Morgawr

Wouldn't that be a biased view based on the fact that foreigners are the ones more likely to travel?

Nope, I see people with luggage on trains all the time, especially the Narita and Haneda train lines (obviously). Locals too.

> 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.

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.

My recommendation:

- (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.

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.

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).

> 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.

I'm just like you, I have so many memories as a kid playing with my parents (mostly my dad) and my sister. From the age of 3-4, I remember my dad coming home with a new PC (didn't know what a PC was back then), "helping" him set it up, trying out games (mostly MS Paint) with him, etc. I remember playing "teaching" my dad to play with pokemon cards. I remember a lot of evenings we spent together playing Doom II, Monkey Island, Tomb Raider, and a lot of other computer games (I remember my sister would press the "shoot" key, my dad the arrow keys to move around, and I was in charge of pressing numbers 1-9 to swap weapons in Doom).

I help around Japanese language learning communities and one of the core tenets of a successful "language learning career" is being able to enjoy doing stuff with the language without necessarily trying to learn the language. Learning the language becomes a byproduct of having fun with it.

For this reason, I have this kind of conversation almost daily with people asking for help in studying or just ways to "find motivation", etc. I always ask them "Why are you learning Japanese?".

The amount of answers I get that revolve around the idea of "I want to get better at it" always amaze me. I'm the kind of person that just does things because I want to have fun. I learned Japanese because I enjoy doing stuff in Japanese. I never cared about learning Japanese, it just happened that doing so made it fun for me in the process. And yet there's people out there whose entire goal of learning Japanese is to "learn Japanese"... I will personally never understand that mentality myself, it's very puzzling.