mratzloff
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
Typing a Japanese word or phrase is just like typing in English, with the exception of selecting the appropriate kanji from a list (no mouse or stylus required). An experienced typist can do this very quickly, on a physical keyboard or on a smartphone.
For a word like "Japanese" (language), i.e., Nihongo or 日本語, it's actually fewer keystrokes than in English: 5 vs. 8, or 9 if you count the space afterward since Japanese doesn't have the same spacing requirements.
In any event, the Internet changed things. Before, it was very difficult to light the entire country on fire.
With the Internet, and social networks in particular, that has changed. The reach is unprecedented; it is a difference of kind, not just magnitude. Anyone can reach very specific groups of people and incite hatred and violence through targeted propaganda campaigns. There's more than one reason rhetoric and mass violence has increased since the late '90s (on a national scale), but I believe this is one of the biggest contributors.
So many HN replies amount to "we all agree this is a problem, but we can't fix the entire problem perfectly, and it has some hypothetical drawbacks, so we shouldn't even try."
(Never mind that as a result of inaction in the face of disinformation and hate speech our societies are rotting from the inside, and many, many real-world atrocities are being carried out as a direct result.)
This is, by the way, a fundamentally conservative viewpoint. Cf. gun violence, homelessness, living wage, etc. Just because something is a complex issue with imperfect solutions doesn't mean we have permission to do nothing.
The Go authors have explicitly stated they don't do things until they figure out the right way to do them. No language gets it all right out of the gate, but Go got pretty close with e.g. its standard library.