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If nothing else, the fact that many people write anything with ink and brush helps to sustain the calligraphy culture. Nowadays, to many (if not most) of them the new year kakizome ritual is the only occasion they practice brush calligraphy in an entire year.

Various businesses provide paid service called 見守りサービス to have someone (or a machine) check up on you. The idea is to detect health emergencies early enough and act on getting help, in case family members and neighbors can't. Not that that is the best option, but at least money can help to some extent.

It looks like this is what it does essentially:

                let luminance = (0.2126 * avg_r as f32 + 0.7152 * avg_g as f32 + 0.0722 * avg_b as f32) as u8;
                let character = match luminance {
                    0..=31 => '#',
                    32..=63 => '@',
                    64..=95 => '8',
                    96..=127 => '&',
                    128..=159 => 'o',
                    160..=191 => ':',
                    192..=223 => '*',
                    224..=255 => '.',
                };

https://github.com/thed24/ascii-gen/blob/main/src/converter....

There has been an RFC about it (for years).

"Remove .m. subdomain, serve mobile and desktop variants through the same URL" https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998

From WordNet:

> 1. skittish, flighty, spooky, nervous -- (unpredictably excitable (especially of horses))

(I didn't know the word skittish, and I figured this might help others, too.)

> 自作自演 (jisakujien ; self-made self-staged ; for example, used for the act of creating a staged situation and then acting as if it were genuine)

The original meaning was a screenwriter-actor performing the script they wrote, which is a perfectly fine thing to do. It can mean 'sockpuppeting', too, and that other use might be more common nowadays, though.

> (or whatever they are called these days, Google for Work?)

Gmail is currently branded as part of Google Workspace, and shows the Workspace logo upon sign in. It probably has been that way architecturarly for a long time, but I think they have made it more explicit relatively recently, at least for non-corporate users.

It looks like "Google for Work" is an old name of Google Workspace.

I don't think any fork was deleted. 3.5k forks as of now vs 3.4k forks in January: https://web.archive.org/web/20220129022012/https://github.co...

Many people won't notice some of their stars having disappeared, but many would be surprised to see their forks deleted without their consent, especially those that are not merely a mirror. People can have diverged forks after adding substantial changes without feeding them back to the original for a variety of reasons.

A lot of the cherry trees planted in Japan are clones, which causes synchronicity - the cherry trees in an area are grafted from a single, best tree found there, and thus bloom at the same time for the same duration, more or less. (At least that's how it's commonly understood, I don't know about the exact science into that.) That, I think, makes the blossom feel more short-lived than a non-synchronized blossom.

> やさしい料学

It seems like that's also a typo or scanno of 科学. Aside from the one letter, everything else about that book matches the bibliographic information of another book whose alternative title (or subtitle) is "やさしい科学": http://webcatplus.nii.ac.jp/webcatplus/details/book/isbn/978...

Are these public domain illustrations in the United States because they are works of the federal government or does the artist retain the copyright?

7 banned, 12 removed as sysops [1]

> We have banned seven users and desysopped a further 12 as a result of long and deep investigations into activities around some members of the unrecognized group Wikimedians of Mainland China

and 12 warned [2]

> I believe it was 12 other users who were contacted and asked to adjust their behavior to work within community policies, especially regarding "canvassing" and good faith collaboration with other users.

To put it in perspective, Chinese Wikipedia has 65 sysops (excluding the ones that have been removed).

[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... [3] https://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:用户列表&grou...

Related threads:

Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011

Wikipedia doesn't need your money (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946912

住民基本台帳収録変体仮名 (jūmin kihon daichō shūroku hentaigana, or Jūki-gana for short) is the character set specifically made for the administrative purposes of those local government registrars. I don't know what the actual computer system used there is based on, but it looks like Tron Code and Super Kanji support the character set. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Juki-Gana

The thing about hentaigana is that it's more or less an open set. I don't think there is the standard set of hentaigana that scholars agree upon. At a quick glance, juki-gana does not seem to be identical to Unicode's hentaigana set (https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1B000.pdf), although I'm sure the intersection is non-empty.

You are thinking about foreignization, which is more common (but still not really common) in the translation of literary fictions than that of subtitles. I think most movies don't do that because they target casual audience who is not ready to consume too much foreignization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignizati...

Not to disagree, but the mobile web site brought a significantly different user experience (for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean), and the mobile readership has been at least as large as the desktop for a long time. [1]

[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/total...

Why does CHI have so many best paper awards recipients each year, when other conferences usually have 1-3? Does CHI accept an exceedingly large number of papers? I would expect some consistency within a domain (although computer science as a domain is arguably broad and diverse).

I would guess many COVID stories that could be big were submitted, upvoted, and quickly flagged because they were deemed out of scope.

If they were not flagged, perhaps one or two could have been among the top 10. But even then I wouldn't be sure about that.

For comparison, "Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967) was among the top posts and not flagged, because of its historical significance (per dang's comment there). I don't think COVID was less significant, but there was no obvious point in time to focus among many related stories spanning over months, unlike the presidential election that had a single victory moment.

There is an RSS feed (linked at the bottom of the page): https://www.slowernews.com/rss.xml

I wonder how it will work against websites like http://neverssl.com (which helps me to log in to some wifi portals, HTTPS Everywhere shows the prompt for a temporary exception.)

I wonder if the Zoom interview was conducted in his native language. If not, he might have been trying to say "I learn from how Jesus founded Christianity and apply that to how I operate my company," which is a bit strange thing to say but not as creepy as "I'm Jesus."

It looks like Kumagai is (at least previously he said he was) a Christian. https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/29818?page=3

> In response to this latest report, TikTok has said “the current version of TikTok does not collect MAC addresses.”

... as opposed to saying "TikTok does not and has never collected MAC addresses."