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> The grand prize of the Gemini API Developer Competition is a custom electric DeLorean.

That's a pretty cool and novel prize. Curious what it's worth.


South Korea has that problem right now. 20+% of people have the surname Kim [0]. 14% have the surname Lee [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(Korean_surname)

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_(Korean_surname)


Nguyen:

> By some estimates 30 to 39 percent of Vietnamese people bear this surname.


There is a cultural difference that make the situation in Vietnam not so bad as it sounds. In Korea, as in Japan, the cultural norm is to refer to people by their family name. In Vietnamese culture, the given name is normally used.


How is that even tenable in the present day in Korea? There would be dozens of Kims in any workplace.


There are, and I've had conversations like this:

A: Did you hear the news about Professor Kim?

B: Professor Kim, our department head?

A: No, Professor Kim over in Computer Science.

B: Oh, that Professor Kim, whom we met at the New Year's party.

A: No, that's a different Professor Kim. This one you never met.

B: Anyway, what about this Professor Kim I never met?

A: He got engaged to Miss Kim.

B: Our department secretary?

A: No, Miss Kim in the president's office.

...and so on.


As a native Korean, I'm sure that both A and B will notice the confusion and switch to full names at around the fifth or sixth line. Korean full names tend to be short so it isn't cumbersome, in fact full names are often used in the first place exactly for that reason.

The real problem by the way starts with multiple persons with the same or almost identically sounding names. My own name (Kang Seonghoon) for example is shared with at least 100s of other Korean people, including one famous singer who got arrested later ;-)


Good point about use of full names. Since you are a native, you might not have noticed this, but I find that as a foreigner operating in professional settings, I only hear people referred to in English as $title+$family_name. Aside from my office mate, I can't think of the given name of anyone on campus.

Speaking of having identical names, the one that cracks me up is 김정은.


It seems by that point it would be more efficient to use full names 100% of the time. Or at least be less mentally stressful.


Wasn’t this caused because when the country adopted surnames, people were allowed to choose their name, and most people chose the name of the current ruling family?


The explanation I saw was tax farming. You don't have a surname, so for the Emperor's purposes, you're getting the surname of the guy who collects your taxes for me


Would be great to see some of Fisk's cases in here /s



Hardware != Software


That is quite the escalation path.


Must have tried other paths but got frustrated, screw it straight to the top!


iPhones have plenty of issues too, I've experienced my fair share, as have others. Technology always has bugs:

https://discussions.apple.com/community/iphone


I did a little anecdotal Search using reddit, added “bricked” to iosBetas and Android and found android had more recent results.

There’s issues with software which affect a function then there’s issues that ruin the whole phone…


Mine is working fine.


This is a wildly unserious argument.


Microsoft bought Hotmail back in 1997. Hotmail was powered by Unix servers until 2004, despite MS's best efforts to transition to their own Wintel-powered backend [0]. These things take time.

[0] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-Live-Hotmail-Was-Pow...


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