You get your waist and height measured as part of your routine health examination every year since you become a worker. Eyes, hearing, etc are also included. Its just your body's "metrics".

Your company CAN look at these (they rarely care to), but they can't fire you for them - you especially aren't fined over it. Japan is an incredibly hard country to fire or penalize workers. They can only check them in the first place because its the company that pays for these screenings in most cases. Free EKG, blood screens, and other basic health marker checks.

I'm so tired of people spreading orientalist crap about this country on the internet.

Small town living is kind of a different kettle of fish though. There can be lots of committees, local rules and association fees you're expected to take part in. Lots of these aren't really forced or regulated "by law", but someone from there is just expected to play into them. Lots of younger Japanese people and foreigners move there, learn about these and find them unbearable -and if you don't play ball you can be treated badly.

In rural areas though the main thing for foreigners is that you'll kind of become a town character "foreigner-san". Kind of unavoidable when you're the only foreign face many of these people will have ever met.

I think some foreigners have this dream if they assimilate enough people will just pretend they're not a foreigner anymore, which personally I think is unrealistic and silly - you are foreign. The truly happy people here find a way to integrate while coming to peace with the fact they're obviously different.

The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I lived back at the UK. Every time I go back it seems more and more people are struggling to pay for basic expenses - and even if I moved back it seems get a great salary I'd have to live in London, which I dislike.

I imagine lots of people far more talented than me must also be feeling the pull to not stay in the country too. Its festering politically and economically. Besides family there really is no benefit to remaining.

From an also non-USian.

We need new laws. Especially regarding deepfakes, it's shocking how many people think revenge porn laws and such are going to be enough here. Rather than just focusing on the data usage, we need more fundamental laws and rights, like the right to control representations of ourselves, like Japan has, where producing images or voice/video in your likeness is prosecutable straight out. Likewise we need laws that explicitly target data use for training that is separate to copyright.

The way LLMs are trained is obviously too similar to how humans learn, and the transformation and then output produce works that are novel based on that "learning", just like humans do. This is so fundamentally different to what copyright laws were made to cover, I find it infuriating how many people handwave these arguments away. Only in perfect 1-to-1 regurgitation does it even feel close to something copyright would be able to cover.

Google just have an incredibly weak product team, across both hardware and software.

My dentist would always lie to me saying "just a little longer left" (even when there was about an hour remaining) which really didnt help, and after we finished about 5 teeth worth of treatments she said she "realised" I have 3 more places she wants to do as well..

It sounds hysterical I'm sure, but I dont think she realised that several times per each treatment I'm genuinely convinced I'm about to die - like making peace with god level. I got over myself and was in a really good cycle of going because I wanted to finally fix everything, and then that extra "reveal" of another 2 rounds of treatment just broke me, I couldn't do it.

The way I was raised, I'm the only person I trust with my sexual health. I would never trust someones word they're tested recently and have unprotected sex with them. I wouldn't trust someone saying they're on PrEP and have unprotected sex with them either. I can only trust myself. U=U is exactly the same situation.

In a zero trust mindset like that, someone telling me they're U=U only tells me they have HIV. I have HIV+ friends who struggle to take their meds at the right time every day, or forget. And I also know people who have lied about when they last took their STI screening to hookups.

I'm also sure a bunch of people would get angry if you asked a U=U person to show you their latest CD4 count or viral load proof too - so what am I to do, just trust that, unlike everyone else, U=U people are perfectly honest, and never screw up taking their meds?

The response to this is often "anyone COULD have HIV, U=U people are actually safer because they have it locked down", but again to me this is about as trustworthy as "anyone COULD have HIV, but people on PrEP have it locked down". It all relies on the trust the other person is on top of their shit.

When sampling data all over the internet, your data set only represents people who did write, did respond to questions - with no representation of what they didn't. Add into that confidently wrong people - people who respond to questions on, say, StackOverflow, even if they're wrong, and suddenly you have a data set that prefers replying bullshit, because there's no data for the people who didnt know the answer and wrote nothing.

Inherently there's no representation in the datasets of "I don't know" null values.

LLMs are forced to reply, in contrast, so they "bullshit" a response that sounds right even though not answering or saying you don't know would be more appropriate - because no-one does that on the internet.

I always assumed this was a big factor, but am I completely off the mark?

Nothing here really sounds like GPTs fault to me. The issue is something that could easily have been done by a human and missed in PR.

(spoilers)

- So much time was spent on the cancer story, only for it to lead no-where. Especially toward the end of the show, increasingly more time was spent with the characters doing nothing and sitting about, still refusing the call to action. It was bizarre seeing there were only 2 episodes left to go, and still no-one was doing anything or even really caring.

- The video game was odd. I'm supposed to believe only advanced scientists can solve it, but actually only one of the levels seemed to be solved with actual science. The rest were just deductions about the society - I really doubt many people would struggle passing through it.

- After the reveal that it is aliens, the show seems to just wander about not knowing what to do with itself. Only the reveals about the cult are really consequential after that, and when it's all revealed you're basically spent just following this rocket story that only 1 character really cares about. Again everything takes too long here too.

- The show didn't seem to care about the interpersonal relationships of the characters at all, but then toward the end spent an insane amount of time forcing us to watch them. The actors couldn't sell it, and the script was bad too. The show only really shone during the sci-fi stuff, but drips it out at a snails pace.

- The ending was silly and didn't land for me. My boyfriend and I laughed at the head going off course because it was just so bizzare, especially as the show had forced us to sit through the the pondering and fake in-fighting about the decision to choose the cancer guy as the candidate. What was it all for?!

- The ship nano-wire scene was insane. Like an amazing sequence we were "holy shit!"ing our way through. But after it all happened and the ship is utterly destroyed it's like.. was I really meant to believe this was better than a missile to disarm it and swatting the place?

Maybe in America where these messenger apps are less prevalent its less of a problem, but in Japan not having access to Line, Instagram Messenger and Whatsapp would basically remove all ways for anybody to contact me.

It's not some sacrifice I can just accept for a digital detox either - texting is the main way people keep in touch nowadays. It would basically remove the entire purpose of having a phone at all.

The daisy chaining prevents single responsibility stuff like this.

Also for what it's worth I've done verification callbacks to every single one of my bosses at some point during my career here and no-one's ever questioned it.