What doesn’t kill you… makes you very tired indeed
I’m still helping my wife with her language school (mostly admin or special tasks). One of those tasks was to accompany ten students on a trip to Cebu in The Philippines to study English.
Reader, it almost killed me.
First, we got to Narita and went to check in, and our flight was cancelled. After several hours, we got vouchers for a hotel and a replacement flight the next day. Not the best start.
Halfway through the trip the students all got upset with each other and I had to host a mediation meeting and encourage everyone to share their feelings and apologise. Not my forte, but it worked out.
Then one of the students became ill and required hospitalization. It was bad enough that I asked their parent to fly out to take over from me.
Got back last night. Feel like I need to sleep for a week.
How was your New Year?
Your First Ten Million Yen
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The Forum
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This week’s books
I had a lot of time to read on the trip as I didn’t have internet access a lot of the time.
I finished reading The City and The City, by China Mieville. It was really interesting and a fun read. Not up to Perdido Street Station IMO, but still good.
I jumped back into Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport. Get a feeling I need to implement these concepts this year.
I read The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune. It’s a whimsical fantasy book. I actually really enjoyed it. A quick read.
And also Blood over Bright Haven, by ML Wang. This is also fantasy, and refreshingly it is just the one book. Good characters, interesting magic system, satisfying ending.
This week’s links
- Optimist indeed! Pax Nipponica
- Great read (thanks, Martin!): ‘A film that only Japan could have made’: Seventy years on, why Godzilla is the darkest monster movie of them all
- Fair enough! Most of these annoy me too: The top 10 annoying foreign tourist behaviors on trains, as chosen by Japanese people【Survey
- A lot of respect for this man: Jimmy Carter, longest-lived US president, dies aged 100
- I really don’t understand why Japan has this system at all. Get rid of it, keep the consumption tax. It’s not like the tourists will stop coming: Japan’s Duty-Free System For Tourists Will Change to Refunds in November 2026
- Japan at #36? Richest Countries in the World 2024
- Be warned: Don’t wipe toilet seats with bathroom paper, Japanese maker Toto advises
- More accountability: Breaking Down Japan’s Immigration System From a Former Insider’s Perspective
- And to Korea of all countries… Japan Freaks out about Falling behind Korea in Nominal GDP per Capita
- Completely agree. I have struggled to find anything I want to use AI for: Resist Summary
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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#10: I’ll be giving the technique described there a try–to let AI summarize the main points of any videos that catch my eye. I won’t be simply relying on the summary and moving on, but using that to help me use my time watching videos that are “good”, vs ones that are not. If someone started such a service, it might be popular.
Too many videos require too much time investment for the content they yield (the reason that I generally avoid videos), whereas with text I can scan paragraph to paragraph or section to section more quickly and more effectively, and then decide whether to go back and review again, and/or choose to pay close attention all the way through, or on specific parts.
With videos that’s awkward and challenging. Only very occasionally are videos are broken into sections, and sometimes those sections have direct links in the info section below the video. Which is a little better, navigation-wise, but while closer, still a distant second to text.
Best case/common practice would be if the video creators -themselves- would do this kind of AI summary on their own videos. Kind of a “Read-this-before-watching” service. Not only a reasonable preview (which they could edit if needed), seeing the summaries might give some these folks some hints about presenting via video more directly, succinctly, effectively, etc. Or heaven forbid, they may see and realize that a text-based version of their content would be better…!