much going on — no function definition, just a string literal method being assigned to a name (which any Linux programmer would get but a windows one may not).

    cat = ''.join

I have a 2.75 yr old daughter. I’m amazed at the mental growth at this age. Anyone have good recommendations for pop science books on toddler psychology? Another post mentioned the author Michel Tomasello.

I’m curious how punishment and corrective behavior is interpreted. Theres a lot of situations I don’t know how to handle. Recently my daughter has been spitting up juice, including on me, because she thinks it’s funny. When something like this happens I give her a light thump on the head with my finger and a stern “no, that’s bad”. But she doesn’t like it and starts crying. She then runs to her mom who then hugs her and says it will be OK. I feel like this is a lose-lose situation. She needs to learn this behavior isn’t acceptable but it makes me the bad guy and mommy the nice one.

Is this happening to Toyotas in Japan? Feels like the “un-Japanese” thing to do. I remember getting a cell phone as a college student. I had AU but my Japanese friends had Docomo. Docomo was way more than AU for the first year but the longer you were a customer the cheaper it was. It felt like real loyalty. I was trained on the US system that the fort year was the cheapest me then they increased the rates. The complete opposite.

Good explanation but he didn’t say how to quote. Single, double, double quotes surrounded by single, etc. Quoting is quite confusing and rarely taught, you just kind of learn by accident and trial and error.

Wow, sounds awesome! I’m from Chicago and there’s a lot of similar stuff around here. Maxwell polish, brags beer with onions and mustard, Italian meats… I’m salivating! I haven’t really been to the eastern parts so I’m unaware of what it has to offer but from your description there’s a lot!

Keeping it on topic… when is Lego releasing a Chicago dog? :)

I had that gas station!

I agree with you on the blocky -ness of the cars. I wonder how the distribution of sizes changed. As the complexity of the design goes up you need different distribution of sizes, smaller for more detail and larger for bigger structures. I always had a good balance of blocks, never too many of one size and never running out of others.