I did consider that, the other factor is Japanese people travel for smaller periods of time so maybe carry tiny suitcases instead of the (multiple) huge ones you see foreigners carry.
> Pretty much every hotel in Japan has a laundry machine, although I don't know of any suites that include one, unless you're going for a managed apartment.
Which is insanely expensive compared to just going down the street to a normal coin laundromat. They are pretty much anywhere (at least in most big cities) and very quick and cheap. You can pay 500 yen at a laundromat, or 5000 yen at your hotel laundry room.
You may be thinking of a hotel's laundry service at those prices. The most I've ever paid to do my own laundry is 600¥ and I've had as low as 200¥, all at 3-4 star hotels.
The person you are replying to never said that Berlusconi was a fascist (he wasn't), just that his rise to power helped enable the far right populism and legimitized/emboldened a lot of fascist thinkers. That's pretty much a fact.
When it comes to art (audio or visual especially) iterating over a concept with some air of "generality" and "good enough" can have very interesting emerging properties. You get a "vibe" for what you want, but you might not have a perfectly clear idea of the entire composition until you actually see it in front of you, and then you iterate over that.
When I write a song I usually just noodle on my guitar with some pre-programmed drums in the background, I just play whatever comes to mind at the time, record it, then listen back to it, change a few things, add a few accents, decide to add another guitar line, maybe shift in fifths or sevenths to add more voices, add a few instruments that fade in and out like strings or brass, etc.
Some people might have more methodical approaches to art, and that's fine too, but in my case it's absolutely a 100% exploration effort about stuff that I don't even know I want until I see it in front of my eyes. These tools are amazing for this.
- (free) set up google sheets (not sure if this is required but that's what I do)
- (free) run an scheduled appscript bound to that sheet with regular intervals
- make it scrape the page (it's just javascript, you can do get requests, etc)
- Have it scrape a webarchive of the page you want to compare (not need to persist state or run a database, etc) and have it check the differences with the current page
- Have it send you an email if there's changes
It's totally free, takes no time to set up, and is relatively effortless. It can even send you alert on failures etc. I do something like this for my reading tracker where I crawl various sites (like amazon, etc) and RSS feeds for new releases of books/series I read and collect them in a dynamic spreadsheet.
good memories :-) I started programing with google apps script.
I think it's a great starting point for students because it's totally free, abstracts over the coplications of oauth (for small things I still prefer it because it's so effortless) and you can combine google apps in fun ways. Considering many students live out of gmail + google docs, it's great
And having a GUI version of the app makes interacting with other students easy bc they can always edit the google sheet (aka database), forms, gmail, etc
I would recommend not using it to do any kind of even simple calculations. It's VERY bad at it but what is dangerous is that it makes the answer look subtly plausible.
I've tried to use it to calculate averages between 10 or so numbers and every time I ask it the same exact question I get an "average" number back that looks plausible but is slightly different every time. Then I whip out the calculator and measure it myself and it's an answer that ChatGPT never gave me.
It's *really* dangerous to use this to do any kind of important calculations like financial stuff.
I find it ironic that it can generate function which calculates average of an array of numbers in dozen programming languages, but it can't tell you the average when you ask it to.
> In a week of testing, I have yet to see ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in either English or Japanese.
I've seen it make mistakes in Japanese in the very first prompt I gave it (which also answered incorrectly)[0].
I don't know why people are convinced ChatGPT is good with languages, I've been trying stuff with Japanese and most of the time it's just incredibly wrong to the point of being counterproductive to anyone who's trying to learn the language or practice translation.
What it is good at is approximating human language in a fluent-looking manner (which is incredibly impressive, I agree with you on that), but it's TOO GOOD at bullshitting its way through most explanations to the point where it will look natural and fluent in a different language if you're not very skilled at it or a native speaker and I've seen people who are very fluent in Japanese get tricked into believing some Japanese wordsoup that was spat out by ChatGPT. I'm impressed by the technology, I'm scared by the legion of people who will just blindly trust this garbage, honestly.
Let me clarify: I have not seen ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in its use of Japanese in continuous Japanese-only text. Like you, I have seen it make mistakes in explanations of grammar, both about Japanese and about English, as well as in its translations between the two languages. Its explicit knowledge of grammar seems much worse than its productive grammatical ability.
If you spot any productive Japanese mistakes by ChatGPT, let me know. The About page of my website, which is linked from my profile page, has my e-mail address. I see from your site that we share an interest in the Japanese language. I would be happy to hear from you.
This is actually how they do it in Japan. They love the lottery system and as a customer it's honestly a huge pain in the ass but once you see the kind of scalping and sleazy tactics that go on overseas you kinda start to appreciate it.
There's a few ways it is implemented and not all artists/venues do all of these but things I've seen are:
- Priority purchase for "fan club" registered members. Most artists have a LINE group fan club with a yearly subscription (like $50 or whatever), then if you are in this group, you get priority access to that artist's events. This means if you're a "real" fan you get to access tickets before everyone else.
- Lottery system based on price "bands". I've seen a few artists let the fans decide how much they want to pay based on tiers. Months before the event, the artist will send out a survey with price ranges you can choose (only one) like: $10, $15, $30, $50, $90 and then seats will be allocated based on a priority level as a self-chosen value. So if there's 5 people who chose $90, 10 people who chose $50, 30 people who chose $30, 200 people who chose $15, and 1000 people who chose $10, if the venue can only host 250 people then 5 + 10 + 30 + 200 (= 245) people will get in at their price, and only 5 remaining people will get in at $10 price point.
- Totally random lottery based on "waves". X people will apply to wave 1, and out of those X people let's say only 70% will get chosen. Then the artist/venue decides on a more approachable size and might host a second wave, another X people will apply to that second wave (including the previously excluded 30%) and another 70% will get chosen, then repeat until the venue is full or the artist decides they cannot host more events. Those who don't get chosen have to suck it up and try again another time.
It's far from perfect, and as I said it can be extremely frustrating, but it has its good sides too.
Every comment I remember of him on HN threads were all hidden, downvoted and flagged. Now, to be perfectly clear, most of them were completely deranged and absolutely unrelated (usually a lot of stuff about god and bible etc etc) and he clearly was not sane of mind, but saying that he was treated "with respect and admiration" is a huge stretch.
People admired his work and acknowledged the existence of his project. People talked about it a lot and it was definitely interesting to see develop. However the person himself was definitely not welcome on HN (and I can't really fault that logic).
The net attitude of HN is one of admiration for Terry because he's more talented than most of us. I think the biggest thing that affected Terry on this site was being hell-banned.
I don't think that banning someone who repeatedly posts "completely deranged and absolutely unrelated" material is not treating them with respect. You don't have to look very far before he starts calling things CIA nigger brainwashing, and stuff like that.
This site was better with him on it. So what if he said a lot of crazy things? If you let a crazy guy offend you, I think that's a "you problem." He did not have the position or power to act on his prejudices; he wasn't hurting anybody in any real way. Posting here obviously meant something to him, since he kept coming back and creating new accounts. It was cruel to shut him out.
Propagation of harmful sentiments from anyone, but especially someone who (rightfully) inspires admiration will spread those further to people who are easily influenced or unable to separate a technical brilliance from someones capabilities in the rest of their life.
To be clear - Terry remains an inspiration to me, but I can understand the predicament of a moderator who needs to maintain a space.
People aware of Terry's condition might be willing to put up with his antics, but that's a minority. Everyone else just sees this crazy stuff being posted.
> Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
This is really not common and if anything it's something unheard of to me. I work in an English speaking company in Japan and most of my coworkers (who are fluent enough to speak English in technical conversations) would instantly switch back to Japanese to talk about technical things between them if there's no foreigner involved in the conversation. I've seen the same thing happen in my wife's company and other companies too. This is on top of the fact that the level of English education in Japan is very low (unfortunately) and these people who work in English-speaking companies are very much the exception. I don't think I've ever seen a single Japanese person favor using English over Japanese for technical discussions if they were ever given the choice.
^ this. I did a lot of integration work with japan over the years and all documentation is in Japanese. All communication via email and docs is Japanese. Every thing technical is in Japanese.
I struggled with Google translate because it’s like 40% accurate at translating technical related stuff.
