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asiachick

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Japan was world-beating in what categories 30 years ago (1993)? It wasn't computers. Cars? Toyota is still #1 in the world. What else? Phones (no).

Japan has dozens of payment systems but how many of them are competing outside Japan?

Why would they? Japanese companies speak Japanese and make things for Japanese. The exceptions are just that, exceptions.

And to be clear, my point is why is Japan called out for this? Where's the article that Germany is a failure because they don't have a global payments competitor? How about France? India? China? Why is only Japan that gets this special "you're a failing country because you don't have a global payment offering"

I like all the rebuttals but the top still strikes me as mostly unsubstantiated claims

That (gerontocracy) in turn has caused Japanese companies to fall behind foreign rivals as they miss technological revolution after revolution — microprocessors, smartphones, semiconductor foundries, battery-powered cars, etc.

smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft. Japan didn't lose here because of anything unique to Japan.

Battery-powered cars: Same as above. Tesla won (for a while) and everyone else Ford, Chevy, BMW, Mercedes, etc all lost. Japan arguably led for years with the Prius. But again, looking at the all car companies there's nothing special about Japan here

Microprocessors: Is this even market? There's 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don't get what makes Japan's "failure" here special.

semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country? Is it just because they're in Asia and Taiwan, Malaysia, and China have been the winners?

There's also this idea that there's a lack of startups. I have no idea about the numbers but living in Tokyo before the pandemic there was no shortage of startup meetup and incubators. Yahoo Japan has an open cafe with lots of people "starting up"

https://lodge.yahoo.co.jp/

Amazon and Google both have places (I know, not Japanese companies but they are targeting Japanese entrepreneurs)

https://www.campus.co/tokyo/

https://aws-startup-lofts.com/apj/loft/tokyo

And the Mercari meetup

https://www.meetup.com/ja-JP/MercariDev/

Of course it's my anecdotes vs someone else's, I have no numbers but I went to tons of startup meetings, trade show like events, etc.... I watched several large bitcoin startups um, startup. I saw what must have been 11 different payment system appear (PayPay, D-Pay, ...), as just 2 categories.

someone will turn this into politics at some point. Someone will promote that reds use Android and Windows PCs, blues use iPhone and Macs. Then you'll need to fall in line or get cancelled.

not looking forward to it.

I'm more of a camelCase person than a snake_case, probably because I've been writing lots of JavaScript for the last 10 years. But, .... You could argue that camelCase is culturally insensitive given that plenty of languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Sanskrit, etc) have no concept of case.

Many modern computer languages (JavaScript, Rust, Swift, ...) allow non-ascii identifiers so if you pick camelCase, then someone writing Japanese, Chinese, Korean has no way to obey. That doesn't mean snake_case would be all that better in those languages though.

    var 画面_幅 = ...;
    var 窓_縦 = ...;
The point is, both camelCase and snake_case are a thing based around western languages.

It's also incredible and probably one of the many reasons they are so successful in Japan is the don't charge more for products out of a vending machine. A typical vending machine might sell a drink for 100-150 yen. The same drink at the store will at 3-7 yen less. Vs, Here in the USA, most vending machine raise the price 50%-300%

Songtell 4 years ago

every song I tried was hilariously wrong

all I wanna do by Sheryl Crow

saving all my love by Whitney Houston

cecilla by Paul Simon

I am curious how much regulation plays a part. I had a friend in Belgium running a 2 person indie game dev company. They needed to hire an artist and mentioned all the regulations in place making is very hard to actually hire.

Basically, it seemed like they were on the hook forever (very long) regardless of how well their company was doing. I don't know all the details and I'm not suggesting in any way that they should have tried to take advantage of anyone. Only that it would seem to me that they should be able to be up front with the artist (we're a small company, we have no income but some funding, there's no guarantee our product will be successful, we can pay you a reasonable and legal salary, but we can't guarantee your employment for more than 3 months. Do you except?)

But AFAIK that was not a option. If it was more like, if they couldn't guarantee employment forever then they were not allowed to hire.

That's an exaggeration as I don't know all the regulation. My only point was it sounded like it made it very hard to run a startup.

Not to squash your enthusiams but this has been done many times in the past and it's just never worked out. I think one reason is, except for a few programmers, the average user just doesn't want smart sketching. Sketching is simple but add all the meta tasks and suddenly it's no longer remotely simple.

Not quite the same but there was even a commerical vector illustration app that tried to add a bunch of "smart" programmable features back in the early 90s. It failed: https://www.google.com/search?q=intellidraw+adlus

Of course that doesn't mean someone won't get it right and compelling eventually. Me, I'd guess it would take some serious ML and maybe voice/gesture recongintion for it to really work for more than a few geeks.

No, because the charms come from the culture and the culture will never be replicated elsewhere. Things like, almost no one steals, people return dropped wallets, people don't destroy vending machines (vandalism is low), people try not to annoy others (few house parties, instead rent a bar, practice music in rented music rooms, not at home, it's legal to drink in public but no one does it except at parks and no one gets rowdy, etc... etc...

just to set expectations. it's small museum. just 2 rooms. it is amazing and you probably will not be comfortable eating sushi, sashimi, basashi for a fews days after :p

This sounds pretty whiny given there are plenty of apartments much smaller that people live in just fine in places like Japan, Hong Kong and I'm sure more.

Here's 12000 apartments the same size or smaller within a 40 minute commute of Shibuya Tokyo

https://www.chintai.net/list/?cf=0&ct=0&m=0&m=1&m=2&m=3&jk=0...

People live in them just fine because their expectations are different. It's like most students don't complain when living in dorms. Yes it's not the same, but the point is the expectation is different so it's fine. Similarly, I lived in hotels for 1~3 months at a time several times, often one after another (no larger place in between). Not a problem because my expectations matched.

It's not just netflix. I hate the my Google TV pops up with ads for media. My PS5 boots straight into the store. At least my Apple Tv mostly doesn't shove ads in my face though my iPhone seems try try to shove Apple Music and/or Apple TV+ at me now and then

I hate them. It's 100x easier to browse a paper menu than the scroll through 2-5 dishes per screen, and often have to navigate sub menus trying to find what's available.

I didn't come to a restaurant to fiddle with my phone for 5 to 10 minutes

You don't have talk to anybody in the whole process.

That's a negative not a positive.

Imagine the environmental impact 31250 phones a hour must cause. All the material that went into them had to be mined, transported, smelted, carried to a factory, assembled, then sent to 1000s of locations by 1000s of vehicles.

Of course it's the same for all physical products.

State of CSS 4 years ago

Not my experience at all. It doesn't matter how well written a spec is. No tests = no conformance. End of story. Most people can't hold an entire spec in their head or think through all the ramifications of the edge cases. Even the spec writers. I work on several specs. I work with people who work on specs. They're all mortal. No test = divergence. Always and without fail.

State of CSS 4 years ago

Did you even bother to look which browser implemented the features first? Will you update your priors based on what you find?

State of CSS 4 years ago

crapping on tables was arguably correct. flexbox and grid allow for responsive designs (work on phone and desktop). Table based layouts do not.

A society doesn't have to trust minorities to be a high trust society. Japan and Korean are arguably high trust societies but they clearly have lots issues with racism to "outsiders".

That is not an excuse for racism. It's just saying your points have nothing to do with high trust or not high trust