What? How are they getting away with that?

Or maybe that's just me in the bargaining stage of my career collapsing.

My philosophy: if the hardware doesn't belong to me I'm not doing anything personal on it, no exceptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OETnuwwsv9U

That's not at accurate from what I know of Japanese history. You seem to be over-indexing on the (relatively) brief Tokugawa-era sakoku policy and ignoring the thousands of years surrounding it where Japan was an active importer of culture.

Kanji, government structure, Buddhism, law, art and more were all imported from China and hugely influential in Japanese history. After the the Meiji Restoration, Japan explicitly set out to Westernize and went abroad to study European and American institutions, invited Westerners in to help build European-style banking systems and government systems, adopted Western clothing, architecture, military organization, legal codes, etc. etc.

If anything the Japanese are masters at importing the things they like of foreign culture and then modifying to make it their own. They have always been importers of culture.

I think Kagi's product team actually uses their own software. I often have a small frustration with something and wish for some mitigating setting or change, then go look in the settings and find exactly what I want.

For example: automatically choose Japanese when entering kanji, and automatically strip HTML markup from pasted content.

I'm sure most of us on HN use them for leisure, but for most people a computer is a device for work, not for play.

I tend to agree with you.

Disagree. The RoR front end was way more stable and usable than the mess they have made now.

I think millennials are even more upset by this than other generations. They grew up with a version of internet technology that was useful and non-exploitive, then watched greedy tech companies and CEOs about face and burn it all down to make extra billions.