At present this explicitly does not include a "lockdown such as we have seen in countries abroad."
I would recommend you not make plans which are contingent on that state of affairs continuing.
"What's the biggest change we're likely to see?"
Every public and private org in Japan will have a conversation tomorrow, and in lamentably many cases for *the first time* tomorrow, on what their coronavirus strategy should be. Some will act; some will start planning to act.
"Every" is a bit of an overstatement for effect here, but as of tomorrow it's hard to imagine e.g. a large corporation or city not having several hundred people working on this issue.
That is, unfortunately, not terribly hard to imagine as of last week or even this morning.
The press conference includes the first time I've heard the acknowledgement from on high (in Japanese) that asymptomatic people can be infectious, which is one of the most important facts for the public health response and which will likely surprise a lot of decisionmakers.
Request from the government to avoid moving from Tokyo/Osaka/etc ("as we've seen abroad during lockdowns") to regions of Japan because a) risk in Tokyo/Osaka/etc "if living life as normal" is low and b) high at-risk population in the regions.
(Both quotes approximate.)
Government clarifies that while compliance with government requests to avoid e.g. operating businesses considered at high risk to spread coronavirus is at the discretion of the business owner, that request could be made directly, by police, in the course of their official duties.
I will note for the benefit of Japanese speakers searching the transcript that the word 職務質問 was used by the questioner, and think your friendly neighborhood legal professional can explain why that is an important word choice.
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Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of.
I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively for reading. Vincent recorded some impressions:
The DC-1 has a whiff of magic to it, comparable to the first time using a Kindle.
(Other people profess to have this feeling from the iPhone/iPad the first time. I honestly don't remember those as being "my life now has a before and an after" moments. Kindle was that.)
The Kindle is a substitute for paper, via eInk. It's the best available way to buy books, a somewhat mediocre reading experience which acts like an inferior substitute for paper, and an absolutely gobsmackingly frustrating software/hardware artifact to use.
Matt Levine has a great piece today (well, you knew that) covering Goodhart’s law in the context of how ineffective it is to track mouse movements as a proxy for white collar productivity.
I think this is tempting thing for management to institute because there is a… suspicion.
That suspicion is not “so-called ‘email jobs’ are actually not productive at all.” This is believed by many people on the Internet. Those people are greatly miscalibrated. The world runs on email. Email causes physical results in the world. Coordination/communication are valuable
The thing which management believes is “I have a rather strong suspicion that, somewhere in my vast workforce of people doing white collar jobs, there are malingerers. Not merely people who are bad at their job. No. Some who are actively abusing me, and laughing about it.”
A memorable moment in new employee training for me was when the trainer said that most people working professionally in our field could not whiteboard out funds and data flow between all entities in a credit card transaction. She asked why I could, given no experience in industry
The answer I gave was that I had credit card processing accounts before and read the documentation and contracts carefully. This was true, but was a bit of a fib.
The real reason was I was curious about how PayPal worked in 2004 and had some time to kill.
You’d be surprised what you can learn by reading more of the Internet than anyone thinks is reasonable.
You’d also be surprised how many people consider themselves cogs in a machine, with a bit of knowledge of what their gears touch and then no real interest beyond that.
Once upon a time I wrote letters on behalf of people to banks. I don’t do that anymore, in general, but I still get asked sometimes. I have been told, but not tried much, that GPT is very good when you tell it to cosplay as me specifically doing this.
So today I got an email.
In “help the correspondent learn to fish” mode, I suggested they use ChatGPT to do this. But, since prompt engineering is a thing, thought I could take 30 seconds to write an example prompt.
This is not verbatim a letter I once ghostwrote on behalf of someone in exactly this situation, and you can see in the transcript that I had one or two thoughts. But otherwise, this is almost exactly what I’d write.
Took 30 seconds, and not the 15 minutes this typically did.
(If one doesn’t like the LLM part of it then sculptors exist, and decoupling their location from the building’s location is ~newly an option.)
(I suspect the guy I like in France who does really nice elves would be happy to use the usual workflow on the usual tools to deliver the usual STL file of a Greek god with the funny non-usual detail being the final print will not be 32mm tall.)
Somewhat self-indulgent because I'm mentioned in the thread, but yeah, this is a concrete example of Google getting convincingly outcompeted in search, *which should surprise me* and no longer does.
I haven't yet replaced my core uses of Google Search with "just ask an LLM already, they have a non-zero chance of getting it right" but I think there are a lot of searches for a lot of people where that is already obviously the optimal play.
One very common genre for me is "tip of the tongue" searches, which for common knowledge questions I've already moved entirely to ChatGPT, but for "can you find a document I read in mid-2000s with the following properties" I still default to considered use of Google.