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I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like nightclubs but wanted to meet women.

This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

I met my wife when she asked me how to get out of vi.

She was a new PhD student, and I was the departmental sysadmin. To be fair to her, she knew vi just fine, but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no ESC, where ESC was mapped to F11.

Classic and important question. By some rights, stack overflow is a site designed to help people escape vim, and fills time between users getting trapped with off topic conversations about programming:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/23/stack-overflow-helping...

Glad it wasn't the answer in your case, of course. :)

Ah that old excuse! Maybe she just wanted to talk to you

Best comment.

> but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no ESC

One of these things? https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:LK201AA_top.jpg

I'd have trouble getting out of vi with that too.

Yes, exactly. We had a combination of DECstation 2100 and 3100s for the grad students to use.

So how do you get out of vi with that keyboard?

Best how we met story ever! Thanks for sharing.

One more reason never to use Emacs!

This was a vi problem; Emacs mainly uses escape for when your keyboard doesn’t have a meta key, which most did by the 1980s

I’m implying that it’s one more data point that you’re more likely to meet your soul mate if you use vi vs emacs.

Oh but only if there’s a crappy keyboard, like a contrived plot device in a rom-com.

Well come on now... F11?

I've done the whole bars and night clubs thing pretty actively in my mid to late 20s. My issue has always been that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Also I don't drink and have a very consistent sleeping schedule, so prowling bars for women until 3 in the morning has lost a lot of its appeal when I spend the rest of the weekend feeling like shit.

Online you get to learn a bit more about them before you invest your time: do they have similar values, similar interests, compatible lifestyles and socio economics? Not all of it is written as text, a lot of it can be easily inferred from the photos, which is why Instagram is so popular these days in online dating as a lifestyle resume. Yes, it's heavily edited to show the best parts, like a resume, but you can still draw some conclusions from it. Like with hiring for your company, the mode you do it, the better you are at guesstimating what that person is like from their profiles. Several hundred first dates and your model gets trained with a lot of data.

Eh. There's a lot to be said about actually meeting people. When I went out I wasn't looking for a perfect match, I was looking for fun. I eventually married because I kept having fun with the one person. We're polar opposites in personality and to some limited extent in values, but it just works well.

There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes the analogy. The club environment is stacked in favor of the attractive, but chemistry usually wins the day.

Definitely, agreed. That's why the online phase of dating IMO should last as little as possible: you want to get to that in-person stage to validate the chemistry, which is one of the biggest drop-offs in the funnel.

Stop using marketing jargon to describe your love+sex life, you'll start soon believing it.

Unfortunately people don't actually put more info or good pictures. 20-30% of profiles say nothing. Just pictures. In Japan where the Japanese culturally hate putting up pictures of themselves online around 10-15% of profiles don't even have a picture of themselves. (on FB where the goal is not dating it's more like 95% don't have a picture of themselves) And then 90-95% of all profiles say the same things. "I like yoga, shopping, dinning out, movies, travel".

I know this probably is somewhat less in other cultures. Certainly I seen no profiles with no picture in the USA but I still see 80% or so of profiles with no useful info in them, just generics.

Not suggesting a bar is better. I'd love to find and/or develop a better system that some how encourages better matches

Bars/clubs are optimized for making people go home with a hole for their peg or peg to fill their hole. There's a lot of bad matches but if you test drive enough pegs/holes eventually you find one that belongs to someone you are compatible with.

It's the Red Army circa 1945 approach to dating. Throw enough bodies at the problem and eventually one of them will be the one that solves it.

If you want to make fewer higher quality matches don't go to a bar.

> that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks.

Which, as the non-photo portion of the prevailing Swipe-To-Date format shrinks, increasingly describes the problem with dating apps.