251–260 of 343 posts
> I'm glad to have gone down this rabbit hole because now I think about the 41.25 near-misses we had, where if an audience had been watching they may have been on the edge of their seats. 41.25 near-misses, until The Answer was the crossing that wasn't a miss: 42
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I took the pragmatic approach and said to myself "look, if Google really wants to know where I am the only way to avoid it is to go into the woods without my phone, so why not?" Then one day the Toronto Transit Commission police thought I was re-using someone elses streetcar fare because of how old it was. I just prefer the streetcar to subways, so I took a longer route. As soon as I pulled out my phone with my locat…
I think it was Isaac Asimov who wrote an article once speculating on a future utopia where there would be total information freedom and transparency - everyone would know everything about everyone's movements. You could see why it would be appealing - how could there be crime if you knew where everyone was at all times? No body could cheat on their spouse, no child would ever go missing. Seems hopelessly naive now of…
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I've concluded that the benefits significantly outweigh the, imo, fairly remote risks. It's that simple.
Read the book. Once you come to realize the collecting of your data isn't "passive" and that ultimately, it's being done to be used against you - and your free will - your perceived benefits are insignificant. Put another way, being complacent and complicit not only sells-out your own privacy, it compromises the privacy of all those round you, your (future) offspring, etc. For what? Convenience?
I already know that the collecting of data isn't passive. I deny that it's being done to be used against me. I also deny any concrete harms for most people on the short to medium term, although the far future is hard to predict.
Given that I deny the likelihood of harm to this data collection, I'm setting a concrete benefit against no drawbacks. Therefore I will continue to use it.
It's an R Markdown notebook. I've been finding these to be a nice evolution on the literate programming concept. I also noticed the author has been responding in this thread but her account seems to have been immediately shadowbanned upon creation, seems to be a common issue recently.
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I thought the same, but I am generation older. It made me think: Does anyone still ask people out for dates in real life? I am sure some, but the ratio must be incredibly low now after online dating became so common. To be clear: I do not think this is worse. For example, with the rise of different types of dating apps, it does seem that women (seeking men) have more agency in their dating life. In my generation (and…
Online dating is common but it doesn’t usually work for the average man. It will work for most women but most women don’t use it. Most men still need to find a partner through other means like cold approach (terrible - it’s highly dependent on looks just like Tinder) or through warm approach (friends of friends, hobbies, social groups, etc. - this is where most average men meet their partners). The issue now is the g…
How is this possible, outside of gender imbalance or imbalanced matching (i.e. one man in a relationship with multiple women)?
After we met, it was clear that we had been frequenting the same bars for about three years, and had attended many shows together/apart, but neither of us had any recollection of recognizing each other at any prior point. The shows were significant acts (for example, an ear bleedingly loud Bob Mould at the Green Parrot in Neptune NJ) that had to be the same show, could not possibly have been a different weekend with some common local band.
But there you have it. No contact until she noticed me sitting at the bar watching a live band at a worn out dive bar/night club, and wanted to know what my T-shirt said. She was drunk. She was adorable. I was smitten.
Plot Twist: When google's algorithms decided those two individuals should pair, it started showing them ads for the same events in order to increase the probability of them meeting. The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI. The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user acc…
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My wife and I were apparently at a party of a mutual friend two years before we met. Neither of us remembers the other being there. Apparently being the guy who brought an Apple IIc and a box of floppies to a college party in 2009 wasn't memorable enough!
> Apparently being the guy who brought an Apple IIc and a box of floppies to a college party in 2009 wasn't memorable enough! You'd be amazed at how few women find that exciting
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When I and my wife met for the first time we were both tourists, we both had never been to that country before (and none of us had ever been to a place the other had been), and we had exactly one day of overlap at this place and just happened to have decided to go to a particular spot at the same time in the early morning. And it's extremely likely that there would never have been another opportunity at any time late…
There would have been another opportunity with someone else that you would have fancied as much or even more.