I love NHK WORLD-JAPAN! They also have a great YouTube channel[0]. I am especially fond of their "Journeys in Japan" series[1] where "English-speaking visitors travel the length of Japan, exploring the local culture, meeting the people and offering travel hints rarely found in guidebooks".
Used to watch it quite frequently because there was a Kodi add-on that could pull down their stream w/o too much trouble.
It's fun to watch, but you should always take it with a grain of salt. I imagine the "budget" to produce English-language NHK content must be coming from the state's tourism board or something, so in the five years I watched the channel, there was nary a negative fact about Japan ever mentioned. There are no problems, no conflicts...only beautiful country where old women still gather acorns by hand, and 80 year-old men who are free to hone their lifelong craft of making tofu.
I think the producers are very self aware of portraying a culture that is slowly circulating the drain.
Every 80 year old guy is "the last X artist of the prefecture" and grandma is crawling around picking acorns or wrapping pears by hand as "my children moved to the city". Every rural train and road are empty. I'm sure the Japanese have an appropriate word for melancholy.
Document 72 Hours can be soul crushing. One minute school kids buying paper products at a HW store, the next an older guy looking at kitchen tiles and talking about how his wife always wanted a new kitchen and he never had time for it. And now she's dead.
We love Document 72. It's one of our favorite things to watch, but it is absolutely true that the majority of episodes feature at least one person explaining that a family member recently died of cancer.
I do too. Somewhere Street and PythagoraSwitch are shows my family and I have watched every week for many years. I find Somewhere Street particularly rewarding - we've learned about so many different countries and cities and their people.
And in general, watching NHK you get a perspective on things that are entirely missing or lacking in the US (e.g. things that inspire confidence and trust in public institutions, what the government is doing to prepare for natural disasters).
This documentary is really eye-opening about Miyazaki, his creative process, mental state, and the relationship with Studio Ghibli. Depressing, but I thought it was worth watching.
Weirdly I sometimes listen to their Swahili news broadcast. For some reason, the Japanese radio's is the only decent short podcast I could find in Swahili, very strange
It's very weird. Mostly, it's only a few minutes of international news, about the latest G20 or the war in Ukraine, with a focus on what the Japanese government does in relation to it.
Thank you for sharing, this made my evening. For others that enjoyed this, I also recommend watching this excellent video in the same vein: "SM64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x A Presses": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A
I spent a lot of time playing cat and mouse with this type of toll fraud in 2022.
1. Rate limited SMS by number/ip: bypassed by large number of proxies/vpn.
2. Added captcha: bypassed by attacker manually signing up thousands of accounts (mechanical turks?) over months and then iterating over them for login OTP.
3. Identifying what carriers/operators are involved and blocking them asap (usually obscure ones).
4. Careful monitoring of SMS send rates and alerting of anomalies to investigate.
Good advice. By the way, the reason captcha didn't stop it is because Recaptcha is $2 per 1000 solves on 2captcha.com (or any other solving service), at $0.02/SMS this only lowers their profitability by 10%.
Coincidentally I just received an email request to reset my password on Namecheap (not issued by me), anyone else? On top of that, my account has been locked for 24 hours for three consecutive failed password or username entry attempts.
You should watch your domains and look out for any friends who suddenly have a new car or a new nice watch :-).
My strategy for things is to use a unique username and email address (and password..) for critical services, that way any hacks/leaks of other sites don't reveal my entire web presence. It may be that your email was found in another dump, or from a domain whois lookup.
This reminds me of Reddit's approach to mobile. They make their mobile web interface excruciating to use, and block features client side just to push you onto their app.
I'm guessing it has to do with mobile users being more lucrative?
Its funny though - because their mobile web interface is SOOOO bad, I'm using the "Apollo" app, which means I dont see any Reddit ads, and its a much better experience.
If they didnt have such a crappy web experience, I would probably just use the native web page and see some ads.
So its actually driving people away to alternatives that reduces their revenue. Crazy...
Is that a net negative for them though? Unless you're a really active or popular poster, you're probably just costing them money browsing the site and not looking at ads.
Yeah, thought of that after I replied. OTOH, it would leave them with people not sufficiently tech-savvy to block ads, which is reminiscent of the old joke about a jury’s being composed of “12 people who weren’t smart enough to evade jury duty.” I guess they don’t care about that one way or the other as long as Some EyeBalls See Ads.
Well, if I'm not there providing expert input on esoteric programming stuff, memes on StarTrekMemes, or participating in my local community's small sub, they'll all decline in value
Reddit will turn into a bad TikTok clone and probably die off to the real TikTok if too many people like us leave
I'm pretty sure they made the math, and that's the reason old-reddit and the API are still alive despite the many threats and deadlines they published for taking them out.
In fact, I would not be surprised if most deep content come from those (despite most users not even knowing about them), because the new interface and the app are both extremely focused on shallow stuff.
To be fair, people have been saying this for years, and it's still yet to happen.
It is, however, true that they've been slowly adding features that can't be accessed via an API, so I think the more likely scenario is that they'll just try to make third-party apps artificially less competitive, betting that it might add up long term.
Sure, in another 10 years or so. They have increased headcount 10x and VC investment 10x but execution is forever stuck at "worse than Twitter" levels.
They do the same thing to old.reddit.com (cookie banners redirect there, etc)
Like, I get that you don't update it anymore, and I don't need (or want) you to, but the new version is insanely slow on my computer, so just let me use whatever I want please.
The "new" redesign is just so bad. Viewing a post only shows comments 1 level deep, and then to see the rest of the thread you have to click "continue this thread" and then you have to go back to get to any other threads, just constant tiresome clicks...
Reading the comments on a post in old reddit is a pleasure, but in the redesign it's a complete mess. Why?
Oh and what the hell is the deal with links to content containing other completely unrelated content as well?
The day they kill old.reddit.com or API access to force me to stop using Apollo (which is an insanely well-built reddit client for iOS) is the day I'll just reluctantly stop using reddit entirely.
I barely use it anymore, but a lot of search results lead to (mostly helpful) reddit threads. If old.reddit.com dies I'll stop clicking on reddit links (even if I wanted, the new one so extremely slow for me it's borderline unusable).
You can actually disable the open in app prompt; it's kind of hidden, but if you open the menu > settings > uncheck "Request to open in app". This makes it usable for me.
I have a location where I am and a location I want to get to. I need a way to specify the two, and a way to enter payment info. That is literally all a taxi app should do.
Getting a message "heavy traffic, your car has been delayed" is what everyone else seeming rational really wants. Messaging and awareness of the current state of the transaction they are in.
Add the German site "ebay-kleinanzeigen.de" to this list. Some responsive design would be easy, but they'd rather have their users use the app with more ads and all the other sweet revenue juice.
Thanks for sharing, very interesting. I did day 2 part 1 in Befunge 93 which was pretty obscure and fun! I can definitely recommend playing around with it (even though it might not be so practical...)
The Japanese writing system uses three different character sets. Loan words are generally always written using one of these three sets, "katakana". Learning how to properly read and write Japanese will take years, but I highly encourage anyone visiting to at least learn how to read the 48 katakana (entirely phonetic). It's relatively low effort for the value it adds to your trip. Many of the Japanese loan words are of English origin, meaning you'll effectively be able to read some Japanese and understand it which can be very satisfying, useful, and hilarious.
I agree, I thought learning spoken phrases would be the way to go when I first visited, and it certainly helped with the basic stuff like restaurants and saying please/thankyou.
But knowing how to read the alphabets would have helped a lot more, because there are so many very understandable things sitting right infront of you if only you knew how to read the characters. コンビニエンス seems impenetrable if you don't know the alphabet, but it's just the adapted word for "Convenience": Konbiniensu.
Duolingo copped a lot of flack here in a recent thread, but it was great for initially learning the alphabets, it took nearly no time to memorize Katakana and Hiragana. If you don't know the alphabet you can't even begin to try and learn the language in situ, so that's step one and a huge help when travelling.
Minor nit: the kana are not alphabets, they're syllabaries. Each character represents a complete syllable (except ン/ん) as opposed to representing a consonant or vowel sound.
They are really straight-forward to learn as, unlike in English, they don't have di and trigraphs and extremely few pronunciation exceptions. Learning the characters can be done in an afternoon, though of course being able to read them quickly will take quite a bit of practice.
I tried to learn Japanese by sheer force of effort and managed to make "do-eet-su" stick in my mind to mean "German". It was years later that the penny dropped and i realized it was just "Deutsch" transliterated.
I can't speak to LoL's quality because I haven't played it, but I personally believe the largest factor was LoL's business model. League was free to play and attracted a huge player base because of it, while you had to spend ~30USD (?) to play HoN. They eventually switched to a free to play model as well, but it was way too late. I have spent thousands and thousands and thousands of hours in DotA, HoN and DotA 2—and HoN was a great game with a worse business model and sadly horrible leadership (CEO caught on several occasions dropping the most vulgar racist and homophobic remarks, banning people in-game if they upset him).
