The real question, according to HN, is why did god create Kubernetes and have every developer glom onto it when only a handful of companies in the universe truly need it?
Edit: the follow up question is "why isn't the universe just a shell script?"
It works by having it beaten into for you several decades of your childhood that you don't speak up, you put the groups first, and appearances trump reality.
I don't necessarily think it's any better or any worse than western culture. My perspective is "it just has different failure modes".
Yes, a large part of why Japanese society appears (and in fact performs) so perfect is because of an absolute fear of shame.
From the moment you are born you are taught to care about what and how others think and feel about you and your conduct. If it's not your social peers, it's the literal Sun ("Otentou-sama") looking down upon you and judging your every single moment. If you shame yourself, you also bring shame upon your family and your ancestors both living and dead.
To be clear: This does work, and most Japanese are happy to serve society rather than feel compelled to do so at threat of cancellation. There are also benefits for the compliant, namely in the form of social safety nets both legal and social to ensure a minimum standard of living.
Japanese expats are a particular bunch, they left Japan because they couldn't stand the shaming and strict adherence to social codes. A kind of "you can't fire me if I quit" response.
Agreed and I would add to the list the ungodly amount of hours they work. I know per hour they might not be as productive (or simply held back by antiquated processes within their companies) but they seem to make up for it in part by working so much overtime.
That isn't really what I meant, and yeah, I was ambiguous. When you have a culture where people can't tell the boss things he doesn't want to hear -- of which resignation is an example -- how do companies expect to get honest feedback? How do they detect problems earlier in the process? Etc.
Cultures are never just dysfunctional; there are usually a complicated set of compensations that makes the dysfunction more bearable. I'm curious how that works.
They don't want feedback. They want you to listen and obey. It doesn't actually matter if things are wrong, so long as in the moment the boss thinks they aren't, then to him they aren't since appearances trump reality. The boss would prefer you didn't disturb that. The result is sometimes things just blow up spectacularly later on down the track but "shou ga nai".
The compensation that makes the dysfunction more bearable is the culture of "gaman" which is deeply, deeply ingrained from a young age. It's normal for them to just suck it up and tolerate shit they don't like. It's a way of life. For everything thing else there is "shou ga nai" which often translates to "it can't be helped" and many Westerners think it's just Japanese people giving up too easily and don't really get it, but it comes from the Buddhist philosophy of accepting things as they are.
>That said; how does a young individual get updates to public transport outages that are only available via twitter/x, or read the menu of the local cafe that is only posted on Facebook?
If such regulations come in to effect, I think those business / institutions will adapt (eventually) to cater to communicating via additional channels.
I think ambiguous homophones aren't actually much of a problem. There's usually only correct option that matches the surrounding context, so the correct inference is easy to make even with no characters at all . After all, there aren't subtitles when you're talking to other people, all the homophones still exist, and yet communication doesn't seem to be impeded.
I did RTK. I also learned to read around 3k kanji. Turns out it wasn't at all necessary to learn to write that additional 1k Kanji in order to become able to read / distinguish it.
The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters. That alone solves the problem directly.
I also did all three volumes and found the extra 1,000 to be a waste. Really polluted my Anki.
> The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters.
But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes. Heading off this frustration directly by studying characters may not have been the best use of my time in absolute terms, but it did wonders for my overall motivation and made me feel like I was doing more than treading water. Pre-Heisig I was reading specific books intended for foreign learners, while afterwards I was just reading the newspaper.
It's somewhat a shame there isn't heavily curated Anki decks for doing what I call "disambiguation study" where you focus on cards that help you distinguish similar things from one another. It'd really speed things up.
>But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes.
I'm learning Korean at the moment and it's particular brutal for this IMHO. Some words have taken a long time to properly understand due to repeatedly mistaking them for very similar words, and there are a lot of these in Korean.
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