Taking ferries in Japan is an entertaining diversion, especially as an American who didn’t grow up around islands. We really enjoyed this three hour excursion as we traveled from one onsen town in Shikoku (Matsuyama) to another one in Kyushu (Beppu).
Also fun was the random Suzume film propwork created to promote the port’s appearance as the main character traveled to Ehime.
I get that Apple needed to switch to the cheaper TSMC process and that's the real reason they're launching the M4 now, but as someone who just paid $5000 for an M2 Vision Pro and an M3 MacBook Air, it feels pretty shitty that a thousand dollar iPad is so much faster.
The onsen hotel we’re staying at is equipped with four of these bad boys and as long as I’ve got this chair in my life I’m not sure I’ll have need for human touch ever again panasonic.jp/massage/p-db/EP-MA88M.html
Famed as the oldest onsen (hot springs) bath in Japan, it’s relatively tiny and cramped by today’s standards, but it was cool to check it off the bucket list. The little onsen town that’s grown up around this main building were definitely worth a visit, especially if you’re a fan of Studio Ghibli’s “Spirited Away”, as this onsen was apparently among their artistic inspirations.
If you go, I'd recommend staying where we did, at Dogokan (道後館) hotel.
After visiting this onsen hotel in Izu last year, I decided to bring Becky this time and we had an absolutely wonderful time. Beautiful property, well-maintained. The staff really go above and beyond, too.
Also, here's my Tabelog check-in of their kaiseki dinner.
I love the Gaburi chicken chain. I first stumbled on it in Tokyo, of all places, even though I’m pretty sure it’s based in Nagoya. Order the chickent thigh (“momo”) kara age until you’re full. The 2 hour all-you-can-drink deal is pretty cheap, too
My Tabelog check-in.
I was pretty impressed to find a decent yakitori place so close to Kabukicho's main drag that wasn't overrrun by tourists. The guy seated next to me had been coming to the same bar for 40 years.
Tabelog page (my review)
I've been using the new MacBook Air since it launched last month and I'd been thinking about writing a full review of what it's like to live with it, but I'm lazy so I'll just piggy-back on Paul Thurrott's glowing review of the 15" model with the following modifications that only apply to the 13" version.
Additional review notes:
Despite 9 years of technological advancement, Apple has regressed significantly on the only metric I care about in a portable computer: weight. Considering that the ARM transition was meant to provide significantly more thermal headroom and enable the design of new form factors, the fact that Apple was able to ship a 2-pound MacBook with a retina screen and Intel chip in 2015 but has thus far failed to ship an M-series Mac that weighs less than 2.7 pounds is simply bewildering.
Everything else about the computer is great.
Searls Score: 2.7 / 10
A number of readers have asked about my Vision Pro setup since writing about how I’ve forsaken my desk for an Eames chair.
Well, here it is. I ran the MagSafe charging cable for my MacBook Air along the left armrest and routed the USB-C cable that charges my Vision Pro battery up the back (which itself is affixed via a 3D-printed enclosure and velcro command strips).
At nearly three months in, I’m loving this setup. Went ahead and cancelled a longstanding to-do to find a more comfortable office chair than my Steelcase Leap, because I can’t really see myself needing one anytime soon.
Despite being known for their seafood, Boathouse's burger is exceptional considering how large their menu is and how many covers they turn a night. Most dedicated craft burger joints aren't half this good.
When the bartenders remember it, I like to order the long-since-removed cocktail S.S. Politician, which is a simple (and extremely whiskey-forward) manhattan made with:
… and served to the brim of a martini glass that's tall enough to ride most roller coasters.
A recent trend in GPT-4 over the past few months is that it's started catching hallucinations (or, more charitably, over-eager user affirmation) mid-sentence. At this point, about 20% of the yes/no questions I ask it result in a sudden about-face. As jarring as it is to read, only once has it explicitly acknowledged its own contradiction—which, I'll admit, was impressive.
Because ChatGPT spews fluent bullshit, it has no relationship with the truth and so no apology or reflection typically follows. However, unlike most bullshitters, if you ask for an apology it'll gladly oblige. Silver lining.
Today we have a veritable smorgasboard of potpurri as we indulge in the figurative potluck dinner that is, "shit Justin wants to talk about." This may be the last major version for a while, so savor this.
Thank you to listeners who took version 10's mandatory e-mail feedback demand seriously, as the mailbag once again is full of good questions. But you must do your part and e-mail podcast@searls.co to keep it that way. Each e-mail you send entitles you to a license to listen to three more episodes, so—in a sense—you can't afford not to write in.
Have some links:
John Hawthorn, a brilliant Rubyist and contributor of quite a lot of important open source in the Ruby ecosystem references a benchmark for a gem that lets you invoke the Crystal programming language from Ruby.
I'll spoil the post here by giving you the before and after.
Before:
The “crystalized” version runs about 4x faster than the pure Ruby version.
After:
Now it’s Ruby that’s 5 times faster than Crystal!!! And 20x faster than our original version.
Writing a program that behaves the way you want is hard, but that's not the end of the journey. Without an understanding of how the computer will execute your instructions, you're left at the mercy of a bunch of arbitrary performance implications that can lead to misguided beliefs emerging within teams and organizations.
A common refrain in recent years is, "we're rewriting all our critical sections of Ruby into Rust." Closer inspection by an expert almost always finds flaws in the assumptions (or, if there are any, analyses) that lead to these whole-cloth "optimizations", however.
I've seen organizations try to pull off pretty much every approach you can think of to escape performance problems and technical debt. The more dramatic the maneuver—like, say, bifurcating one's codebase into two languages and then bridging them—the more likely it is to fail to accomplish the stated goal or to fail outright.
Trust me when I say it's almost always better to dance with the one who brought you. Embracing the problem usually leads to better solutions than running from it.
Currently reading my 6th book in Japanese and I finally made the leap to using a full Japanese dictionary (as opposed to a Japanese-English one).
Finding that my mind is staying in flow longer, retaining more, and a lot of nuanced/overloaded terms (like さらに) are much more clearly described in a full dictionary than JMDICT. 💫
Build the thing right: LLMs are mediocre-but-useful tools
Build the right thing: LLMs are spectacularly bad, because they are so over-indexed on positive affirmation that they’ll never tell you your idea is stupid, much less suggest a better one.
Was talking to someone who thought he was an expert in prestige television, but dude didn't even understand why Battlestar Galactica and The Young Pope are in the same cinematic universe.
This week, I've been working on a new multimedia mode for the blog that I call Spots, which are essentially map pins of places I visit.
Rather than merely list all of my Spot posts one-at-a-time as reverse-chronological posts, I also wanted to make a single interactive map that aggregated all my annotations in one place so that readers could explore them spatially. Because I'm a tool for all things Apple, I decided to use the MapKit JS framework they introduced in 2018 for the job.
All told, it was actually pretty easy to get up-and-running and the documentation (while sparse) told me what I needed to do to get a map rendered, centered, and loaded with annotations.
One thing the docs didn't tell me however, was how to let users make a map full screen, and the reason the docs don't mention it is because framework doesn't support it. And that's quite a bummer when your layout's maximum width is as narrow as it is on this humble blog.
So this morning, I figured out a way to hack together a full-screen button that aped the Maps UI's look-and-feel for MapKit JS. Since it's an odd omission, I figured it might be useful to somebody out there if I did a quick show-and-tell on how I did it.
Here's what the button does, before and after clicking it:
Interested? Well, here's what the recipe calls for:
This is going to be a niche one, but maybe somebody will Google for this someday.
This morning, I figured out a relatively low-effort way to export my visited restaurants (行ったお店) in Tabelog and then decorate them with latitude and longitude as well as translations of each restaurant's name and summary.
There are basically three steps:
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability
Sorry cows, your skin is simply too good to not wrap our metal devices in.
The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future.
On second thought, it's very unlikely Apple would ever go back to leather. My guess is FineWoven quietly disappears and isn't immediately replaced with another "premium" material in 2024.
A local friend is taking his first trip to Japan this week, so we took him to one of the two(!) local Gyu-kaku locations here in Orlando.
A ton of these have sprung up throughout the US in the last few years, and if your town has one, I'd strongly encourage you to check it out. It's a cook-your-own-food restaurant chain in Japan and the American renditions (mostly) do their Japanese counterparts justice.
If you want to know what to order, go for the top-of-the-line ("Supreme"?) all-you-can-eat menu and just keep ordering harami skirt steak (salted, not sauced) until your stomach explodes.
