"Taking Copilot out of the loop" if you ignore the massive ecosystems of Github, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.
Different CoPilot product. Typical Microsoft naming confusion.
Readit Newsnihonde commented on Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/zora_goron
nihonde commented on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline cnbc.com/2025/01/17/supre... · Posted by u/kjhughes
This is going to be an interesting experiment:
A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?
I remember pre-Musical.ly TikTok here in Japan, and it was MUCH better then. In fact, it noticeably degraded when Musical.ly was folded in.
American social media culture revolves around money and sex in a way that isn't as popular in Korea/Japan/S. Asia—roughly speaking, the original scope of TikTok's userbase, since Douyin has always kept Chinese users separate.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of garbage social media content in Asia, but it's more boomers and gen-z era that consume hentai/money flexing/politics/etc., so that nonsense was almost completely absent in the early days of TikTok, when the users were mostly Asian teenagers and young adults trading choreography, in-jokes, and showing off their video editing skills.
nihonde commented on How to design a house to last 1000 years constructionphysics.subst... · Posted by u/ddubski
I agree on that, although there are residential homes in Japan that implement energy efficient outer shell, while still keeping the Machiya look. There definitely is a preference in Japanese society for western style homes.
Most modern Japanese homes are not "western style" at all. They're usually built by large industrial concerns (e.g., Toyota, Sekisui, etc.) that prefabricate many components at scale. The process of building such a home in Japan begins with a company architect fitting their design system onto your lot. The price is fairly predictable, and relatively cheap—-under US$300K in most places. The home is designed with more or less the following priorities:
1. Safety
2. Ease of maintenance
3. Efficiency
4. Cost
And more recently, considerations for SDGs (sustainability goals) with respect to materials used.
Longevity is not a priority, as homes are expected to depreciate in value over roughly 20 years. There are many reasons for this, but my personal opinion is that industrialization has made it possible to upgrade the technology of the home at a pace and a price that favors rebuilding.
As for machiya and kominka, local governments like Kyoto have tried to intervene to preserve the traditional homes. The "no build" lots do not allow a property owner to build on anything other than the load-bearing structure for the old home. As a result, you have many empty lots and coin parking lots around Kyoto where the old home was unsalvageable or where the owner could not afford a renovation. To be honest, only tourists/foreigners would want to stay in a machiya for the novelty of it. Although they were marvelously engineered for their time, they tend to be rough living compared to the extremely easy and cheap prefab homes. There is also the problem of craftspeople who can maintain these old homes dying out, which adds to the cost of keeping them.
I don't think it's possible to attribute any of this to a general "Japanese" attitude, though. On the one hand, one of the most important and longest-lasting spiritual sites in Japan is Ise Jingu, which is rebuilt from scratch every 20 years as a Shinto ritual of renewal. On the other hand, you have some of the oldest and largest wooden structures in the world still standing in Nara.
As usual, it's complicated.
nihonde commented on How to design a house to last 1000 years constructionphysics.subst... · Posted by u/ddubski
"rigid steel structure"
Steel is springy. Tall steel-framed buildings and bridges routinely sway in wind, which is usually harmless to the structure but annoying to occupants. Unless you get harmonic oscillation, where the energy stored in the motion builds up, which can be a problem and has destroyed bridges. Much of seismic design involves connections which raise the resonant frequency of the structure so it can't oscillate at a low frequency with high amplitude. That's what those triangular reinforcement beams one sees in San Francisco really do. It's also what all those rectangular trusses under the Golden Gate Bridge do. Those were a retrofit.
Wood's flexibility usually causes problems at joints. Nailed joints are not very strong in tension. Most construction today in areas with earthquakes or high winds involves metal reinforcement of joints. There's a collection of galvanized sheet metal parts for that at any Home Depot.
Tension joints for wood are seen in classic Japanese construction, in boats, and in cabinetry. Not so much in modern houses, partly because they work better in hardwood. I wonder if, in the next installment, the author will discuss those.
> Tension joints for wood are seen in classic Japanese construction
Japan also has several wooden buildings that purport to be 1,000+ years old—although these situations inevitably lead to Ship of Theseus debates.
As my post was one of the first in this these threads, the topic had not yet gotten divisive. Moreover, my comment about moderation did not regard my comment but regarded the parent comment, which I felt made a substantive contribution and got downvoted for it for, I am guessing, ideological reasons.
Thanks, anyways. Ironic that they effectively "censored" my comment rather than engage with it.
Prompts a few thoughts for me: (1) coming to HN is like time-traveling ~10 years back, (2) HN today reminds of the late stages of after slashdot, digg, etc. peaked, and (3) decentralized projects have real incentives with "points" that mean something, so losing some silly HN points to moderation seems more meaningless than ever before.
You reach for Web3 when your requirements include: (a) self-sovereign ID/auth, and/or (b) hosted materials that can't be censored via a centralized hosting provider.
Horses for courses.
ps. Does he think Web3 is about storing data on the blockchain network? It's not. Ex. https://ceramic.network/
nihonde commented on Hayao Miyazaki prepares to cast one last spell nytimes.com/2021/11/23/t-... · Posted by u/cmsefton
Not surprising, but sort of disappointing that the writer thinks that modern Japanese culture so heavily defined by its interactions with the West, esp. from WWII. It's not that it's untrue or incorrect, it's just that Japan is more complicated than that. Lots of old paradoxes and influences that don't really lend themselves to a neat thesis. You're doomed to fall short, like when you try to explain a beautiful dream to someone who didn't see it.
nihonde commented on Decentralized data storage has finally landed storj.io/... · Posted by u/alessandroetc
Bad memory? The first ever EURUSD exchange rate was 1.2034 in December of 2003. Today's rate is 1.2042.
It has most certainly not been going down for a long time.
Now do BTCEUR and BTCUSD.
Goods and services will never be priced in BTC because BTC fluctuates by the hour and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The only way I can see this happening is if you literally eliminate all other currencies, including other cryptocurrencies, because there will always be currencies competing with BTC (and not without good reason).
Classic example of buying a good using BTC: say it costs 100 satoshis. By the time I click and purchase, and by the time the BTC arrives at the seller's address, the value may have changed for the better (BTC price goes down - hence I paid "less") or for the worse (BTC price goes up - hence I paid "more"). For the most extreme example, imagine how people that bought a pizza with Bitcoin when it was worth 5$ feel right now. A 15$ pizza in 2009 or whatever is worth ~150K USD now.
You’re measuring everything in dollars. But there are already economies that exist outside the realm of dollars. And who says the future belongs to the US dollar? In fact, historical reserve currency cycles strongly suggest otherwise, not to mention the untested waters of current monetary policies, a failing GDP, and waning political gravitas...
" Bitcoin is a way for me to step outside that debt I did not want or deserve"
Try paying your taxes in Bitcoin. Then you'll find that it has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with avoiding having your assets stripped by the IRS.
You want to live in a jurisdiction, then you pony up the tokens that jurisdiction demands. Or you lose your liberty and everything you own.
Sure, but what happens when that jurisdiction’s currency can no longer put food on the tables of its law enforcers?