legerdemain

  > Extremely poor journalism... some shmuck journo...

This is a guest opinion column by a book author to promote a book. All of these facts are very visibly stated on the page, including the word OPINION (in all caps at the top of the page), the author's professional bio, and the title of the book being promoted.

There is now a US chain for onigiri: Onigilly. About a third of the menu is vegan and gluten-free.

A Japanese measuring unit for rice, kind of analogous to "one cup" in US kitchens. Measuring cups distributed with rice cookers are usually one gō in volume even in the US.

Help me read this as something other than a slur on my character.

What should I suggest to my downstairs neighbors when I do deadlifts?

  > Finally I must add, all the friends (more like acquaintances) you make
  > at the gym are absolutely crucial to motivate oneself and also just have
  > a positive social interaction.

Eh, been going to a gym weight room for 10 years and it's damn lonely and demoralizing. I'm sure it's different in tiny one-room Olympic weightlifting gyms or whatever.

I'm not in my 20s anymore and I'm not actually that athletic, so 10 years of looking for a gym buddy have yielded nothing for me. Otherwise, the people I recognize at the gym are either the ones who camp out a piece of equipment or just walk around chatting others up and apparently never lifting anything.

I got "visit the post office," "go to the supermarket," and "defrost something from the freezer."

...Oh wait, that's just my "to do" list for today.

High schools in my area called the course before calculus "pre-calculus," analogously to "pre-algebra" coming before "algebra" in middle school.

I went to a combined middle/high school in a small city of 200,000 in upstate New York, and no one on our Math League team distinguished themselves in any way other than by transferring to another nearby high school that had an actual IB program. At that level of engagement, Math League was all right, just something for a nerdy, unpopular teen to do to break up the monotony of dreary upstate winter evenings.

I'm more interested in this "Analysis II" the author mentions taking in his freshman year. "Analysis II" at the undergraduate level usually refers to a proof-based course on real-valued functions of several variables. Basically, a retread of Calculus III with a more rigorous foundation. But the author never mentions any mathematical results from calculus and beyond, and I'm under the impression that grade-school math competitions only target subjects in arithmetic, elementary combinatorics, and classical geometry.

Nothing he wrote after it experienced more than modest success, while much of his output was rejected or criticized. His health and finances declined. He was forced to abandon writing as the main source of his income. His family worried for his sanity. He was little read at the time of his death.

Moby Dick more or less ruined Melville, who was until that point a relatively popular author of exotic adventure stories. It made no money and fell into obscurity for 70 years before being rediscovered by a new generation of critics whose goal was to identify and champion "the great American novel."

Keep this in mind when you make your novel more like Moby Dick.

  > On the topic of venues: you don’t need to rent anywhere.
  > There are plenty of companies with way too much
  > space just looking for a way to put them to use and
  > bring people in.

This may be true in Cleveland. The semi-official Bay Area Rust meetup has had two events in the past three years, because it can't find venues willing to host events.

Trust me, I have checked. And I wish you had trusted me to be truthful without making me reiterate it.

Maybe rooms for individual study, but not meeting rooms for ~20 people. That shit costs hundreds of dollars per hour.

Ha ha ha it really is full of creeps.

I can't leave, I have no other choice for cheap space to run events.

I think the author is reading too much into his past viral successes.

It is very possible to write about niche topics with gusto and at length, but without finding an audience or a circle of peers. Twenty years ago it was common to call this the "long tail," a term popularized by a bestselling middlebrow book.

I put my trust in the "long tail" of the Internet audience and wrote in public for a few years. The experience did not shape me intellectually, as reading a good book or learning a skill might have done. And it did not bring me into contact with a circle of peers who learned from each other.

The author even offers the example of his wife, who published a long piece of writing in a niche different to his and did not benefit in the "search query to find people" way.

I think there is a likelier and more specific explanation for the author's observations. Namely, over the past decade, guru figures like Scott Alexander have popularized a style of academic-sounding essay-writing that is diffuse, meandering, and often very long. Fans of this kind of writing also reward authors who aspire to global or timeless significance by writing about a set of "cornerstone" topics that includes Plato, Roman stoics and the Roman Empire in general, Tolstoy, Enlightenment-era American political philosophy, and popular takes on behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology.

Some of this guy's posts struck gold with this audience and got widely disseminated through their social networks. I strongly suspect that writing about historically and thematically adjacent topics (e.g., Russian Realists other than Tolstoy) would produce a lot fewer "search results" for the author.

I think WasmGC can potentially take a lot of wind out of Rust's sails. If WasmGC reaches a smoothly working state, Rust will stop being the most obvious choice for writing memory-efficient WASM applications. And while some people may find writing Rust intrinsically fun and gratifying, Rust could really benefit from a use case where it truly dominates over other available options.

First things first: it's Meetup dot com. It's a commercial product owned by a commercial entity. It's not a community service.

Second, nothing replaced it, at least not in the Bay Area for tech meetups. It had a few shaky years under erratic WeWork ownership, and then COVID dealt it a killing blow.

I really think people used to go to Meetup events to catch up with acquaintances and eat the free pizza. They were like low-pressure parties where you could talk to strangers about something you cared about. Most Meetup groups that went to Zoom had huge drops in attendance, because being on a call with strangers is awkward, puts everyone on the spot, and is generally not fun at all.

I think IRL tech meetups can still come back, but I think a lot fewer companies are willing to host. I've spoken to several organizers of small tech enthusiast groups that I care about; they absolutely hate the online format and are desperately searching for IRL options. I go to an IRL AI/ML event that moves around startup offices in SF; they have overwhelming interest and have to turn away 2/3 of the people that sign up, because they just don't have the capacity.

What's left on Meetup:

- dead groups that stopped scheduling events years ago

- groups that are managed by tech companies (in spaces like Web3) that organize events that sound general-interest, but are actually promoting their own services and solutions, and usually fold after 1-2 events

- non-sponsored tech enthusiast groups that run events on Zoom and get like 3-4 attendees per event

My takeaway is that online-only is absolute poison for organizing events where people can meet each other, and IRL is heavily blocked on companies willing to host events and feed people free pizza. All the IRL stuff I've been to this year has been attended and overattended, but there just aren't as many events compared to 5 years ago.

Has anyone tried the apps that the author mentions (Saturday, Geneva, BFF)? Are there other ones you had a good experience with?

I have always thought it was just a coincidence or an intentional reference, but there actually exists a connection between Hipgnosis (British design studio responsible for a lot of prog rock album covers) and Psygnosis (British video game studio whose logo has a very prog rock look to it). The connection is the artist Roger Dean.

Another connection I was unaware of: the artist whose painting graces Eno's Another Green World is also the artist behind A Humument, a popular piece of modern art.

I 100% concur with afavour that regularly running into acquaintances around town is magical, and wonderful, and pro-social, and a rare privilege.

I've had that experience only once in my life, when I lived literally in the center of town in Palo Alto, and ran into coworkers very regularly on the street, because our company gave us a subsidy of hundreds of dollars every month to live within a 10-block radius of the office. And these were misanthropic pale boys who mostly had no hobbies and avoided going outside and meeting other people if they could help it.

I've lived in 200k-sized cities and I've lived in college towns and I've lived in quaint, "walkable" suburbs. And nowhere have I had the experience of serendipity as a result of density, because in all those other places I would get in a car and drive to a specific destination point and meet no one either there or en route. And even if there were some amenities I could "easily" walk to within "only" a mile or so, no one else I knew walked there with any regularity, so I'd never see any friends around town.

Objections that go "but I'm happy with my life in XYZ location, how can you say that" are missing the point. If you haven't experienced the difference, it is as stark as night and day.

In threads like this, people often bring up gyms as social spaces.

Hell. No.

I've been using a gym for most of my adult life. Gyms are anti-social spaces. Big box gyms, sports clubs, the gym at the Y, campus gyms, the gyms that most people go to.

Maybe boutique gyms and gyms where you always work with a personal trainer are different. Every gym I've been to: hell, no.

Thanks for writing Modern Fortran!

Given a permutation of a collection of elements, it's trivially possible to find the next permutation (in lexicographic order) without ranking and unranking. Sedgewick 77 [1] calls it the Fischer-Krause algorithm.

The traditional (and still readable) reference for generating combinatorial objects such as permutations is Nijenhuis & Wilf's Combinatorial Algorithms.

The author of the article ubiquitously misspells "lexicographic" as "lexographic." That might make it harder to Google the term.

[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ELE572Papers/p137-sedgewick...

The irony of being outlived by Shane MacGowan.

My last comment here for a while, but to answer the question... you might not end up being able to? Like, ever?

It's like asking "how do I win the lottery." You can improve your odds. And you might also never win. A lot of people never win the lottery despite buying a lot of tickets.

For some people, success at building connections is a matter of personality. Or it might be the area where you live. Maybe it's how closely in touch you are with people you knew from grade school and college, or whether you moved away from the town where you grew up. Maybe it's whether you're close with coworkers. Maybe it's whether you are enthusiastic about hobbies you have in common with others, or maybe it's how you look and dress.

There are so many different factors that influence the outcome for any given individual. You can follow none of the commonplace advice and end up in the middle of an active social network. Or you can put a lot of energy into trying things out and come out empty-handed in the end.

The message pretty clearly states that the visible presence of the homeless is a crime against the OP that leads to vigilantism (i.e., attacks on the homeless). This kind of eliminationist rhetoric is common on this site.

The extended "original" versions of several idioms, including this one, were created in the 21st century. See, for example, this: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/508907

Likeness courtesy of Harrison Ford.

Body movement by Jackie Bradshaw.

Facial acting and expressions from Tony Armstrong.

Nose performance (closeups) by Vic Ganderton.

Hands: Industrial Light & Magic