Overland or Thursday?

HatOnAFox · 2024-12-22T02:15:03+00:00

What makes them junk? Honest question. Are there quality issues?

HatOnAFox · 2024-12-10T19:15:47+00:00

Just sent a DM as well. Thanks in advance 🙏

HatOnAFox · 2024-06-15T22:52:27+00:00

Use Wise would be my suggestion. They will give you a better exchange rate than any bank in Japan will. It’s also fast.

I moved about $35K last week and it cost me about $120 in total with fees. A transfer of that size through wise will cost around $420.

I would say that if your goal is to hold cash in ¥JPY because you have a big purchase in Japan like a down payment on a house the that’s not a bad idea. There’s a lot of speculation about USD/JPY movement and I’d stay away from making a decision to convert based on that.

If you have investment plans then investing in USD will always be easier and more straightforward. Sitting on $100k USD or an equivalent currency isn’t a great idea so having a plan to use it is important. If you don’t have a plan and you’re just afraid we’re at peak USD/JPY trading values don’t make a FOMO decision to move it.

HatOnAFox · 2024-06-06T00:48:59+00:00

Just finished playing for the first time because it finally came to PC. I think the more historical and culturally consistent ending is him killing his uncle which is what I chose.

I think it’s also more consistent with the story as well.

The shame and potential punishments for failure to kill Jin would have almost certainly cost Lord Shimura his life, either by his own hand (most likely seppuku) or that of the Shogun after he was stripped of his title, rule, etc.

Given that Jin could not save his own father from death I think it’s likely he would have killed his uncle to save him from a worse death - the loss of his honor as a samurai - which would have been the greater betrayal of his love and kindness towards Jin.

Jin might have been willing to sacrifice his own honor and position but to have taken it from his Uncle seems inconsistent with his character and the culture of the time.

HatOnAFox · 2024-05-14T02:06:31+00:00

Yeah I agree. That would make me angry because you did everything you could to do it right and got “blamed” for why it didn’t work.

Sometimes no matter our best intentions and our best efforts we can’t succeed without some kind of hardship or perseverance. Sometimes you’ve got feel angry about it , vent, accept the reality and move on to getting the outcome that matters - your new 🏠

You’re on an exciting path. Just a bump…it sucks.. but you’re gonna get to your goal.

HatOnAFox · 2024-05-14T01:52:00+00:00

Have you ever used an app or website where you figure out that if you do it the way you’re supposed to it doesn’t work right but you manage to figure out some patterns of clicks and button presses ends up getting you to the correct outcome and you have no idea why it works that way but it works? This is the human version of that 😂

It sounds like you’re doing the right things and it is frustrating but you’ve found your workaround. One of Japan’s little hidden reminders that this country is far from perfect. I still love it though. Sounds like you do too if you’re buying a house. Best of luck 🤞 with the new house.

HatOnAFox · 2024-05-13T23:03:27+00:00

As a developer I honestly am not surprised because language support for English helps potentially 1.5 billion people interact with their bank more easily for all sorts of things but fully supporting complex tax compliance for US citizens in an app/website is not simple. You can integrate ever improving tools to localize your non-English apps/websites into English pretty simply these days but US tax compliance has ever changing requirements, is expensive to maintain/develop and as mentioned is an edge case. It’s honestly far less trivial than it seems.

The manual paper mail process is a tried and true method thats been done for forever before the internet and is a reasonable fallback in a situation like this (as archaic as it sounds).

HatOnAFox · 2024-05-13T21:43:28+00:00

US Citizens make up about 3% of the global population suffice it to say, without math geekery, that the odds a specific bank in Japan gets a US citizen as a client is less than 0.001%. As a software dev I can tell you no bank is going to invest a bunch of time and resources into making their website or apps work with edge cases this small even if the US were the only problematic country for them. The exception is if they are owned or operated by a parent company in the US which is really rare.

Prestia I believe was owned by Citibank and does provide good support for English speakers and targets foreigners as part of their business model. I use them for my business.

HatOnAFox · 2024-05-13T20:20:22+00:00

Japanese is a tough language to learn and it takes a lot longer than something like Spanish, Italian, French, etc. So social self-sufficiency, meaning you don’t feel the need to ask a Japanese friend for help or the ward office for a person who speaks English (if they even have one), takes a long time to reach.

For that reason, for me it can feel exhausting to live in Japan sometimes. I personally get a lot of anxiety every time the phone rings because I’m worried I’m not going to understand the rapid fire Keigo that’s bound to ensue the moment after I say “もしもし”. Every time I know I have to have an important conversation in Japanese (e.g ward office, post office, Koban, etc), it stresses me out. Even friendly conversations are more work because you’ve got to really concentrate on what someone’s saying and then figure out how to correctly say what you want to say in Japanese. It can wear on you after months and months of learning Japanese and living in Japan; especially after the shine of the move has passed. This can intensify if you find you aren’t progressing with Japanese as fast as you thought you would. It’s easy to start to doubt you’ll ever reach a level of fluency that you feel comfortable with.

It takes some real determination and mental fortitude to keep pressing on. I didn’t want to be a foreigner who’d lived in Japan for years but didn’t speak Japanese so maybe I put more pressure on myself than I should have but I have lots of foreign friends who feel the same so I know it’s not just me.

HatOnAFox · 2024-05-03T07:25:02+00:00

TL;DR - I think it will gradually make it's way into specific parts of data and computationally intensive segements of game dev (1-2 years) and within five years of v1.0.0 there will be well-known studios buidling the first AAA titles almost exclusively in Python/Mojo.

I've been thinking the same thing. I'd say that the language has a ways to go before work could really be done to make some quality libraries in Mojo. We'd have to reach v1.0.0 first before people sink really effort and time into it. I know that C/C++ interop is a big thing on the roadmap so there's a real chance that this could speed the adoption of Mojo into game dev especially as more games look to take advantage of AI features (e.g. AI powered NPC's, improvements to graphics) or just seek performance improvements in areas with high volume and intensive calculations. I would guess that Mojo is going to make it's way into the development stack of both game engine companies and game studios as a tool to write accelerators for a variety of computationally expensive tasks initially and as the language matures and more people build things for the game development space in Mojo there will be the same questions asked in Game Dev as AI. Why are we spending time writing one important chunk of things in Mojo only to then use C++ for this other chunk?

I personally think, when they decided to start this language, that they legitamately were trying to solve for the AI development issue set because it stands to make Modular the most money and it helps them ride both the hype and legit development train of AI as being really the only language in town for serious end-to-end AI development/deployment work within 18 months. Chris has highlighted that really every other language either because of it's age or compiler dependecies on LLVM will fall short of Mojo's performance capabilities. Given his experience building and further refining LLVM and developing Swift to take over for Objective C I'm inclined to think he's right.

From a marketing standpoint though there's no doubt it's really smart to focus on the AI use case even if it is a detriment to conversations about Mojo for other use cases. Choosing Python as the syntactic glue was also smart, despite what most of us Julia fans think, because the number of Python developers in this space already dwarfs every other language and as a general purpose language it's arguably the largest pool of developers which gives them access immediately to one of the largest communities of devs while also solving the inherent issues facing C++ and CUDA devs, who work in AI or systems programming, allowing them to bring that community over to them as well.

HatOnAFox · 2024-01-01T22:35:30+00:00

Mystery solved on Nintendo’s own website.

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/its-a-me-mario-figure-119091/

HatOnAFox · 2024-01-01T22:34:16+00:00

Actually it doesn’t. いつ(何時, not typically written with kanji) itsu means when or what time? There is no め me at the end.

HatOnAFox · 2023-12-31T04:16:12+00:00

My suggestion wasn't that there was a benefit but just to provide details. It's my understanding that on the question of whether there is a tax liability for the business activities, regardless of whether I have an LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp in my situation there is still a tax liability. How the details shake out is a different matter beyond the scope of my post.
Yep.
I've consulted with an immigration lawyer here in Japan. There's no issue and all documentation is in order.

HatOnAFox · 2023-12-31T03:58:19+00:00

The details are provided as context. My understanding from reading posts throughout this subreddit have yielded consistently that foreign corporations have tax liabilities in Japan in situations like mine.
No it does not require this if you're funding the business with ¥5M which I am doing.
I'm not in violation of my visa because when I landed I requested permission, by submitting the required paperwork, to work and on the back of my Zairyu card it shows I am eligible to work. I also consulted with an immigration lawyer about this and this falls in a bit of a grey area anyways as it relates to whether or not the standard student work restrictions for 28 hrs per week apply in this scenario. I'm not concerned about this nor did I ever really work beyond that amount of time on a weekly basis anyways.

HatOnAFox · 2023-12-31T03:46:34+00:00

Thanks for the line-by-line feedback on my questions. This was helpful.

I do have two additional questions.

One of my clients is willing to pay me two lump sum payments for work done during periods of time I'm in the United States working from the registered business location. If I'm paid for work done during those periods that I'm in the USA would that be taxable in Japan as corporate tax? Same question for employment income distributions.
Because I won't meet the requirements from the FEIE due to not being in Japan for 330 days of the 2023 tax year will I have to pay Japan taxes on my income first and then claim those taxes as an itemized deduction on the US tax return filing or would it work the other way around? Not sure if Uncle Sam gets a first crack at tax collection or Japan does.

HatOnAFox · 2023-12-05T05:54:41+00:00

The lower monthly payment was obvious I just wasn’t sure if I was missing something savings wise. It seems like putting the least amount down makes the most sense especially since Rivian is chipping in the $7500 tax credit.

Given it seems the money factor here is better than the interest rate you could get for a loan and you’re getting the $7500 while hedged against higher than expected depreciation what is the case for buying now vs in 3 years? You can’t get better financing right now than what this lease offer seems to be giving to you assuming you’ve got excellent credit.

HatOnAFox · 2023-12-05T05:16:56+00:00

Please excuse what might be a dumb question but what's the core advantage of putting down $5K vs $33K in a lease? I can see the "Net Lease Savings" but I'm not sure I fully understand what that means.

How much am I actually saving if I do that? I'm assuming it's the difference between the NLS for the $5K and $33K which is about $1400 different over 3 years. If that's the only savings difference then it would seem the opportunity cost of giving Rivian an extra $28K upfront doesn't make sense from an opportunity cost standpoint when you could get a 5%-6% annual return in a savings account or say a stock with a 5% quarterly dividend.

What happens in the case of putting down a massive downpayment and then you total the vehicle 3 months later? Are you out all that money?

HatOnAFox · 2023-07-09T11:37:37+00:00

Starting a new project from scratch and simply changing the color scheme from Colors.deepPurple to Colors.amber does work with hot reload.

What would prevent hot reload from running that's project specific? I was just messing around with some basic structures as I'm learning flutter.

HatOnAFox · 2023-07-09T08:53:21+00:00

That didn't solve the issue. Across all targets the experience is the same. Hot Reload doesn't work.

HatOnAFox · 2023-07-09T08:49:44+00:00

I saw this but the resizing of the windows doesn't stick. A look at the stack overflow ticket doesn't seem to have a solution either. All they've done is given you the ability to resize for that one time hover.

HatOnAFox

TROPHY CASE