stringsandchars

> That's a horseload of bullcrap.

I agree it'd be hard for almost any other country to match that general sense of "safety" in Japanese society - we've probably all read the stories about wallets full of cash being dutifully handed in to the lost property office, and so on.

But the idea that Spanish towns are seething with pickpockets and everyone is creeping around in fear is also "bullcrap", imo.

My family is from Spain and I've spent a lot of time living and visiting there. Before she passed away, my 90+ year-old mum was out with her friends every single evening - playing cards, walking around the streets, mixing it up with families and small children strolling and playing outside long into the night.

I'm pretty amazed some robbers somehow knew your alarm was off that one time you had to rush out. That was pretty bad luck.

> It's a concept that's difficult to replicate elsewhere, but Lydon compares it to what made old Main Street America so special. Designing at a people-first scale pays off. "The smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access, a feeling of safety and community for all ages… it's hard to overstate how well this all works."

Honestly, even though I love the idea of Japan and the idealized vision of Japan that's often presented in the media, I can't help thinking that a lot of this stuff can be found much closer to home in Europe. The BBC didn't need to go all the way to Tokyo - they could find this in pretty much any Spanish city.

I think the only wise thing Elon Musk ever said was "Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, 'What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?'"

> Kindle hardware is significantly better and cheaper. If you don't mind tinkering get a kindle and jailbreak it to remove ads and add koreader.

Because Amazon were increasingly locking-down their systems - and also because they are all-round shits - I decided to abandon the ecosystem having been a customer since the days they only sold books.

I have owned two Paperwhites, two Oasis devices, and a Kindle Scribe. I sold all of them last year and bought a Kobo Libra Colour.

I get WAY more joy from reading on the Kobo. I love buying books from the Kobo store (yes I know they also have DRM) - and I'm buying and reading WAY more on the Kobo than I was at the end of my time with Amazon.

Every time I buy yet another book on the Kobo Store I feel the thrill of sticking it to the horrible, anti-user shits at Amazon.

> pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering

While I understand people pirating movies - there are hundreds of movies I'd happily pay to watch, but which are literally unavailable to me because of some arbitrary 'regional' restriction imposed by the distributors. But I can't think of a single book that isn't available in most parts of the world - certainly they're available wherever a Kobo is for sale.

So how are new books going to be published in the future, if people like you don't pay writers for their work? Would you like your work to be pirated, so you wouldn't be able to even buy another Kobo?

Disappointed to see that the first reactions on HN are so dismissive.

I'm both amazed and really pleased to see anyone attempting to launch a totally new scanner in 2025, and genuinely hoping the actual scans are really made at the resolution and color-depth claimed in the text: too many recent scanners are simply upscaled, lower bit-depth devices marketed with exaggerated specs.

I also have a Nikon Coolscan 9000, so I'm not immediately in the market for this. But I don't expect the Coolscan to last forever, and the Firewire connections on the machine are already abandoned by Apple, who chose not to support the cables in their latest Operating System - so eventually I won't be able to connect it to a new computer.

OTOH - partly playing devil's advocate here - I'm dealing with several bank and inheritance-related issues in the UK from my home in Sweden now, and needing to do pretty much ANYTHING with an authority in the UK feels like stepping back into the 17th century.

There's a constant requirement for paperwork to prove who I am - always in the form of items that are 100% digital nowadays in the Nordic countries (like a "utility bill" or a "credit card statement" - on paper, posted by snail-mail to my home address!)

These then need to be 'notarized' by a legal person - with seals and embossed stamps before they can be used to identify me. It's medieval.

I'm genuinely hoping that this is just an early beta omission because, contrary to the very limited use-case presented in the article (iPods) Firewire is still an essential part of many professional workflows: an enormous amount of very expensive high-end music-studio equipment uses Firewire, as well as film scanners such as the CoolScan range from Nikon, that still outperform camera scanning - even using modern 'medium format' cameras like the Fuji GFX100.

Replacing that equipment would be extremely expensive - disincentivizing buying new Mac equipment.

My work really flourished during WFH. I was actually headhunted back to a place I'd worked before with the (verbal) promise they were now and always would be 'remote first'. During the last 2 years my productivity has exploded. I get up, make myself a coffee, and start working at 6am. Then after a shower and a walk in the forest, I work a full day of intense and focussed work. I've been happy, fit, fulfilled. I've often visited the office and love the social interaction. I've often worked weekends and evening because it's been fun, and I've felt loyalty to the company. Then 8 weeks ago the CEO suddenly announced RTO.

But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

We're living in a mad world.