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I like classes for meeting new people for a few reasons. First, there's a structure around the activity which doesn't force you interact all the time. Second, you're not entering an established group as the one new person. And third, you're all going through a shared experience which naturally helps form bonds.

If you're really hard up for social skills, and you like being around silly fun people and are okay acting silly yourself, I recommend taking an improv class. Any introductory improv class is basically kindergarten games to help you realize how low stakes socializing can be.

But I also realize improv isn't for everyone. In that case I recommend finding an activity you might be interested in and taking a class in it. If you aren't sure what you're interested in, good news! That means you get to take all the classes until you find one you like.

Even if there's no classes for your activity, anything that can be done out of the house and with other people probably has a community built around it. Use your interest in the activity as leverage to expose yourself to that community.

The highly random and somewhat convoluted mechanisms remind me of something like character creation in the rpg classic traveller.

You do have a little choice there (unlike here), but I think the same appeal is present even without the choice.

The experience is a bit like reading fortunes from tea leaves.

The fun comes from assigning meaning to the outcomes. This happens, generally, automatically as a human instinct. In traveller, the process of character creation generates a kind of narrative in your head of who the character is.

I've been thinking about these kind of experiences a lot lately.

Is it a game? I don't think a discussion of definitions is very interesting, but I would call it a game by any casual meaning of the word. Certainty, in traveller's case, a roleplaying game. But I recognize the same appeal in these zero-player games.

You're playing something, just in your own mind. The primary game isn't what's on the table, but what's in your mind. You're not committing to choices in physical (or digital) space, you have no agency there -- but there's still a rich experience happening between your ears -- full of hopes, predictions, disappointments, elation, creativity. It's like reading but you're also part author. You're not reading from a book, but from pattern matching inside randomness.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around it myself. I have little more than the recognition of something interesting in this direction, but beyond that I can't articulate it.

I was reflecting the other day how discovering things online felt like being in on a secret. You had to just know about a chat room or BBS or website. Each one was like discovering a secret.

Now it's the opposite, anything special posted online will quickly get overrun. It's the parties and places not posted about online that feel like you're discovering hidden gems.

I have a feeling "slop" is the new "spam" (etymologically) -- it could be with us for decades.

I see it as more iterative than revolutionary.

I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.

And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.

The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.

Yes, that's a good point. It doesn't need to cross the 20% to trigger a larger weighting -- it will smoothly increase at a 5:1 ratio below that.

Not sure what you mean, can you help me understand?

Do you mean if free float goes from 5% to 100%, and weighting goes from 25% to 100%, it's more "extra supply" than "extra demand"? That's a good point I hadn't considered. I'm not sure the details of the lock-up period though, it might be staggered. So if it goes from 5% float to 50% float, that's 45% of additional shares available to buy, but an addition 75% of the market cap that indices now need to weight to. But it's true this would only happen once (when free float goes from below 20% to above). Then after that the extra supply would be more than the extra demand. Or do I misunderstand?

I'm not so sure the silent majority is positive on AI, I think the opposite is more likely. Let's not forget that national poll where it was less popular than ICE -- I think it was 26% positive vs 46% negative.

My view is AI is becoming a poster-child for the increasing wealth disparity. When people are negative on AI it's not just the technology but the entire idea around it. It's simply cool to hate AI and that's going to be a hard hill to overcome, I think.

That's true for the S&P but not nasdaq, nasdaq is market cap weighted. There used to be a limit that the available float couldn't go below something like 20%. (This is because 5% float available but 100% market cap would cause a huge supply/demand mismatch). But for spacex they changed the rule so there's no minimum, it's just that below 20% float, companies would be weighted at 5x the float instead of 100% of market cap. If spacex is planning on something like 5% float, it would be weighted around 25% of market cap with only 5% of float available to buy.

But it gets worse because when the lock-up period expires in 180 days after ipo (currently scheduled right before quarterly index rebalancing), it's possible that frees up more than 20% of float and it suddenly has to be weighted at the full 100% of market cap -- triggering additional automatic buying.

It certainly seems like it's set up for our retirement accounts to be the insider's exit liquidity.

My memory growing up is that making your own C library was basically an inevitable rite of passage for any aspiring programmer.

In hindsight it maybe should have also been obvious from the language alone. "Richmond Hill" feels a bit like saying "Rich Hill Hill" which is basically like saying "Wealthy Desirable Area."

If meat was involved, the cooking time may have been unsafe if other precautions weren't taken by the cook (like checking the internal temperature).

I'll admit that's better than I expected, but these ratings also imply there are plenty of humans who will beat LLMs at chess.

I'd find it deeply funny if the optimal vibe coding workflow continues to evolve to include more and more human oversight, and less and less agent autonomy, to the point where eventually someone makes a final breakthrough that they can save time by bypassing the LLM entirely and writing the code themselves. (Finally coming full circle.)

It's not just the risk percent but also the scale of "very wrong" that matters.

Sounds like she is proceeding with the procedure despite this fear, which seems to indicate to me a fairly astute assessment of the risk.

However, I agree people are generally not very good at evaluating risk.

This feeling may have more to do with the nature of biographies than anything.

In radio, talking over the start of a song and ending right when the lyrics kick in is called "hitting the post" and sometimes it's done without prewritten copy, just winging it.

It's just a skill you can practice and some people get quite good at it.

One difference with this is if you miss the lyrics, you can just try again next time. There's a new song every few minutes.

There was only ever one launch of Voyager 2.

Sounds similar to jury duty at least.

I'm surprised I don't see a reference yet to Darius Kazemi's iconic 2014[1] talk, which is basically riffing on this joke for 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw

A key takeaway I've kept with me this whole time is the idea of there being two kinds of creative advice: (1) how to buy more lottery tickets, and (2) how to win the lottery. The former is useful, the latter not so much.

[1] Wait, 9 years ago? That can't be right.

It's a 50% increase in your days off for only 20% reduction in work days.

"Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle" popped into my head not long ago and I thought wow, that's a reference not a lot of people in this world would understand.

Even though it's famous inside (and out?) of text game circles, this is a game I still wish had a wider reach. It really just does something with video games that I didn't think was possible before playing it, and haven't seen explored satisfactorily since. Unfortunately, you sort of need to know how to play text games to appreciate it.

If anyone reading has tried text games and have found they just aren't for you, you can get somewhat of a proxy of the experience by reading through this community let's play of the game (https://adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/8481). Although long (like the game), I think it brings you on the typical journey of playing, even if you aren't necessarily making the connections yourself (which would normally be a big part of the appeal).

> isn’t our whole life a sequence of meditations? Because we always focus on something

Focus is only the method (one of many), not the goal. In (eg) vipassana meditation, the goal is "to see things as they really are."

> meditation is “doing nothing”. Okay, but then again there’s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time.

Meditation is not "doing nothing," it's actually a very active process. If anything it's more like the practice of intentionally thinking nothing. This is not as easy as it sounds.

One of the early meditation exercises is to sit quietly and count to ten slowly (perhaps one count for each breath, and each breath taking a ~5 second inhale, ~7 second exhale). When you notice your mind drift to something else, refocus on the counting and start over at zero. The goal is not really to reach ten (if you do, start over at zero). The purpose of the exercise is to realize how noisy our internal thoughts and feelings are, to practice observing them, letting them go, and refocusing on your focal point (counting or breath, etc).

There's nothing special about running, we might find ourselves doing it from time to time. But then why do people jog? Meditation is similar. It's an exercise.

And to further emphasize doing vs thinking: meditation has very little to do with what we're physically doing. You can meditate while walking, driving, or doing any activity. (It's just harder to do because there are more distractions.)

> just sit peacefully and observe your thoughts. Then again, aren’t we doing it anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it?

We are not, typically, observing our own thoughts. We're thinking thoughts, and feeling our feelings, but not actively observing them. But meditation is not just observing thoughts, but also letting them go without attaching to them. Letting every seed of a thought float away without taking root.

> Can you please share your own personal specific definition — what exactly is a meditation for you?

Meditation (to me) is the practice of letting go of thoughts. By doing this enough times, we strengthen the process so it becomes automatic. The goal is so we can observe our own thoughts and feelings, and everything around us, from a more calm and clear point of view. "To see things as they really are." It also has other benefits.

To be concrete: after waking up I set a timer (anywhere from 1-40 minutes depending on what I need) and sit quietly with my eyes closed (or sometimes open). I focus on my breath and all the sensations around me: the sound of the fan, the tension and release of muscles, etc. When a thought pops up, I let it pass by without judgment or attachment and return my focus to my breath. When the timer goes off, I'll continue meditating for a few minutes if my mind is really restless.

After meditating I'm typically in a calm, collected state, ready to start my day. Throughout the day, when I remember, I'll return to that state of awareness (of everything inside and around me) and meditate for a few moments during whatever I'm doing. After meditating regularly for a few months, I find this process will happen throughout the day without forethought (just automatically out of nowhere). When something happens that triggers an emotional reaction in me, I'll see the emotion as though it's a button I could choose to press or not.

I know you don't like analogies, but meditation is like you're following a toddler walking down a path. The toddler wanders every which way, following whatever whims. Each time it leaves the path, you gently and without judgement pick it up and return it to the path. It doesn't matter how many times you do this, the toddler will always leave the path. The goal is not to teach the toddler to stay on the path. The goal is not to keep the toddler on the path. The goal is to strengthen your arms so you can return the toddler without effort. This is the practice of meditation.

Heaven's Vault is the perfect game for this. Especially if your family likes stories, mysteries, and puzzles.

I recommend playing together and reading the dialog out loud, giving each character a unique voice if that's your wont.

The story and investigation are the main draw, but the core of the game is an ongoing puzzle about deciphering an ancient language that's a slick blend of the game mechanics helping you along and the slow, free-form expansion of your own understanding. It's a great group activity.