And I am exactly the opposite - aside from my first job out of university 10 years ago I have gotten every job since through connections

That's where the author is, and it's fine. IMO, these people tend to be better represented online, because getting a job through connections/influence/visibility is necessarily going to be louder than clicking submit on a form.

My current job was done via a connection, but every previous job has been through spamming my resume to every job I'm even remotely qualified for and/or I find interesting.

I have a degree now, but I dropped out of college the first time around, and so I didn't have any connections in the software industry, or anywhere really. When I dropped out, I assumed any desk job career was out the window. I applied to Aldi, Lowes, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Taco Bell in one day (driving and applying in person).

On a lark, and almost as a joke to myself, I applied to exactly one software job from an ad on Craigslist, and they were the only ones who actually got back to me, thus jumpstarting my software career. I've had a lot of jobs in a lot of different places, and despite knowing lots of interesting people I've only managed to convert that to a job one time.

I have no idea how people use friendly connections to get jobs.

Whether you like it or not you will look stupid to native speakers. It's a subconscious bias

Idk if that's universal, when I run into people who struggle with English or just don't know it my first thought has never been this is a stupid person.

"Looking stupid" and "being a stupid person", or even "coming off as a stupid person" are not the same things.

The Neo is supposed to be the budget version. I think MacOS is a decent computing platform for some engineering and creative endeavors -- if one more college kid gets access to it for cheaper I say it's a positive

I work in east Asia for a western startup. My work schedule is shifted a few hours earlier, so I end up waking up at 5 and have meetings starting at 6. I work in silence the rest of the day and we have no-meetings days once a week.

I love it.

Japanese has a word for green now 緑 (midori). Traffic lights use the word for blue for historical reasons

I also live in Suginami! There's always a lot of kids running around together, especially after school, but that feels quite normal for anywhere in Japan, no?

I can’t speak to the rest of Japan, but in Tokyo, yes.

Suginami in particular seems to be very kid focused in terms of infrastructure development efforts. 6 years ago the was a wild sprouting of daycare facilities everywhere around, and these days new parks pop up everywhere. They were going to close the nearby jidoukan, and the new major seems to have reversed all of that. Japan is absolutely making an effort to reverse population decline xD

Enforce stacked PRs, reject PRs over 500-1k LoC (I'd argue even lower, but it's a hard sell)

Did a coal miner write this comment?

Worse, an environmentalist.

Miner vs. straw man, who wins? :o)

I was very pissed off to find that my Youtube Premium didn't work when I visited Armenia. I was still paying for it, but ads played and I couldn't listen to videos in the background. WTF?

There's so much obvious evidence of manipulation on Wikipedia, it's insane that it doesn't come under more scrutiny. It's even worse on non-English Wikipedias

reputation scoring for authors plus various voting and scoring metrics for the articles themselves but perhaps since I personaly never have looked at a persons wiki, what I see is generaly very well cross referenced and much of it leads off into PHD dissertation nitty gritty ,rabbit warrens of hard science, where there is no need to put up "vandals will be prosecuted" signs so perhapps, nonhistorical persons should be shuttled off to, :), wikibook