I’m really not sure what I just read. I mean, I know what I read in terms of the words - but I don’t understand what its purpose is. But I don’t necessarily think it matters…

It was thoroughly diverting, held my attention and made me wish that more people wrote pieces like this where the only real purpose is the conceit, and the subsequent journey the author takes you on.

Sort of on-topic: The Kuril islands are a big deal in Hokkaido. I attended a protest there (by accident) a few years ago with many Japanese demonstrating for a return of the islands to Japan. It was kind of odd as an outsider because the protest clearly has no effect, and there's no chance of it ever happening outside of Russia losing a war.

And thus was born a new game, one that combined knowledge of history, politics, and pop trivia.

Oh Man. A few years back, my daughter played so much of Lost in Japan repeatedly. I thought the singer was another girl, because of the others in the playlist such as Kate Perry, and Justin Beiber.

We have to invite Shawn Mendes to read this post.

This… this is impressive dedication to a gag blog post. Enjoyed the read.

lovely

Man this is so dumb I love it Unfortunately the song is stuck in my head again...

Precisely the type of thing I immensely enjoy reading on a holiday!

I'm patting myself on the back. After reading the first couple paragraphs, I went Eh? and came here to the comments. Thanks everyone for saving me the time.

So I just had a fun 5 minutes trying to talk gemini around to believing that Shawn has a position on the Kuril Islands dispute by submitting all the evidence in the article, but the llm is pretty impressively consistent and insistent that the song is figurative etc. Miss the days when it was so easy to get an LLM to argue for anything by persistence.

Reading this felt very similar to watching “Pitch Perfect 237” (Anna Kendrick 9/11 conspiracy) https://youtube.com/watch?v=MiC9X_MoE1M

It’s sad that LLMs seem unable to produce that kind of brilliant deductive reasoning.

This is hilarious, I need to find more blog posts like this.

But just how seriously should we take Shawn Mendes' stand on the Kuril islands? How big of a hit was _Lost in Japan_?

Excellent deduction, but somewhat rushed at the end. Almost sloppy. If Mendez is flying to meet up with a friend at a hotel, it's clearly necassary to check if there are any hotels on that island to begin with.

We can, of course, assume that if there's an airport, there's a hotel, but being a Russian territory even the most benign assumption may prove false, so it's still prudent to check.

The good news is that there is not one, but two hotels on Iturup, both with impressive ratings (even if across a dozen reviews each). With this in place, I trust, we can put the final dot to the story of finding Shawn Mendez and his views on the annexation of the Kurils.

The article suspiciously leaves out whether there’s a hotel on Iturup Island, on which the whole argument hinges.

Quick Google Maps reveales there indeed is one.

What a relief!

This is also an exercise in deductive reasoning, which I recently read, somewhere here on Hacker News, is a good skill to exercise.

This misses one obvious possibility; that it just happened before Okinawa was returned to Japan.

(Granted, that was a while ago, and he looks young-ish, but I don't really know anything about Shawn Mendes, so am entirely open to the possibility that he's in his 70s and doing that blood boy thing from Silicon Valley.)