Matthew Damp’s Post

I’ve seen articles talking about how the great geographical coverage and reasonable price of Japanese trains encourage a train-centric lifecycle. There is another other key reason, though, they run early and run late, every day. The image is just one of many commuter lines that connect to Tokyo station (and one of the more minor train lines). You’ll notice that the first train, which is heading away from Tokyo, starts at 4:55am with the last train that leaves at 12:24am. Every day. Technically, the Sunday schedule is a bit different – 4:42am for the first train and 12:21am for the last train. Not a critical difference. It is the reliability and availability of trains that actually make people give up their cars and use the trains for vast majority of their day-to-day lives. The trains in the greater Tokyo area are not commuter-focused, with morning/evening rush hour concentrated service. I think that many of the public transit agencies in America miss this and then wonder why their adoption rate is so low.

A couple days back, I saw a couple of posts that were similar to “I want to make a quiche and it was horrible – find a couple of blogs… scroll past author’s life story… ad… more of their life story… another ad… so I jump over to ChatGPT and get the answer immediately! Sooooo easy!” They must be new to the whole internet “thing”. Facebook started out so useful. Amazon’s search used to be amazing. Google, Twitter, Digg, and dozens of platforms were amazing at the beginning but slowly and steadily got worse as they followed the path of enshitification as described by Cory Doctorow. ChatGPT is still in Phase 1: the desire to build a user base puts priority on user experience and has not moved on to Phase 2 or Phase 3. There is no reason to believe that this time is different. Why would large language models – especially with their required high-end compute, power, and data center needs – be able to avoid the drive for revenue? What would stop the companies behind these tools from sacrificing the user experience to feed growth? If you are unfamiliar with the three phases or Cory’s description of this wonderful term, I recommend you listen to his interviews with WNYC’s On the Media podcast: https://lnkd.in/gRcA_2CV

With all the buzz about working and living in Japan, there is one common theme that makes Japan so attractive.

Remote work, hybrid work, and RTO mandates are all over our LinkedIn news feeds. Dozens and dozens of research papers, articles, and opinion pieces about the pros and cons pointing at different metrics, but it seems something is missing: is the company with the RTO mandate actually providing a space people want to be?

Having had APAC and global roles as a PMO lead, I've watched many different groups try to sell complex digital tools. Japan looks like such a good market for digital transformation - all these manual processes! - but DX is harder than you might think.

Earlier in my career, I was Microsoft-centric system administrator (Active Directory, Exchange, etc.) so the CloudStrike issues would have ruined my weekend if it had occurred 8 or 9 years ago. But looking around at the “our critical systems are on Linux so we’re fine” type comments, it raises a question for me. Are these big corporations who are proud of their robust infrastructure built on open source software helping to maintain all of this valuable code? Are they contributing money? Developer time? Tools and licenses? Actual code? Economic theories regularly mention the “free rider problem” that exists in almost complex system and there have been complaints about this in the open source community over the years. Maybe it is time for these companies who are congratulating themselves for side stepping this CloudStrike catastrophe should be putting some money back in to the community that just saved you millions of dollars in downtime. Any takers?

It has been 30 years since Dassault Systèmes opened the Tokyo office and we'll have a little bit of a celebration at the next big 3DEXPERIENCE Conference for our Japan customers. Sign up for the event and learn about how our solutions work together via the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, allowing you to build virtual twin experiences and take you design work to whole new level. This year, the conference will be held at the ANA InterContinental Tokyo on June 21st.

I always did think that the NETVIBES Sourcing Intelligence - OnePart solution was the easiest way to enhance overall design efficiency but a 43% average reduction in the number of parts in a vehicle is kind of amazing. That is a lot of engineering time freed up to work on real innovation.

When you want to make large buildings with complex shapes - like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid - you need the power of Dassault Systèmes' CATIA software. Check out the The B1M's video about The Henderson building in Hong Kong.

Quite a good crowd at SusHi Tech today