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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 1st, 2023

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  • Even the cheapest shower curtains have extra sewn in threads at the bottom which weigh them down and prevent clinging.

    Mould isn’t an issue if you’re airing out the bathroom properly, and washing the curtains every week or so.

    Glass is also prone to mould as well, but you can’t just throw out it. The tracks they require are particularly difficult to keep clean and give me the heeby jeebies.

    Washing curtains is infinitely easier than maintaining and cleaning the glass tracks.


  • That’s even more confusing, why not forego the shower glass entirely and just have a shower curtain instead?

    Yes I know it’s likely retrofitted, but I won’t pass a chance to say that shower curtains are superior. Shower glass looks glossy in brochures, but everyone IRL has a sad squeegee hanging from it.


  • Because the US still does not have instant, or near instant bank transfers. ACH bank transfers cost money per transaction, on the order of 0.30-0.50 per transaction, and can much higher for larger transactions.

    The US is just incredibly, and uniquely behind when it becomes to accessible payments. This is the reason why “FinTech” such as Cash app, PayPal, and Venmo, in addition to credit cards, are popular - they literally just don’t have the infrastructure in place for you to pay back a friend after they pay for a meal.

    Every other developed, and even some developing countries, have had fee free instant payments, for the better half of a decade. The UK/Hong Kong have Faster Payment System (FPS). Europe has SEPA, and most countries mandate that transfers cannot charge fees. Australia has Osko. India has Immediate Payments Service.

    I read horror stories of USians paying rent by writing cheques or mailing cash to avoid bank transfer fees and subsequently stressing out about fraud. This is just insane to everyone else, who just pays via instant bank transfers.








  • The Japanese public are definitely not willing to lend to the government at such low interest rates. The majority holder of Japanese bonds is the Bank of Japan, who needs to purchase large amounts of bonds to conduct its monetary policy. This has lead to some accusations of the two having an incestuous relationship, when central banks are supposed to be independent.

    Before the Bank of Japan started hiking interest rates, most Japanese people were stuck in a liquidity trap, where they had to pay to store money in the bank. This was due to a combination of low/negative interest rates, and lots of banking fees due to the oligopolistic banking sector. 7-eleven (the convenience store) bank is unironically the fastest growing bank there, in no small part because they were the only bank with a wide ATM network which didn’t charge fees during business hours.

    It is certainly… interesting that the Japanese government, with access to such cheap credit, decides to invest it abroad for higher returns, rather than invest it domestically and pursuing structural reforms to improve its own growth, and in doing so perpetuating the spread between government assets and liabilities.

    FYI there are a lot of investors who do this exact trade, i.e. borrow cheap money from Japan, and invest it abroad.





  • Japanese conservative monarchists are wild.

    Look up the Google Maps reviews of the imperial palace. For some context, the majority of the imperial palace is completely off limits to the general public (in stark contrast to most developed countries), and the royal family does a new years greeting.

    The reviews are monarchists unironically saying things like that they travelled for days, lined up for hours, caught a glimpse of one of the royal family, were temporarily transported to heaven, and will dedicate their lives hoping for the forever prosperity of the royal family.


  • Unfortunately I find even prompts like this insufficient for accuracy, because even when directly you directly ask them for information directly supported by sources, they are still prone to hallucination. The use of super blunt language as a result of the prompt may even further lull you into a false sense of security.

    Instead, I always ask the LLM to provide a confidence score appended to all responses. Something like

    For all responses, append a confidence score in percentages to denote the accuracy of the information, e.g. (CS: 80%). It is OK to be uncertain, but only if this is due to lack of and/or conflicting sources. It is UNACCEPTABLE to provide responses that are incorrect, or do not convey the uncertainty of the response.

    Even then, due to how LLM training works, the LLM is still prone to just hallucinating the CS score. Still, it is a bit better than nothing.