> Pretty much every hotel in Japan has a laundry machine, although I don't know of any suites that include one, unless you're going for a managed apartment.
Which is insanely expensive compared to just going down the street to a normal coin laundromat. They are pretty much anywhere (at least in most big cities) and very quick and cheap. You can pay 500 yen at a laundromat, or 5000 yen at your hotel laundry room.
The person you are replying to never said that Berlusconi was a fascist (he wasn't), just that his rise to power helped enable the far right populism and legimitized/emboldened a lot of fascist thinkers. That's pretty much a fact.
When it comes to art (audio or visual especially) iterating over a concept with some air of "generality" and "good enough" can have very interesting emerging properties. You get a "vibe" for what you want, but you might not have a perfectly clear idea of the entire composition until you actually see it in front of you, and then you iterate over that.
When I write a song I usually just noodle on my guitar with some pre-programmed drums in the background, I just play whatever comes to mind at the time, record it, then listen back to it, change a few things, add a few accents, decide to add another guitar line, maybe shift in fifths or sevenths to add more voices, add a few instruments that fade in and out like strings or brass, etc.
Some people might have more methodical approaches to art, and that's fine too, but in my case it's absolutely a 100% exploration effort about stuff that I don't even know I want until I see it in front of my eyes. These tools are amazing for this.
- (free) set up google sheets (not sure if this is required but that's what I do)
- (free) run an scheduled appscript bound to that sheet with regular intervals
- make it scrape the page (it's just javascript, you can do get requests, etc)
- Have it scrape a webarchive of the page you want to compare (not need to persist state or run a database, etc) and have it check the differences with the current page
- Have it send you an email if there's changes
It's totally free, takes no time to set up, and is relatively effortless. It can even send you alert on failures etc. I do something like this for my reading tracker where I crawl various sites (like amazon, etc) and RSS feeds for new releases of books/series I read and collect them in a dynamic spreadsheet.
I would recommend not using it to do any kind of even simple calculations. It's VERY bad at it but what is dangerous is that it makes the answer look subtly plausible.
I've tried to use it to calculate averages between 10 or so numbers and every time I ask it the same exact question I get an "average" number back that looks plausible but is slightly different every time. Then I whip out the calculator and measure it myself and it's an answer that ChatGPT never gave me.
It's *really* dangerous to use this to do any kind of important calculations like financial stuff.
> In a week of testing, I have yet to see ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in either English or Japanese.
I've seen it make mistakes in Japanese in the very first prompt I gave it (which also answered incorrectly)[0].
I don't know why people are convinced ChatGPT is good with languages, I've been trying stuff with Japanese and most of the time it's just incredibly wrong to the point of being counterproductive to anyone who's trying to learn the language or practice translation.
What it is good at is approximating human language in a fluent-looking manner (which is incredibly impressive, I agree with you on that), but it's TOO GOOD at bullshitting its way through most explanations to the point where it will look natural and fluent in a different language if you're not very skilled at it or a native speaker and I've seen people who are very fluent in Japanese get tricked into believing some Japanese wordsoup that was spat out by ChatGPT. I'm impressed by the technology, I'm scared by the legion of people who will just blindly trust this garbage, honestly.
This is actually how they do it in Japan. They love the lottery system and as a customer it's honestly a huge pain in the ass but once you see the kind of scalping and sleazy tactics that go on overseas you kinda start to appreciate it.
There's a few ways it is implemented and not all artists/venues do all of these but things I've seen are:
- Priority purchase for "fan club" registered members. Most artists have a LINE group fan club with a yearly subscription (like $50 or whatever), then if you are in this group, you get priority access to that artist's events. This means if you're a "real" fan you get to access tickets before everyone else.
- Lottery system based on price "bands". I've seen a few artists let the fans decide how much they want to pay based on tiers. Months before the event, the artist will send out a survey with price ranges you can choose (only one) like: $10, $15, $30, $50, $90 and then seats will be allocated based on a priority level as a self-chosen value. So if there's 5 people who chose $90, 10 people who chose $50, 30 people who chose $30, 200 people who chose $15, and 1000 people who chose $10, if the venue can only host 250 people then 5 + 10 + 30 + 200 (= 245) people will get in at their price, and only 5 remaining people will get in at $10 price point.
- Totally random lottery based on "waves". X people will apply to wave 1, and out of those X people let's say only 70% will get chosen. Then the artist/venue decides on a more approachable size and might host a second wave, another X people will apply to that second wave (including the previously excluded 30%) and another 70% will get chosen, then repeat until the venue is full or the artist decides they cannot host more events. Those who don't get chosen have to suck it up and try again another time.
It's far from perfect, and as I said it can be extremely frustrating, but it has its good sides too.
Every comment I remember of him on HN threads were all hidden, downvoted and flagged. Now, to be perfectly clear, most of them were completely deranged and absolutely unrelated (usually a lot of stuff about god and bible etc etc) and he clearly was not sane of mind, but saying that he was treated "with respect and admiration" is a huge stretch.
People admired his work and acknowledged the existence of his project. People talked about it a lot and it was definitely interesting to see develop. However the person himself was definitely not welcome on HN (and I can't really fault that logic).
Because a lot of stuff you read online is made up, misleading, wrong, or even all three. Either on purpose or not. The most insidious stuff is what "seems plausible" but isn't, it's how you get stuff like common myths and misconceptions[0]. Shouting "source?" at every article is not pleasant and may sound annoying, but I think we should respect people who question things (or simply want to dig more) rather than pushing back asking for "why". The pursuit of (true) knowledge in and on itself is something that shouldn't be questioned, especially in this technological age.
I'm just like you, I have so many memories as a kid playing with my parents (mostly my dad) and my sister. From the age of 3-4, I remember my dad coming home with a new PC (didn't know what a PC was back then), "helping" him set it up, trying out games (mostly MS Paint) with him, etc. I remember playing "teaching" my dad to play with pokemon cards. I remember a lot of evenings we spent together playing Doom II, Monkey Island, Tomb Raider, and a lot of other computer games (I remember my sister would press the "shoot" key, my dad the arrow keys to move around, and I was in charge of pressing numbers 1-9 to swap weapons in Doom).
I help around Japanese language learning communities and one of the core tenets of a successful "language learning career" is being able to enjoy doing stuff with the language without necessarily trying to learn the language. Learning the language becomes a byproduct of having fun with it.
For this reason, I have this kind of conversation almost daily with people asking for help in studying or just ways to "find motivation", etc. I always ask them "Why are you learning Japanese?".
The amount of answers I get that revolve around the idea of "I want to get better at it" always amaze me. I'm the kind of person that just does things because I want to have fun. I learned Japanese because I enjoy doing stuff in Japanese. I never cared about learning Japanese, it just happened that doing so made it fun for me in the process. And yet there's people out there whose entire goal of learning Japanese is to "learn Japanese"... I will personally never understand that mentality myself, it's very puzzling.
Surely there is a huge difference in getting a one-time amount of "extra" money (which most people would see as a "present") and knowing you'll keep receiving the same amount of money regularly every month for a few years. Furthermore, I clearly remember when we got the covid assistance money a lot of it was to incentivise local spending to support local businesses (at least it was here in Japan, I admit I'm not American so the message maybe was different over there).
>because of an immigration system that keeps foreigners from immigrating for work
Okay so let me dispel this myth. I don't know when it started, how, and where, but Japan is not that hard to immigrate into if you have a job or are a student enrolled in a Japanese school. The biggest issue is probably the language and the fact that most jobs are in Japanese, but if you speak Japanese (or can find an English-speaking job) then it's not that hard to immigrate into Japan. Work visas are pretty easy to obtain. Permanent residency is relatively easy to obtain too, and even better, citizenship is even easier to obtain (although you have to renounce your former citizenship). With that in mind, the US are objectively harder to immigrate into compared to Japan, on paper at least.
Which brings me to...
>and in part because of lots of systemic racism
I think the main issue of Japan is just cultural and the language itself. A lot of what can come across as racism is just a misunderstanding of societal expectations and behavior. Language barriers are really hard to overcome and Japanese is one of the hardest language to learn if you come from an English speaking background (or most European languages, really). The fact that most people in Japan don't speak English well, and that they are a culture that is significantly different from a lot of the west doesn't help.
And yes, there is still quite a bit of sexism and racism (although I'd argue the latter is more from a position of "unknown" rather than actual hatred/disdain). Stuff is improving fortunately, but it takes time.
This said, I don't think racism and xenophobia as a whole, or the country's own immigration policies, are what are keeping Japan so non-diverse.
source: Live and work in Japan, speak Japanese. This is obviously just my opinion.
What if some people that would usually be in the group that enjoy playing table tennis realize they actually want to run a marathon and they find out that most marathon gear is only built to help group A run better? What if there were shops that sold marathon gear but there is limited supply and since 9 out of 10 customers are group A people then those few group B that would like to buy the gear cannot because it's always sold out? What if I specifically started selling gear saying that 50% of it was reserved for group B to help them participate in marathon and that I cannot sell it to group A people? That's clearly discrimination, isn't it? And yet...
The problem is that there's so many variables in this equation that it can't simply be resolved in a simple "racism bad" or "discrimination bad" and "if they really wanted to they could but in reality they don't want to". It's a bit more complicated than that.
The implication might be obvious because that might be the most immediate solution to an evident problem. Just because the analogy works and you don't like the (obvious) solution it doesn't mean we should throw out the baby with the bathwater in the process.
That's not what they are suggesting. That's what you came up with as a solution for the problem which they presented. You're arguing against your own conclusion.
> the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software
The harm is not the "embarrassment" of seeing someone in the likeness of yourself (or your son, your friend, your partner, etc) doing something shameful. The harm is the fact that people are very likely to believe it is true and it's not a fake obviously edited photo or video.
You can disagree on the seriousness of the harm or risk or danger or whatever but I think the distinction between an obviously silly/embarrassing fake (a puppet, papier mache, badly done photoshop picture) and a realistic convincing deepfake video is pretty obvious. They aren't even in the same ballpark.
> IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
This is also a really good point and I agree it's a danger.
