excuse

People don’t need an excuse to not want to talk to you, which incidentally is itself one of many “great” ways to learn to be quiet. As an example, I once had a roommate who was on some kind of medication for social anxiety, and he was one of the most irritating people I ever met. Failing to overcome his inhibitions was clearly not the main problem, those inhibitions were totally rational, and could have been a stopgap to avoid stepping on people’s toes despite not having any intuitive understanding or intrinsic interest in how to do that.

Probably the girl who is dashing around the room squeeling with joy every time a new person arrives and giving them a huge hug, the girl who is excitedly talking about her hobbies, job, or emotional revelations to a circle of smiling friends and acquaintances, the girl who is grabbing people and dragging them onto the dance floor to get the party started.

…

And maybe someone will say that this whole analysis is shallow and misguided, and that pursuing any of these things by opening their mouth and speaking more would be a betrayal of their deep inner self or something.

I think something that people who are casually socially successful often don’t understand is how important it is to that success to have the correct emotional reactions to other people, and how difficult it is and how wrong it feels to fake those. That is a betrayal of yourself. You should strongly resist approaching friendship as an instrumental goal or a puzzle to be solved. For this reason it isn’t well described as a skill, because the most important factors are not skills.

and you could very easily end up completely alone if you never developed the skill of meeting new people and developing relationships with them.

Solitude really isn’t the end of the world, it could be a lot worse, despite how challenging it is to face. It does no one any favors to think of this as a high stakes game with solitude as the punishment for losing, that’s not actually how it is.

If you want quiet people to talk to you, the main thing would be helping them understand that it is genuinely safe to do so. If you want quiet people to talk to other people, that’s probably none of your business.

I think you are correct to identify it as a contradiction, and shouldn’t fight your feelings. For lots of people absence of durable connections inherently just hurts you and you can’t change that by pretending like it doesn’t. How you are treated is experienced as an opinion, and in a real sense it is one. Something that helps to cope with it though is realizing that the opinions about you that society expresses by being such an environment are disingenuous and deluded. So much about the way people think about and treat each other is wrong, both factually and in terms of whether it makes for a good way to live, but even if you can’t ignore it you can object to it through the way you treat yourself and others.

Maybe in some ways it’s better, but being pushed to spend 4+ hours a night on homework and encouraged to think it would be the end of the world if you get a bad grade on an exam really sucks.

I only really get brown lentils, the two things I tend to use them for are the main ingredient in soup (along with carrots onions potatoes etc), and for fried lentils on rice.

Get health insurance, a good one

Ethernet cable

The imperfect answer is to diversify. If you think there is a real risk that you get screwed by the organizations you are trusting your money with, keeping some portion of your wealth in any of those things you are ridiculing is a rational choice to hedge against that risk.

Those are all also risky, but the risks are different as they are (mostly) about your personal security rather than trustworthiness of institutions, meaning you have a lot more protection from being completely wiped out in a single event.

Yes, a lot, it’s my favorite hobby. I like trying to make good arguments, appreciating when other people make good arguments, and pointing out bad arguments. Topic doesn’t matter too much, though maybe free speech is the one I get most heated about, especially the idea that arguments are worthless and should be suppressed.

Making food

More corrupt and less democratic than the countries that have got it probably

An advantage of github is that its social network type features give you ways to make more educated guesses about whether a project is legitimate vs a malware trap. It’s great that it is not difficult to find alternative hosting for git repos to evade Microsoft’s censorship, but I don’t think there exists an ideal alternative solution for trust infrastructure, which is extra important for anything piracy related.

I don’t like the thought of first-party javascript being able to fingerprint me either though

Afaik even Tor can be vulnerable to some kinds of fingerprinting, if javascript is turned on, which is required to use some websites, I’m thinking of this as something that could be used in conjunction with Tor

The reasons they want to do this sound horrible, and I wouldn’t want to use any such thing Google puts out, but I was thinking the other day about how something like this might be useful for enhancing privacy by preventing websites fingerprinting you. Think something like an Invidious server, except for any arbitrary website instead of only youtube; you can indirectly interact with javascript features, maximize the browser to fill your whole monitor revealing its resolution, but the end server will never know you are doing this stuff because all they see is the way your middleman server is configured (which will be as generic as possible).

Something that elaborates in the direction I was already interested in imagining. Back when there were few open world games, that was really interesting to me, because I was always trying to find ways to get around the confines of constrained game areas or think about what could be there, where the game does not let you go. After playing enough of those, open world specifically got less interesting, but I think the same concept can apply to a lot of different things; a game gets a lot of points with me if it goes somewhere new that I have imagined going but been disappointed that it isn’t yet possible.

Using it like that for in-game paintings kind of sucks, wasted worldbuilding opportunity. If a game has details that imply you should spend time looking at them, they should have content that has to do with the game and isn’t arbitrary filler.

Actual avocado life hack: buy way too many avocados, then when they decide to be ripe on their own time, cut them into cubes and freeze them. Now you have avocado on demand whenever you want.

Oil is fungible, so Oilcoin would make more sense than a non-fungible token. It might be tricky to figure out a way to transport physical fuel over the blockchain, but annoying details like that are what vibecoding is for.

And I’ve had people in my life who simply cannot do that.

I’m probably guilty of it, but the way my life has gone reaching out to people just does not come naturally and it’s hard to overcome the assumption that it would not be welcome, or the intuition that it’s something I am not allowed to do. The idea of people you build an enduring connection with is appealing, but abstract and hard to imagine.

Can that be realistically achieved though? Any representative government is going to be vulnerable to the selection effects of people who want to be in charge ending up in charge, and those of them most willing to do whatever it takes having a competitive advantage. The formation of an elite class colluding at the expense of the rest of us seems like a natural result.