Big Four and other firms that are required to show "independence" allow investing in mutual funds, ETFs, and other securities where you do not have direct control of individual shares. It does not require a blind trust or other complicated legal setup. I would assume this proposed legislation would allow something similar. Although I suppose you could argue that Congress-critters have substantial enough insight into entire markets/sectors (as opposed to individual clients, like the Big Four) that not all ETFs/mutual funds would provide enough distance.

I know it's cool to hate on superhero movies right now, but I thought Across the Spider-verse knocked it out of the park.

Amazing art (seriously, every frame is like a painting, much like Into the Spider-verse), great voice acting, great storytelling, great rewatchability. And it is quite self-aware, poking fun at multiverse movies (quite a few references to "bagels" in a nod to Everything Everywhere, for example; and complaints about other Marvel multiverse movies, etc).

I have seen this "the LLM doesn't really know the difference between a name and anything else" comment a couple times. I'm somewhat familiar with LLMs and NLP in general, so I'm curious about how true this is.

It seems to me that ChatGPT has quite good Named Entity Recognition and other capabilities that would allow it to categorize people/places/etc. There are many articles documenting processes for using ChatGPT to do NER on a corpus. It certainly seems to have a good capability of doing this when I've interacted with/prompted it, especially when they are well-known/common names. Thinking through my (admittedly limited) understanding of LLM inner workings, it would make sense to me that it would actually be able to pick out names/places/etc and know that they are proper nouns, etc.

Machine translation (probably used in this particular instance) tends to screw this up royally, but LLMs seem to have a much higher hit rate. Do others have this experience or any other information on it?

Cheers

Indeed. Complicated, obscure, and with few feedback loops to help you improve. It takes a lifetime to master even for Japanese, while most foreigners have no hope.

At my old company (a large accounting and technology consulting company), new grads were not allowed to interact with clients for their first year. There were classes on teaching them how to write e-mails and have phone calls in proper "keigo" (polite Japanese).

Most long-term ex-pats that I knew in Japan (those with Japanese wives, kids, etc) eventually just "give up" trying to become Japanese. They can speak fluently, they can get through complicated discussions at the city hall or the hospital, but they will never be Japanese.

Don't get me wrong -- in general, people in Japan are very polite (if only to your face), it's an extremely safe place, and the culture is an amazing experience. I have many, many fond memories. But it can be difficult to resign yourself to always living in an ex-pat bubble, knowing that you'll always be different from 99% of the rest of the population. It's a good life experience that everyone should have, I think -- it has certainly given me a lot of empathy for immigrants of all colors and creeds.

Hah. I would almost prefer if that had been true. You'll (almost) never be called gaijin to your face -- it's only behind the scenes that you hear it whispered.

However, it's a common joke in the ex-pat community that white foreigners have "gaijin cards" (gaijin ka-do-), Meaning that we could act as stupid foreigners and ask for certain concessions, which would be granted for no other reason than that we were gaijin.

Happy to provide more details. I've sometimes thought about writing a short book sharing some of the stories of life in Japan (both my own and other ex-pats). So many heartwarming, funny, and fulfilling stories, coupled with just as many stories of anxiety, depression, and frustration.

Tokyo attracts people from all walks of life, from those that are young and single (university students who study abroad in Japan, JET english teachers) to those that are executives, have families, etc. They come from the surrounding countries in Southeast Asia, from Australia, South America, Europe, and, of course, from North America. Perhaps interestingly, very few black Africans reside in Japan -- but that's a whole different story.

As far as specific anecdotes, there's the Australian executive and his wife who both spoke fluent Japanese, but left Japan when their children got to school age, because their kids were struggling with attending Japanese schools (and Japan was a dead-end for his career; he went back to Australia and immediately doubled his already-large salary). There's the young Singaporean businessman whose girlfriend (now wife) joined him in Japan for almost three years, but left because they couldn't integrate. There's the guy from Atlanta, Georgia, who's still in Japan after 8 years but still struggles with integration on a daily basis (both in his personal life, especially as a Christian; as well as business, when trying to start his own company in Japan). There's the Japanese-American woman who returned to Japan after living abroad for 15 years, lasted 3 years, then went back to the US because of the sexism.

And then there's me, I suppose -- from California, moved to Japan with my wife, got divorced while I was there, dated in Japan, had two different jobs, visited more of Japan than most natives (again, not difficult -- most Japanese do not travel extensively within Japan). Took lots of Japanese language lessons but never became fluent enough to be comfortable in a business situation (to clarify: I was comfortable muddling through conversations, but it would have reflected poorly on my team/company, so I often just listened.)

Cheers.

The ones with good jobs that leave the country because it's difficult to live there are also not making youtube videos about it. They just take their skilled labor and go elsewhere.

I was one of them -- I lived in Tokyo from 2017 to 2022 and was within the top ~5% of earners (not hard to do in Japan if you are working for a western company on a western salary -- wages are extremely depressed in Japan).

Visiting Japan is great. Living there is hard, even if you have a good job. Integrating into the culture is extremely difficult, and there are many examples of direct and indirect discrimination against foreigners. The ex-pat community is quite small in Japan. Anecdotally, most people stuck around for 2-3 years before realizing they needed to move on for a variety of reasons.

Considering that our ancestors, Australopithecus, and even as late as archaic Homo, had larger canines than us and that the trend in canine size in our evolutionary chain has been reduction, I fail to see how this applies.

Please note that I'm not saying that we don't eat as much meat as we used to. The opposite is true; due to the availability of meat, we eat much more. However, we also don't eat raw meat. We figured out ways to cook or otherwise prepare our food so that we can use molars instead.