I don't think the culture is the same due to cabinets having network capabilities now, but I do think it's possible.
At the taito station in Akihabara, I've met tourists a few times when I was in town for a large tournament (EVO Japan) and made friends from it. I've also had people watching me play, but unfortunately I don't speak Japanese.
I know there's a few arcades that still have some street fighter III: third strike cabinets with regulars. I can't speak for other games but at least for street fighter, people are almost always open and friendly.
I was there 2 years ago. I went inside one of the multi storey gaming places in Akihabara. The old school (90's and older) era games are a small section in one floor when there is 6 storeys of gaming.
That sounds like the Taito Station on the right side of the street. On the other side there is a Gigo with a whole floor for retro games, and Hey! that is focused almost only on retro games.
Of course it's not. Why look at anything positive or actually do something when you can instead engage in the tired tropes like looking at the past with rose tinted glasses as a way of comforting yourself.
You can be as positive as you want to be, and should absolutely take action and do things to better socialize.
But to pretend it’s remotely the same as it was 40 years ago is utterly ridiculous. Now when you do such things like a running club you are joining a group of very self-selecting people who for the most part have a certain personality type.
You simply do not get the diversity in group experiences as there used to be. It was either go through social discomfort or sit alone bored with zero social interaction. Now the friction to get that social dopamine hit is extremely low bar, and going beyond it the bar has been raised considerably.
Not to mention doing stuff like running club or rock climbing just feeds into the hyper-scheduled world the west has become. Spontaneous social interaction is important too, and those third places are increasingly scarce and involve far more friction. Which again self-selects for certain personality types and lifestyles.
For some people these changes are positive - much easier to find niche activities to do with others. For other people they are extremely negative.
>Now when you do such things like a running club you are joining a group of very self-selecting people
I'd disagree with this pretty strongly. I do workshops at a makerspace in Berlin, which is in itself a pretty nerdy place but we've got everything from pensioners to middle aged moms to obviously a lot of people from the university or tech work.
In much smaller cities not just here you'll find chess clubs, poetry slam groups, church choirs what have you. None of it hyper-scheduled or commercialized. I can't speak to what this was like 40 years ago I wasn't alive then but there's no shortage. I think the biggest difference is, people don't move. In the Western world mobility is at an all time low. If you were young and lived in a place where these opportunities didn't exist people literally just packed their bags and relocated. In the words of Morgan Freeman: https://youtu.be/oZcSivXEGys
I definitely agree that a big part of it is how immobile people are these days.
What I meant by hyperscheduled is that typically these activities revolve around setting a schedule in advance for everyone to commit to and plan around. This sort of thing simply does not work for me. At all. Maybe once every couple months or so.
For example my local makerspace requires at least days (if not weeks) advance booking for most tools. When I’m in a project mood or want to meet up with friends to hack on something it will be more of a “hey let’s go figure this out, meet you there in an hour!” situation.
What I personally miss are the social clubs/spaces - heck even neighborhood pubs - that used to exist as simple meeting points. Whoever was there happened to be there and you’d tend to slowly make more social connections over time. You show up when you felt like showing up, and probably find a handful of casual friends there no matter when you’d go.
There is an extreme dearth of such impromptu meeting points/gathering hubs at least where I live. If you want to meet with friends you typically are going to schedule it a few days out - even if it’s meeting up for drinks after work. With work from home that’s even far less of a thing since even coworkers are geographically dispersed vs. cutting out of work 30 minutes early to go grab drinks at the bar around the corner.
By the time I get through my exhausting work calendar each week all I want is some control over my day back - and let the day go by feels vs a calendar. This is the largest difference other than social media I’ve felt over the past few decades.
That's "just life" unfortunately. By the time most people reach their mid-30s, they accumulate enough commitments that they have to plan things in advance or they just don't happen.
If a friend turned up randomly and unannounced at my door and asked if I want to go to the pub, they have the following barriers to overcome:
I'm out for 10 hours a day during the work week and I'm asleep another ~8h. In the remaining 6h I want to go to the gym, I have to eat, I have to run errands, I have to spend time with my wife and in the remaining time I might just want some alone time. Odds are I'd have to turn my friend away, which would make me feel bad, even though I'd have gladly joined him in the pub if I could plan for it. And I have no kids! If I had kids, the odds are even worse.
We all wish we could be back in our 20s when we had all the freedom and none of the commitments, but the truth is that for 95% of people this isn't possible. When you are in uni (or fresh out), you have all the time and energy, but (generally) no money. So you can spend a lot of time with friends who are in a similar position. By mid-life (30-55), you have money and energy, but no time. And in your winter years, you have money and time, but no energy left.
In each of these phases, you can try to go against the flow and experience friction all the time, or you can try to make the most of it and adapt.
If you absolutely desire the freeform approach you describe, perhaps you need to step up and establish the clubs and spaces you'd like and select for members who have a similar desire.
Most spaces in cities have to cater to the lowest common denominator, and simply wouldn't be able to function without strict scheduling rules. It'd be patently unfair if the 20 year old uni student hogged the equipment when you turn up for your 2 hours of free time that you planned a week in advance, wouldn't it?
Or have a military takeover or manufacture a crisis. At the very least they will claim election fraud and we saw what happened in Trump 1.0. There are definitely many ways MAGA will (likely) remain in power. Fascists don't give up power without a fight.
Watching BBC news earlier, two interviewees were acolytes of Venuzuelan politician and exile Maria Corina Machado, who recently received the Nobel Peace Prize, and Juan Guaidó, the former American-backed coup (or whatever you want to call it) leader. They were adamantly pro-Maduro getting helicoptered away, but somewhat neutral on bombings on their own capital city. I think the consent factory is still making porkie pies.
Machado seems to be the opposite of an exile until she escaped to accept the Nobel Peace Prize last month.
Machado was prohibited from leaving Venezuela by a decade-old
government-imposed travel ban and, by late 2025, had spent months in hiding
amid the risk of arrest.
Yeah it’s surprising how little justification there’s been for this. As a well-read US citizen, I don’t actually know why we did this.
Was it for oil? Socialism bad? To stop drugs? I think you latter is the narrative I’m most familiar with.
Immigration would be the most logical, since this administration and political base care a lot about that, but I don’t think they’ve drawn a clear line between economic success and emigration. Logic isn’t exactly a cornerstone for these idiots.
I’m guessing we did it to flex and distract from our own economy, but usually there is at least some pushed narrative for why America did the thing?
Geopolitically the US has abandoned world hegemony and is consolidating in the western hemisphere.
Venezuela has massive oil reserves and its leadership has been anti-Zionist since Chavez.
It’s a juicy target close to home, been a thorn for decades, and not as prickly as Iran or Yemen.
But you’re right, it’s noteworthy they are not attempting to sell interventionism to the public anymore. 15 years ago they’d have staged a color revolution and gone with the populist uprising narrative. They seem to have dropped the narcoterrorist narrative already. The use of raw force without moral justification is a sign of decline. The Twitter right is trying to sell this as an imperial / Nietzschean triumph but few are going to buy it.
I think it’s just realpolitik grand chessboard strategy. Knocking out an unfriendly/uncooperative leader of a strategically important country. That’s always been the real justification for US foreign policy. It’s a game of risk, without moral considerations beyond optics. There isn’t much more to it than that.
You can be socialist if you cooperate. You can be a dictator if you cooperate. It’s not about political philosophy or forms of government, just playing ball with the hegemon.
The media has been branding maduro a narco-terrorist for a while now. And trump has declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction and exclusively blamed venezuela for it. The establishment has a playbook and they stick to it. Let's not forget the nobel committee gave a "peace prize" to a woman advocating for war against venezuela.
Venezuela has been linked to the fentanyl crisis. "The Trump administration has described strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific as attacks against terrorists attempting to bring fentanyl and cocaine to the US.
However, fentanyl is produced mainly in Mexico and reaches the US almost exclusively via land through its southern border."
The 'wars on drugs' and the 'war on terror' have been abused many times in the past to just do whatever person 'x' wanted to do anyway. See also: National security.
You are still young so you don't seem to get it yet but history has shown that killing or capturing the leader of a country with outside actors rarely leads to anything good. It usually just leads to more instability.
Pop-culture shows you that if you get rid off Mojo Jojo you suddenly get rainbows and flowers but reality doesn't work that way very often and it is just propaganda.
Colombian here. Maduro wasn't the leader of a country; he lost the elections and became a cruel dictator. He led a regime that murdered, tortured, and disappeared thousands of people, turning Venezuela into a narco-state run by the ELN and other paramilitary groups. It may not have worked in other areas, but the US intervention in Panama, which resulted in the capture of another dictator, Noriega, transformed Panama into the fastest-growing economy in Latin America (6% average annual growth). Poverty fell by 60%, and today it's a very prosperous country. I can assure that there will be massive celebrations today by all our Venezuelan brothers and sisters living in Latin America.
Edit: I just discovered that Noriega was also captured on January 3rd.
Maduro was the leader of the country. Leadership is a practical matter, it doesn't depend on elections or democracy. Stalin wasn't elected either, and nobody says "he wasn't the leader of the USSR".
Likewise, there are leaders of countries who weren't elected that are currently aligned with the US, and nobody claims those leaders aren't the leaders.
A dictator or a king aren't elected, but sometimes they are leaders nonetheless. They are leaders if they de facto lead their countries/kingdoms. If insurgents wrestle control, they cease being leaders.
Well it didn't take long for Trump to announce he now runs Venezuela to plant US companies to export oil to the US. Once you understand American foreign policy it is just predictable.
If you want to "own" Nvidia, the much more realistic way of doing this then trying to compete with all the data centers that are already being built with Nvidia chips is obviously with open source models. In the case of open source models, inference is much more important to most people not training which a maxed out macbook already does a good job of.
"We are doing what we can to hang on to relevancy as gatekeepers who already held way too much authority over a field". They are going to use AI on the job anyway.
This also applies to universities. The world has changed but they have not and they will make sure to try and stay relevant as much as they can to continue to take money.
Edit: looks like it will take a while for some people to accept that we are not going back from this. The cat is out of the bag and your certificates are increasingly irrelevant. Sorry if you spent a lot of money and time to get it.
Certifications have always been irrelevant for me, but that's only because my goal has always been what I'm capable of doing on my own AND (this one is a biggie) I was unbelievably fortunate to have several people in my career who trusted that I could get the job done.
Certifications are about low trust. With the advent of modern LLM tech, trust levels are probably not going up.
Nobody needs to hire someone who can use an LLM because if that is the skill they're looking for they can just use the LLM themselves.
So if you need to hire someone because the LLM isn't cutting it, then you'll by definition need to be hiring someone who isn't using an LLM. Someone who isn't just using an LLM to make you think that they aren't using an LLM.
How is that going to be done? Sounds like a job for certifications to me. Not today's certifications, but a much more in depth, in person, and gatekeepery certification.
My guess would be that certifications, unfortunately, will be significantly more relevant in the days of LLMs. Not less.
Isn't that what the CPA and Bar exams, to use US analogs, do? They are an in-depth test or sets of tests that prove a person has a useful set of knowledge in a given domain.
I don’t think it will be too long before the pendulum swings back towards “real people who actually know the subject”. At that point, I might feel bad for everyone who coasted on AI.
Using AI is a different skill set that allows you to dive into topics that you otherwise aren’t ready for. I just used it to do a task that would have taken me a couple days of reading up on a different software system that I wasn’t already familiar. Now I have no need to ever really know that system, is that a good thing or not? I don’t know yet. But I had to know lots of basics about how those systems work in general to get the AI to do the thing I wanted, snd it wasn’t a one shot prompt, rather it was an iterative prompt process.
I touch LaTeX once every 10 years. I'm not going to learn it because I'm not fond of debugging macro processors and have never had a good experience with the language where you have to invoke a stew of packages that will mysteriously stomp on each other. I generated a script the other day to prepare a document in the format I needed. It mostly worked, but the LLM also stumbled on the packages until I could coax a working solution out of it. They're good for these problems where you only need shallow knowledge.
Most of us who touch latex make our one great template and forget it, or at least we try to just work off what is given to us.
You still need "knowledge" to use AI, but AI can handle details. Students relying on AI to pass classes means they might not ever obtain the knowledge they really need to use AI well, or maybe I'm cynical and they actually learn the cursory knowledge they need to use AI during the test because otherwise they wouldn't be able to use AI.
I hope there are at least some classes on using AI to solve problems though, like in a domain. "Using AI to boost programming" should be a CS course at least that you can take after you learn programming the manual way.
Get back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field.
Accounting exams are gatekeeping, yes. The good kind of gatekeeping where you make sure the people doing the job are actually capable. And you have avenues to punish those who fail their clients.
> This also applies to universities
Eh. I’d say the actual academics are about 1/3 of the university experience. The rest is networking and teaching you how to think and solve problems on a more abstract level. I’d say the people who farm that (and particularly the abstract thinking part) out to AI are going to be the ones left at disadvantage in the future. You’re completely replaceable.
At the end of the day the job market will correct itself accordingly which is what most people who bother going to university or collecting any certificate care about. And right now it is already looking bleak. https://accountancyage.com/2025/09/29/pwcs-graduate-glow-up-...
Might be time we start adapting the pipeline into employment and start revising the importance of some of these gatekeepers before more people fall into unnecessary debt.
I've had no end of problems with accountants regardless of their certifications, they operate in a domain with an incoherent body of contradictory and highly subjective rules yet make it out to be a science.
My conclusion as a whole is that accountancy as a profession rarely delivers any actual value to their customers, where much of the job is compliance theater at best.
One of the main issues I had when I took accounting was that you often couldn't figure out things from first principles because the "right" way was whatever the relevant financial accounting standards board said it was. But following that standard is what companies need to do--and therefore has value--even if it's arguably arbitrary (within some general framework).
Yeah ... that's kind of the point. The money doesn't exist, but the violence people will use if their money is misappropriated is very real. Accounting is loophole patch stacked on loophole patch for thousands and thousands of years.
It's not intellectually enriching, but like it has the weight of society going back forever with dire consequences when it fails. That's not nothing even if it's boring from a technological point of view.
I think of it sort of like git. Technically, any sort of distributed version control would have served our industry just fine. Git didn't need to win, but things are vastly simplified having basically one version control framework to rule them all.
You can now post a link of a website into an LLM and turn it into an interactive resource. I did this but with a 1000 page PDF today to help me learn more about game engines. Best way to do it if you don't want it to become another PDF / bookmark that is forgotten.
Can you give an example of how this has helped you with graphics/gamedev? What kind of questions are you asking gemini when giving it a 1000 page book?
Salesforce... A company worth so much and able to layoff almost half its employees but does what...? Agentforce doesn't seem to be anything but another GPT wrapper with a lot more buzzwords and now they are already backtracking?
Reality is that no one involved in AI development cares about you. All investment is going to keep getting pumped towards data centers and scaling this up. Jensen Huang, Trump, Satya Nadella, they are all going to get even more insanely rich and they couldn't care less how it will affect you. The only thing you can do is join the club and invest in stocks which Trump is also gaming in his favour.
Comments like these are kind of ironic.
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