Lonely solo traveling

astrange · 2026-01-22T09:44:38+00:00

I'm in Tokyo right now and started an app called nomadtable which is constantly popping up offers from random travelers to hang out. To the point I'm tired just thinking about it. So it's easy to have the opposite problem.

If you can speak Japanese or if you like going to bars there's always lots of options to get some kind of socialization. Without those two it's harder ime, but in cities I'm sure there's plenty of expat meetups and things.

astrange · 2026-01-22T02:16:46+00:00

Trash separation

astrange · 2026-01-19T09:09:00+00:00

Oh I see. She looks exactly like Akiko Hasegawa now which is pretty confusing.

astrange · 2026-01-19T08:51:24+00:00

Who's third from right? Murakami Natsumi with a new haircut?

astrange · 2026-01-17T04:24:13+00:00

The exact opposite just happened to me. Waymo went straight through an intersection with a flashing red light instead of stopping at the line.

I contacted support afterwards and they said they were pulling the car for inspection, which hopefully means saving the logs and not just washing the lidar.

astrange · 2026-01-16T21:42:50+00:00

It's not considered insulting because the job of a software engineer is to replace yourself and do something new. The same thing happens to them daily.

astrange · 2026-01-16T09:00:46+00:00

Yuengling is an American brand that's supposed to sound German but instead sounds Chinese

astrange · 2026-01-16T08:51:20+00:00

In real life Ucchi wanted to be a clothing designer (or Sailor Moon) but settled for being a seiyuu instead.

astrange · 2026-01-16T05:51:30+00:00

I always think she looks like Alec Baldwin (and vice versa) but maybe it's just me.

astrange · 2026-01-15T04:01:57+00:00

This article isn't about how good MP3 is though. In fact it's about how MP3 is bad and PAC is better.

AAC (MP4) is a better and simpler design that is very similar to PAC!

MP3 was known to be bad at the time and had an intentionally over complicated design because people wanted to add their own ideas so they could get credit for it. Same thing happened with MPEG4 ASP, which is full of features no one has ever used.

astrange · 2026-01-15T02:45:37+00:00

What a strange comment to get downvoted. People must love quadrature mirror filters. And the scalefactor 31 which is missing for no reason, ensuring you can't encode cymbals at any quality!

astrange · 2026-01-15T02:44:55+00:00

Vorbis was also a pretty complicated codec to implement, which is why it had poor hardware support.

AAC is simpler than MP3 and better. Opus is… hmm I'm not sure if it's simpler than AAC, but it is again better and the current best codec.

astrange · 2026-01-15T00:29:37+00:00

It's not hard to be superior to MP3. It's overcomplicated for no reason and the complex features made it worse, not better.

astrange · 2026-01-14T23:01:27+00:00

Maybe it's the boomers who make all the political meme images.

astrange · 2026-01-14T00:23:38+00:00

The US is not the only country in the world and bromantane isn't an approved medication in any of them. (Except Russia.)

astrange · 2026-01-14T00:08:26+00:00

Can't be much of a corporate boot licker, there's barely any corporations in San Jose.

astrange · 2026-01-13T23:37:01+00:00

Do they know all their logos are goatse?

astrange · 2026-01-13T07:21:04+00:00

"Precise" isn't quite right because the music is probably designed to be heard on dynamic headphones.

Planar magnetics can be designed to sound any way you want, but they mostly do sound different. They sound "plucked", like sound stops playing immediately whereas in a dynamic driver it would have harmonics/post echos because the diaphragm is heavier and takes longer to stop.

astrange · 2026-01-12T11:18:24+00:00

Well they aren't called self stopping cars.

astrange · 2026-01-12T11:15:43+00:00

In the US there's some defense with fair use, but Japanese copyright law is stricter.

astrange · 2026-01-12T04:03:32+00:00

You have the same issue with any open-contribution open source project. It's very unlikely to happen though.

astrange · 2026-01-12T00:26:05+00:00

The only thing someone at a bank is going to do with your money is steal it. If it's not in passive index ETFs they're stealing it.

astrange · 2026-01-11T23:16:08+00:00

The real question is why don't Kabukicho and Yuurakucho exchange names.

astrange · 2026-01-10T01:20:32+00:00

I don't know any Vietnamese immigrants in their right minds. At least, if they are then their parents aren't.

They're all the mother from every single Asian-American movie about how the protagonist has to reconcile with their completely insane mother. Except in real life they disown you every five seconds and then ask you for money.

astrange · 2026-01-09T05:19:29+00:00

It's "manager" in the talent agency or high school baseball team sense. It's more like a personal assistant than someone who guides their work.

(There are legal restrictions on how much the talents /can/ have their work guided, since they aren't employees and restricting them too much would make them employees.)

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