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A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#501

Post by butwhywhyoh »

dan-robertson wrote: post #75

I’m a bit surprised by the negative reactions here. I don’t think the post is saying “I use a tool to remind me to talk to my spouse/close/friends/family” so much as “having weak social connections is more useful for both sides than not having them at all and I have a tool to help me do the work of maintaining them”. Two things which I think are acceptable and similar are: 1. Contacts who mostly just exchange Christm…

Sorry, under no circumstances would I EVER want to be a part of someone's automated list of "weak connections". And it sounds like I'm not alone.

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#502

Post by thelettere »

vorpalhex wrote: post #496
thelettere wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand - have you never used Google scholar? Type in the relevant terms and there are a million relevant results. I just pasted the top one, which is all about how physical pain and mental pain is basically physiologically identical and specifically mentions Tylenol in relation tto its effect on social pain. Full text shod be on sci-hub.

You understand Google Scholar returns unrelated studies, right? You have to actually read them. "results by searching terms in google scholar" is not a metric of truth. Did you actually read your posted source? It does not mention Tylenol, nor is it on Sci Hub. I can tell you what is in it, I can not read it for you however. It is likely Google Scholar selected it because it cites another study which does discuss Tyl…

Yes it does mention it - scholar gives you direct quotes in the subheading, which for this one is: "alter one type of pain (eg, Tylenol reduces physical pain) can alter the other as well (eg, Tylenol reduces social pain)."

I did a paper on this subject some years ago, so I know the info is legit. I didn't expend a ton of effort because information on human beings in hacker news is almost always shockingly lacking and so if I bother to write a high quality post it almost always gets either ignored or downvoted - because the "experts" here don't have the knowledge base to recognize what is true.

And as for scholar, if you type in the right terms, 99% of the time it gives good results. So in this case obviously "tylenol" is not a good search term because that's a brand name. What you want is the active ingredient, which in this case is Acetaminophen. If you type "Acetaminophen rejection" into scholar what are the results?

I just did and there's a wealth of highly cited studies backing up OP's claim, including the very first result.

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#503

Post by samatman »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #497
samatman wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all to bikeshed your tool, which I'm sure works just fine, but this is the sort of application where GNU Recutils really shines. https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ I mention it because it doesn't get the attention that it deserves, as a format midway between relational data in database and plain-old-text.

The tooling (or lack thereof) is the only problem I have with recfiles. It quickly gets unpleasant entering the (repetitive) metadata every time (and the CLI entry isn't much better). I get the impression from the recfiles page that the Emacs plugin is the main supported one, and maybe that one has a good UI flow that makes it usable, but I don't use Emacs. I thought/hoped visidata would solve the problem. It has dec…

I'm glad you mentioned it because it's the format I would like to see get more attention, and I agree that tooling around it is holding it back.

The repetition is genuinely useful if editing or adding one or two entries by hand, but tools for ingesting data into recfiles format, working with it in bulk and so on, I agree with you, they're primitive.

My daydream is a tool like jq for recfiles, with something in front of it like pandoc for structured data, so that I can put my choice of JSON/TOML/YAML/TSV/CSV through the filter and work with it in recfile format.

The real prize would be a solid library for importing and exporting SQLite data in recfiles form. The mapping is obvious and the metadata would allow for preservation of more of the underlying schema than the standard outputs, which are CSV and a collection of literal SQLite commands which you can execute to insert the data.

I think pairing SQLite with a standard recfiles protocol would be exceptionally powerful, a workflow where SQLite reads a collection of recfiles into an in-memory database, slices and dices at leisure, and exports the changeset as patches over the recfiles? Yes please.

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#504

Post by hungryforcodes »

p_l wrote: post #432
hungryforcodes wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh actually I really agree with you and the OP. I was responding more to the parent post. I think it's ok to just partition our lives into friends we value -- and largely ignore others. We'd be insane otherwise. So long as we remember to keep a general humanistic value for the man (or woman or trans or define-it-yourself) on the street... As I get older I find it hard to even KEEP UP with normal friends flung far awa…

Considering my own issues, this system makes me envious, specifically because of how hard it is to ensure to call and talk or message etc. That said, the system I guess shows dual-use case of CRM technology ;)

A CRM for long lost friends would be handy...

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#505

Post by harry8 »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #491
300bps wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are small talk and are taxing on me :-( Years ago I read the book, "How to Practice" by the Dalai Lama. Like any book, there were a few parts that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, one of them was: "If you are in the right frame of mind, your worst enemy cannot hurt you. If you are in the wrong frame of mind, your best friend visiting can seem like a horrific chore."

> "If you are in the right frame of mind, your worst enemy cannot hurt you. If you are in the wrong frame of mind, your best friend visiting can seem like a horrific chore." Can you tell me the connection to what I said? Best friends don't send me these little text messages.

You're in such a particular frame of mind that you're missing it.

These are the extremes. At the extreme with the "wrong" (bad word, for mine) frame of mind even your best friend is horrible to talk to. You are very unusually at that extreme. Half way between the wrong frame of mind and the opposite point on that spectrum you probably want to talk to your best friend but not someone further down your ordered list of friends. How far down is the cutoff where you don't want to talk to that person at all? That tells you how far away you from the (not so much worst, but probably most introverted) frame of mind you are.

Remember your very, very best friend in the world wasn't that at some point and you had this whole journey of incidental and deliberate contact over time for them to get to be there.

Someone thinking of you and braving the reach-out rejection vibe to send you a message asking how you are, well they might not be being totally manipulative and selfish and horrible. At least mentally give them that chance, and yourself that you are worth it.

2c, ymmv, everything said may not apply to you in any way at all.

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#506

Post by harry8 »

This was the selling point of facebook and why people clicked away their privacy to the great surveillance machine.

Note how ridiculous facebook seems as a solution to this problem now? Facebook has to go, delete it. Regulate it hard. Burn it to the ground if that's the only way.

The bait and switch /must/ have consequences for ethical reasons IMHO.

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#507

Post by p8pPaTH6AiDdGxi »

admjs wrote: post #12

I have a similar system, not for friends, but for acquaintances, business connections etc. I have a google sheet and a google script, the script runs once per day and checks the last time I emailed them or they emailed me. If it’s too long ago it adds a reminder to my calendar for that day. It’s simple and means I don’t have to remember to use the system.

I'm also trying to build my own in a quick easy way. Could you share with me your sheet (with private info removed) so I can work from that?

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#508

Post by brthsim »

dang wrote: post #426
brthsim wrote: post #151

[flagged]

Could you please read and follow the site guidelines when posting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Note these: " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " " When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3. "

No post body was provided.

Re: A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people

#510

Post by CamelRocketFish »

manmal wrote: post #435
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this. I'd like it a ton if I had a single feed that would aggregate my texts, whatsapp, my various email addresses, telegram, signal, skype, zoom, facebook messenger ...

Beeper is essentially that. I’ve been using it for a few months and it’s surprisingly usable already.

How did you get access to it? It seems there’s a wait list.
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