Free Food (Julia)

Obligatory new-project-tweet github.com/JuliaPoo/Artfu…

@mayaofspring ooo rainy morning too

Went on a walk with a friend

Last Thursday I too visited (together with another travel companion (human)) the aforementioned little café place; its name is 茶処山里 "tea place mountain village". We already went to the Suwa area to see somewhere more rural, while its Touhou Project connection gave us more of a context for it. However, I hadn't known about the café place until For You served me the quoted tweet the evening before; how did Nikita know this information would be of great use to us the exact next day? The café by the shrine had maybe 5 tables across, all run by one old lady. Its menu was like in any other place like that; some soba, anmitsu, chocolate cake, green tea and coffee and this sort of stuff. The one distinction was a wall hosting various Touhou-themed illustrations and items, accumulated from fans' offerings over the years; in fact while we were there a group from China gifted a small mirror, its casing illustrated with Moriya Suwako, to be placed on the shelf. Through the couple hours we spent there we saw a good crosssection of the café's customers. A bit less than half of them were more ordinary shrine visitors; the rest were fans on their own pilgrimage. The owner was lovely, asking the fans all kinds of stuff about their journey et cetera. When both us and the Chinese group next to us participated in the room's conversation, the language situation got delightfully complicated as all of Japanese, Mandarin, and English kept getting exchanged between different overlapping subgroups as per their proficiency; one could draw the Venn diagram. I commented to my travel companion how while I would like to know Polish, English, Japanese, and Mandarin, I don't actually have any foreseeable use for Polish other than family communications; ironically, a Polish group entered later, and they didn't know any Japanese, and so I ended up interpreting between them and the inquisitive café owner. (The owner mostly spoke to whoever seemed to be most proficient in Japanese; earlier it was a Chinese guy living in Japan, later it was me). I wondered how this café came to be like that; the owner wasn't exactly a devoted fan herself, though she did say that she loves the Touhou music and the fumofumo plushies. She said that it used to be a plain café, but around 2010 she got curious about all those fans visiting her business, and so she learned that there is a Touhou game based on the shrines in Suwa. I didn't quite catch how exactly she decided to start collecting offerings, but given her openness and inquisitiveness I could perfectly imagine that gradually playing out. Once the friend I was travelling with finished drawing a cute Suwako in the visitors' log, we left for the next destination. The ema tablets at the shrine featured not just people's wishes, but also numerous drawings of Touhou characters, usually Suwako. (One tablet I keep thinking about said "I wish that my mum gets better from her illness" side-by-side with a colourful Suwako). It's a common sight in Japan whenever a particular shrine is featured in otaku media somewhere; I presume the shrines don't mind the extra business. Shinto can get very wholesome this way.

had way too much fun golfing copy.fail , so I made a website to compete with other people copy.golf holding the WR at 492 bytes, please beat it (or pwn the website host for extra points)

@onehappyfellow oh interesting, i rmb this now. i recall commenting on this from my other account.

@FreeFooooooood so you won't believe this but I have my longest post to date on exactly this blog.happyfellow.dev/computational-…

LLMs are great tools for upholding the illusion of intellectual work happening. The consequences are obvious. New blog post: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work blog.happyfellow.dev/simulacrum-of-… Enjoy!

@onehappyfellow One can bring up the hiring industry, education, etc. But imo one of the most horrifying example of this rn is in the current iran war. Baker has an excellent exposition on this: theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/… 7/n

@onehappyfellow The friction is necessary for discretion to occur. "Human-in-the-loop" mitigations fall short due to the increased speed decisions are made. 6/?

@veorq LMAO LOVE THE COLOURS

I factored the number RSA1024-1 using my home-built QPU stack; alarming sign that RSA1024 will soon be broken. I'm choosing Full Disclosure, in the interest of transparency and Science advancement: gist.github.com/veorq/25bee6ef… Non-ZK proof that the correct RSA1024 was used: #RSA-1024" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti… @yuvadm your move

@lililjiliijili ^-^ cdn.astrobin.com/ckeditor-files…

銀河の中心あたりの惑星からみた星空はどれくらい明るいのだろう

@mayaofspring @onehappyfellow oh true. i think its also how as a city-state, residents cant simply move out if 'the city' gets unaffordable, so the state is forced to make public infra as inclusive as possible

@FreeFooooooood @onehappyfellow but also Singapore gov had a narrower scope: they're only concerned with the welfare of the people on the island already. The immigration policy is stricter than UK, for better or worse; they're solving the problems for 4 million people, not potentially 400 million

aaaah, reading politics here is poisoning my brain. let me get everything out so I feel better: - there's just one empirically validated way of getting masses out of poverty: economic growth - nobody is owed "comfortable life" just by the virtue of their existence. - the most reprehensible kind of person is one who could produce, create, improve but chooses to just consume or worse, destroy - public spending is very rarely the answer. sometimes it works because it solves a coordination problem. that's useful. - "fuck you, I owe you nothing" and "I want to spend my time and money helping people" are not incompatible. if you think they are: fuck you. - everyone cannot enjoy above average standard of living. we can increase average standard of living. - you can't save everyone. spending infinite resources to help every single person is short sighted. it you see it as cruel rather than a simple fact, well, I'm sorry

@mayaofspring @onehappyfellow obv there's still homelessness. people fall through the cracks all the time, and its often not their fault. but strong public infra makes being homeless less detrimental. e.g., public showers and toilets, 24 hr laundromats, cheap transport and food, etc.

@mayaofspring @onehappyfellow true, and strong public infra is needed to avoid dysfunctional neighbourhoods. ngl idt the state uses much force to get people off the streets. police do chase u off occasionally, but imo the bigger calculus here is that There Are Options.

@onehappyfellow unrelated, but imo one of the most understated part of public policy is to treat subsidiaries with dignity. singapore's policies has a long way to go, but e.g., building rental housing right beside regular public housing with the same aesthetic is a step in the right direction.

@onehappyfellow also e.g., healthcare subsidies for lower income families AND social workers stationed at facilities to help families navigate the system. u can't just throw more money at the problem if u lack strong institutions to provide the structure.

@onehappyfellow also more public spending absolutely works, but u need strong institutions and infra. e.g., building free homes for the homeless and unemployment benefits absolutely works... if u have robust transport and social infra and ample work opportunities etc

@onehappyfellow i cant say for london but i can deffo say for where i live that the rules r very different even from a decades ago. people surviving on 'min wage' (not defined where i live) are working extremely hard, and their options to escape r incredibly thin.