this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Defines "ages". Blue leds came out of Japan somewhat recently and that's pretty huge

[–] TheBloodFarts@lemmy.ca 8 points 13 hours ago

Veritasium has an awesome video about the Japanese scientist that discovered blue LEDs, guy basically did it single handedly despite pushback from his boss. Absolutely insane scientific achievement

[–] ColdWater@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 day ago

Ground breaking AI🤡

[–] superkret@feddit.org 25 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Their AI needs longer to develop cause it has to be folded a million times.

[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 6 points 21 hours ago

They have impure silicon there so their software dev practices had to become way more advanced to compensate

[–] ZeffSyde@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago

Found the Japanese sword enthusiast.

[–] pyre@lemmy.world 42 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (15 children)

dude had already swallowed the tech bs, thinks ai is the furthest advancement of technology when it can't compete with ancient tech. literally can't do what a calculator can do reliably. or a timer. or a calendar.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 9 points 23 hours ago

Please let's try to keep generative AI from claiming the entire word "AI".
Current generative AI is good at and built for mimicking patterns with boundary conditions.
This means it does a decent job of imitating authoritative knowledge, but it's just mimicking it.
People are hyped for it because it looks knowledgeable, it's relatively simple to make, and a lot of what we do is text based so it's easy to apply.

There are a lot of other types of AI, the majority even, that work significantly better, take a small fraction of the computing power and provide helpful and meaningful results. They just don't look like anything other than complex math, which is all any of them are in the end.

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[–] HighFructoseLowStand@lemm.ee 7 points 21 hours ago

I don't exactly keep up with the technological innovations of every country, but I get the feeling it isn't so much that Japan hasn't innovated in decades, so much as they haven't done anything he (it's 4chan, let's be frank, it's a he) personally finds interesting or that is publicized in the medium he gets his news from.

[–] Panamalt@sh.itjust.works 43 points 1 day ago

Japan still generally places more emphasis on quality over shitting out shiny new, overpriced garbage as fast as possible

[–] diverging@lemm.ee 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Doc: "No wonder this circuit failed; it says 'Made in Japan'."
Marty: "What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."

[–] feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What was the joke supposed to be here, that they had rapidly industrialised.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think they had a poor reputation and then rapidly improved which led to their current reputation

[–] superkret@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They started out like China, making cheaper copies of Western tech. Then they started to innovate.

China is now on exactly the same path, and it's well into the phase where they are innovating, but most people still refuse to acknowledge that.

[–] shawn1122@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Western tech had a massive head start.

When a country's tech manufacturing is being developed it's going to start by making what already exists because.. it has to start somewhere.

It didn't take long for Japanese cars to supersede American cars. China is now doing the same to both American and Japanese cars. Nissan nearly went out of business and is still in trouble. Tesla's situation isn't helped by how dislikable its founder is so its value is plumetting.

Most countries don't know how to deal with the advent Chinese EVs so they're just slapping massive tariffs on them and hoping they figure something out in the meantime.

It isn't just going to stop at Japan and China though. Japan was subsidized by the US post WW2 and China built its manufacturing from the ground up. There are many other countries on that path which will lead to significant global competition. The West is going to have to keep its head up if it wants to remain competitive by the end of the century.

The leading Western nation responding to increased global competition with reactionary protectionism is a bad start. It's squandering all of the soft power the US has cultivated post WW2 leaving a power vacuum for China and other influential nations on the ascension to capitalize on.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 4 points 23 hours ago

It's also worth noting that, economically, it's not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.

There's nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they're born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.

A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it's not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Really? Isn't it pretty obvious, I mean they make electric cars now.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah but a lot of people still don't realize that they make better electric cars now.

[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 49 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because AI software isn't ground breaking and is actually useless

[–] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I had some use of it. It is really good at summing and organizing a bunch of text.

[–] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes AI has good uses, it made my job faster, I can now focus on more important things because I'm not wasting time with bullshit that AI can do in a seccond.

But you can't say that on Lemmy, here it's all useless, a scam and gave my dog AIDS.

[–] uranibaba@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (4 children)

A lot of people here on Lemmy keeps saying that AI is bad because it failed one task it wasn’t built for. Or because it can’t do everything. I don’t get it.

[–] lightsblinken@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

maybe go for a "its bad because of the return on investment" angle? for the amount of literal billions we have thrown at it, perhaps its ok to expect more. if you gave me a mere couple of billion, i'd make healthy lunches for school kids to foster education and health outcomes (2-4-1!)

[–] uranibaba@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I haven't spent billions on it, so it is not a bad ROI for me. Perhaps it is for those who has invested in creating OpenAI, LLama etc, I am not one of them.

Spending the same amount of money to create a better world would be ideal. But if the money was not spent on AI development does not mean that it would be spent on anything better. That is also a discussion about the money spent on AI and if it has been worth it (a discussion very much wroth having), it does not diminish the usefulness of AIs.

[–] MouldyCat@feddit.uk 3 points 1 day ago

How many billions (in today's money) were spent on going to the moon? What about the billions poured into refining the internal combustion engine? The billions that have gone into making and running massive particle accelerators?

Technology is constantly advancing and we often don't know where it'll take us until we get there.

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[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

So good in fact that apple spawned a whole new category of memes making fun of how badly that works.

[–] hobovision@lemm.ee 57 points 1 day ago (10 children)

The idea that Japan was ever more technologically advanced than the US is a tough argument to make. Perhaps they had better consumer and transportation technologies, but the US led the world in nearly all other forms of technology (see silicon valley, NASA, US defense technology, etc). It's cool the hate on the US but there's a reason it was the world super power for decades. It's too bad it's turning into an anti-science christo-facist kelptocracy.

[–] shikitohno@lemm.ee 24 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I think it's mostly that they did way better than the US in terms of making many consumer technology products widely available at a higher quality and better cost than the US did. Like, Japanese brands were huge for televisions, audio equipment and similar goods. I can think of several that were the go to brands for TVs when I was growing up, but I can't think of a single US-based manufacturer, even a crappy one.

They also did way better in terms of building out internet access and public transport than the US has done.

It might only be within a few limited sectors, but when those sectors account for the vast majority of peoples' interactions with technology, it's going to have a far greater impact on their perceptions of relative advancement.

Also, in the pre-internet days, it probably helped that non-Japanese people largely didn't see all the ways that Japan can be an extremely conservative country, like their reliance on fax machines long after pretty much every other country with the means to do so had almost entirely left them behind as obsolete.

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[–] superkret@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

The tech for silicon valley comes from Asia. You literally couldn't build a chip factory in the US right now, the know-how doesn't exist there anymore.
So the US is leading the world in writing code and building long tubes spewing hot gas out of one end.

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[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 188 points 2 days ago (17 children)

Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980.

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