Which leads me to...

- Is this closed source?

- Does it cost money?

- How does it discover data relationships?

- Is this closed source?

Currently, the code is not open source, but I might open-source parts of it in the future.

- Does it cost money?

The software is free to use. If there is demand, I might create a "pro" version for businesses in the future. However, I intend to always have a free version available for individuals.

- How does it discover data relationships?

I've discussed how it discovers data relationships in the documentation here: https://docs.apiparrot.com/docs/tutorial-extras/exchange-mod....

In short, the tool breaks down the data in the requests and responses into smaller parts by identifying their formats. For example, `["foo", "bar"]` would be recognized as a JSON array and broken down into the elements `"foo"` and `"bar"`. By applying this method recursively, you build a tree-like structure of the data.

If an exact match is found between data in a response from a previous request and data in a subsequent request, a correlation is detected.

Please feel free to ask if you have any more questions!

My bosses OTOH...let's just say, there's no penalty within companies for pointy haired bosses not making decisions to purchase something like this and ignoring staff.

It's a false economy but I'm tired of it and just purchase what I can afford.

Learn the dying art of in-person socialization. Memorize interesting things to talk about if needed. Buy a deck of icebreaker cards for inspiration.

Strike up conversations anywhere and everywhere. Learn magic tricks to entertain people with. Film things in your neighborhood and show people clips that you think they'd like.

For the rusty or nerdy (like me), write test cases for your interactions. Figure out what went wrong if someone isn't receptive. Refine your approach until you figure it out.

"Digital everything" has proven to be a dead end. We need to go backwards to go forwards.

Adaptive socialisation happens through conversation. It is as scary to live in a society where conversation is forbidden as it is in a society where discourse is manipulated or perhaps even made overwhelmingly toxic to the point where people relapse into the sort of brutish tribalism that... forms the plot of many Roddenberry episodes.

It's kinda tricky to start conversations with strangers in a world where everyone out in public has their Airpods in, in an effort to tune out everyone and everything around them, or in cultures where talking with strangers if frowned upon.

For example, I'm trying to make new friends now in my 30's in a foreign country where everyone has their friends/cliques since childhood, and it's basically playing the game on ultra nightmare difficulty.

I can see why a lot of people just give up and hermit themselves into their introvert hobbies and resort to para-social relationships with people online, as forced socialization consumes a lot of time and effort with next to no returns.

You're missing the point. Airpods are not a core issue, but people insulating themselves audibly (and maybe soon visually if the Apple Vision Pro catches on) certainly doesn't help spark up random encounters with strangers in public.

Sure, some of it is due to more awareness on mental health than in the past, but a lot of it is also due to things just being worse and more difficult.

Is it more difficult, or do we have greater expectations?

I look to my grandparents' generation and they "settled" for their neighbours as friends. I seriously doubt they were perfect soulmates, but they put in the effort to make it work and ended up quite close as a result. Whereas people in my generation seem to want that instant spark. If that isn't felt, they keep looking instead of working on building a relationship with who is there. Nowadays, becoming anything more than an acquaintance with your neighbour is almost unheard of.

As in - When you, the digital-first-lonely-guy, put away your phone and turn to the obviously-busy guy on his phone with earbuds in and doing super important socialdoomscroll work and you say "Hey, cool shoes!" suddenly it's not a problem anymore.

Instantly.

And it's never not been that way.

Now, you're correct that if they just fucking did it, it'd _probably_ be fine. But what happens when they try to speak to their peers who scoff and ignore them? Or when every person they try to talk to simply can't hear them. Or when there simply isn't a place to go after school and chat, and all social interaction stands on phone organizing as a prerequisite.

Yes, if they broke the seal on interpersonal interaction they'd see that almost everyone is actually positive and happy to speak and make friends. But that seal is getting harder and harder to break every day

It reminds me of the reproductive crisis that started happening in Japan some decades ago. The blame, as I recall it, was on the rigid social norms meant that it was super uncomfortable for everyone whenever a guy tried to talk to a girl. Guys stopped trying and switched to being absorbed in jobs and increasingly niche obsessions, further from the normalcy and reality around them.

Seems like we're not taking any hints from their example and instead saying "gee, society is bigger than me, woe is me, I'll just continue digging the hole".

It's exactly like evolution in nature. Life didn't start on land because one single fish decided to jump out of the water an breathe air then every other fish followed, no, it started because collectively millions of fishes died trying to do that at the same time over millions of years till adaptation of the species to the new environment happend.

Society is exactly like that as a collective. Going against societal norms as a lone wolf, doesn't get you seen as some sort of rebel hero who everyone looks up to, but as a weirdo/creep most of the time if you aren't handsome, rich or charismatic.

The point of the conversation is that if /you/ are feeling isolated (and, statistically speaking, YOU ARE) /you/ can affect /you/ by breaking out of your lil self-imposed isolation chamber and doing what normal humans do: communicate.

Will doing so change society? Who gives a hoot? /You'll feel better/.

Frankly these excuses are just that. Excuses. Stop catastrophizing. Start trying. And, while I'm ranting, stop encouraging others to catastrophize too.

Communication is a two way street where the other party has no obligation to listen to you when you want to communicate.

How do you communicate where people aren't interested in listening to strangers?

None of the advice requires the other to person do anything, but you're doing a great job of demonstrating that they /do/!

...

Thinking about this thread... I've had another thought.

I wonder if those that're trained to primarily communicate online are trained to do so adversarially in order trigger people. Triggering people is the most effective way to keep talking to someone. Like how they say if your child or pet can't get enough attention out of you they'll do naughty things, because even getting yelled at is... attention.

Yes & no. I think this speaks to the bubble most HN commenters live in. Step outside a VHCOL coastal city and the statement does not hold...

I don't live in any coastal city. I live in mainland Europe.

“Fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment. Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder that often develops after one or more panic attacks.

Symptoms include fear and avoidance of places and situations that might cause feelings of panic, entrapment, helplessness, or embarrassment.

Treatments include talk therapy and medication.”

turns out, the poison (talking) is the cure (talking).

Whoever came up with the modern definition of "agoraphobia" has failed to define the term. "Fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment." Is there any other kind of fear? The word is so broadly inclusive as to have little meaning.

ἀγορά (agora) – assembly, especially an assembly of the people; the place of assembly; speech; market, marketplace [1]

φόβος (phobos) – fear, terror, alarm, fright, panic [2]

Agoraphobia seems straightforwardly to mean "fear of public spaces and interactions." A person might say that etymology is not definition, but if you look at the most common examples of agoraphobia, this is exactly what's being described. [3]

We need to stop being so "inclusive" in our definitions! The purpose of a definition is to make something finite, i.e., to circumscribe its boundaries in order to enable clear thinking about that specific term. Broad definitions harm critical thinking.

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%81%C...

2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CF%8C%CE%B2%CE%BF%CF%8...

3. https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/agoraphobia/over...

This is not a personal attack, but just my observation of how people perceive the way social interactions should work. Part of these perceptions would also be why people are driven to chat with women on OnlyFans, and why an AI would be effective....

A long time ago I started noting when people (esp. my partner) said they like certain things in my phone, then I get them as gifts days, weeks, months, years later. People now think I'm very thoughtful, but I'm just a good note taker. The experience made me think that people who are naturally more "thoughtful", at least partially, just have better memories.

I also second your approach. I have a todo.txt file of various restaurants, experiences, places my gf wants to visit. Next time I want to plan a date, I look up the list ("Hey babe, let's go that that [RESTAURANT MENTIONED 3 MONTHS AGO] tonight. It's proven to be a very good system. <3

IMO one of the major problems of the very online era is that we hypothesize about what somebody might find objectionable, and then act like it really matters. Some people might find anything creepy and objectionable. But we managed to get by—even with the knowledge that some people didn’t like is—before we invented all these theories.

And if you do need to do that for work functions or something, you don't have to disclose that you are just doing how to win friends and influence people.

(Same, not a personal attack, I'm interested in this subject and good to see it from different views).

But like others in the thread I do believe that practicing socialization will cause you to improve at it.

And at the same time people will think you're creepy and awkward if you "don't do it right", and if you tell them it's something you are consciously trying to improve on and you show them your written test cases, they might also think you're creepy and weird. One of society's non-rational double standards.

From my view:

  /Ok ready? uhhhh ooooo here goes!/
  Me: "Hey nice shoes."
  You: "... thanks?"
  /OMG I DID IT/
  Me: "this is my stop, have a great day!"
  /OMGEXCELLENTFINISHSOHAPPY/

  Me: "Hey nice shoes!"
  You: "Thanks" (weirdo)...?
  Me: "this is my stop, have a great day!"
  You: /wow, ... i think he genuinely just wanted to give a compliment. didn't even try to bum money off me. huh./

point is - doesn't matter if they're confused or surprised you spoke to them. there's an assumption that if you speak up you must be out to manipulate them (sell something, convert someone, beg, etc.) and when you prove youre not, you help normalize ambient conversation AND fix your own sense of isolation.

That's not to say that no one should ever say anything to an stranger, it's just to point out that there are non-zero consequences to your actions.

I think that depending on who you talk to they'll give more or less consequence to making someone feel uncomfortable. (I'm not strictly talking about dating or talking to someone you are possibly romantically interested in). Some specific extreme examples are: at work or if you are in a position of power over someone (you are their boss or their teacher)- or these situations there are more consequences to having an interaction where someone felt uncomfortable.

Yes, those are cherry-picked relationships, but just to say that fear of making people uncomfortable is a real and valid concern. Is your discomfort made up in your head? Many times it is.

Back to OP, relationships are complicated... it's not hard to see why people end up talking to AI bots instead.

Fact is, the more you worry, the less success you'll have. Which reminds me of Hamlet -- the original worry-wart -- who said it best:

> 'conscience does make cowards of us all,'

There's always gonna be supply, and there's always gonna be demand, you can never get rid of it since you can't get rid of biology. Even some animals provide sex in exchange for goods. As long as both parties are adults and consenting, I don't really see the fuss on this topic. Just legalize it, regulate it, tax it, and everyone wins.

"But it's not allowed according to the $RELIGIOUS_BOOK..." Shut up and mind your own business. If you live in a secular society, religion has no say in this.

I've never been able to do that but in the last 2 years or so I've somehow gained the confidence/ability/interest, whatever it is. Where I live, in the grocery store, on walks, etc people really don't seem to mind short random conversations a lot of the time. Perhaps I used to think they mind because that was the mindset I was in myself at the time.

For me, I'm a bit of a screen junkie with social anxiety. One of my blockers was negative self-talk. I would think, "They're going to get angry. They're going to ignore you. They're busy. You're going to waste their time."

I started replacing that with images of the person being interested and delighted by the interaction. That helped, but I also knew that wasn't realistic if I just walked up and blurted out, "Hi, I'm an isolated remote dev and I'd like to talk." Someone might be sympathetic, but I didn't want sympathy; I wanted people to have fun. So I started using the techniques I mentioned.

This can all be learned from books on small talk, personality psychology, social dynamics, etc. But unfortunately, it's rarely talked about or taught, at least in my circles. And people are suffering as a consequence.

Isolation has a feedback that makes it hard to break out of once you're in really deep. The more desperately lonely you are, the worse your social skills.

Strangers are strange when you're a stranger.

i cant believe anymore that "negative self-talk is bad for you" has to lead to "the negative self-talk is false." because frequently it's exists as a defense mechanism. it's likely i've just trapped in the spiral too long. but i don't have enough counterexamples to disprove them. the longer i chose to go on the more counterexamples i accumulated until it was too much.

from this I concluded that I needed a type of relationship closer to a steward...but there's a reason people beyond a certain age don't seek out those relationships. it creates a power imbalance that is ruinous. i didn't know this. i spent years in that kind of friendship. i paid the price. i do feel like i wasted their time.

Timing and location is super important too though I haven't figured out the best places. Haven't had much luck at bars and stuff despite that being a common suggestion. Everyone seems to be there already with a social group and have zero interest in meeting a stranger.

He explained it is a skill, which needs to be learned, while many people use an app because it reduces their anxiety.

"How to talk to anyone" would be my first recommendation.

I first developed coping skills for work situations in my first internship. Thanks to a great manager who recognized some of my issues and was able to give contextual help. After that my professional life was better, but I struggled in social and academic contexts. Eventually, I started to get the social/relationship part down but only by being forced to because I moved to another country for a job.

Without these events, I'm not sure I'd have developed these skills. I still struggle and eventually pursued medication. I suspect some people have an undiagnosed condition, but the majority have limits to their emotional development, challenges from their upbringing, etc. that are very individual to resolve.

Unless there is some forcing function, I think the majority of individuals will fall into paths which don't help them. Then it's even harder to get onto a path where it's /just/ a matter of "developing skills".

And it's not even necessarily much of a skill, it's more spending the time and effort to find people you connect with (and being open to the people you do connect with).

It can be done over the net too, but in-person is better while the net has been actively and intentionally made worse to monetize addiction.

If you want a girlfriend/boyfriend you start by making friends with people. Then you will notice some of your friends are of your sexually compatible gender, which means you may have friends that want to have sex.

Also helps to avoid listening to incel/femcel, PUA, and similar bullshit that actively makes the listener repellent. A lot of women for example will ghost at the first whiff of Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson adjacent thinking, and as a man I'd do the same at the first whiff of the kind of stuff you hear on the angry womens' subreddits. I don't want someone with a head full of influencer poison.

A major reason to get off the apps is because the apps (social media and similar) reward toxicity and exploitation and are structurally designed to be maximally addictive, meaning they're made to keep you on them not talking to other people. Social media stopped being social around 2012 really. I call them tobacco companies of the mind.

Not a good advice if your friends group are the same sex with you, which tends to be the case for a lot of people.

You gotta fish where the fish are.

Like, if you're unemployed and you want a job, you don't first go out making friends, hoping that once you become friends one of them can give you a job. You get a job by looking for a job and applying to jobs. Sure, depending on where you live and who you engage with you, might luck out and meet someone who can have a job for you but that's not the norm and you don't want to leave your survival to that random chance.

Similarly, if you want a romantic relationship you need to engage in dating activities specifically designed to maximize the protentional of meeting a romantic partner, not in friend making activities hoping one of them will be your next romantic partner because you might be wasting a lot of time with no returns.

Actually, I think the opposite is better: Engaging in dating activates can actually net you some friends along the way if the romantic part doesn't click.

Maybe it's just me, but my luck was women only wanted me when I was too busy or having too much fun to go looking. I have a terrible poker face and if it seems like I'm looking for love then for whatever reason in my individual case it seems to be taken as a sign I don't deserve it. Of course if someone was offering, I might free up the time.

Not sure how common this is, but I've heard same from others.

I know almost none such people. Do you see how anecdotes work? Almost everyone I know met their SOs either in college, via online dating or at work, and rarely at a sports group or through a common friend gathering.

>If you have a friend group with a healthy mix of gender+sexual orientations

So a friend group that isn't gender mixed is unhealthy? I think friend groups form (as adults) organically via matching interest and personalities, they're not guaranteed to be mixed gender, especially if you're a male into male dominated jobs and hobbies. What now? Do I kick out Bob from my friends group and tell him due to DEI requirements, his position needs to be filled by a female in order to achieve a "healthy mix"?

>those people know other people, then you have a good shot at finding somebody you gel with.

Just because people know people doesn't automatically mean more dates for you. A lot of those people might already be in relationships or just incompatible with you romantically or even socially. Not every new person you get to meet will want to be your date or even your friend.

You're underestimating how many things need to fall into place in order to meet your SO "from other people". It's a lot more luck than things you can control.

> A friend invites you to their friends party and you spend some time talking to people.

I think your PoV and advice in entirely skewed towards college/early 20's dating when everyone's single and throwing parties.

Also, when I said parties that includes potlucks, D&D sessions, going to the movies, book clubs, etc.

I also did not mean to imply that a sausage party was by definition an unhealthy way to hang. You do you.

And by the way, I'm in my 30s.

Also either male dominated activities or non existent in my area. Hence why dating apps and bars/clubs are popular.

> going to the movies

BTW, How are you meeting your potential date by going to the movies? Dunno about you but whenever I went to the movie people just watch the movies, not talking to others. How do you flirt there?

I've been married for a long time but I've seen enough of today's dating scene from the outside in and heard enough about it from people in it to think it really is worse than when I was dating in the 2000s. I think the reason is the normalization of this PUA meat market mentality, which has come in part from influencers pushing these ideas into the culture and in part from the nature of dating apps (especially Tinder) and how they encourage it.

https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-22-meat-your-match-with-thi...

There's always been a meat market aspect to dating of course, but we've turned it to eleven and taken away the human part entirely. On top of this we've slathered a layer of toxic gender stereotypes received by way of shitty grifter self help gurus.

I feel like my wedding was one of the last flights out of Saigon.

It's a figure of speech, not a literal meaning. If you can't make the distinguishment, then I'm sorry.

>I think the reason is the normalization of this PUA meat market mentality

What if the PUA mentality is the effect and not the cause? Simply look at the statistics on how harshly women rate men on tinder vs how men rate women, and it might sink in who the meat market really is

ugh at the huge proportion of humanity that's like this, though

The real "red pill" is disconnecting from the matrix of social media, influencers, and PUA/MGTOW/incel (or their female equivalents, which do exist) stuff and being human. The "matrix" is monetized, manipulative, addictive social media and apps. Influencers are people who have aligned themselves intentionally with this matrix to ride on it and monetize you.

Wasn't that how it was in the movie? Blue pill == stay connected to the matrix, red pill == go to the real world.

I fear sometimes that sociopaths have inherited the earth.

I mostly meant to say that there seems to be something wrong with society at large and that it's leaking into our language. I view it in terms of psychological framing (or something like it). We use these very utilitarian and transactional phrases more and more frequently, and I suspect it may reflect a deeper change in the way we think about others.

Are you sure.

I think Only Fans was growing pretty rapidly before Covid and before AI.

If I want a cute furry girl to scream at me that spaces are better than tabs, so i'm worthless coder, I'm not getting that in regular 'in-person' socialization.

Could be anynthing - get more fit by taking up sports or gym. Men are more attracted to fit women, why would an opposite direction be different. Each of us can be a better version of ourselves. With improvements comes better confidence, again a thing the opposite notices.

Then it will start working on its own. Help it by exposing yourselves more to the opposite sex ie in some social events related to your strengths to speed things up.

This trajectory will change people for the better. Its really that simple (and complex)

Buy a new shirt that fits. Generally, don't dress like a total slob and care about your-silly-self a bit.

>No faking, no lies, just a bit of good old hard work

While I agree about no lies. no faking - faking confidence initially does help immensely - if you don't believe yourself, nobody else will. Being confident is a skill that can be learnt.

It doesn't mean even fake one can't make a difference, depends on 'target', it maturity, intelligence etc. But if you expect a lot from the opposite side, you need to deliver at least as much, the more the better.

Agree with appearance, its a bit silly game but it works so who am I to question it.

No doubt about it. Many people can tell how forced it feels. Yet, w/o any confidence (fake or otherwise), there won't be any steps made - hence no progress. Again, with time confidence can be 'mastered'.

Hey I agree with this. But also an alternative path. I'm one of those people who did learn all the social skills and while not witty I can in general navigate and make conversation with all kinds of people now, and have been doing it for decades at this point. But the reality is before I found online niche communities like HN, what i felt was... extreme isolation and loneliness. The internet is a doom scrolling nightmare, but there's a part of it that lets folks like me find community they may otherwise never have found. I feel we're in a nadir of social networks at this point, where they are all optimized for superficial attention and (simply put) money. But there's a huge untapped potential there for helping people find, form, and maintain communities. You can technically do that now, but you have to swim somewhat upstream (ex: stick to more niche areas of Reddit, and bail when it becomes popular). It doesn't have to be like this. I've been pessimistic about technology and the limits of the digital world for the first half of my life, but I'm done with that now. I recognize the issue is people like me have spent far too long bemoaning the state of things, and not nearly enough time building the world we want to see.

I love your advice, and agree with it. But I also think the digital world can be so much more than it is now. I hope other folks like me are waking up and realizing they have to build the world they want to see, rather than (only) trying to maximize their life skills in this existing one.

This is a business, plain and simple.

Just about every in-person social structure is experiencing falling numbers. For a lot of these (church, especially), there's good reason for why that particular structure needed to change or fall, but there's been nothing to replace the old structure. But for others, they experience failing numbers because modern society has become incompatible with unstructured, non-productive in-person interaction with strangers. "Where will I find the time to go to this singles mixer for bird watchers, I have to work 70 hours this week just to make rent?", etc.

Studying your own social interactions to see where you may have gone wrong is likely a fool's errand. Physical attraction is determined visually in milliseconds, which means there's little to nothing you can change via behaviors to increase success in that way.

The rise of simp apps like onlyfans reflects the total desperation of men who fail to meet the genetic standards for looks. You are correct that the reach of social media is responsible as it has isolated most average men, as attractive men are always a swipe away for any woman who is looking.

While your suggestion to be more social is healthy and helpful for most daily interactions, looking for partners requires more than just that, it requires looks.

I've known many incels and almost was one some time long ago. You gotta get off the dating apps, they aren't for dating, they're for making men feel so bad about themselves that they believe they must spend money to get a chance at any real women. That's what they do to you. Go to a bar with people if possible and try to speak to a stranger. Try to speak to a stranger in the train, on the sidewalk, at the grocery store. Leave it at a single sentence complement if you must, but do it. Smile with your eyes when you make eye contact with someone. Speak to people and leave those forums trying to blackpill you. They aren't your friends, they're just holding hands as you all slowly commit suicide.

The rise of incel ideology is a terrible thing for our young men. We should be setting better examples so the only explanation they have isn't "your fucking face is broken and you'll never be good enough"

Also go to therapy

Good looking people might have social interactions set to easy mode by it's simply stupid to say just because you didn't hit the genetic lottery means no one will ever get close to you.

You know a better determinant of good social interactions? Confidence. If you carry yourself well and don't act like a toxic man-o-sphere dipshit people won't avoid you. You can be ugly as sin but have a good personality and get laid.

Far too many young people fall prey to influencers and think they're just doomed to loneliness. Then they adopt the stupidest most toxic personality which only creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Be clean, don't slouch, smile, and tell some funny light jokes. People like that. No one gives a shit about bone structure. Humans aren't robots responding automatically to genetic programming.

Nevertheless, there are countless scientific studies outlining the severe disadvantage ugliness inflicts on people in all aspects of life. This has been magnified by social media.

You can't really "bootstraps mentality" physical attractiveness outside of weight control. All the confidence in the world won't help a goblin be desirable. Plus, personality is as genetic as looks, and some people just aren't wired for extroversion.

I fear that pushing a bootstraps narrative for ugly people will just result in unwarranted self blame.

There's no doubt that inherent physical attractiveness, extroversion, confidence and charisma, winning the genetic lottery, creates huge advantages. I've seen it in action, seen it open doors that will never open for an asymmetric, scrawny, socially erratic, introvert nerd with a high-pitched voice like myself. Seen how it affords choices and outcomes I will never have, no matter what I do.

Like so much of life, it is patently unjust and painful.

But it turns out there are enough other doors to open and ways of opening them, that me and all my similarly hopeless friends, got laid, got long-term partners and went on to experience the same relationship joys and failure modes as the beautiful people.

I wish I could warn my young self I'd be the comic relief in the mainstream mating game, but that it's OK, that I should try it, study it, realize and grieve my inadequacy, just get over it, get comfortable with who I am and what's achievable for me, and then go and play a slower, deeper game in a smaller, more congenial league.

What works? Sure, do the self-improvement stuff. Get fit, get a purpose. Find and live by your values. Practice fearlessness and not giving a crap what others think and leverage that into charisma (which is really hard but doable and I'm still working on it).

Find your tribe or social ecosystem and learn to love it (I had contempt for nerds that I had to get past. It was internalized shame at being mainstream-inadequate and it held me back for decades.) Explore adjacent social ecosystems. Get out there. Engage. Do not care about winning any specific outcome.

Have faith that it gets better, almost certainly, in most cases.

Most important, and in accordance with your values and self-respect, work hard to make ongoing net-positive social contributions (all kinds will work, interpersonal, social, material, intellectual, ethical, time, effort) with no strings attached. Use your strengths and interests.

I know this works. I am a weird intense socially-incompetent pedantic misanthrope, but I make the effort to spare my friends the downsides and I deliberately contribute positives. For example, I lead with my values in word and deed. They aren't a matter of consensus and I am contrary to my friends often enough. My super power is that I am entirely comfortable around opposing values. I will not conform to other people's and I don't care, on a personal level, if they adopt mine. Oddly, that combination results in a lot of approval and status. (I didn't plan this, it's a byproduct of my misanthropy, I figured it out after the fact, and realized I was on to a good thing.)

Sometimes at gatherings I can tell that I've just gone off the range, and I can see the look of friendly acceptance. “He's a freak, but he's our freak.” That group judgement of me reflects well and raises my social status considerably. I know my wife is proud of the social respect I've earned, even if the means are a mystery to her. It means nothing at all to some of the ladies, but it does to her.

This is just one example of how a skinny inconsequential nerd can project dominance without cash outlays, big muscles or a strong jawline. And there are so many other ways to be a social contributor or leader. Which equals reproductive fitness!

You, and every other “ugly person” out there has strengths. Find them. Develop them. Use them. Get over the fact that you can't succeed in mainstream competition. Just let it go. Look around, explore, and play in arenas you can win.

Remember (paraphrased) “behind every high-status female is a high-status male who is sick of her shit.” There's no particular advantage in winning one, and there are likely serious downsides. (And before y'all get mad at me the reverse is obviously true too. Married with kids, you know. And I can't speak to the generalization across gender permutations.)

I'm aware that online dating is a problem, and maybe there's a big problem in unrealistic expectations. Going to absolutely support the advice that you get your head out of that world. Play in the real world like it's 1970, 1980, 1990, whatever works for you. I have direct knowledge there are women doing the same. Society will figure it out in the long term and you will be ahead of the curve.

Very few people look like Sloth from Goonies, someone you can easily describe as a goblin in terms of looks. Being overweight, scrawny, or having some unflattering features does not make anyone a goblin by any sane definition.

The Incel cult bullshit reduces human being down to genetic robots that can't think or choose for themselves. It also requires you to ignore the world around you where ugly/fat/whatever people all over are in loving relationships. No one is automatically behaving because genes favor something. Normal actual humans have free will and make their own choices.

Many plants have evolved the production of capsicum because mammals have a sensitivity to the chemical. In the wild mammals will avoid capsicum bearing plants. As a mammal capsicum causes me pain. Despite my genetic programming I love many spicy foods and willingly prepare and eat them regularly. The Incel cult bullshit would have you believe because I have a genetic predisposition towards avoiding discomfort and a susceptibility to the pain causing effects of capsicum I would never eat so much as a bell pepper ever.

Everyone has physical imperfections. Every attractive person you ever see takes a shit eventually. They get acne. They have body odor. They get ingrown toenails and sweat. Some attractive people have awful personalities or are just personally insufferable. Some are dumb as a bag of hammers. Others are psychotic or just assholes to the core. Many good looking people only look so good at certain ages and change significantly over time. Physically good looks are far far from the only measure of the quality of a person or their overall personal attractiveness.

There are vanishing few genius super model warrior poets in the world. There is zero utility in looking down on yourself for not being one of them. It's also ridiculous to assume everyone else in the world is holding out for those super rare specimens. It's also problematic when your primary concern for a romantic partner is physical attractiveness. There's way more important things than physical attractiveness when it comes to romantic relationships.

Using a poetic descriptor like "mournful" in this context seems out of place.

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/plants-emit-ultras...

(For those who haven't used it, fzf is a fuzzy-searchable menu for the command line. You pipe lines of input to it, and it shows them in a menu. You start typing and it fuzzy searches the menu and selects the best match. Then you press Enter to pipe that out, or Tab for multi-select. It's fantastic.)

I have convenience functions in my profile script that pipe different things to fzf...scripts, paths in the current directory to copy to the clipboard, etc. It's indispensable.

Bonus: progressive enhancement. If someone doesn't have fzf/those convenience functions, it's just a directory with shell scripts, so they don't have to do anything special to use them.

This year, I actually had a prospect thank me for a cold email I sent him. He said in his 20-year career, had had never gotten one that was so helpful.

Of course, that was nice, but the metric I'm most concerned with is sales -- and yes, they lead to those as well.

The best ones, like the "best in my 20 years" one, have been the result of a lot of research, hand-crafting prospect lists based on what I believe are their exact needs, then writing a message that speaks to those needs.

I'll add since this is HN: I have no course to sell and my startup isn't mentioned or linked anywhere. I'm just writing to share what's worked for me.

The researcher's criticism of Loma Linda isn't that people don't live longer there; it's that Adventist Health purchased Dan Buettner's marketing company Blue Zones LLC in 2020.

Adventists are teetotalers, so he questions why they'd want to be associated with the Blue Zones guideline of drinking "every day at twice the NHS heavy drinking guidelines."

Which is a fair question -- but it doesn't have anything to do with whether Loma Linda is an area with greater longevity.

The CDC looked at average life expectancy in Loma Linda across all demographics. Purely geographical and on average.

The blue zones focused on the greater longevity specifically of Adventists in Loma Linda.

It wasn't a question of whether living inside the municipal boundaries of Loma Linda automatically conferred some special health benefits -- clearly it doesn't.

It was, "Why is there an unusually high concentration of outliers living here, and what behaviors cause them to live longer than average?"

There are 330,000,000 million Americans. There are likely millions of categories people can be split into. Just for fun let's say counties (6000+) then any of a zillion other cross items (left handed, blue eyed, above average height, smells like butter, etc., etc.,Etc.) Say we find 10,000 of these categories.

Life expectancy is decently modeled as a gaussian with std deviation 8 years. A 10 year excess is a z-score of 1.25, and 10% of samples will be at this point.

The odds of TONS of subsets of size 9000 of the 330,000,000 people that can be found in the same pair of county+trait from the 600,000,000 pairs is nearly 1.

Thus the Adventists in Loma Linda are far more likely to be one of these many blips that have zero causal power than they are to have special life sauce. Finding them is merely an artifact of being able to filter data, not a special power of the objects.

Or a simpler way: pick two binary traits, split the 330m Americans into 33,000 chunks of size 10,000 where each group has all in one of the four pairs of traits, and you would expect (more or less - there is some more math to do here) that 10% of these groups has average lifespans over 10 years, i.e., 3,300 of the groups are the same as the Loma Linda Adventists.

No magic needed. Just rolling dice.

I just gave you the math showing such groups are common, with no need for anything special. It's simply math. It as simple as: if I flip a coin long enough, I can find a run of 10 heads, or 100 hears, or a trillion heads.

The number of Americans and the number of ways to organize them is large enough that, just by chance, there will be many that have a 10+ years lifespan for no other reason than we simply have zillions of ways to split people into groups.

The math I presented give you the direction to compute such things. Learn enough math to solve the expected number of such groups, and you will be surprised.

To show one such group is anything other than statistical chance takes far more science and study and analysis than just saying "Look group has desired thing Y all we have is to repeat what the group did!"

> It seems that it is not that easy to find them

It's trivial to find such groups - medicine finds them all the time. Pick any medical result X that is expected to add Y years to life, pick some population center, pick those in the center with the habits/genetics in the study, and voila, you get yet another mystical group with magical life properties.

Except it's not magic. And it will happen with certainly without there being any underlying cause simply due to statistics. Medicine tries to remove the pure randomness of the result and demonstrate a causual relationship, but that is hard and not always done. They do this extra work because they know that stuff like the above happens so often purely randomly.

Simple example: [1] claims (I have not dug into the study, but it is likely well done) that 8 habits (eat healthy, exercise, good body weight, not too much alcohol, not smoking) would add 20ish years to life expectancy. So, go to a big city, find those in this group, and you'll get likely several thousand of them.

And now woo hoo! 24 years!

And for special effect, pick the subset that intersects yet another silly variable, say has red hair, or was bullied as a child, and now you too can get headlines that will spread like this one: "The 8 traits that make readheads live 20 more years!" "Bullied kids can do this one simple trick and outlive their tormentors!"

But this is simply nonsense. There is science, there is causality, and there is statistics, and not being able to disentangle them leads lots of people to post voodoo as if it's not simply random chance.

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/8-healthy-longevit...

> This claim is hard to reconcile with the CDC's official numbers which show a typical life expectancy for the entire area

Buettner's focus was on the outliers. Loma Linda is a longevity hotspot, and the question is why.

He found the long-living outliers practiced certain behaviors that they associated with Adventism, like vegetarianism.

Not all Adventists practice those behaviors. About half of Adventists eat meat, for example.

But the long-living outliers were Adventist and practiced the behaviors that he highlighted. So that was his takeaway.

By focusing on the older people only in such a small population, he is introducing selection bias and survivorship bias. Moreover, he did not control or compare studies. I believe there are more than one Adventist community in the US, yet those are not Blue Zones somehow?

Blue Zones LLC also provided a set of answers to that question, and one of those answers (“drinking 1-2 glasses of wine per day”) is clearly not true in this case.

And honestly, it’s just Bayesian statistics—if they present 5 data points, and 4 of those data points are floating somewhere between data errors and fraud, then odds are, that last data point is flawed somehow as well. Certainly they would need to do some extra work to prove that it isn’t.

https://www.xkcd.com/882/

Who's claiming that living inside the boundaries of such zones would confer health benefits?

The paper is pointing out that if you actually look at the data there is nothing remarkable about the region's average lifespan (actually lower than the entire country of Japan), which is what's being discussed here.

That's my point -- the region's average lifespan is irrelevant. It's only relevant given the misconception that Loma Linda itself has some special properties of rejuvenation.

But that doesn't mean it's not a longevity hotspot. Even if the average lifespan there were lower than normal -- say a large number of unhealthy people lived there -- it still wouldn't negate that, if an abnormally high number of healthy centenarians also live there.

"Loma Linda residents have some of the highest lifespans in the world."

"Well it turns out they actually just have average lifespans."

"Only true Loma Linda residents have the highest lifespans."

If you discount everyone who died at a normal age, you can conclude that Loma Linda residents are doing something special.

Just kidding. But more seriously, the original claim was deeply flawed so it makes sense to challenge the criteria for the population study.

In a large enough forest, there's always one or two randomly weird trees.

If Adventists have cracked the code for longevity, you'd find their other congregations with similar benefits. Barring that, we're just p-hacking our way to a spurious conclusion.

Isn't there bound to be some random noise?

Loma Linda residents don't have a notable longer life span than the other residents of California.

The CDC's average was purely geographic and irrespective of lifestyle, which is different.

> A slice of carrot looks much like the pupil, iris, and radiating lines of the human eye. Of course, science has demonstrated that carrots improve eye function.

Seriously?

Reddit has worked around their lack of it to some degree with location-based subreddits like r/AtlFilmmakers. But subreddits are high maintenance, and they isolate content. Plus, the naming conventions aren't standard. Maybe there's r/AtlFilmmakers for filmmakers in Atlanta, but another subreddit for musicians uses the state in the name instead of a city.

It's a bit like folders vs. tags. It would be nicer to have a single filmmaking subreddit with the option to filter on users' locations -- and default filtering out of location-specific posts in other places.

That wouldn't just make for better dating, though it probably would compared to something like Tinder. It could also lead to stronger local communities and better health outcomes.

Funny this got mentioned as France just successfully got that very feature removed from Telegram by arresting the founder and citing that feature as the one being used most for abuse.

Bunch of sources about that here: https://ground.news/article/telegram-to-start-moderating-pri...

France and Russia are at war now?

Wagner mercenaries moved into Mali after French troops withdrew from it. That's hardly the same thing as French soldiers 'fighting' Russian soldiers.

France actually does take their control over their former colonies rather seriously.

Perhaps my previous statement was a bit too bold. Let’s just say I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a factor in their decision to now prosecute the owner of Telegram.

Source for this? Skirmishes between French soldiers and Wagner mercenaries?

It’s well documented that France is fighting with Wagner in their former colonies, as well as Russia undermining their influence there.

It’s also well documented that Wagner and Russian troops mainly use Telegram for communication, same as in Ukraine. Again, well documented.

And these messages are stored on Russian Telegram services.

Telegram was completely fine to use in France, until Wagner started causing issues in Africa and then it suddenly became a problem.

But we’ll see what happens with the court case.

This statement is demonstrably untrue.

That the conflicts are well-known and have been happening for a while is quite true of course.

But this bizarre framing of these conflicts as "between Russia and colonialist powers" (as if Russia was not also a colonial power, or its influence games in Africa were any different from those of the Western powers) is just propaganda, and rather trite propaganda at that.

But indeed it was, and this is an extremely basic fact of its history. It wasn't run on exactly the same model as the overseas empires of the Western European states, but its modus operandi absolutely fits the definition of a "colonial empire" per the definition in Wikipedia:

   A colonial empire is a collective of territories (often called colonies), either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas, settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state.

This idea that conquest can't be called a "colony" (or that territorial contiguity has anything to do with the definition of the term) is just silly. As if the American States didn't promptly set out to settle and colonize the West after 1789 (because these places were contiguous to it), or Germany didn't very explicitly set out to colonize Poland in 1939, and so on.

Russia is also providing economic and political support to many African governments, especially those who have turned away from the west and are afraid of regime-change operations.

After some backlash about safety/privacy, it was disabled on everyone's account and required people to manually opt-in:

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/10/strava-flyby-feature.htm...

Very few people opted back in so the feature became useless.

Most people still have the setting that matches them with people who have run with them on a group run (same exact route at the same time).

Honestly, though, there are easier ways to determine where you live and your routine, e.g. address books + parking a car outside of your house & observing.

I mean given sattelite imagery is a thing I doubt army bases are secret, but that was still a bit of a whoopsie, on both the personnel's part and the app's.

If you’re looking for someone, these features often make finding the names of their new accounts trivial. It also tells you that person is within the app’s range.

At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being underrepresented compared to other platforms and we now see how that turned out.

I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to give people what they want and I consider TikTok to be so addictive that I’ve avoided using it, but it’s definitely a successful idea.

The controversy was that they were being actively suppressed as a moderation decision.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

My personal preference would be to have no thumbs on the scales.

Additionally I hate TikTok for the intentional addictive mechanism that requires an attention 'ante' to find out if a video is interesting by preventing jumping to a later point in the video to see where it is going. Basically gambling but with attention instead of currency, the algorithm optimized to give the user just enough to keep them coming back but not too much to satiate their desires.

Search Science is one of those research domains where it appears things are going backwards, google barely works anymore, facebook videos was terrible from the start and AFAIK stayed that way, YouTube only works for me because I have a subscribe list to people I support on Patreon. Amazon is being flooded with duplicate listings which should be trivial to de-dupe and clean up but I guess they suck at search science as well. If Amazon doesn't fix their search and fake good problem people might as well buy from Temu. Almost forgot, Twitter can't find bots that are so easy to find that they become 'X in bio' memes.

In practice, you are right that there is an attention ante; most videos are short enough to sit through them to see the payoff without making the effort to scrub.

how? no idea what you’re referring to.

Fuck that noise.

Edit: as does the Art of War, the Quran, the 1981 fall almanac, etc. education is almost a farce in 2024

On other apps like FB, it does show location-based content, but nothing I’m ever interested in (it doesn’t seem to understand interests+location, only interests or location). So like sure, it has posts from my neighbor, but it will be about lawn care or something else I’m not interested in.

- Less physical activity, more obesity. Both have known effects on memory and cognition.

- Childhood screen time, which has been linked to poor sleep, worse communication skills, and developmental delays.

- Easy, anonymous access to infinite novel pornography, which may affect the development of gray matter and the functioning of the prefrontal cortex.

- The decline of community and communal spaces and the detrimental mental effects of isolation.

Getting people suspicious that more science education will decrease IQ is about the last thing we need. (And I wasn't a STEM major, for the record.)

No studies are cited. The assertions are corroborated by the author's personal experience.

Take its claims with a grain of salt.

This is about how people self-described when they feel alert and productive. It doesn't necessarily mean there aren't benefits (or conversely, detriments) to "early to bed, early to rise."

It's possible that the work of those who feel the most alert in the morning is more physical -- for example, manual labor. Maybe they have less of a need and opportunity for cognition, so their scores are poorer. Maybe, too, the work makes them feel differently by evening from how night owls feel.

It's also possible that those with a high need for cognition tend towards work that can be done at any time of the day or night, and they are tired in the morning because they (whether optimally or not) stayed up late in the night working on it.

So, a follow-up question is how this relates to behavior. If night owls consistently go to bed around the time of peak melatonin production and wake up early, do their scores improve? Do their preferences change? And the same question in the inverse for larks.