koito17

All I get are train stations unless I decide to input the city instead of the street... but then the areas are no longer 30-minute walks!

Interesting failure mode, but I like the concept overall.

The law is somewhat vague. You have a "duty to make efforts" (努力義務) in rescinding your foreign citizenship after electing Japanese citizenship. The Ministry of Justice has never clarified its interpretation of 努力 (i.e. what counts as "making efforts"?) I am friends with a few Japan-US dual citizens who have done nothing after electing Japanese citizenship; they are essentially gambling on a gray area of law.

Note if you acquire Japanese citizenship afterwards (or never had a second citizenship in the first place), then 国籍法11条1項 automatically voids your Japanese citizenship at the time you obtain a foreign citizenship.

I accepted I was reading LLM output by the time I got to

   None are constexpr — debugging is a runtime concern.

I am not very experienced with C++, but runtime debug functions are one of the last things where I'd expect compile-time computations. Inlining? Sure. Doing anything else at compile-time? Not really.

The sentence feels like a remark about something a human reader is very unlikely to be thinking about.

Well-designed cryptographic systems are designed so that you can understand everything about the system and still not get inside.

It's pretty much the exact opposite of security through obscurity.

> It's going to be the banks first.

In Japan, this is already the reality. The FSA required brokerages to implement passkey authentication, and the effect is that it's no longer possible to have a brokerage account without a passkey. (Some brokerages, like Nomura Securities, will offer two separate client portals. The portal with money and trading-related functionality requires a passkey).

The thing that sucks a lot is that brokerages seem to also restrict the allowed software/hardware. Don't know the details, but none of my FIDO2 hardware keys were able to be used. I consistently use these hardware keys through WebAuthn, so I was surprised when my brokerage explicitly told me my hardware key is unsupported and I must use either Windows Hello or the iOS Passwords app.

The FSA's official explanation for mandating passkey implementation is that people kept falling for phishing attacks, and the attacks were getting too sophisticated thanks to "AI" or something.

I swear I've seen these "[Latest macOS release] does not appear in UNIX certification site" threads every year since the release of Big Sur in 2020.

It takes several months for the certification to appear on the site. What would be newsworthy is if we see a release next year without this release getting certification.

Even then, visual diffs were pretty flakey for web development, because one's OS and browser choice would slightly alter the exact pixels blitted to the screen. At least this was the case for the tests that would simply match pixels instead of computing a sort of visual hash.

It's also partly why some people preferred snapshot tests that compared the DOM tree instead, though that was brittle in other ways (e.g. tests would break if an application's frontend used a major UI library and an update to the library permuted the order of classes in some part of the HTML).

There's quite a few implicit assumptions in that.

In my case, I am double-taxed (both Japan and US side) on capital gains. Tax treaties reduce, but not eliminate, the extent of double-taxation.

Many US-based brokers do not allow Americans abroad to purchase mutual funds, so VFIAX is not a choice for me.

Maybe I can go with eMAXIS Slim All Country... Oh, but that is a PFIC under IRS rules and I'd be taxed on unrealized capital gains. So I guess no Japan-equivalents of VT for me. That's fine, I guess I'll just buy VT in my US-based brokerage account; but now I'm in a suboptimal spot with respect to monthly contributions, calculating JPY-denominated income tax on dividends, etc.

I even made an implicit assumption when I said "calculating JPY-denominated income tax on dividends". That assumes your tax status is permanent resident. If your tax status is non-permanent resident, then a decent financial advisor will recognize that only the extent of income remitted to Japan gets taxed, so VT distributing at all isn't an issue (until 5 years later). What should you do before the 5 year threshold is hit? etc. etc.

But yes, if you're born in America and plan to stay within the same state for the rest of your life, then a 100% automated setup that simply deposits $1,000/mo into VFIAX is probably fine. (But keep in mind, to most non-Americans, VOO is not really diversified compared to funds like VT).

Otherwise, there is value in consulting someone (or something) that regularly handles taxes and financial planning.

Users generally have no way to verify that a third-party provider, even if they advertise themselves as privacy-focused, will adhere to their own terms. This is similar to the issue of privacy-focused VPN providers that claim to not log user activity (and then end up leaking user activity). You can get proof of ~P, but rarely proof of P, and often times the proof of ~P is due to police raids, data breaches, etc., not something of the provider's volition.

What you can possibly audit is probably data sovereignty. For instance, I would not be surprised if Mistral's customers demand concrete evidence that their data is held within the European Union. But that is a distinct issue from training on input tokens.

GP's point is about "sending tokens to someone else's computer" versus "keeping the tokens locally". I think model capabilities are secondary.

In May of this year, I was running qwen3.6:35b-a3b on my MacBook (bought in 2024). Obviously not as fast as, say, running a model on Cerebras, but a year ago it wasn't really feasible to have a local model running on my 2024 laptop with vision support. (Concretely, I was passing apartment diagram pictures to Qwen and making it compare different apartments for which ones would feel the most spacious while optimizing for initial moving costs and other factors.)

This was back in May and I wouldn't be surprised if there have been significant improvements since then.

Overall, I think it's fair to compare a workflow like "use llama.cpp locally to upload some pictures and ask questions" to "open the ChatGPT app, upload pictures from your phone, and ask questions". Sure, you can't run a model like GPT-5.4 locally, but the model is mostly an implementation detail here. What a user will care about is: "when I go with the llama.cpp option, am I getting useful information from my conversations?"

It looks close to the kind of documentation artifacts GPT 5.6 Sol would generate for me.

That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.

The Japanese word used in the context of price lists would be something like 料金表 or 料金メニュー.

When I see "tariff", my mind only thinks of 関税 , and I was just as confused as you were. Turns out its just an item in a price schedule.

Finally got rid of Webpack in 2022, and now I'll be able to get rid of Babel, too.

It's a bit mesmerizing to think that Vite at the time was still "that newish tool the Vue folk use", and now it's pretty much the standard bundler for web frontend. Also the easiest one to configure and use (in my experience).

Similarly, I'm glad I don't have to deal with karma, jest, etc. anymore.

In Japan, the identity verification is quite strict to subscribe to a voice/text capable phone line. Still yet to get robocalls or spam texts. I'm sure they exist, but despite handing out my phone number to city hall and countless private businesses, I have yet to receive one.

On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead.

Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker.

Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.

That would surprise me. I don't recall having to change my iPhone's region after moving to Japan. Transport IC cards in Apple Pay have "just worked".

I am vaguely aware that some phone manufacturers silently remove certain NFC hardware (or disable some driver) in order to avoid paying Sony patent fees. Apple doesn't seem to do that, though.

Board members often have posts at multiple companies because of how little work they actually do.

Meanwhile most companies prohibit side jobs for us plebians (sorry, "non-executives".)

I remember a few years back when there was 2 major outages per month.

Thankfully this is encouraging me to stop working overtime for now and enjoy the rest of my night

All that achieves is companies introducing ads to boost revenue for next quarter's earnings.

For a concrete example: LINE (most widely-used messaging app in Japan) has paid subscriptions, and even the highest tier subscription doesn't reduce ads. Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.

Some people at my company take it to the extreme and let Codex run unattended overnight, bypassing permission for all commands. Running on the host, not even in a container or VM.

The devaluation didn't really get out of control until 2022 IME.

In 2021 you were still able to divide by 100 and not be far off in conversion. Typically traded between 105 ~ 115.

Nowadays the Yen is so weak that I unconditionally convert my whole paycheck to USD after paying rent. Even if risk-free interest rates between Japan and United States converge, there's just not much reason to hold Yen if you want to avoid losing purchasing power to inflation.

e.g. I can risk money in NTT stock for a meager 3.0% dividend yield. Or I can convert to USD and keep the cash in my brokerage account, where it earns 3.4% interest. If I want to raise the risk to similar levels as the NTT stock, I would be looking at utility company ETFs yielding up to 7% for the past few years. Of course, there is foreign exchange risk (e.g. 10% move down in USD/JPY and a year's worth of carry trade gains are eliminated). But if the fundamentals were there for a stronger Yen, then intervention wouldn't be necessary. So for now I'm exposing myself to FX risk for the chance at getting marginally better wealth preservation.

The Japanese name is actually 囲碁 (igo). 碁 (go) is just an abbreviation; I don't see it often in Japanese text, but for some reason the Anglosphere decided to adopt it.

囲 is a simplification of 圍, and 碁 is a Japanese-specific letter that roughly maps to 棋. If you read 圍棋 in Chinese, you get weiqi.

I've heard there's been a lot of redevelopment in Nagoya, in preparation for a possible future earthquake from the Nankai Trough.

Exactly one month ago, there was almost consecutive daily earthquakes in Kantō region. Always a good reminder the whole country lies on seismically active fault lines.

> This is like a comment a golem built to raise the S&P 500 would write.

That's neoliberalism for you.

They were looking at 16 variables, degree of about 10 in each one. That search space is simply too big for a plain bruteforce. So they did some sort of filtering to reduce the search space to a pool containing "possible counterexamples".

There was also a paper giving a lower bound of about 100 for possible counterexamples in that particular framework. Later raised to 108 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14178

I don't remember the details very well since this was back in 2015 and wasn't really involved in the research. Consider this to be some sort of telephone game between what I heard in 2015 and what I remember today.

A little over 10 years ago I remember meeting a postdoc who believed he had something close to a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture. He and another person was bruteforcing polynomials in about 16 variables, something like 80 - 700 terms each, using binary trees for mapping coefficients.

They were guessing, at the time, that the lower bound of a counterexample (P, Q) for max(deg(P), deg(Q)) would go up to 200.

To think that Claude Fable was able to find a counterexample in degree 7 is insane to me. We are truly in a new era.

Ironically, on the Japanese net, you'll find people complain about the "low range" of EVs compared to hybrids, meanwhile most people in the car-centric areas of Japan don't travel (let alone drive) outside of their own prefecture.

One complaint that I do think is valid is that many people don't live in a house with their own garage and 240V power line. i.e. dedicated home charging is impossible for many people.

Recently had to touch a Python project at work. Just setting up the editor needed me to use 2-3 tools out of: pyright, basedpyright, ruff, ty, mypy, and possibly other tools I'm forgetting that kind of do the same thing but throw errors in different parts of the codebase.

Also, for some reason Optional[T] became deprecated, just as the ecosystem finally embraced types ~3 years ago.

In fact, one my company's greenfield projects decided to use TypeScript instead of Python for the [surprisingly] more consistent tooling, and the fact that the big LLM providers all have official TypeScript SDKs anyway. Also, for agentic coding, LLMs don't seem noticeably worse at TypeScript than Python.

My experience can be summarized as:

- for some reason we need 2-3 static analysis tools just for typechecking

- no tool understands each other's comment directives

- each tool reports a different error in your codebase

- even big libraries (e.g. matplotlib) make half their functions return Any

- you'll be tempted to silence the "partially unknown type" warnings, and you'll have to do it for each tool that's running.

That's just the model quantum mechanics uses.

It doesn't mean "we believe reality works this way". It means "at extremely small scale, probabilistic models from QM best predict the behavior of electrons".

> approximately no one has heard of

Just cause it isn't used for webshit doesn't mean "approximately no one" has heard of it.

Lean is pretty much the most popular language mathematicians use today for computer-assisted proofs. More mature audiences may know about Rocq, Isabelle, etc., but Lean was already popular enough for a few people I know to have written their PhD theses on it about a decade ago.

I think GP is joking about a port to Lean because that would at least produce a formally verifiable output.

Many organizations, surprisingly, still do things like using Kubernetes with TLS terminated at the ingress. In that case, you just need the splitter in the same network as the nodes hosting the ingress controller. Or inspect the unencrypted traffic within the cluster.

It takes a non-trivial amount of work to set up a service mesh (and mutual TLS between services), so many k8s clusters end up with unencrypted traffic inside the cluster network.