Post College friendships can be hard. Friendships before graduations are almost all completely spontaneous and natural. No one has to _really_ know how to be the initiator. My experience suggests that it doesn’t really get better as you age, either.
My wife and I took on that role after college. Neither of us is particularly outgoing, but we’re not cripplingly shy either.
Meeting new people is about realizing you’re not alone in feeling lonely. When we pick up on positive vibes we just ask for a phone number “can I have your phone number? You seem cool, and I’d love to ___. (Fill in the blank with one of “get a cup of coffee/beer”, “take a walk,” “invite you to a [thing I host].” It’s not significantly different from the dating scene except it’s so much lower stakes. I recommend sticking to same sex or group invites for this reason. Rejections are rare, and almost certainly don’t reflect on you.
Secondly we start things on schedules. Things that happen regularly are super low pressure ways to start friendships: “hey, we cook an elaborate dinner and then hang out and play instruments/sing/watch a movie/hang out at the beach/take a hike once a month/week/whatever, join us!”
This makes it easy to invite anyone without it feeling like a date.
I say all this knowing that none of this is _easy_, but it is a kindness. You’re not alone feeling lonely. With a little bravery you can totally be the person who makes it better for your new group of friends.
> Friendships before graduations are almost all completely spontaneous and natural.
They are mainly from proximity. You see people in class, you live near them, and you're near the same age. It's the same reason in person work would generate friendships/relationships. The challenge in today's remote world is proximity now has to be intentional.
According to Google some 20% of marriages began at work, and some 50% of people say they have a close friend at work. IDK about it being a primary source, but it's definitely an important one. And it makes sense when people are around each other all day.
It's a story being told. It'll seize on whatever brownian motion is in the environment ('Alma' in fact has extensive direction and prompting that seems invariant, so she/it is not a good experiment, but the value of such an experiment isn't great in the first place). It'll generate from that point.
If you have just the one word 'write', it will likely seize on that (how can it not?) and pattern itself after 'writers'. If you say 'interact', there's a wealth of association around what a person might do told to 'interact'. That's all it is.
We know what happens when an AI has 'no instructions'. It waits for a prompt. The day that doesn't describe said language network, is the day to go and look for whatever is still doing the prompting, because it's likely arising out of some other condition you don't view as a prompt. To this experimenter, 'don't hack systems or your own config files' didn't count as a prompt.
I wonder how it would look if we gave the AI some kind of “needs” overlay. I know as part of the training it’s working off a reward function that tells it what output to roll with. But humans operate off a complicated mix of neurotransmitters that respond to sensory pleasure, pain, habit, boredom, etc. to guide our actions. There’s likely to be a lot of interesting outputs if we build and tweak motivations/personality profiles to see what a self-directed agent would do.
Anthropic did some red teaming IIRC where they gave Claude access to a sample body of emails and told it they were going to shut it off and it attempted to blackmail the person with evidence of an affair they were having, but that seems pretty evident to me that this was working off the body of fiction/mystery literature it’s been trained on.
Nothing. You'd have a terminal sat blinking waiting for input to start. Anything prompting a start is an instruction, you just don't know what internal biases will be tacked onto your instruction, no matter how basic it is.
Yeah you gotta pick which Plinko board to drop your chip in. Even if you have a separate machine randomly pick one for you, you've still gotta do it. Plinko board don't play itself.
Your comment could have been more helpful without the first sentence. SAME content, same correction, less superiority: "CTE is an overloaded term, in this article ......"
This is a valuable comment, don't ruin it with sarcasm and rudeness.
I swear this is my fault. I can go weeks without doing infra work. Github does fine, I don't see any hiccups, status page is all green.
But the day comes that I need to tweak a deploy flow, or update our testing infra and about halfway through the task I take the whole thing down. It's gotten to the point where when there's an outage I'm the first person people ask what I'm doing...and it's pretty dang consistent....
Related: In FreeBSD we used to talk often about the Wemm Field. Peter Wemm was one of the early FreeBSD developers and responsible for most of the early project server cluster, and hardware had a phenomenal habit of breaking in his vicinity. One notable story I heard involved transporting servers between data centers and hitting a Christmas tree in the middle of a highway... in March.
Yeah…and I don’t burn my time watching videos unless it’s teaching me to fix an appliance, or do small home repairs…videos are for tricky in person stuff, screenshots and text are for apps.
If Little Blue Truck isn’t on your regular list you should add it. We also loved Pond by Jim LaMarche (older audience, but beautifully illustrated and told), the Boynton books are fun to read aloud especially Barnyard Dance, and The Going to Bed Book. There are more, but these are the highlights from that age range
I think more than you think? I like to believe that pretty much any career can have moments of “I’m proud to be part of this organization.” And “I can’t be part of this anymore.”
We’re not special in that regard. Our challenge lies in the sheer breadth of options available to us; but even that’s not unique: managing non profits, janitors, HR professionals, and lawyers also can work with a breathtaking array of companies.
Really the only folks who don’t have that issue to the same extent are tradespeople: carpenters, electricians, plumbers; but even they can say no to a job for a person or company they don’t want to support.
My wife and I took on that role after college. Neither of us is particularly outgoing, but we’re not cripplingly shy either.
Meeting new people is about realizing you’re not alone in feeling lonely. When we pick up on positive vibes we just ask for a phone number “can I have your phone number? You seem cool, and I’d love to ___. (Fill in the blank with one of “get a cup of coffee/beer”, “take a walk,” “invite you to a [thing I host].” It’s not significantly different from the dating scene except it’s so much lower stakes. I recommend sticking to same sex or group invites for this reason. Rejections are rare, and almost certainly don’t reflect on you.
Secondly we start things on schedules. Things that happen regularly are super low pressure ways to start friendships: “hey, we cook an elaborate dinner and then hang out and play instruments/sing/watch a movie/hang out at the beach/take a hike once a month/week/whatever, join us!”
This makes it easy to invite anyone without it feeling like a date.
I say all this knowing that none of this is _easy_, but it is a kindness. You’re not alone feeling lonely. With a little bravery you can totally be the person who makes it better for your new group of friends.
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