Moonshot’s (Kimi’s owner) investors are Alibaba/Tencent et al. Chinese market is stupidly competitive, and there’s a general attitude of “household name will take it all”. However getting there requires having a WeChat-esque user base, through one way or another. If it’s paid, there’ll be friction and it won’t work. Plus, it undermines a lot of other companies, which is a win for a lot of people.

Very off-topic, but war on drugs failed in NA, but is successful in East Asia. It really depends on government and how they handle it. I’m not American, but my understanding of war on drugs was also that it wasn’t just about drugs, might be wrong.

We do our review through Claude github actions. Works well.

You don't really have to.

I mean, it’s “Not A Good Thing” for the US. Chinese people are proud of their accomplishments in the past couple of decades, and deservedly so. Now they can do the whole realpolitiks as well.

Sure, I don’t agree with lots of their stuff, but I’d rather a guy who doesn’t flip flop his mind every 4 years.

That only works in a moral framework where everyone is subscribed to the same ideology.

Working in a large scale org gets you accustomed to general problems in decision making that aren’t that obvious. Like I totally understood what she means and in my head nodded with “yeah that tracks”.

Maybe it helps them sleep at night.

Imo, the article is exaggerating quite a bit, and written from a perspective of a tourist, which is fair. Nowadays these bars aren’t hidden or try to be out of sight. Like there’s a whole google maps category just for these type of establishments.

But in general, you’d expect what was outlined in the post. From my friends and etc., food might range from pretty bad to average. Might get charged service fee if you’re not hyperlocal to the bar. Also atmosphere, once again, depends. City, neighbourhood, sleeziness level and etc.

About the gay stuff… Honestly it’s more of a “i don’t care just don’t show it off” attitude, rather than “no gays allowed”. But the “don’t show it off” part applies to straight people as well. Nobody is gonna do or say anything, but an auntie might shake their heads as they pass by.

Tattoos are a bit different. If you’re white, nobody will care unless they’re very visible (face/neck). You’ll be barred from some establishments (e.g. onsens/gyms), but if it’s coverable with the covers then it’s fine. Mostly historical reasons, and people’s aversion from accidentally hanging out with the “troublesome crowd” as one would say.

It’s worth pointing out that there are certainly establishments where tourists aren’t welcome. Ironically I’ve had some gay friends walked from a local only gay bar to the tourists welcome gay bar across the street :-)

Not a local, but in my experience this is due to tourists not being able to speak Japanese, which makes the people working in a place very uncomfortable ("will this person follow the rules? How can I do proper service if I can't communicate?"). A 大丈夫、少し日本語をしゃべります (it's ok, I speak a bit of japanese) has been enough to open the doors for me.

That being said, they do have issues with some nationalities. For example, the average American is way too loud for the average japanese place. Even if they think they are being polite, they just talk too loud and too much for japanese sensibilities.

Oh definitely. I mean, my neighbourhood has a bar that doesn’t even allow people who don’t live in the area as well. I guess, the gay bars not allowing foreigners is for a different reason, but soft discrimination is very ubiquitous. On the bright side, there are hundreds of thousands of other establishments that will happily take your money.

To be clear, I take zero issue with the bar exclusion and my friends are in the same position. The cultural differences are so substantial that it’s an understandable desire for locals not wanting to adapt theirs to suit ours.

The "download service documents here" (something like サービス資料ダウンロード) call to action part is true. But everything else sounds like a marketing fluff for the company in the article. Like yes, the process is longer, but it's mostly due to risk-aversiveness of most of the companies.

it is the "marketing fluff for the company in the article". Not sure why it got posted, just water is wet marketing text with no value.

Not really? It’s incredibly easy to run an A/B test targeting hundreds of thousands of users to test hypothesis and refine your eventual feature. All these eventually add up. And honestly, the upper management is pretty smart too.

Yea, I really don't get the idealism from some that say "the billionaires are going to fail any minute now" when the problem keeps getting worse and there is no end in sight.