I miss Japan.
Anyhow, as someone who was a professional translator for a few years, if I had written this card it would have been among the best work of my career.
It is a work of art two sentences in length.
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.
In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.
In honor of someone’s bad bug today, I will retell a story of my worst bug:
Once upon a time I was the CEO and entire engineering team of a company which sent appointment reminders.
Each reminder was sent by a cron job draining a queue. That queue was filled by another cron job
Tokyo has positive population growth of about 100,000 people a year, and rents and home prices are roughly stable for last decade.
How? Outconstructing NYC. And LA. And SF. And Boston. And Houston.
Combined.
Every year.
LT:
@patio11
is an amazing twitter follow. One of the bits of wisdom he espouses is how Tokyo remains affordable for housing despite *explosive population growth* and sky high demand because they simply BUILD TONS MORE HOUSES.
“How is Tokyo addressing its housing crisis?”
“We don’t have one. We build homes.”
“Do you discourage techies from moving into town?”
“Techies live in homes so we build homes.”
“How do you deal with Chinese speculators?”
“Build homes.”
“But earthquakes and ocean!”
“Build homes.”
Me: “Well, it is the principle of the thing.”
Bank: “Of course sir.”
Me: “Oh and please check the box to remember their information for future transfers.”
Bank: “Of course sir. Can I help you with anything else?”
Me: “Yes I would like to make a *second* time transfer to…”
In the “Japan does a better job at hotels” and “Japan does a better job at taking children seriously”, for ~$12 our hotel had a 20 minute cooking class for children where they got dressed up as patisserie chefs and, under the instruction of a staffer, made themselves dessert.
Apparently Walgreens is testing, in Chicago, a “new” concept: almost all goods (save two aisles of “essentials”) behind a barrier, passed over it to the customer in response to an order entered on a kiosk.
This is almost a return to the retail experience of the late 1800s.
This is one of the reasons why "Can you describe what I'd need to do to buy a $50 book?" is a deceptively good question to ask during job interviews (or earlier) for getting a read on how a company treats engineers, what their tolerance for process-for-sake-of-process is, etc.
Japanese bank: And how can we help you today?
Me: I will need to send a domestic transfer to complete a startup investment.
“Absolutely Mr. McKenzie. Will this be to someone you have made a transfer to before?”
“No.”
“And the amount?”
“$AMOUNT.”
“Oh sorry. You will need to…”
Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.
Ruriko: So when do we register with Chicago?
Me: We don’t.
R: So how does Chicago know everyone who lives in Chicago?
Me: It doesn’t.
R: … Does America have a government? How do you even do population statistics?!
Me: Count every ten years.
R: You ARE TROLLING ME.
Periodic observation for the benefit of junior developers: You do not have to be embarrassed about not knowing a particular bit of syntax or API. Googling things efficiently is a core job skill.
~15 years in I'll still look up "append to array javascript."
I learned a bit about fracking today and even relative to my prior expectation holy cow does it sound like sorcery.
As one example of many, how do you think they get information from bottom of the well to top of the well while drilling?
Lillian (9) math homework:
*picture of a leaf* What is the best estimate of the mass of this leaf?
Lillian: That cannot POSSIBLY be enough information to answer this question.
Lillian, doing homework: I hurried to get on time to school.
Me: Word order.
Lillian: Why?
Me: It’s just a thing in English; there’s only 1 order that works.
Lillian: And I’m just supposed to memorize thousands of combinations.
Me: Yes.
Lillian: Who designed this broken language.
You’d be surprised of how much of management, consulting, teaching, senior ICing, etc is:
“I want to X.”
“Have you written down a plausible plan to get to X with steps listed in order?”
“No.”
“Alright let’s sketch it. OK step one: are you going to do it?”
“Why would I do that?”
A gem form the LessWrong community: 'Humans are not automatically strategic.'
"A large majority of otherwise smart people spend time doing semi-productive things, when there are massively productive opportunities untapped."
Scaled crime is a result of a business process and it’s a very useful lens to understand how that business functions for the purpose of interdicting it.
Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.
An innovation in Japan which I think will arrive everywhere: double-blinded shipping, where neither the sender nor receiver know each other's address.
This was negotiated by a large marketplace (Mercari), which didn't want to have to walk so many users over the privacy hump.
TSA at O’Hare: Does anyone speak Spanish?
crowd: *no takers*
TSA: Really? Come on folks, need help.
Me: I studied it for a few years but depending on the question it might be difficult for me to…
Colombian gentleman: Bro do you know where ATM is for a *brand* debit card?
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.
This demo is not perfect but outperforms probably four nines of all non-heritage Japanese majors in the U.S.
Yiiiiiiiiikes that was not on my bingo card for this year.
It doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you; they'll rotate outwards after next perf cycle and it will be a new PM who will be utterly powerless to stop Google's mismanagement from shutting down the project you rely on.
You have to treat all non-core products as ephemeral.
Bank: Can you get us account statements of all of your bank accounts to underwrite the mortgage?
Me: *sigh* And this is why collecting checking accounts is eventually a painful hobby.
Bank: What.
Me: What.
Bank: How many are we talking about?
Me: I have cut down recently. Only 40
I fixed the idempotency issue and added MANY safeguards. We never unintentionally duplicated a call again for the life of the company.
Nobody remembers this now except me, and engineers who I tell it to, when they think that they’ve just made the worst mistake of their career.
Engagement is a toxic metric.
Products which optimize for it become worse. People who optimize for it become less happy.
It also seems to generate runaway feedback loops where most engagable people have a) worst individual experiences and then b) end up driving the product bus.
Have you ever wondered if perhaps we did not understand the sense of humor of the ancients as they would have expressed through Tiktok had they had Tiktok? Because this is *definitely* getting categorized as “religious site” by future archeologists.
Some people find air travel unpleasant, but every time I visit an airport, I feel like I’m witnessing an intricate worldwide logistical ballet which somehow functions absurdly well despite all the challenges of the world.
Also beating gravity, as sort of a dessert.
Proud papa moment:
Liam (7) doing math.
“Some elephants are at a river. 2 leave. 13 are left. How many were there at the start? Write an equation and solve.”
Liam: “I don’t know what ‘some’ is here so I’m putting a ? for that.”
Credit cards are a legacy system. They are extremely important to commerce worldwide, but exhibit path dependence. Much of their functioning under-the-hood derives from decisions made more than 50 years ago.
Stripe is working on upgrading this critical system, for everyone.
Culture is a real thing in the world, and in a healthy engineering culture, someone not involved in immediate firefighting would take that engineer aside within minutes and say “You are probably worried for your job right now. Don’t be. Let me explain incident postmortems.”
Wow, props to Vanguard.
(They made a decision to not support buying the Bitcoin ETFs as they judged this was against the interests of their users. They will certainly lose business over this and know that to be true.)
@SplitCapital
Wow. It is worse than I thought. I called and the answer I received was "Currently we aren't allowing those to be purchased as it doesn't fit with Vanguard's investment philosophy."
Me: "Ok but you let me buy GBTC in the past."
Him: "Yes I believe you can only sell that now."
There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection that it presents with.
This is, FWIW, a fairly complicated area where the IRS’s position is “We won’t make trouble for small business owners unless you really go out of your way to turn your credit card into a business into itself.”
Fun fact: cash back from your credit card isn't taxed.
I knew a person who lived off their business's cash back from their card. Was like $200-$250k/year.
I think, but am not sure, that there's a limit (like $300k or so).
Ruriko: Why do you keep using that handyman?
Me: He’s honest and competent.
Ruriko: He forgets half of the time he has promised to come over.
Me: In America, this is a classic “pick two” situation.
Ruriko: So there are no honest, competent, reliable handymen?
Me: “Promoted” out.
This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation.
Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.
One of many, many instances of “Wow competent execution on basic operations management from the 1950s feels like absolute magic. I wonder why nobody thought of that.”
Yet again, one to add to the list of low-hanging fruit when it comes to innovation. Immense productivity increases reported here, with reduced wait times and earlier diagnosis likely saving a great many lives:
People often ask me why I live in Japan.
A part: is that it is a place where I could take my daughter to lost-and-found to ask about an acorn, knowing that someone would return an acorn, knowing that someone would clearly expect a lost acorn to be returned and therefore ask.
Popular tweet in Japan: The tweeter found an acorn at a shopping mall and he brought it to the lost and found just in case a child has dropped it. At the lost and found there was the mother and the daughter who were there looking for it.
He said he was truly surprised.
I feel like the video game industry has not really evolved with the consumer group, still pitching "100+ hours of gameplay!" when what many of us really want is "An engaging play session wrapped up in 30 minutes while the baby is sleeping."
The OSS community has yet to come to grips with “Companies with $50 million in the bank send an incredible volume of support requests to people who are worried about making their $600 rent, and the community and culture in OSS makes this feel normal.”
"A module is like a piece of digital property, a right that can be transferred, but you don't get any benefit owning it, like being able to sell or rent it... however you still retain the responsibility."
If you don’t allow enough X to be produced then it isn’t the market which excludes people from having X; the market/prices just deliver the bad news to the marginal people you decided didn’t really need an X available.
I got about ~40% faster solving sudoku after casually watching an hour of YouTube (turns out sudoku YouTube is a thing) and now I’m wondering how many other things in life are shaped like this.
A random thing that will probably help someone out eventually:
Should you ever have the occasion to e.g. sell a company or have your startup equity become liquid, call your bank (or chat up a new bank) *in advance*, and ask "If I were to bring in new money, what's your offer?"
Me: When I was your age computers were *gestures* big and too heavy to lift.
Lillian (9): And you walked up hill both ways!
Me: No that is a joke but computers really were that big.
Lillian: Wat. How did you take it between classes?!
Me: We didn’t have them for classes.
I have very complicated feelings about Factorio: Space Exploration, like “That might be the best game I ever played” and “The primary thing I have to show for work-like activities in the past year is this screenshot.”
In-flight screen: Could we interest you in a movie?
Me: Not that interested in superheroes.
“How about a slice-of-life story for a Japanese salaryman?”
Me: You have my attention.
“He works in a bank.”
Oh they made this for me.
“It’s a melodrama about financial fraud.”
The answers to all of these questions, happily provided by people old enough to remember them, are a good demonstration that the fairly recent past was actually radically worse than the present.
How did people get airplane tickets before the internet? Did you call the airline and they mailed you the tickets physically? In fact how did you buy tickets to anything that had to be bought well in advance?
Me: “On an entirely different note, I find myself needing to make a transfer of 1,000 yen ($8) to reimburse my friend’s company for the coffee they so generously bought me.”
Bank: “Are you sure? The fee for that transaction would be an absurd portion of the price of a coffee.”
Nurse: “I don’t suppose you have your son’s birth records?”
Me: “Would depend on what kind?”
Nurse: “Height / weight / etc.”
Me: “I have a record of that on six occasions recorded in the booklet they asked us to bring to all appointments.”
Nurse: “Wat.”
Me: “We’re from Japan.”
I know folks are very, very tired of hearing coronavirus updates, but if you have not been following it & are in a position where you need to care about general shape of the pandemic, read up on Delta.
Best single lay-appropriate explanation I've read:
“It’s a pity you have no subsidized housing.”
“We do. Build homes.”
“And I envy your lack of regulation.”
“Got regulations. Build homes.”
“You have to understand, Republicans.”
“I don’t, but, build homes.”
“I suppose there must be some inscrutable cultural thing.”
“Build homes.”
My apartment’s super, explaining why he placed a carefully manicured plant in middle of the garbage room:
“As you know some people have not followed the trash disposal rules, leaving that space untidy. I thought a beautiful plant would inspire them to act more appropriately.”
Personal opinion, but I am glad that Pfizer and Moderna shared their vaccines with the world by inventing and distributing them. I hope we massively increase the production of vaccines to be shared with the world, and incentivize future sharing appropriately.
I think many people in the upper middle class underestimate how desirable Lyft/etc are because their jobs already come with harassment-free managers, flexibility to run errands in the middle of the day, work being available every day, and not being fired if you need a day off.
Tokyo could drown in tech dollars but teachers would continue living in cheap housing because Tokyo builds housing. If you stop building housing, you’re deciding someone doesn’t get to live there; market just tells you their names.
An uncommon arrangement for teachers in economic boom towns — employers acting as landlords — is starting to catch on as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars
Inspired by a thread on HN incredulous about engineering headcount at a large software company:
The biggest thing people don’t appreciate about large companies is the basic productive unit isn’t an individual it is an engineering team with about ~8 members.
Co-signed. Every cell phone in America is vulnerable to the weakest link among X0,000 call center or retail employees who make approximately McDonalds wages, and due to the magic that is “billionaires and homeless people use same cell phones”, ~impossible to opt for better here.
There is an increase of account takeovers due to insiders at telco firms simply giving control to people paying them. Do a check on systems where this would permit a compromise.
Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
Me: That’s a colorful dress, Lillian!
Lillian, 4: What. No. It is pink. Just pink. Monochromatic pink.
Me: ... Who taught you ‘monochromatic’?
Lillian: Who taught you ‘colorful?’
Jack Bogle passed away.
If his is a new name for you: when you retire, he'll have been directly responsible for about $1 of every $2 you receive from your investment returns or pension, by negotiating down by 95% fees the financial industry charged for no good reason.
So my two favorite companies (Stripe and
@twilio
) published a case study together about everyone's favorite topic, credit card authorization rates.
I want to zoom in on what creates a tenth of that 10% uplift, because it's sort of wild.
From a conversation with a friend:
Tech should build more cathedrals, less in the religious sense and more in the "Make a beautiful, physical space which is open to the public and will endure for hundreds of years to say This Is Who We Were And What We Hoped, 2021 Edition."
As I have mentioned many times, the main reason I studied Japanese and moved to Japan was a WSJ article which confidently said that the dot-com bust signaled the end of U.S.-based engineering employment and that all future engineers would be hired in China/India.
People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason why not to. This time it's AI, last time it was that tech was over because the Internet Bubble burst, the time before that it was that all the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to India.
“… come into the branch to authorize a first time transaction of that amount. This is for your security.”
Me: “As the bank is aware, I am presently in the United States, where it is inconvenient to go to one of your branches.”
“We are sorry but this is policy.”
“Of course.”
IRS: You owe us 10 cents.
Me: Oh for the love of.
IRS: You are required to use EFTPS to pay for this variety of tax.
Me: EFTPS will not let me pay because...
IRS: Then pay by check; 10% penalty.
Me: To confirm: you want a total of ELEVEN CENTS. BY CHECK.
IRS: Yes and hurry up.
There is an exchange rate between competence and power, in both directions, and this discomfits many people.
One specific way: many people who do not desire power and keep piling on the competence will have to deal with the moral challenges of power whether they want them or not
There is almost infinite demand for people shaped like this, dating back to the letter to Garcia.
What you call them is sort of irrelevant and they often exist in odd parts of the org chart anyway.
What's the right job title for a startup when you want a super scrappy person who can basically do whatever is asked, is self-sufficient, and learns quickly?
But spans multiple departments/roles.
Asking for a friend.
The best reason to charge more is to make more money, but the next best reason is that you will price out “pathological customers.”
Customers like the one below *are numerous* and higher price points mean you’ll lose less of your brain cells dealing with their many challenges.
Interestingly Japanese manufacturing, which (obviously) contains individuals capable of English, is aware of this joke.
Most of my colleagues treated it as likely apocryphal, with the caveat “Of course, requesting faulty components is legitimate. Two use cases at least:”
Me: … everyone just takes your word for it.
Ruriko: … You are dealing with all of this American nonsense.
Me: Had a feeling I would be.
Ruriko: … How do you do health insurance?
Me: Hah funny you should ask. Let’s have that conversation when you’re calm and sitting down.
I was probably 30 or so before I realized that many hotel services are open to people who are not guests, such as their bars and restaurants, which are pricey but very conveniently located and frequently underused.
Ordering a coffee at a 5-star hotel so you can work in the lobby is one of the world’s great arbitrages. You can either pay $3 for a run-of the-mill Starbucks with rickety seating and janky Internet, or $6 for a soft leather couch, table service, and supersonic Wi-Fi speeds.
People have said “This didn’t happen” and given it is in the Atlantic I will bet you there is at least one other person who very definitely worked at the NYT and who knows how the game is played who confirmed to the Atlantic this happened.
A fun recent ship from Stripe: we trained an ML model on all of the disputes and chargebacks to give every one in your dashboard a 1 to 5 score based on likelihood that you'll win it, which we can predict given card issuer, type of dispute, etc with some accuracy.
a) You'd be surprised how much of mindspace is terra nullius. Everyone in the world had white paint and black paint for hundreds of years and yet this never existed until someone decided to just go for it.
b) Instagram is directly causing a Cambrian explosion in commercial art.
The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits among consumers and (in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many places and markedly decreasing the total cost of people required to implement it.
Email is one of the most important skills that isn't, you know, actually taught anywhere, except maybe by apprenticeship in sales and consulting organizations.
This seems like a missed opportunity for every organization which sits downstream of email.
The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.
Checking in on how code-is-the-only-law, be-your-own-bank, lets-be-ungovernable world of DeFi is doing.
Oh, Compound had a $70 million bug this week? I suppose we'll go down the crypto governance flowchart to:
If you received a large, incorrect amount of COMP from the Compound protocol error:
Please return it to the Compound Timelock (0x6d903f6003cca6255D85CcA4D3B5E5146dC33925). Keep 10% as a white-hat.
Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed.