I want to point out here, in Australia there is a brand of socks called Darn Tough that is sold at Kmart, Target and BigW, it is NOT THE SAME Darn Tough brand you see raved online. It’s a completely different sock brand thats been around for about 20 years in Australia and just happens to have the same name. They are not great socks, very thick but don’t last long.
The coin flip, chance concept is something I’ve dealt with too. I was fast going down the incel path in my mid 20s. One of my managers at work was given two tickets to a speed-dating event, his mother told him he “needs to find a girlfriend” so she can “be a grandmother”. He didn’t want to go. We were having fun talking to him about how awful a speed dating event would turn out to be.
He said he would go if one of his friends came with him to the event (afterall, he had two tickets). He called so many of his friends, most were already in a relationship, or were busy that day, or just rejected the invitation. Then he started asking workmates at work, similar responses. Eventually he approached me, he knew I was single, knew I didn’t have social life, knew I never spoke to women, he said it would be a good opportunity for me to put myself out there. My first inclination was to say “no way”, “absolutely not”. I’m not attractive and a bit autistic, I don’t make a good first impression to anyone. The thought of awkwardly making small talk for 5 minutes at a time with 12 different women who were judging me based on first impressions, was the absolute opposite of my idea of a good time.
Then I thought about it as a chance to help my colleague, he wasn’t going to go unless I went with him, I wanted him to go, he wanted me to go, plus it was at a new bar that I’d heard good things about. At the very least I’d get to have some drinks with my work friend.
The event was about as awkward and anxiety-inducing as I expected for the most part. Most women were much older than me, and clearly had zero interest in chatting to me. So I took the pressure off myself, I wasn’t there to find a girlfriend, I didn’t buy the ticket, I was there to support my friend. There were two women around my own age, who were not bad looking and I actually managed to hold a conversation with (the beers helped). At the end of the event you could write down the name of anyone you felt a connection with and the organisers would find mutual matches.
Next day I find out I matched with one of the women I’d indicated. I got her contact details, and started talking to her via emails and SMS for a few months, getting to know each other better. Again I didn’t put any pressure on myself, I didn’t know this person, I didn’t ask her to match with me, it was a “easy come, easy go” situation with zero stakes. After two months we eventually went on a real date, and turns out we were a great match. Two years later we were engaged. Today is our 10th wedding anniversary, and we have two kids.
After we started dating I found out that she only went to the speed dating event as a support person to her friend. She didn’t go in looking for a relationship either.
That got me thinking about the odds of this happening. If my colleague didn’t get given tickets from his mother, if any of his other friends weren’t busy and went with him instead, if I didn’t agree to go along with him, if she didn’t go along with her friend for support, if I didn’t write down her name at the end, if she didn’t write down my name. The mind boggles. She told me it was a 50/50 whether she wrote down my name, just like you mentioned.
When people say dating is a “numbers game”, that doesn’t need to be interpreted in a predatory or creepy way. I think this is what it is about, the chances of finding a connection with someone really is a chance, but the one thing you can do is find a way to make that chance non-zero.
I got caught by this one today. I use the search feature all the time, and I don’t know why I didn’t notice that until today. I found the thing I was looking for, then wanted to go back to issues backlog for that repo, I clicked “Issues”, that just took me to a filtered view of my search term within issues. Deleting my search term didn’t help. I was clicking around for at least a minute before I realised there’s actually no way back to the main repo from that page.
That’s like saying “what’s the best ingredients to learn cooking with?”, firstly it all depends on what your want to eat, secondly it doesn’t really matter what the ingredients are to learn cooking skills.
Trillium is a full featured configurable and programmable self-hosted note-taking app that can be easily configured to suit the use case you’re describing, it does categories, tags, links to other topics etc.
Someone suggested I try Supermaven yesterday, it’s got some good benefits over competitors. It has a 300,000 token context length so it can send a very large amount of context for your completions, and it has an extremely fast API response time (usually less than 200ms) so completions appear near-instantly as you’re typing.
It’s the first “copilot-like” tool I’ve used, and I’ve only been using it for a day, but so far I’m liking it. And I’ve already signed up for the $10/month pro plan.
+1 for CBAT
A few people I work with, in the data science and environmental science fields.
That’s a great perspective, thanks for sharing that and it makes me want to reconsider using Gleam, but even more so makes me want to properly learn Erlang. And actually I’m not really a fan of Ruby, so that’s not something I’m attached to in Elixir.
I certainly appreciate the introduction of typing in Gleam, but one criticism I’ve seen of Gleam is the lack of function overloading, that is such a core feature of both Erlang and Elixir.
What’s your thoughts on Gleam vs Elixir?
I just started learning elixir last month then I read about gleam, watched some video introductions, it looks good, but I think Elixir is still the better language to learn right now to choose one.
Ah yes, H’taln’k from J’briom-4, flying his Zal’t M’lort class Winger to the Mont Bronl’n port with the day’s haul of Sea Crom’t. Oh won’t his mabs’k be pleased with this delivery.
This was my favourite joke in high school. It was the only proper joke that I memorised and practiced to have a good delivery. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
Yeah. I tried it once, just to see if I could do it. Now I know I can, I never need to do it again. I buy the frozen stuff.
As a Queenslander… I often dream of the day I can move to Tasmania. I’ve been there a couple of times (once to a friend’s wedding, and another time for a work trip) and it’s a beautiful place and the only place I’ve ever been that I don’t need aircon running 24/7 to be comfortable.
Nothing. I have this weird thing where I can’t listen to music and do my work at the same time. Listening to music is an active experience for me, I have to focus my whole attention on it and enjoy it. Putting music on as background noise doesn’t work, it gets super irritating because I can’t focus on my work or on the music.
The other issue is that the instant I put my headphones on at work to listen to music, someone comes to my desk to talk to me, without exception. And I hate talking to people, so I avoid wearing headphones at work these days.
Don’t get me started on the number of Toms, Olivers, and Olivias at my daughter’s school.
When these kids start working in offices, is going to usher back in the day of calling all co-workers by their surname “Hey Jonson, I have that report for you from Smith. Thanks Brown.”
I think they used to do that back in the 70s and 80s because everyones firsnames were all James, and Peter.
I’m really only good at one thing, that is designing and developing software. So I try to make all my personal stuff open source, so others can benefit from it too.
This is almond juice, not milk.
Holy mother. That’s like jumping in front of a train every evening and relying on the groundhog day to wake you up in your bed again in the morning.
I bought a Miele S8 off marketplace about 5 years ago. After I bought it, I did some research and found the same thing you did. The S8 was the most powerful vacuum that Miele ever made, and used a motor made in Germany. After that model they replaced it with the C3 that is almost identical except uses a Chinese motor.