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How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

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Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#61

Post by inputcoffee »

dang wrote: post #57
inputcoffee wrote: post #36

See? This is the future liberals want... (note: this is a joking reference to a meme. https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-future-l... Feel free to down-vote but at least realize what it is).

Please don't. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102195 and marked it off-topic.

It is a joking reference to a meme "this is the future liberals want"

see: https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-future-l...

It is not really a political opinion on what liberals want!

Although out of context, of course, it doesn't make sense anymore. I would delete it if I could.

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#62

Post by differentView »

andrewcoover wrote: post #24
paulcole wrote: post #6

>invites are not environmentally friendly As opposed to the sustainability of dozens of people traveling from near and far.

This article is a sick hack for how to invite people to your wedding without paper invitations, not about environmentalism. Missing forest for trees etc.

>not about environmentalism

From the article: "Finally, invites are not environmentally friendly as they are one time use and easily lost or misplaced."

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#63

Post by lacampbell »

throwaway9475 wrote: post #19
lacampbell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same kinds of people who admonish you for taking an elevator because it's bad for the environment, even when your legs are sore from cycling to work.

I guess it's a kind of armchair environmentalism: it's easy to "go green" by switching to canvas bags (which _does_ help, a little), but then not make large, more sacrificial changes that would _actually_ benefit the environment. I don't know. It's tough, though, because to a large extent we're forced into lifestyles that are bad for the environment. You can't just decide to stop using the electricity produced by the…

I have a smaller carbon footprint than most, I guess, though usually for selfish reasons. I ride a bicycle because I don't want to spend money on a car - either purchasing or maintaining one. For me it's a luxury item that can wait. Plus it's a time saver to do some cardio and get to work at the same time. Similarly I'm interested in these hippy "sustainable" house building techniques mainly because they're cheap and I want to avoid a mortgage.

But people who drive to work everyday still try and lecture me over nothings like putting a laptop on standby overnight.

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#64

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

I like the general spirit of automating things, but I find the attitude behind some of this automation a little weird. The point of a lot of these courtesy 'messages' (whether invites, postcards, thank you notes etc.) are that they were personal. The medium does not matter as much as the fact that they were personal, and the money spent on it matters even less, at least to me.

There's no joy in receiving an automated message any more than there is joy in listening to an IVRS voice or an automated sales call. I'd be happier if I received a simple handwritten note or a phone call from a friend inviting me to something than if I was one of 1000 automated recipients of fancy gold-plated card.

For instance, a friend wrote a script to auto reply to people who had wished him on his birthday (he wasn't hiding it, so I didn't have to guess that it was an auto-reply).

Now, the way FB displays and folds posts made on your timeline makes it very difficult and painstaking to reply to a lot of them (if you refresh your page by mistake, you'd have to keep clicking on More... multiple times to get back to where you left). So I'd be completely fine with him posting a common status saying Thank You to everyone.

But knowing that it's a bot reply kinda took away the point of the reply, at least for me.

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#65

Post by hueving »

curun1r wrote: post #49
throwaway9475 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the mentality expressed in the article, where environmentalism is only observed for tiny pieces of waste that don't matter. These same people (like you mentioned) fly dozens of people on airplanes, which is so much worse. Or they have kids or don't update their home's insulation or drive a gas-guzzler. At the end of the day, there's only so much you as an individual can do (and certainly the CEO of…

Penny wise and pound foolish... Micro-optimizations are often easier to wrap our heads around, so we tend to want to focus on them. They're also often situations where you can get a clear win rather than a much more imperfect improvement. In development, it's sometimes called bikeshedding. You see it often in financial planning where people would rather cut out their morning latte than focus on investing better. This…

I'm going to take the more pessimistic view. It has little to do with what you can wrap your mind around and is much more correlated with the inconvenience of fixing it.

Dropping paper invitations has very little real inconvenience factor, so people do it and tout their environmentalism to receive their karma from their friends that care about that type of signaling.

When it comes to making a real sacrifice (e.g. not inviting people who would fly to the wedding), you will find very few people willing to do that.

It's the reason the prius is so incredibly popular compared to fully electric cars. It comes with the environmentalism bragging rights while still burning plenty of fuel so there is no change in lifestyle. Toyota was even nice enough to build it in a weird shape so people can easily see how forward thinking and smart you are.

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#66

Post by eldavido »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #33
iblaine wrote: post #10

Physical wedding invitations are still tradition such that people may get offended if they do not get one in the mail.

That's a good chance to set the tone on how you'll intend to live life from now on. Many people seem fall back to tradition, succumb to pressure and go against their own values when the wedding comes around: Spending too much on the event, diamond ring, church ceremony despite being non-religious, doing a traditional celebration instead of something individual and fun, or geeky like OP.

Counterpoint: it's also worth considering the costs of breaking with tradition.

I mean, sure, nobody has to get married. But then you might not get custody rights over your children. It might be more difficult to pick your kids up from school. Perhaps it will complicate inheritance. You won't get the tax breaks. You'll have to explain your relationship every time you're introduced to more traditional people, which might include family, or various other people with whom you'd just rather not get into an extended conversation about your life choices. It might complicate banking, especially in case one partner is survived by the other.

There's a direct analog to this in tech. Sure, you're only going to win by innovating. But you have to do so sparingly, knowing that innovation is risky, expensive, and difficult. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, it's best to "just use postgres".

There are certain things worth innovating on. Perhaps the exchange of some token item (a diamond) is worth one of them. For me, it wasn't, I just bought the stupid thing, and got on with my life. It's nice, it'll last, and it's a time-honored tradition I'll never have to get into 1000 annoying discussions over. Life is just too short, everybody knows it's a diamond, we're married, great.

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#67

Post by paulcole »

downandout wrote: post #50
paulcole wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They're doing what they can To be a little more accurate, "They're doing what they choose to." Nobody does what they can. My problem is in even saying that this is an environmental decision, like that matters at all.

They're doing what they can within the confines of the activity they are engaged in, which happens to be having a wedding. That involves travel, whether environmentalists like it or not.

If I decide to fly by private jet but bring my own reusable water bottle, have I done what I can?

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#68

Post by paulddraper »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #64

I like the general spirit of automating things, but I find the attitude behind some of this automation a little weird. The point of a lot of these courtesy 'messages' (whether invites, postcards, thank you notes etc.) are that they were personal. The medium does not matter as much as the fact that they were personal, and the money spent on it matters even less, at least to me. There's no joy in receiving an automated…

I'm curious to know where it fell on the time matrix :)

https://xkcd.com/1205/

Re: How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

#70

Post by gogopuppygogo »

sly010 wrote: post #3
jdpedrie wrote: post #2

I like it, but I think if I'd sent out save the dates via SMS for my wedding I'd have been sleeping alone for quite a while.

I am sure there are APIs for postcards. Heck, there are APIs for handwritten postcards ;)

https://maillift.com/ - because handwritten is basically a necessity in a wedding scenario
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