I lived in Japan and your level of written fluency paired with the patience to distill aspects of Japanese culture strikes me as AI. Even amongst long time foreigners, there’s this unspoken “we’re not explaining this to you, figure it out yourself.”
Your level of fluency would be incredibly rare, and I’ve never seen any Japanese person use romaji in casual online conversation.
“Gunma Banker Mode” would 1) be an insane commute to Tokyo where most banking occurs 2) is strange for someone who says they’re not a programmer, but a banker who is “switching their OS.”
Lastly, your comments just stink of AI because you point the obvious out in not—so-correct ways. “Code” is not the context, but I can see how HN could be reduced to that.
If both are true — this is an AI article and people are commenting with AI, then I fear peak dystopia is upon us and HN is losing its magic to information pollution. Sad times
Your insight into Japan is impressive. You are spot on—commuting from Gunma to Tokyo daily would be insanity. I work at a local bank in Gunma, not Tokyo. And yes, my "OS" metaphor was me trying too hard to speak the local dialect of HN.
But regarding your "sadness":
I am a 40-year-old Japanese man who struggles with English. Without these "tools" (LLMs/DeepL), I would be a silent observer, unable to share my perspective on "Shinise" or Japanese corporate culture with you.
You call it a "dystopia" where AI pollutes human connection.
I see it as a "bridge."
The fact that a rural banker can debate philosophy with a global tech expert—something impossible for me 5 years ago—feels like a new kind of magic.
The polish is machine-made, but the soul and the logic are mine. I hope you can accept this "augmented" form of communication.
I don’t really see what’s newsworthy. Acela already runs in the NE corridor and many trains have outlets. Other than the 27% increase in trains, it’s hard to tell what’s different
I’m not creating a medium account to read the entire article, but I read plenty of bad code while living in Japan — as a full-time employee, a contractor, and open source projects. I would take this article with a grain of salt.
I’m mixed about Next.js. On one hand, it’s a company building a framework with investors, of course there are incentives for them to corner the market. Like the author mentions, Redis labs has a similar model. The license is MIT, so Netfify or anyone can fork and offer a better alternative, if they’re capable and willing to take on the risk of it flopping. Also, if I’m an investor in Vercel — why would I encourage them to put my investment at risk by aiding competition?
On the other hand, there does seem to be a sleight of hand with Vercel. They want it both ways — to be a company that champions and fosters open source while also keeping the necessary friction in place to make their hosting platform the best choice.
For better or worse, I think we’ll only see more of this model in the future.
I think linux + osx combined is probably developer majority. I'm assuming most Windows development is .NET or Unity based. Over the past nine years, I've worked primarily with Node, Ruby, and a smidgen of Java and no employer has issued Windows machine. It's in sharp contrast with the start of my career where I was in VB6 and C# where I only worked with Windows environments. Could be confirmation bias, though.
Windows is a great platform for developing any language or platform, not just .Net. Personally I think it blows macOS and its dated tools out of the water in any category
Stackoverflow found that Linux and macOS is the slight majority for professional use and the minority for personal use with developers (with the caveat that the total professional use of all categories is >100%)
Just curious what tools are you missing on MacOS or Linux that are found on Windows?
I have been on MacOS the last 8 years or so but before that was all Windows and Linux. I prefer MacOS now but curious what I am missing. My colleagues that are using Windows machines all use WSL with dev containers so really just using Linux under the hood.
My experience is that pretty much everything is cross platform these days. I don’t do .Net or game dev though. Just Go, Java and some NodeJS these days.
Yeah, but with Windows GUI along with fractional scaling, device, and etc support haha. I've developed on both bare Linux and for years in Linux VMs. Saying Windows+WSL is "really just linux under the hood" does this setup a massive disservice. It makes me smile every time I type WSL into the terminal lol.
Yeah Linux desktop environments are a bit of a mess but OP specifically called out MacOS as well. Once you add Rectangle it is a solid DE in my opinion. Also it is Unix/linux compatible so kind of the same beast with good GUI/hardware and *nix terminal.
Was just curious what Windows only tools I am missing out on.
I agree. Long time Linux engineer who prefers Windows to OSX as a desktop OS. Currently use a Windows workstation with WSL and VSCode as a daily driver. I feel this currently gets me the best of both worlds(Windows/Linux).
I passionately disagree with this. Abstractions inherently introduce some level of opaqueness and it's only useful in the context of making things more maintainable. Duplicated code is easier to reason about because its intent is closer to the problem it originally solved.
I chose TypeScript for a large project for the first time in early ~2018 and had no idea how much history I had missed. I presumed that the adoption was the other way around and that TypeScript was chosen because it fit the project's needs, but just as grandparent and parent suggest, AtScript was very much a thing.
I'm currently on one. Was very burnt out from high stress environments and not practicing enough self care for the past five years. I experienced daily bouts of mild to intense anxiety despite being what most people interpret as a calm person. Reasoning, I was laid off and decided to not take a job.
I took unemployment.
Positive benefits: I mellowed out, started having more patience, and could see how a big source of burnout was how attached my ego was to my work.
I started working on a link shortener a couple of months ago. Despite it being a hobby project that a lot of folks undertake, building something resilient that is somewhat well-designed is a lot of work. Biggest benefit: I started looking at programming as more of something that I'm capable of instead of my self worth / value on display in pull requests.
> Did you return to your old job?
Nope.
> Would you have done anything differently?
More routine. It's liberating to be able to do what you want, as you want, but I would posit that a majority of humans thrive on routines.
> Is there anything bad out of the sabbatical that you didn't expect?
Friends and family being concerned for my well-being despite my spirits being much higher
Your level of fluency would be incredibly rare, and I’ve never seen any Japanese person use romaji in casual online conversation.
“Gunma Banker Mode” would 1) be an insane commute to Tokyo where most banking occurs 2) is strange for someone who says they’re not a programmer, but a banker who is “switching their OS.”
Lastly, your comments just stink of AI because you point the obvious out in not—so-correct ways. “Code” is not the context, but I can see how HN could be reduced to that.
If both are true — this is an AI article and people are commenting with AI, then I fear peak dystopia is upon us and HN is losing its magic to information pollution. Sad times
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