Back in 1995-1998 or so, Lotus 1-2-3 was the price of a mid-range computer and Wordperfect was about half that. People were seriously invested in them, in several ways.
I remember resisting myself as a kid the change from DOS to Windows versions of apps. Practically I was more productive with my memorised key combos and found it extremely annoying to switch. I also had an Amiga background that "workbench" and mouse point-and-click interfaces in general were meant for design and authoring applications but not for documents. Coming to think of it, I still feel this way - which perhaps is why I'm so naturally inclined to use stuff like vi(m)/emacs and tiled window managers.
using the same directory drastically reduces the amount of assumptions about your system's permissions and your own installation (or lack thereof)
old school *nix editors typically do something like emacs and vi typically do, whereas old WinDOS/Mac single-user systems would have an installation file and a cache system-wide, and post NT and OS-X they have roughly the same but in a centralised user directory that is not system-wide, but is located as if it were (different evolution path)
deleting published stuff in any sort of decentralised network is always going to be limited at best
there is just no way to police what happens to data that is broadcast, which doesn't remove control away from the reader
it's annoying because in the abstract it's something everybody has the potential to need and need badly, but if you're afraid to put something out there to your name/pseudonym you really shouldn't
it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market
other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly
but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with
Yep, but it they had to double or triple it on short notice, they'd have just removed it from the store instead, and I imagine that the RAM is going into 256GB systems for more $$$ but still nothing really that alarming for the consumer.
I worked in Japan for ~7 years. I don't think I can relate with any of this, for starters I think not speaking Japanese relatively fluently would completely shape your experience from the get go.
Granted, this was a long time ago and even seeing non-Japanese around in Tokyo was rare, unlike now. But in the office environment let alone in tech, I doubt you can really make it work without not just speaking Japanese, but being considerably adapted to their culture. I think the chances of the dev just moving to Japan to work in tech and be anything other than a total outcast are poor. Which is ok if you plan to just do a year or two maybe. Even the author himself first got well acquainted with the language and culture then moved into development. And even so, this is hardly for but a select few to just fit into this lifestyle.
For North Americans or Europeans, the intersection of people who can make it work and are also incentivised to make it work looks infinitesimally small to me, esp. if you can opt for jobs in the industry in America or even Europe. It's a totally different story for someone from say South Korea or Taiwan, or to a lesser extent other Asian countries. For starters, coming in as a junior dev in Japan or as a translator won't be a massive pay downgrade for them. For South Koreans and Taiwanese the culture will be a lot more familiar, although there will of course still be some friction. So imagine coming in as mid-manager or higher, wow it sounds like quite the experiment to me knowing the place well. CEO with capital, maybe. But good luck with that.
I agree with you. The person in the article worked at Mercari which I used to go their tech meetups. The moment you entered it was as though you teleported into an SF/SV meetup. Mostly English speaking people with English presentations in a room with an SV like microkitchen, free SV snacks, etc... That's not the norm at all.
Yeah, saw Mericari and had some flashing lights go off.
Most Japanese tech is in - well Japanese - companies like Mericari, Woven and Rakuten are exceptions, hence you get a blog post on how to speak English properly.
> Granted, this was a long time ago and even seeing non-Japanese around in Tokyo was rare, unlike now.
Please say "non-East Asians" when that's what you mean. There were already loads of Chinese and Koreans around in Tokyo 7 years ago.
> For North Americans or Europeans, the intersection of people who can make it work and are also incentivised to make it work looks infinitesimally small to me, esp. if you can opt for jobs in the industry in America or even Europe.
The cultural adaptation you're talking about applies just as much to China and Korea, yet there's a huge reason for Europeans (not Americans, but they're the sole outlier) to work there as SWEs - post-tax + post-big-city-CoL, salaries are a lot better until you get to 10+ YoE.
People tend to look at London or Amsterdam stated salaries and think this is impossible, but the tax and housing cost differences completely change the equation. 40k EUR at 40% tax is the same as 30k EUR at 20% tax.
In big European capitals, for 800 EUR/month you get a parking space or a place to share with 3 others. In China or Korea in a tier 1 city for the same money you can rent a nice, newly built place for two (so 400 EUR/month/person) in a central location with private indoor parking and great transit links.
> Please say "non-East Asians" when that's what you mean. There were already loads of Chinese and Koreans around in Tokyo 7 years ago.
it wasn't 7 years ago, it was 20 years ago, 7 years up to 2006
there were some Chinese, but really few and far between and in the Kanto area, mostly in Yokohama
i was studying Chinese back then, and I struggled to find people to practice
> The cultural adaptation you're talking about applies just as much to China and Korea, yet there's a huge reason for Europeans (not Americans, but they're the sole outlier) to work there as SWEs - post-tax + post-big-city-CoL, salaries are a lot better until you get to 10+ YoE.
probably it does - certainly Korea, China not as much - and also differently, and the topic here is Japan
> People tend to look at London or Amsterdam stated salaries and think this is impossible, but the tax and housing cost differences completely change the equation. 40k EUR at 40% tax is the same as 30k EUR at 20% tax.
40K is extremely low in tech, and where are you paying 40% tax on 40k??
>In big European capitals, for 800 EUR/month you get a parking space or a place to share with 3 others. In China or Korea in a tier 1 city for the same money you can rent a nice, newly built place for two (so 400 EUR/month/person) in a central location with private indoor parking and great transit links.
I can't speak of living in China or Korea, I have only visited. It wouldn't cross my mind to live in China, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.
RE in Japan is currently much better than in say the UK or SanFran or NYC. MUCH better. This wasn't the case when I was there, it was comparable or even more expensive. However the yen was stronger and salaries in tech were, although lower, much closer than they are now. If you are a computer scientist or an electrical engineer, you will easily make double or triple the salary, so rent doesn't make up for it. This is a volatile situation though, right now the situation for juniors seems to have deteriorated massively everywhere, so it's really hard to tell how it would work out either way. But unless you really want to learn the language and the culture and are willing to make strong sacrifices for it, moving to Japan in order to work in tech sounds like a crazy proposition.
The typical solution is to work in one of the "global" (aka American) companies in Japan: google, amz, apple, ms, etc. At least for now there are enough jobs across all those companies for motivated foreigners, though that could change.
you're uploading before seeding, and i'm willing to bet Meta weren't seeding but, as they correctly stated in that regard, they're sharing even when they try their best not to because of the way the protocol works as zero-upload is typically impractical for any significant size files
some trackers will additionally penalise you for not sharing file parts, but this depends on the tracker
If you try to download any significant file with zero-upload, you will run out of peers that will share with you much earlier than you will download the file. It's not practical.
Most people that speak of leeching or not seeding really are talking about not seeding at all after they've completed. In fact, most clients will let you set upload speeds to a trickle but not zero (zero means unlimited in most clients). From a legal standpoint, that already means you uploaded.
It’s true that most clients do not support a zero upload configuration, but it’s not inherent to the protocol, and modified clients exist.
I’m not aware of any clients that will refuse to share data with clients that are configured to not upload. I don’t even see how they could determine that, especially in situations where there are no other peers to upload to, and given that stats are entirely self-reported and clients that send bogus numbers exist.
You would need a central tracker that cares, which is what private torrent communities rely on, but not public/DHT torrents such as those discussed here.
You’re correct about seeds, but peers who are also downloading will often stop sharing with you if you stop sharing with them. Seeds generally are configured to try to give different pieces to different peers so that they can send them to each other and reduce load on the seed; they don’t want to give you the entire file directly unless you’re the only person downloading. And peers prioritize and filter which other ones they’ll send pieces to based on reciprocity.
You will probably get the data eventually, and it really depends on the composition and configuration of the swarm, but generally, you do need to upload if you want to ensure the fastest and most reliable download.
Long-running torrents are mostly populated by seeders. Bit torrent was originally designed for a lot of downloaders to get a file at the same time with limited seeding bandwidth, so leechers would need to trade with each other a lot, but that's not really the situation most torrents are in today.
You can, but you will slow down your own downloads dramatically by doing so. In some cases you will fail to finish them.
The case for doing this would be just so you can have this ridiculous legal defence Meta seem to be trying to pull out. Really no other good reason. Even for the most parasitic leeches, zero upload is a bad strategy.
"tit-for-tat" trading of chunks only happens between peers that both are actively downloading. Seeding nodes just let anybody leech.
You totally CAN disable all uploads in the torrent protocol. Just set the "upload budget" to zero in most clients. Just nobody realizes they can do that.
Bittorrent is wildly successful in part because every popular client makes it nontrivial to "opt out" of it's more socialist components (chunk trading, DHT participation, seeding by default).
Making an "leech behavior only" torrent client is straightforward and viable.
Tit-for-tat kicks in. It's fine for smaller files to just jump peers with zero upload, but i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.
> i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.
You're not that likely to get throttled by seeds though, and most torrents that are downloadable at all have a few seeds. Seeds have no way of verifying whether you're contributing the network, they're just there because someone (implicitly) decided to make the file available to whomever drops by and asks for it.
they'd most certainly go for very large curated collections like those of Anna's Archives, we're talking about 10s or 100s of TBs per archive
going 1 by 1 would be quite the exercise in itself considering just how much variety of formats, styles, crap added in the files, random password crapware, etc etc you find for anything other than the most trendy stuff
I remember resisting myself as a kid the change from DOS to Windows versions of apps. Practically I was more productive with my memorised key combos and found it extremely annoying to switch. I also had an Amiga background that "workbench" and mouse point-and-click interfaces in general were meant for design and authoring applications but not for documents. Coming to think of it, I still feel this way - which perhaps is why I'm so naturally inclined to use stuff like vi(m)/emacs and tiled window managers.
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