I learned today that 7/11 in Japan wasn't a pure licensing play but a technology enabled business model disruption of large grocery stores and mom-and-pop convenience stores. The launch of 7/11 Japan introduced: franchising, JIT inventory management, and centralized POS terminals to the Japanese retail market. The linked article explains this in more detail.
You can just implement Prosemirror from one of the greatest web teams on the planet and get pretty much every text editing nicety for free - markdown rendering, document version history, blocks, tables. If you choose to deal with prosemirror-collab-cmmit, yjs, or automerge you also get eventually consistent multiplayer. All the "I wish this was a native app" people don't understand the cathedrals that have been built on the web.
One of the things we got really lucky with is that Claude Code and not the ChatGPT app won the war for the defining AI product and it runs on your filesystem. There's a different reality where everything had to go through the API on a closed app layer and we're all begging OpenAI to add XYZ endpoint to their platform.
Anthropic is now racing to close this gap because they realize there's no lock-in. If the product is just .md files with hierarchy, you can drop any harness and intelligence on top of it. It is interoperable by default, possibly not even by intention.
We should do everything possible to stop the great lock-in that they'll attempt in the next 18 months.
We are all ignoring the obvious solution to this. One of the benefits of being a global hegemon is having close allies who are good at things we are not.
Intel fell behind on semiconductors and now Phoenix is turning into an outlying suburb of Taipei while the children of TSMC engineers are making the local school district look like magicians.
All the US has to do is subsidize one of the Korean heavy conglomerates, probably Hyundai, and get them to start pumping out cargo boats out of say Louisiana or Georgia with the promise of a government buyer. This problem goes away by 2032.
It is also happening to restaurants and HVAC installers and plumbing businesses. They just got around to buying those up a little more recently. We should expect the price and service consequences to start showing up in the next 5-10 years.
N=1 disclaimer but this also happened for me with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for my peanut allergy, soft boiled eggs for my raw egg yolk allergy, and shrimp based broths for my shrimp allergy.
Unfortunately it has not yet worked for tree nuts or bivalves but perhaps someday a switch will flip inside me.
It takes much longer than 70 seconds to heat up a 12 inch stainless steel or carbon steel skillet on a home burner to a point where it can be used to fry an egg or sear a chicken thigh, both of which are things a home cook may do with some frequency.
They did encrypt the vaults. The problem is that for accounts that were opened before 2017 the used an encryption algorithm that can be cracked with modern hardware. Not a typical desktop GPU, but someone with some firepower could pick an account and crack the master password in a reasonable length of time (on the order of weeks/months).
Roosevelt Island isn't car free, but if you're willing to accept 15mph max speeds, no through traffic in exchange for living in NYC with some of the most incredible views it's a nice place to be.
Your guess that this is driven by a SaaS is built around assumptions of how process and repetition is structured in the West and its labor markets but this doesn't hold in China.
In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct.
There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form.
edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
Echoing this to say I took a full two years off and came back to a 30k raise and that too as a product manager - meaning no hard skills to show in a leetcode type setting. The right team will always understand why you had to take a break. In my case, the first year was for post burnout travel and personal time, the second to recover from a difficult bout of covid. No one blinked at the situation.
OP, if your financial position allows it, consider taking as much as six months off. I don't know what part of the world you are, but a big change in geography and culture and people around you will probably help break your rut. Consider taking a long trip out to somewhere affordable and sunny and give yourself permission to do nothing but walk around.
Email is my profile bio if you want tips on how to plan something like this.
This is a problem in many places, but it is absolutely not a problem in Korea which adds housing units in every one of its metro areas at a rate that would make community approval boards in the United States pass out.
Seoul has a population of eight million. In the five years between 2015 and 2020, it added two hundred thousand housing units, and that rate is only going up.
Not the type of book whose review I would expect to see here. The reviewer was evocative enough for me to pick up a used copy on Amazon. Thanks for sharing.
1. The heart is a giant muscle and needs balanced sodium and potassium to function. There are electrolyte blends in the market designed for fasting to help with this.
2. You're insufficiently hydrated because you've reduced your drinking intake or haven't replaced the water you would get in your food itself.
3. The body is in a state of hunger and alertness. Your sympathetic nervous system is ratcheted up in awareness of this and in search for possible food. To calm this down, practice diaphragmatic breathing exercises.
Tokyo summers are miserable, as are the ones in Seoul and New York City. I have lived in all three and every July/August I wonder if this is the year I start cooling off in Bogota for a month.