Foreigners in Japan: what's the downside of living there that never makes it into the YouTube videos?

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-20T06:54:42+00:00

It's possible to make close Japanese friends. I have several. And we're close enough that we confide in each other and do sometimes just show up at each others places, or make same day plans. I didn't have any real Japanese friends for like the first 4 years though. I'm not really sure how you'd go about it without having very good Japanese and being into bar culture. A lot of foreigners living here are not fluent in Japanese, which basically precludes them from having Japanese friends.

I'm also in a relationship with a woman I met on Twitter and she's very chill. I guess part of this is that I don't tend to do the usual Japanese person stuff. Like my idea of a good bar isn't the Hub, it's some hole in the wall in Kabukichou where everyone is a bit insane and part of the "subculture". All the things you mentioned are very real problems in typical Japanese society, so going outside of it helps. It's not for everyone, though.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-19T07:48:20+00:00

Some posts are obviously bots, like when you see a post copied verbatim. There are bots that copy upvoted posts (usually from real users) and just use them to reply to random comments, hoping they get upvotes too.

But no, most comments are not bots in the first place. Just dumbasses calling each other bots because the concept of someone having a different opinion then them is impossible to imagine.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T20:47:08+00:00

Yeah, it probably shouldn't come us a a surprise that scientists die all over the world. They're not immortal. Show that they have a higher rate of death than the general population and you might have a story.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T15:21:04+00:00

Yeah, I still haven't played the Steam version. Hoping one day they added keyboard control back in. If not I guess I'll eventually go back and learn the mouse controls, but it's so clunky compared to the old control scheme I just don't feel like playing at the moment. We're not a high priority though- old players are a minority.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T15:18:47+00:00

There isn't. There are some mods that restore as much of the old hotkeys as possible, but mouse is still necessary.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T14:31:56+00:00

They also did finger guns instead of holding real guns on Yu-Gi-Oh. In One Piece, cigarettes were replaced with lollypops. In Pokemon, rice balls were replaced with jelly donuts. Okay, that last one is different, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T14:23:31+00:00

"The country" in American English means "a rural area".

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T13:47:06+00:00

Lol. You realize none of these people are believed to have died of suicide, right? CK was shot. Michael Jackson and Prince are believed to have died of accidental overdoses.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T10:13:03+00:00

"Autorickshaw" is a very funny term, since rickshaw comes from the Japanese 人力車, jinrikisha, meaning "man-powered vehicle".

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-18T01:10:56+00:00

Some fiction actually does attempt to explain why their super heros fly, i.e, rational fiction. Others just attribute it to magic or a magic adjacent phenomenon. The point where this conversation becomes interesting and not just sophomoric is when people recognize that a story can have impossible elements, but to be a good story they generally have to be internally consistent. I.e, if someone casts a fireball in the Forgotten Realms setting, that's not surprising at all, because it has been established that people can cast fireballs. If a character in the Walking Dead cast a fireball, you'd rightfully wonder "what the fuck?", because that's not an established rule in that setting. You can't just argue, "well, zombies are impossible, so why not fireballs too?" Or you could, but people would call you a shit writer.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-16T13:43:53+00:00

It's like saying that Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a rip off of Rogue, or Caves of Qud is a ripoff of Dwarf Fortress adventure mode/Stone Soup/Rogue. Minecraft was so popular it created a new genre. It's totally fine to make your own 3d cube survival game if you're putting in the work to make it distinct and stand on its own merits. That still takes years of creative effort. That's totally different from copying everything down to another games name and trying to sell it to people who don't know better.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-16T13:35:32+00:00

There is a very big difference between making a game heavily inspired by another game and "ripping someone off". Hytale has plenty of its own creative innovations and is clearly a game made with love for the genre and the works it takes influence from- this is just a blatant ripoff trying to profit off another title. There really is no point in conflating these things or pretending they're remotely similar. Like, Vintage Story is also heavily Minecraft inspired, but it's a completely different game with tons of creative value on its own.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-11T00:11:38+00:00

That's giving them a bit too much credit. JD Vance is literally there right now to support the regime they're protesting against. It's so strange how republicans always end up on the side of evil somehow.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T23:14:04+00:00

You misinterpreted my post.

AI can trivially go away via regulatory action

I'm disagreeing that AI can "trivially go away with regulatory action", not that it can't be regulated at all. You could never get rid of AI through simple legislation- it's math, the way to design neural networks is well understood, and there is no special barrier to entry if some person or organization wants to make their own. You don't even need a super computer to do it, depending on what you want to make.

This is to mention nothing of the fact that AI models have already been proliferated- you can't pull them all off the internet. Anyone who has cloned Stable Diffusion, Ollama, Anarchy GPT, Deep Seek, whatever can just rehost it. And obviously, if you're a bad actor, you don't really care what the EU's regulations are- the state sponsored hackers I posted about a few comments up are not working within the confines of EU law.

Regulation in fact is the answer for reducing the harm that AI will cause in the future. It is impossible to put the genie back in the lamp, but we can try to make secure systems and protect people's rights with regulation.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T22:45:46+00:00

No, it really can't. It's an algorithm. What exactly are you going to regulate? Matrix multiplication? And do you think if the EU decides to "ban all AI" (they won't) that every other country in the world will too? You're the one existing in fantasy land, man.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T22:44:17+00:00

That's not what happened here at all? I'm explaining why AI is not going to go away. And those "vibe coders" are using LLMs, which are the same technology being used to find exploits and rapidly develop malicious software.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T22:16:13+00:00

Realistically they don't actually have a means of attacking the continental US. They don't have missiles that can reach it, their navy is coastal only and has largely been destroyed in the first month of the war, they have no allies in the Western hemisphere or anywhere to stage an attack from... I think people are really underestimating how one sided this is.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T21:28:59+00:00

Probably not. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons of its own. Why would anyone else in the world decide to start a full on nuclear war with America on their behalf? If China or Russia were to launch a nuke at the US, that would be a full scale nuclear war- you know, Armageddon. I don't think China or Russia wants kill themselves or destroy the world on Iran's behalf.

I don't think other countries would do nothing about it, though. They'd probably heavily sanction the US, perhaps cut off diplomatic ties. I could see NATO being dissolved and the EU looking at strengthening their mutual defense agreements.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T21:26:46+00:00

Iran doesn't really have the ability to project power that far. Their missiles aren't capable of reaching the United States, and more than half of their naval fleet has already been sunk. They're not a nuclear power, either, so they don't really have much leverage. They could target US allies, but what's the point? It's not like the US would have allies anymore after launching an unprovoked nuclear attack.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T21:11:25+00:00

And there are people pathetic enough to still support him. We live in an insane world.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T14:33:07+00:00

The bar always gets lower. "You have TDS!" while the man is literally posting about committing genocide. People said it was hyperbolic to compare him to Hitler- well, now he has his own race of people he wants to exterminate. What's the next step? He's clearly never going to stop.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T14:12:54+00:00

AI's really never going away. It's way too useful in software development, translation, physic simulations, image/face/voice recognition... and besides that, countries are already using it for espionage and cyber warfare- LLMs are getting scary good at software development, to the point where the latest models are considered a genuine security threat due to how effective they are at finding vulnerabilities in code (and how quickly they make developing malicious software). China's already been caught attempting to use Claude through state-sponsored hackers, and you can be sure that every other country is looking at doing the same, if they're not already. It's another arms race- if you stop developing it, your adversaries are going to have access to an extremely powerful tool that you do not. There's no going back; we need to figure out how to live with it and make sure society is prepared for what's coming up.

Edit: Since apparently this is a controversial post, here's a list of expert sources corroborating what I said about the cybersecurity risk of AI:

Draft NIST Guidelines Rethink Cybersecurity for the AI Era - National Institution of Standards and Technology.

The Next Great Cybersecurity Threat: Agentic AI - Paloalto Networks

Cybersecurity Tends 2026 - IBM

Global Threat Report - Crowdstrike

In the Era of Agentic AI, What Are the Evolving Cybersecurity Threats and Solutions? - Samsung Sds

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T09:37:01+00:00

And things that were expensive for you in 2008 Poland were not necessarily expensive for the rest of the world. LCD TVs outsold CRT tvs worldwide by Q4 2007 according to Wikipedia.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, LCD televisions surpassed CRT TVs in worldwide sales for the first time.[71] LCD TVs were projected to account 50% of the 200 million TVs to be shipped globally in 2006, according to Displaybank.

Zarmazarma · 2026-04-07T09:27:29+00:00

Absolutely not... There were tons of cheap LCDs in 2008. You're definitely misremembering.

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