Well he won't meet me. I live in the No-Facebook Bubble. Though sometimes the parties I help organise are listed on the Facebook by third parties. So there's that slim chance...
How do you know when someone isn't on Facebook? ;)
Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
11–20 of 187 posts
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#12>And Max acknowledges this privilege.
Closed article.
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#13This is an awesome idea. I've spent a lot of energy making apps to automate my life and management my schedule. Now I'm tempted to also have it throw in something random now and again. I couldn't go to these extremes (I couldn't pick up and move to another country for instance) but it would be cool to say do things less extreme... like pick a random place for dinner or watch this random Netflix movie.
Yeah it is a very interesting concept. But, I don't know if I could do things like show up at a random person's house for their Christmas party. I just don't think its in me. But I definitely could do random restaurants / movies / public locations. So a much less extreme version.
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#14Max should meet Luke Rhinehart -- The Dice Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
I have to finish that book. Very nice first half.
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#15I love the idea of random surprises. I created a simple app that picks random items from a Chinese ecommerce site within a set budget. My long term goal was to use ML to learn what each user liked and send them random items on a schedule, selecting from multiple sites. I never finished it because other things took precedence but the random selection part works. Anyone interested in this as a service?
Someone built a similar thing a couple of years ago to get random things from Amazon: http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-...
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#16This is great. I think that the illusion of time speeding up as we get older is due to getting into a routine where we do the same thing every day, and the brain begins compressing memories as our everyday experiences become less novel. Using a "randomizer lite" program to shake things up might be a good start to breaking the routine.
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#17Max should meet Luke Rhinehart -- The Dice Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
What is the chance that would happen? ;-)
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#18Ah, but what was his source of randomness? Perhaps he didn't have enough entropy and now he's got to do the last few years all over again ;)
I think I naturally do a bit of that myself: whenever I have some empty time, I fill it with something "random", only instead of choosing randomly I often choose the cheapest option. For example, I once booked a flight to Iran departing hours after I bought the ticket, simply because it was the cheapest option for an interesting place to fly (under $180 round-trip.)
I think the design choices really impact the end result, though. One minor design flaw might result in completely eliminating a whole lot of interesting places or things, which is what I'd be scared of. For example, that cheap fare to Iran was only on one travel search site, which didn't have an API. By selecting one booking website as an API, and letting the algorithm decide for me, I wouldn't have gone to Iran.
Similarly, there are a lot of things that wouldn't seem like an "option" to a computer but are an option to me. I've wanted to see Greenland from the air, so I've been taking a lot of flights that pass over Greenland on the way to places I needed to go anyway. But if the algorithm decided for me, it would probably have booked air tours over Greenland - substantially more expensive in terms of both time and money. It wouldn't be able to say "hey, you know that trip across the Atlantic you have in a few weeks? Why not pay $25 more to have it fly over Greenland?"
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#19Max should meet Luke Rhinehart -- The Dice Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
just finished reading that yesterday, as a matter of fact - if anyone is feeling trapped and debating major change versus incremental improvement, it will provide some perspective, for sure - also some insight into our dicepresident
Re: Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
#20I actually met Max while we both happened to be in Thailand in 2015. We spent the day on bicycles following the directions his script told him, without hesitation. Regardless of where it was in the city, that's where we went next (a laundry mat, daycare, cafes, and the zoo iirc). Nothing was skipped, because it was what the software told us to do. Here are some pictures from that day https://goo.gl/photos/gyCNRz2rs7z…
That's really interesting. I was thinking of doing a social experiment that's similar but the script would be crowd sourced and determined at the last possible moment.
If you followed a crowdsourced script wouldn't that essentially just be "twitch plays pokemon" for real life?