I try to fly with Skymark when I can because their website is gloriously basic in the best way possible, it's like barebones server-rendered HTML. And you can book your ticket without payment being in the critical flow. You get like 24 hours to pay and that removes SO much stress from booking airline tickets. I hope they never change or "modernize" it with some shitty JS framework.
ANA’s domestic reservation system is not too bad in my experience, and I think is similarly basic like Skymark. They also allow you to hold a reservation for 24 hours without paying, and cancellations are free I think even after you’ve paid. It does struggle a bit with the concept of middle names, though.
But ANA’s international bookings use a completely different system that is the single worst website that I’ve used in the past 20 years. And yeah part of it is that they’ve tried to add some javascript without having the requisite competence to, say, perform proper input validation or render server error messages to the screen properly. I recently needed to enter an address, for example, but when I clicked the submit button nothing happened. It was only by snooping around in developer tools that I realized the server didn’t allow dashes in this particular address field.
Edit: apparently ANA is “upgrading” their domestic booking system to use the same Amadeus platform their international bookings use starting May 19, 2026. You can clearly see a different booking flow depending on whether you search before or after that date. So I retract my earlier positive statement about their domestic bookings.
A single Ambisonic B-format recording can be shipped and at runtime decoded into any coincident or near-coincident stereo pair pointing in any direction or into any surround sound format. It is a universal format that encodes the direction and intensity of arriving sound over a full sphere.
I'll admit to McDonald's Japan being a guilty pleasure of mine. Most things I get are pretty close to the picture. It's not perfect of course, but it's McDonald's, I'm not exactly expecting gourmet food and presentation. The fries kick ass though, I almost always get them hot and perfectly golden brown.
The quality of the fries is directly proportional to how good the attendant at the fries station is at following procedure and not dumping loads of pre baked fries in the keep-warm bin (don't know the English McD's phrase for it). They get worse from being under the heating lamp for too long or being left over the frying pan too long dripping. It's not rocket science but many don't want to be shouted at when the station runs out of fries so they overdo it on the supply. This is exaggerated when a rush is winding down and the production isn't scaled down quickly enough.
If I remember correctly there is a small trouble shooting section in the floor managers quality guide (small booklet with all procedures, weights, temperatures, stack height of boxes etc) which hints you at what is going wrong if you ever want to know and get your hands on one. Though that will have changed since mine is ancient.
I figured as much, and I would expect a Japanese mcdonalds employee to give slightly more of a shit than say, an American employee so that probably explains the discrepancy in the average experience if you were to compare them.
That reminds me of when I worked at a movie theater. We used to serve the popcorn scooped directly from the popping machine into a bucket. But then they had a corporate guy come in and install warmers so we could pre-load a bunch of buckets/bags of popcorn and hand them out when ordered. Of course the ones from the warmers aren't as good as the ones freshly popped, and this guy gave some bullshit about "ackshually popcorn right out of the popper isn't as good, it needs time to dry". It's not like the customer is about to take their popcorn into a multi-hour sitting activity where they have time to "let it dry"...
I always tried to hook up the nice customers with the fresh stuff when I could, it felt criminal handing them one out of the warmer.
Cool, now maybe let's do something about all the shit I have to clear out out my face before I can read a simple web page. For example, on this very article I had to click "No thanks" for cookies and then "No thanks" for a survey or something. And then there was an ad at the top for some app that I also closed.
It's like walking into some room and having to swat away a bunch of cobwebs before doing whatever it is you want to do (read some text, basically).
Haha, we had a solution for that, called pop-up blockers. Then when they became very usable, everyone switched to overlays injected with javascript, so they became unblockable.
But thinking of this at this moment, this could be a good use for a locally ran LLM, to get rid of all this crap dynamically. I wonder why Firefox didn't use this as a usecase when they bolted AI on top of Firefox. Maybe it is time for me to check what api FF has for this
I'm waiting for someone to develop an augmented-reality system that detects branded ads or products, compares them against a corporate-ownership database, applies policies chosen by the user, and then adds warning-stripes or censor-bars over things the user has selected against.
It would finally put some teeth behind the myth of the informed consumer, and there would be gloriously absurd court-battles from corporations. ("This is our freedom of speech and commerce, it's essential, if people don't like what we're doing they can vote with their wallets... NOT LIKE THAT STOP USING SPEECH AND COMMERCE!")
I noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
It was really satisfying to get everything working (especially the NFC because I've found RF to be a bit tricky), but the eink logic was actually a bit of gamble, because I broke my only eink while prototyping so the production batch was the first test of the driver. So always carry spare components when designing prototypes!
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