torisima

I live in Japan. I usually have no trouble finding public restrooms or places to throw away trash. When necessary, I use the facilities at train stations.

Exactly. You can do it entirely with Cloudflare. Even if you limit yourself to what's available on the free tier, there's a surprisingly wide range of things you can build.

That is absolutely correct.

For applications requiring simultaneous writes from multiple programs (concurrency) or ACID transaction properties, using Markdown files as a substitute for a database is undoubtedly an anti-pattern and entails a risk of data corruption.

The weak yen has certainly made Japan feel much cheaper for foreign visitors in recent years. But even before that, the general price level was lower than in many Western cities.

Also, if you're trying to save money as a local, moving just 3–4 train stops away often makes a noticeable difference in rent or hotel prices.

Wouldn't it also be difficult for Grok to monetize through ads like OpenAI or enterprise customers like Anthropic?

That is certainly true. There is a subtle difference between building a company that becomes attractive to acquirers and building one with the primary goal of being acquired. If the latter drives your decisions, you may optimize for acquisition criteria rather than customer value, which can take you away from PMF.

In that case, even if using a service violates its terms of service, distilling its AI output is not necessarily illegal under the law.