tiredofsametab

I don’t use a smartphone enough to worry about it. If I am using my phone, most of the time it’s either Anki, Google Maps, or, like you mention, banking/government stuff.

Texting via SMS (or whatever it is these days) isn’t really a thing in Japan, either, which makes things more difficult especially as I despise talking on the phone. If, for example, I’m at the supermarket and wife remembers something she needs, getting that message is good

I was redhat/mandrake of which neither worked well on my PC, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and mint (playing with distros like LoaF at various points).

I got started on Linux at home from the valley of despair on early-2000s Gentoo. It wasn’t that bad, but I did have a lot more time on my hands being too poor to go out most of the time.

I just put mint on a laptop yesterday; got no time for it anymore

well, I’m snipped so that’s not a problem, but if we decided to for some reason adopt, they probably wouldn’t love it. I wonder if tabbed browsing would ever go away and it would be a surname based on something that everyone forgets (there are more obscure examples but for example Cooper, Cobbler, Fletcher, Bowyer, Tyler, Taylor, Brewster, etc.)

My brain added an ‘n’ to the first word of “waking universe” and I think it still works

Japan really likes it’s foam (7:3 beer to foam is considered best). They even have cans where most of the top pops off and it foams up to a head (I hate those). I was always the guy who would order it without foam at my local. One of the half-Japanese staff was the same. I don’t care for the texture (and younger, poorer me didn’t care for what I saw as a waste of money). The only good thing I’ve heard is it can keep the beer fresher in the glass for longer, but I was never a slow drinker.

(Mostly) very good public transit in big cities and even in some smaller areas.

I personally still love to see the mountains. I grew up in a place scraped flat by glaciers in the US and seeing the mountains on a couple of sides of me every day here in Japan still feels really neat and inspiring, even a decade in.

I think VK is still around which I also think is Russian.

mixi might still just be owned by a Japanese company, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some US company gobbled it up. You need a Japanese phone number (or maybe phone short mail address from a Japanese carrier) to use it and no one I know has used it in many, many years, but it technically still exists.

Japan takes baseball teams seriously to the point that some bars forbid anything but the most basic conversations like with politics and religion. I think younger generations care less, but ive seen conversations ended as they got heated.

I agree with charity and giving them away as a first priority. However, have you considered building an igloo?

My company thankfully still employs simultaneous interpreters for meetings and has one translator on staff. I think, at least in part, because of how bad translation tools can be from EN <> JA.

I used to live in the US and travel a lot by car. The infrastructure, specifically the roads, their striping, their guardrails, etc. could change drastically at state borders. They could sometimes even be of different quality and material at county borders within a state.

I’ve been in Japan a decade and you couldn’t pay me enough to live in the US. I have great work-life balance at my main job which is fully remote.

Do you want or actually need to talk? I know that places like the US love their smalltalk, but a lot of the world is perfectly content to sit in silence.

If you need or want to for some reason, it seems like you got some good info in other comments. Do read the room for receptiveness, I guess. Realize that, as with any skill, it takes practice and building.

I think Feynman would be interesting based on the videos of him I’ve seen. It probably also aligns best with where my knowledge is. Einstein is probably too theoretical and too much math I don’t know (or have long forgotten in the decades since I learnt it).

I have zero Polish and my French is mostly forgotten so Curie is out, though she would be my second choice of those listed (I don’t recall if she spoke English off-hand).

I was out doing parking lot and road striping doing all the math in my head or on paper to make fit things in, make sure we were square to the curb occasionally, etc. as a young adult. IIRC, the spots were 7-8 feet wide (depending upon what the client wanted, but I think our normal was 8) so knowing your times tables (or, more accurately, multiples of 8) when running down the tape measure made things easier. Pythagorean theorum for checking square to the curb or some other fixed point. More fun math (that I now forget) for doing things on curves.

This would have been 2001, I think, and we probably had a calculator bouncing around somewhere in the truck, but we never used it. No smartphones or tablets in those days.

I still sometimes just go wherever without my phone (more often on accident, but occasionally on purpose), but I definitely don’t find myself doing math on the fly too much, heh. Imma go be old somewhere else now.

Rural US in the 1980s and we learnt it starting at I think like 8-9 years old. At the time 9x9 was all we learnt and we were just expected to memorize our “times tables”. I don’t recall any song or anything.

I have stronger than average taste and smell. Do not recommend. Various things taste pretty awful, I’m more sensitive to smells and even things I like can become overwhelming.

I used to be able to see better in the dark than anyone I know, but that has faded with age. I’ve also always been somewhat colorblind so fixing that might be nice. I would also fix my hearing being kinda wonky (as in basically useless whenever multiple things are producing sound at once).

I’m tempted to want some kind of better balance or electromagnetic perception (though that one could be awful for the same reason I wouldn’t want to see much beyond what I do on the visible light spectrum since UV radiation and infrared could be a wall of noise).

Both BYD and Tesla have announced humanoid robots for around $10k starting next year.

I can’t speak to BYD, but Tesla has claimed all kinds of things that never materialize or are not what they claimed to be.

That aside, I don’t think most people have $10k laying around. Most couldn’t even afford a $1k expense (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-money-emergency-expenses-2025/), so I don’t think we’ll be seeing any widespread adoption at that price in the near future (which is what I took your comment to mean, but maybe that’s not what you meant).

For clarity, I’m not someone who’s just anti-AI, I’m just someone who thinks it’s way over-hyped, is being shoved in places it doesn’t need to be (especially in a half-baked state), is an environmental disaster, and has many other problems.