legerdemain

These tips are offered often and are presumably working for someone. As someone who has followed or tried to follow them for most of my life, there are lots of ways these tips might fail to serve:

  - Places you visit often might be fundamentally antisocial: e.g., a gym where everyone wears headphones.
  - Tickets to popular events (AC/DC) are astronomically expensive and sell out long in advance.
  - Inviting people who you don't know well to smaller, local, less spectacular events tends to bore people.
  - If someone is your first local prospective friend, inviting them and only them out constantly can stress an already tenuous relationship.
  - Introducing people to each other may reveal that they don't enjoy each other's company, so now they're both less interested in hanging out with your group.
  - Your prospective friends might have no local friends of their own, so they depend on you disproportionately for all of their socializing.
  - Your prospective friends might not drink alcohol or enjoy hanging out in bars, so hanging out at a bar no longer feels very inclusive.
  - Some people have a tight budget and don't deal well with the perceived obligation to spend money when out with friends.

To be honest, I've had a hard time managing these complications. It should be dead easy to apply advice, but it's not.

> I'm curious to hear if you can think of a better way to make friends irl with a decent chance of success.

Any environment where you can meaningfully help each other: a group for new parents, a study group at school, joining a non-profit advisor board.

> Did you not make one single lasting connection (friendship) from that?

I made a lot of activity partners: people I could talk to about that topic, and maybe some adjacent topics, but who didn't have a lot of interest in making me a part of their life outside that general topic. They wouldn't join invitations for dinner, they wouldn't hang out outside the club's context, and they would eventually flake out.

That's advice to meet activity partners, not friends. Think of your closest friends. Did you set out to meet them by looking for people with their exact interests? Maybe you did and you and your friends are part of a scene, but I'd bet most people did not.

On advice like yours, I started a niche club and ran it for 3 years. When people join your club, they're not there to meet you! They're joining to participate in the club. Now you're in the awkward position of responsibility as the club's host/organizer, with the additional distance between you and the other participants.

You mean like mittens, but with separate fingers? What would that accomplish exactly?

Notably:

  > here in Switzerland

This is ostensibly a think piece by the CEO of a software startup building a product for human-AI collaboration, ostensibly describing that same process. And it starts out pretty focused, but then it just goes on... and on... without really developing a point or making rhetorical progress. Fruit-by-the-foot writing. Is the future of writing full of essays so mind-numbing and interminable that humans will need computers to preprocess them?

This... doesn't explain anything about the song. Not its writing, not its production, not the music video. It's just a list of platitudes. Even the Atlas Obscura article has more content.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son...

Bay Area, but not SF. Mostly dead. Multiple organizers I've talked to pointed to companies no longer wanting to host. There are a few exceptions, but the number of events is much, much lower than it was before 2020.

Lots and lots of well-sponsored AI meetups, especially in SF, but every single one I've been to has been 100% fluff.

From 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

  > I work on Bun and this is my branch
  >
  > This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
  >
  > I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.

Go back to school for what? In the last few decades, schooling has been one of two things.

The first is certification for high-growth jobs that exist as short-term accidents of history and policy-making. Think of the droves of people doing rote medical billing and coding, mostly as an artifact of the current state of the US healthcare system. Or think of an over-saturated nursing specialization.

The second role of education has been the lowest rung on the ladder to join a prestige profession, like medicine or architecture. It takes a significant chunk of your lifetime, and there are ingrained cultural expectations around the age at which you do it and what your future prospects look like.

A lot of people who fantasize about a midlife pivot have no personal history with any other profession, and mostly seem to aim for occupations that are easy to describe and get saturated easily.

This author assumes that workforce development is a first-order priority for businesses, or at least for the health of the industry.

Why make this assumption so confidently?

The arrival of the electronic computer did not turn human computers into programmers, it simply eliminated them en masse.

This is absurd. The author misrepresents the type of "abstraction" that people mean. This abstraction ladder goes as follows:

  - contributing individually
  - contributing as a tech lead
  - contributing as a technical manager
  - leaving the occupation to open a vanity business, such as a gastropub or horse shoeing service

"SF" = science fiction?

I have seen this perspective a lot and I don't understand it at all. When I meet a stranger, I don't wonder if they exercise enough for me to befriend them. Same for their clothes-shopping habits, past some very basic threshold. Same for whether they pay for me.

A lot of this advice for how to improve yourself so that other people like you comes off so incredibly vain, neurotic, and juvenile.

I'm at Paris Baguette, a Korean lower-end coffee shop chain common in the Bay Area. The guy next to me has headphones on and his laptop on a stand. Or it's four middle-aged Latino women celebrating a birthday. Or it's a bunch of local high-school kids.

Do I lean over and say, "Hi, how are you guys doing? Really good coffee they have here, huh?"

I'm at the gym. It's a big-box gym. It's full of dudes wearing Airpods Max, a few couples in skintight athletic outfits, a few teens with phones on tripods filming themselves for Tiktok.

Do I come over, gesture for them to take off their headphones, and say, "Hi, how are you guys doing? That's really good form, on that lift, really good form. Keep it up!"

I'm waiting to cross a road. On the other side of the road is a Caltrain crossing. The traffic light cycle takes forever, and then the train comes and preempts it. And then preempts it again when people finish getting on. A crowd of parents with strollers are waiting to cross. People are returning from the farmer's market with bags of vegetables. People on bikes.

Do I lean over and say, "Hey, how are you guys all doing? It sure takes a while to cross. Wow!"

There's a reason they call them Caucasian.

From deep within the essay, another restatement of praise for East Asian street food culture.

  > That is because there is an abundance of inexpensive and delightful street food/casual dining establishments (carts, izakayas, takeaways, food courts, night markets, etc.), that make it a rational, and healthy, choice.

I can easily imagine that a world of unregulated food stalls can deliver food that is cheaper, more ubiquitous, and more convenient. I grew up in a version of such a world!

Is street food ever healthy, by any reasonable definition? What does a steady diet of street food do to a body?

The author shows a tendency to give colorful, but opaque names like "gutterballing" to things that can themselves be explained in a short phrase ("working on something that is similar to, but not exactly what you actually want, and getting predictably frustrated").

Where does this tendency come from? My first guess is self-help literature. Or maybe this is a personality trait to write this way? Or a kind of marketing, becasue only your writing has these colorful fun terms?

With posts like these, I always wonder how much comes from statistical observation and how much is regurgitated cliches.

Yes, WeWork sold Meetup to a series of increasingly awful holding companies.

I've never been to a meetup hosted at a WeWork office in the bay area, and I used to go to quite a few. Most were at company offices.

A $10 pizza from Costco a hundred times is a thousand dollars. Coworking space fees for a couple of years is a sum of money. Meetup organizer fees add up.

I'm surprised Yemeni cafes have already built a reputation. We have several in the area, and they are indeed open very late, although they attract a customer base that seems less open to interacting with strangers.

Yup, your second paragraph describes the place I'm talking about pretty accurately. Nothing wrong with Etsy trinkets in isolation, but not if that's the limit of what the tools are used for.

This is backwards. You have the privilege of curating who's not there, by not inviting them. The fascinating people you do invite aren't obligated to show up.

Meetup isn't a victim of Covid and WFH, it's a victim of being sold to WeWork years before Covid.

Historically, social clubs were a thing!

You've got gentlemen's clubs of the kind that Phileas Fogg from "Around the World in 80 Days" belonged to. They were leisure spaces where the rich could socialize with each other, dine from a wider menu than their own domestic staff could offer, access a bigger reading library, and organize group activities like automotive clubs and regattas.

Then you've got private societies like the Freemasons and the Rotary Club, which were usually segregated by gender and race, had a religious component, and offered services like mutual aid and insurance.

A different take: joining one of these spaces (in the bay area) has exposed me to a weird and unpleasant underbelly of society that I barely knew existed. It's like the worst of Reddit, but in real life. People who want you to work on their projects "for the exposure," crypto scammers and people who are very naive and enthusiastic about crypto, depressed unemployable people, people who secretly live on the lobby couches, elderly people just watching videos all day, get-rich-quick people, people who are always "starting to learn" for years at a time, it's quite an array.

This has absolutely never worked for me in cafes, not in decades of trying across multiple states. Cafe regulars either bring their own company or "laptops open, headphones on, heads down."

Amusingly, the rec league pinball people are absolutely ferocious about promotion. Pretty much every thread in r/bayarea about looking for friends gets a pitch from a pinball person.

There's a subreddit for people using this app, if you're curious: r/TimeLeftApp

This suggestion is common to the point of banality, but it really does benefit hugely from having "a mailing list of several dozen friends and acquaintances" to bootstrap it.

I've been trying something very similar to the author's approach for three years now: a casual tech meetup. My results are way worse despite putting hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into the endeavor.

The people you attract might themselves have no local friends. That's why they're showing up to your meetup! But it also means that they won't help to expand it.

The people you attract might not be alcohol-drinkers. A lot of people who suggest organizing casual meetups usually have a pub in mind as the venue. Bringing 12-15 people to a restaurant takes a lot more planning. Getting 12-15 people to agree on a restaurant that meets their diet and budget needs is, well...

You might attract people who are much younger or much older than you. The average author of this kind of article is 36. Do they like the company of people who are within ±20 years of age from them? And do those people like each other's company?

Long story short, you might end up like me, having invested years of your life and a surprising amount of money, to make 3 casual acquaintances who you're sort-of-but-not-super-friendly with.