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Ensheinification
Tech is too depressing, so I stayed away from tech for a while. It turns out real life is depressing too[^1]. [^1]: I did just spend a few days writing about something that made me happy. Now back to my depressing self. Recently my shoes broke, so I went…
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Ikoku Nikki Watching Notes, Part 5
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Asa auditions for the school concert and gets in. She still hasn't finished her lyrics. Makio can't remember the writing advice she gave Asa a year ago. Asa thinks about asking whether her mother's diary…
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Ikoku Nikki Watching Notes, Part 4
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Asa needs to write lyrics for a school concert. Makio's advice is "write with the intent to kill". Asa hears this and it might as well be a foreign language. The show cuts between three different conversations…
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Ikoku Nikki Watching Notes, Part 3
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Asa and Makio visit the grandmother. She used to be fierce, but after her daughter's death, she became a lot nicer. Upstairs, sitting in her sister's old room, Makio tells Asa to keep liking the mother she knew.…
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Ikoku Nikki Watching Notes, Part 2
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 One of the first things you learn about living with someone after a death is that even the most basic interactions become minefields. Asa's friend Emiri sends her a LINE message. Just a normal "how are you?" But…
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Ikoku Nikki Watching Notes, Part 1
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 In a season with big names like Frieren and Oshi no Ko, Ikoku Nikki came out of nowhere and became my favorite. The premise is simple: a 15-year-old girl named Asa loses both parents in a car accident. Her aunt…
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Yet Another AI Post
Unpopular opinion: I think the price[^1] of LLM tokens will go up in the future, not down. Because almost everything else in life (groceries, housing, cars, clothes, video games, streaming services, GPUs, RAM...) has gotten more expensive over…
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The Lunch Machine, Part 3
(This is part 3 of a three-part series. Read part 2 here.) The villagers grew sick from the food of the Large Lunch Machine, but the inventor was never punished. Because in this kingdom, bad people did not always face the consequences of their…
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When You’re No Longer One of Us
When Reddit forced Apollo to shutdown, its developer, Christian Selig, was one of the most beloved figures in the Reddit community. But after the shutdown, the tone shifted. The same person who had been celebrated for years was suddenly seen as a greedy…
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We Can’t Have Nice Things
"Pffft a subscription app. I'd buy it if it were a one-time purchase." "Pffft a paid app. I'd download it if it were free." "Pffft proprietary software. I'd use it if it were open source." "Pffft the developer still hasn't shipped my feature despite the…
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My Intern Al
Business update: I hired an intern. His name is Alfred, but he prefers to be called Al. After working with Al for a while, I realized that having an intern on your team tends to reduce overall productivity, because you need a senior member to guide them,…
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Ah Chai the Chicken Rice Hawker
Ah Chai sells chicken rice at a busy hawker centre. For some reason, his stall is very popular. Every day, his stall is surrounded by a long queue of hungry customers. One morning, Ah Chai had an idea. "For one extra dollar," he called out, "you may join…
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I Tried Making an AI App and It Made My Life a Living Hell
A while back, my friend who runs a wedding website came to me with an idea. He wanted to create a virtual try-on app so people could try wedding gowns, something not unlike Google's Doppl. I had no experience working with the OpenAI API, but out of…
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The Age of Slop
"Advertising… Advertising… Fix Vista." We laughed at this ad in 2007 because (obviously) the best way to solve Vista's problems was to spend your budget fixing it instead of advertising. But eventually, companies decided that this wasn't just acceptable,…
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Technotes
A few months ago, I posted this image on Mastodon, because the Apple documentation website sometimes feel… err, underwhelming. Many people have already pointed this out, so I won't repeat their complaints. When people complain about Apple's documentation,…
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The Lunch Machine, Part 2
(This is part 2 of a three-part series. Read part 1 here.) After the cook left the village, some villagers decided to open their own restaurants. Every morning, they all ran to the Large Lunch Machine. There, they cooked lots of food and brought it to…
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Eight-Nation Alliance
In 1894, the Qing dynasty lost the First Sino-Japanese War. After this loss, China signed a treaty agreeing to pay a lot of money to Japan. The treaty also gave Japan access to Chinese markets for their ships and goods. This opened the door for other…
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Then What?
Yes, you can vibe code a ChatGPT wrapper that turns users' photos into Studio Ghibli style. Yes, you can do this without learning how to code. Yes, you can do a lot of marketing to get people to pay. Yes, you can make tens of thousands of dollars before…
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Weird Chinese Snow White Picture Book from 1939
In June 1938[^1], Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in China and quickly became very popular. But due to certain circumstances[^2], the release was limited. If you were not one of the rich people in Shanghai, the movie was probably out of reach…
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Idea: A Modern Potion Store
Have you heard of Potion Store? No? It was made by Potion Factory. Still no? How about The Hit List? That's also by them. Still no? Oh gosh, now I feel old. Potion Store was a web app that let developers sell their apps online. It was built with Ruby on…