Yeah great movie. But you're a little misguided, you can never use the words "Australian" and "culture" in the same sentence. Little bit of a juxtaposition :)
Best line in the movie, "that's not a knife, THIS is a knife"

i didn't know singapore was on the jet programme actually.
how do you think AI will change the "success path" for people in singapore?
and what about bitcoin in singapore, how do most people view it?
i remember a few years ago seeing some interesting statements from singapore govt officials about adoption of digital assets so i thought it may be advanced there. but then i also it's a very strict state, so i don't know how freedom money fits into that.
i've been thinking a lot about children lately, because both my parents died in the last 2 years and i saw how much it meant to them to have us around during their last days.
but we won't have that, so it's a trade off. most the travel i did was before meeting my wife, but since then we've also travelled a bit.
i'm the same, i try to have meaningful experiences with the people around me as much as possible.
hai, gambarimashou!

the "sensei" in the nym was a clue too.
yeah the deep work is harder than i think to achieve.
i work from home so there are distractions.
the price i pay for my first 1.5 hours a day is getting up at 5am!
good luck with everything and keep posting, i'm always reading.

People are laid back here for sure, but sometimes a bit too lack and not that motivated! Ask any American who has worked here, Kiwis are cool, but sometimes stuck in second gear.
AI, oh yeah, I am leaning into that heavily. My next business is going to be leveraging AI to do what I do, and be as productive as a team of 10 people, but without having to hire anyone.
Right now I spend the first 1.5 hours of my day learning AI, at the moment I'm learning Hermes. It's steep, but the gains are big I think. Cos I'm self employed I benefit from being more productive so am diving deep.
Glad you're enjoying the chat. Are you a teacher still?
I think I saw you mention once sometime that you were a teacher.

One thing that is common in NZ is for young people to travel a lot. We have a saying here "OE", which means Overseas Experience. People will say "he's on his OE". All my friends have lived in many different countries, and then most return to NZ.
I know you live in SIngapore, but I'm not assuming you're Singaporean, but if you are you are probably similar in the fact that you don't come from a global power and your population is small, so you have to learn about the world.
We all grow up, and continue living, with the knowledge that NZ is small and there is a big wide world out there, very different from home and we want to experience it.
I grew up in a mid sized (very dull) city in NZ, and at 21 I went to the US for a year, then at 23 I was in Japan. Very formative experiences, but not actually that uncommon for Kiwis.
I just wanted to work in travel because I thought banks and insurance companies looked like really boring places to work. And we come from a tourism country, so there's a lot work around. When I started you could earn OK money, enough to survive and even buy a house, so we didn't feel like we were losing anything.
And the work experiences were unbelievable, helicopter trips into the NZ backcountry, hiking on glaciers, underworld rafting and caving. But the best thing was the people we met, I have visited many people I've guided over the years at their home in the US, Japan and Australia. And made lots of great friends from the people I worked with.
Good work stories and good friends.

you are right about the profit margins, it was a great lifestyle but I never made lots of money. but i travelled all over my own country, and the world, with that job. all my friends with office jobs were very jealous.
you could make ok money, not finance bro money, but in the 90s and early 2000s, things were way more affordable. all the people i knew who worked as guides and travel companies bought houses, like everyone else. now, that's out of the question.
i love working in travel, so moved into IT for travel companies. better $$, way less seasonal and less prone to shocks.

I know, I was just teasing. I didn't know Lindy was born in NZ.
It was big news, I remember it as a kid, and we still say it in a fake Aussie accent.
The movie was called Evil Angels in NZ and Aus.

This Week in Bitcoin is 100% value for value and very good.
Also Bitcoin And...
PBJ (formerly known as Presidio Bitcoin Jam) doesn't have sponsors

You would be referring to Australia, another continent actually. You'll notice it on a world map. You are from the US I guess? I love Wayne Gretzky man, he was so cool.
That line is from a famous movie called Evil Angels, with Meryl Streep and Sam Neil, who was a Kiwi actually. And it was "a dingo stole my baby".

We were not lucky enough to have kids unfortunately. We still keep up ties with my wife's family by going back to Japan every year, she goes twice. I like very much having a home to visit in another country. I get very spoiled when I go there.
Yes, I pivoted away from the Japanese market, but not really because of the decline in that market but because of opportunities in other markets. The Japan lessons continued here too. After working to the high standards required by Japanese travellers (accommodation, dining, vehicles, service, inclusions) I noticed thought that other markets (notably the US and UK) would like the same level of service so launched a new company.
I described it as "Toyota efficiency in the backend with Kiwi friendliness on the front end", and it was a hit. Turns out American travellers like good service too!
But now I work more in IT for travel companies, over the years I've picked up a lot of tricks about websites and booking systems, so that's what I do now.
I still love the travel industry and guiding in the outdoors, but haven't guided a trip myself for 5 years.
Thank you for your stories here on SNZ!

When I first saw the title of this post I was going to reply with something flippant, like "being born was a real turning point in my life, before that everything was just dark", but then I read your post and did a bit of a double take.
I've read lots of your posts and thought you still lived in Japan, and as I have a connection to Japan always tuned in when I saw something from you.

When I was in my 20s, I also went to Japan on the JET Programme, not as an ALT but the other job on that programme, the CIR. Before that, I spent two years in Japan on a working holiday visa, teaching English at a conversation school.

But here's where my story differs from yours, in the 90s, when I went, going to Japan and earning yen was a huge pay rise, not a pay cut. Especially for the kind of work I was doing in New Zealand.

Once in Japan, I studied the language and travelled all over Japan as well as a dozen countries in Asia. When I got back home, armed with my Japanese language I starting working as a tourism guide, and eventually started my own company running tours for Japanese visitors. Then one day on a tour, I met a Japanese tour guide, who became my wife a few years after that.

Thirty years on, I look back and see that visiting Japan was a huge turning point in my life. I still go back there every year and have many connections to Japan and Japanese people.

It's now strange to see that Japan is affordable, and my own country much more expensive. I remember in the early 2000s, visitors to NZ would always remark how cheap everything was. Now Japanese travellers can't afford to come to New Zealand, or not as many of them can.

Earning yen in the 90s was like holding Bitcoin in the early years, it just kept on going up, and when you took it to SE Asia, India or other places, you could live like a king. I travelled for so long on my savings built up in Japan.

The connections and opportunities I made from going to Japan were, and still are to this day, the biggest turning point in my life. Apart from being born, that trumps everything :)

Thanks for the post, took me down memory lane!

Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

This started way before Social Media.
Read the Jon Krakauer book Into Thin Air, or another book called The Climb.
1995 accident started this, Sir Edmund Hillary had called it out beforehand.

How to learn a foreign language:

1. Go to that country
2. Spend several months or years there
3. Meet locals and make friends with people who speak only the language you want to learn.
4. Get into the music, sports or local culture, in that language.
5. Study hard, with whatever tools work for you. Children's books are great.
6. Partner / spouse that speaks that language accelerates this.
   I've done this twice in my life and it works, well except for the spouse, only did that once and we still speak that language at home.

What does SOTA mean?
I use Cursor, mostly connected to GPT5.6, to manage a lot of web development projects. Mostly because my client is OK with data going into GPT.
And now Open AI has announced they are pulling their service from Cursor I have to consider my next steps.
They probably have no idea about the difference between GPT and Grok, and it's just front end code and automatation tasks, there's no sensitive data or proprietary code, but I am considering my options.

They may have been crap at generating entropy, but I'll bet they'll be world leaders in creating bullshit to (try) and cover their arses. The more I read about this the more I think there's no way they couldn't have known about this.

Conflicts with what Rob Hamilton claims, that he found the bug quickly with Kimi K3. Who ya gonna believe, Coinkite or Rob Hamilton?

You know what I thought this morning, if governments want to attack Bitcoin they don't have to bother. Leave it to us to self destruct by ourselves, we're showing we can do a pretty good job.
And we'll achieve our long stated goal of reducing goverment deficits, cos they won't have to spend any taxpayers money on it.
Other note, very good article here on the technical side of this. There's no other way to say this, it's negligence (polite word for piss poor technical design, execution and testing) by Coinkite.
I use CC and have recommended them to friends and family, not any more. In the process of moving all my funds somewhere else now.
https://wizardsardine.com/blog/coldcard-rng-vulnerability/

"and did not generate the seed using dice rolls only"
what is the exposure if you generated the seed on the device and then added entropy with 100 dice rolls?

maybe so, but jeez. do you stay with any coldcard after this, if it's true that it's a device vulnerability. or is any RNG at risk? i remember how "safe" i felt after learning how big a 256 bit number was, hope that's still the case.

Where. are you seeing this?
I cant' see it anywhere on Clark Moody's dashboard.