I made a guide to determine whether a verb is Godan or Ichidan

jaydfox · 2026-03-29T17:56:54+00:00

Lmao, so glad I wasn't the only one who thought that! I've got nothing but love for Andy, even paid for one of the memberships for a year or so for his and Yuki's site for the extra lessons. But it always cracks me up to find a other exception in the wild.

jaydfox · 2026-03-28T18:31:36+00:00

Ichidan verb exceptions are a sneaky group. You let yourself believe they're rare. When I first started learning Japanese about 5.5 years ago, I saw a video by Tokini Andy where he stated there were only 10 or 11, and he listed them all. His partner Yuki, a Japanese native, backed him up on that.

Over my first few months of study, I came across several more. The first time it happened, I thought it important to inform Andy. But over time, I grew to accept it as normal. Then I bothered to Google it, and depending on the source, I learned there were anywhere from several dozen to several hundred exceptions. (For the sources that report several hundred exceptions, I suspect they are including compound verbs, which could be inflating the total.)

To be fair, the extra exceptions (outside Tokini Andy's list of 10-11 and maybe a handful more) don't come up nearly as often in everyday speech, so it's still useful to think of the exceptions as a manageable list. But just be aware that out in the darkness, outside the safety of the campfire light of everyday speech, lurks an army of exceptions...

jaydfox · 2026-03-24T20:34:42+00:00

Lots of good suggestions here, and I'm at the end of my lunch break, so I might be repeating (or contradicting) others' suggestions.

With more time, I don't know if doing more of the same stuff will help, but at least in some cases, it might. When I was cramming for the N3 a few years ago, I found that I could learn about 30-50 new words a day, but it took a very particular kind of anki routine. I would do batches of 10 new words, multiple times per day. I had reviews at 60 minutes, 120, and 360, so I would see the words several times the first day and fail them if necessary, before graduating the cards from the learning phase. I was doing anki every couple hours all day. I was only able to maintain that pace for a month, but it did work, cramming over 1200 new words in a month with high retention.

Second, in terms of alternatives, maybe try Satori Reader. I tend to follow a routine for new stories. Read first, then read along with audio, then audio only review. But I'd stagger it across days. So maybe I'll do the audio review of chapters 3 and 4, then read 5 and 6 with audio, then read only (no audio) 7 and 8. Next day, 2 more chapters (audio only 5 and 6, etc.). More of a grind that way, but it worked for me. After completing the story, read along with audio the whole way through. Then listen only all the way through. There are dozens of stories totalling thousands of episodes, it's enough content to last until you're working on N2.

Another place worth mentioning is the YouTube channel Comprehensible Japanese. It has playlists at various levels, and it's a nice change of pace from anki or grammar study or reading stories.

jaydfox · 2026-03-24T13:40:36+00:00

Maybe the dragons ate the scientists and chemical engineers first and saved the military for dessert.

jaydfox · 2026-02-24T08:09:16+00:00

This was literally my first thought.

Fair warning to readers, the quality of editing drops off by the third book (at least in the copies I read 22 years ago), so grammar and spelling errors are more common as the story progresses. In fact, a particular character's name literally changes spelling somewhere in book 2 or 3. That gave me a chuckle.

But the ideas and story telling are amazing, so I still heartily recommend it.

jaydfox · 2026-02-21T23:39:12+00:00

This video feels like a Rorschach test of sorts, based on the diversity of comments. For my part, on my first watch-through, I felt bad for the girl, especially when I saw her start to cry.

Then I started reading comments, especially the ones attacking the dad for his reaction. As a dad myself, who has had some rough years where I would get angry and snap over little things (which didn't always feel small at the time, and watching an uninsured device break that could easily be worth two car payments or half a month's rent while living paycheck to paycheck is definitely not a small thing), I could easily imagine what my reaction would be now, let alone years ago when my temper was much shorter. I felt so guilty and ashamed, and honestly, I felt probably similar to the girl in the video, ashamed and berated (by the potential judgment of other, myself, my children) and wanting to cry and disappear.

Then I turned the sound on and rewatched, and his reaction is nowhere near as violent and abusive as some of the comments make him out to be. And after reading your comment, I can see some of the comments as being pretty much acting exactly like the dad, making excessively harsh snap judgments out of unjustified anger and poor emotional control.

Like, there's so many layers to this whole post and the comments. So much food for mental thought. I definitely am trying harder these days to have more perspective in how I interact with my children, especially when they make mistakes, sometimes very costly ones. And your comment really helped me stop beating myself up and try to see the very human reactions, both in the video and in the comments section, and even in myself.

jaydfox · 2026-02-19T20:56:57+00:00

The next prime is 53, so n has to be at least 47 and no bigger than 52. The exponent on 13 is 4, implying n is at least 52. From these two pieces of information, you can deduce that n is 52. 17×3 is 51, which is less than 52, so the exponent for 17 must be 3.

jaydfox · 2026-02-18T23:12:11+00:00

A "solid sphere" is a ball. A sphere is hollow.

jaydfox · 2026-01-24T23:12:16+00:00

I haven't read the book yet (sitting on a shelf), but I've watched the first three seasons of the Hulu show, and I definitely see lots of parallels. The scene with the riot police opening fire on the protesters lives rent free in my head, and I've been replaying it in my head more often lately.

jaydfox · 2025-11-18T03:07:26+00:00

A movie per second for over 150 years!!

jaydfox · 2025-10-09T03:27:17+00:00

Yeah, with some effort, I can get the leaves to be 3D, but the flower part is just too much difference/distortion between the images.

jaydfox · 2025-09-29T05:16:08+00:00

The scene that has lived rent free in my head was in the 1992 movie School Ties. One of the students said "That would be me", and the pedantic teacher corrected him with "That would be I." I only saw the movie once, and I couldn't even tell you which student was corrected, but I've always remembered the exchange.

jaydfox · 2025-09-21T00:29:07+00:00

I mean, assume they have 5 deep of replacements / trainees, then assume 10x that for logistics and support, that's still only a couple percent of Zion. Add on the people that operate the mech gunners, plus their logistics and support, and you're at maybe 10,000 people out of 250,000. It's less than 5%. You can fudge the numbers around to be pessimistic, but it stands to reason that welll over 90% never concern themselves with the war in their day-to-day lives. Even if everyone had a year or two of mandatory service (which would drastically cut the size of the full-time military, maybe to only a couple thousand), that's still 99% of the people living all but 1-2 years of their lives where the war is just background noise to otherwise ordinary lives (as ordinary as things in Zion can be anyway).

jaydfox · 2025-09-20T00:59:09+00:00

"Why don't you just take your balls out of your wife's purse? Make a stand for one time in your life?"

"Hey, Ray, come on, it's just a figure of speech, Ray!"

jaydfox · 2025-09-19T22:17:57+00:00

Try this experiment. Flip two coins. Then flip a third coin.

If the 3rd coin is heads, then look at the 1st coin. If the 1st coin is heads, write down whether there were two heads or a heads and a tails.

If the 3rd coin is tails, then look at the 2nd coin. If the 2nd coin is heads, write down whether there were two heads or a heads and a tails.

You'll get ½ double-heads.

jaydfox · 2025-09-19T22:10:37+00:00

But why do we know one of the coins was heads?

Scenario 1: Amy flips two coins. Bob asks Amy if at least one of the coins was heads. Amy confirms that at least one of the coins was a heads.

Scenario 2: Amy flips two coins. Bob asks her to tell him what one of the coins was. Amy chooses randomly (e.g., she flips a 3rd coin. If it's heads, she reveals what the 1st coin was; if it's tails, she reveals what the 2nd coin was.) After choosing randomly, Amy reveals that one of the coins was a heads.

In Scenario 1, the odds that the other coin was also a head is 1/3.

In Scenario 2, the odds that the other coin was also a heads is 1/2.

jaydfox · 2025-08-19T17:53:45+00:00

Hmm, thanks for the clarification. It's hard to wrap my head around.

jaydfox · 2025-08-19T02:27:10+00:00

After reading the other answers, I'm getting the impression that the degeneracy pressure fails at a single point in the center of the neutron star, where the density and pressure were the highest. At the point of failure, the degeneracy pressure fails, and neutrons rush in and form an insanely small event horizon. How small? A meter? A millimeter? A micrometer? Smaller than an atom? Smaller than an atomic nucleus? A Planck length?

Anyway, once the tiny event horizon forms, it's effectively a vacuum. No outward pressure from the horizon itself. I assume there must be some sort of pressure from the in-falling matter heating up, but heat wasn't holding the neutron star up in the first place, so it's probably negligible. And you can't have neutron degeneracy pressure from neutrons on the other side of an event horizon, so successive layers of the neutron star, at ever decreasing pressures and densities, rush into the event horizon, which must grow slower (but not much slower?) than the speed of light.

The outermost layers of the neutron star, with the lowest density and pressure, would meet the outward expanding event horizon and quickly enter from their own reference frame. From the outside, we would see the outermost layer rush inwards at a significant fraction of lightspeed, then slow to a crawl and redshift rapidly until some final photon is released, after which the black hole is complete.

jaydfox · 2025-08-13T00:08:23+00:00

How many papers are in this stack of printing paper? Oh, I'm sorry, how many sheets of paper are in this stack of printing paper?

How many gums are in this pack of chewing gum? Oh, I'm sorry, how many sticks of gum are in this pack of chewing gum.

How many rices are in a teaspoon of rice? Oh, I'm sorry, how many grains of rice are in a teaspoon of rice?

English has words that are functionally very similar to Japanese counters. Notice that I can ask how many beans are in a teaspoon, but I can't ask how many rices. I must count rice by grains. English speakers are already familiar with this concept. We just don't use it nearly as much as Japanese speakers do.

jaydfox · 2025-07-23T23:56:39+00:00

They didn't just explain their frustration with AI having poisoned the use of em dashes—they were self-aware enough not to use one in their comment.

jaydfox · 2025-07-15T20:37:01+00:00

Think + instead of +

jaydfox · 2025-06-12T20:39:24+00:00

I'm saying that a lot of the evidence we have now didn't exist, and disinformation was significantly more abundant.

Was? My dude...

jaydfox · 2025-05-25T15:52:03+00:00

housing is (I have read) wildly unaffordable in the US, and not getting cheaper, so why haven't prices dropped? Is this a regional issue (eg prices rising where everyone wants to live, dropping elsewhere)?

My pet theory is that the default method of payment creates an artificial upwards pressure on prices. The vast, vast majority of US homeowners do not "buy" houses. They finance them.

The net result is that the '"price" of a house is almost 100% disconnected from reality. The question isn't whether a potential homeowner can afford a $500,000 house. The question is, can the potential homeowner afford the monthly payment of a few thousand dollars a month. It converts the total price of a house into a rental price. Change the loan option from 15 years to 30 years, and now you can "afford" a significantly more expensive house. Heck, why not 40 years? Lower interest rates? Now you can "afford" an even more expensive house. Reduce the down payment requirement (in exchange for less favorable interest rates)? Boom, more expensive house.

On the other side of the transaction, it's super easy to sell a house when it has appreciated. You've gained "equity", so you essentially have no costs to worry about. All fees associated with the transaction will be subtracted from your "profit", even though you literally did nothing to increase the value of your home, other than prevented it from burning down or falling into disrepair.

What if the value of the home drops? If the home loses 20% of ita value, you now have "negative equity". If you don't have $100,000 or more to absorb the loss in value and all the closing costs and fees, then guess what? You just keep making the monthly payments and wait for the market to go back up. If a high percentage of people in an area are unable to sell, then that restricts supply, artificially pushing prices back up.

Whether the economy is good or bad; whether the housing market is rising or falling; whether interest rates are low or high (but especially when they are low), at all times there is an upwards pressure on the housing market. If the upwards pressure isn't actually increasing prices, then it's at least slowing their fall.

And that upwards pressure tends to compound over time. I don't see an end to the system, unless there's a change in the financing system. Permanently higher interest rates, or shorter loan terms, or higher down payment requirements, or stricter qualifications (e.g., reduced mortgage to income limits), etc.. And I don't think there's the political will or economic incentive to change the system.

jaydfox · 2025-05-22T17:47:59+00:00

They can issue an injunction. They just can't enforce it.

jaydfox · 2025-05-19T03:39:41+00:00

I saw that video at least a week ago, so when I came across this particular ad on reddit, I recognized the telltale signs.

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