I still use my dad's Hi-Fi and record player. I bought kilos and kilos of vinyl records in my trips to japan.

For "smart anything", I stick with "Home Assistant" and "ESPHome". The latter is an open source platform to build your own smart devices. You can DIY light switches, remote buttons, remote sensors, even build a security camera for $10 (ESP32CAM). Runs great on Raspberry Pi.

For "good behaving" smart things you can buy, you need to look for the "Matter" standard. Devices are required to always have an open, local API so even if the manufacturer disappears, your smart hardware is still smart even though it can't phone home anymore.

I still stick to ESPHome

It's the same argument every single time IPv6 is mentioned. "I prefer NAT because it gives me security". People just don't understand the difference between a stateful firewall and a NAT.

I stopped trying to explain this. You'd think that the slashdot crowd would understand some basic networking concepts, but nope.

I asked Claude to improve the design on a Vue component and it did. It didn't do any magic, it just looked up what CSS library we were using and it used it as intended (accent colors, primary colors, etc). and threw in some icons.

Could I have done it? Sure. But as a "mostly backend" developer, it would have taken me a lot of time to read the docs and examples. And another good chunk of time to choose the right icons.

this is a stupid take that completely misses the point. no matter how "good" (by whatever your perception of "good" is), people won't visit the website because their main driver of traffic (Google) is simply hiding them.

google puts their AI crap in the most valuable space of the results page. on mobile you even have to scroll down to see actual search results

Microsoft got fined for antitrust for bundling a web browser. google gets away with stealing content to train LLMs and used their golden results page space to promote their web browser with no consequences

can you make phone calls with these? The problem in Japan is actually getting a number you can call from. Many of these sims, especially the ones targeted at tourists, are data-only SIMs. to get a phone number you need identity validation and for this they often require a proof of Japanese address.

the stories about sim card bullshit I've heard from Japanese resident podcasts and a travelers Discord group I'm a part of.

the question usually pops up whenever people are trying to buy tickets and the website refuses international phone numbers. reasons vary from "technical" to "only a small % of tickets are for foreigners, the majority we sell to Japanese"

I guess it depends. Is the phone "discounted" if you do this? For a while, committing to a yearly plan meant that you got a phone for the price of a phone plan. The alternative is paying for your phone, and just change service anytime.

This sucks however when you are traveling abroad. If your plan doesn't have roaming at your destination, you can't use a local or travel SIM/eSIM. For some people this seems to work fine.

I never owned a sim-locked phone and never will.

Funfact: sim-locking is the standard in Japan. And if you think you have it bad in america, you really need to take a look at the things they do in Japan. They have two-way SIM locking: you can't even use your current SIM on an unlocked phone!!! You HAVE to buy the phone FROM the phone company or else it won't work. Or you can get a SIM that will work with unlocked phones, but they won't sell you a phone (not even sim-locked) if you do this. Are you a foreigner? no sorry, we won't sell you service because you're a flight risk. "We have been having cases of foreigners leaving the country with unpaid bills. yes, we know you are a legan resident and you need a phone to function in society nowadays but you know, the risk of you not paying us 1 month of is far greater than whatever money we can make off you".

I can't blame him. If I had the talent I'd run one of those get-rich-quick scams too.

Just inflate the value of your company with VC money for a few "rounds" until a big player buys you, then take the money and run.

It's the standard business model in Silicon Valley really.

it will also hopefully change the whole "Business Class" airline travel landscape

currently, Business has become exorbitantly expensive. Recently United wanted $10K for a ticket from Buenos Aires to Tokyo. It's ridiculous, but this keeps happening due to rewards cards. I know very well that most people in those flights have NOT paid 10K out of pocket. Most are just upper-middle class with thousands of miles in CC rewards, or a company is paying for it.

I expect once those seats keep going empty, airlines will lower prices to a more sane level.

also it's extra surprising to the android that runs Meta because he can't comprehend why people would prefer to meet face to face instead of in the Metaverse

I just run Home Assistant with a ZigBee network. ZigBee is just completely offline and it works great. It's a mesh network too.

For other things, I run ESPHome which is a platform built on top of ESP8266/ESP32 MCUs to make "smart devices" very easily. my "smart floodlights" are just cheap floodlights with a ESP8266 and a relay. They're connected to wi-fi and I can turn them off and on remotely, for example, to turn the outside lights when i hear a noise at night

My camera system is ESP32-CAM boards. Under $5 will give you XGA resolution at around 15fps. Wi-Fi only but it's good enough for my needs. Any camera system I get has to support offline mode. Ideally with RTSP.

Why would anyone use "bare javascript" instead of TS is beyond me.

A couple years ago some high profile libraries ditched TS and moved to bare JS because it was "holding them back". But then again, idiots developing JS libraries love to break API compatibility completely in every major release. And not like "yeah let's rename this argument because my OCD prevents me from being productive if i see this name).

No like, "let's completely rewrite the codebase and make a fundamentally different product, but call it a new version".

I'm looking at you, "React Router"

Various fucking NATION STATES have been contemplating this for decades.

And now it turns out a startup in america will do it with VC money.

What China (and before it, Japan) have tried with infinite government money, and failed, a startup will do it with VC money.

No. It's because you were figuring things out and making terrible decisions 50 years ago. None of you really knew what you were doing. You just called IBM support and had them do things for you, or did what the manual said.

The fact that systems can't be upgraded and have to run in layer after layer of emulation is proof that you did a poor job building a maintainable system. You never changed the program to run on a new system. You always had IBM to save you from doing it by having companies pay them more and more.

Yes. Definitely. Without a doubt.

The problem with these old COBOL systems is that they have decades of patches one on top of another, and very little formal testing. These systems were made in a time long before "modern good practices" were established. They work because the business requirements are straightforward and change very little. And the things they do are relatively simple. The barrier to entry is extremely high. COBOL is not taught anymore, and even if you learn COBOL on your own in Linux, in real life it won't be a Linux OS. It'll probably be several layers of proprietary IBM VM emulation, with Linux running AS/400 running AIX. And on top of that, you have whatever customizations this particular user made. You're a slave of what someone that wasn't necessarily a "wizard" decided 40 years ago.

With a more "modern" language, COBOL can make use of modern "good practices", especially automated testing and such.

the "jump frameworks every couple of years to whatever is trendy" is out of place when you are mentioning Java and C#. Both are well-established languages and have been stable for literally decades now. Java and C# (actually .NET) people are not in the same game as JS developers.

The problem isn't the language, but all of the things that come around it. Using a modern language would, if anything, let you ditch the expensive IBM support contracts for mainframe hardware (and maybe switch to slightly less expensive support contracts for regular hardware)

if anything, it's more vulnerable than on-prem because on-prem very often uses "bad practices" that end up saving you.

For example, it's good practice to have DNS names for everything. Lazy sysadmins will just hardcode IPs instead

But hey, you're immune to DNS failing you if you do this...