vanilla_nut

I'm curious if other Americans have any advice about how to make friends. I find it obnoxiously and unnecessarily difficult, and I don't think I'm alone.

I don't enjoy any of the community or volunteer events in my area (I have tried everything regular, but nothing has stuck). I moved here for work, so I don't have any friends or family support structure in the area. Everyone gets around by car, even though it is extremely walkable here (a personal preference), so I don't even see my neighbors except for when they drive their cars in and out of their driveway.

I know that social isolation is awful for my health. I know that making new friends can be tough at first; you need to hang out with someone enough times in a row to overcome the initial awkwardness and build up mutual understanding. But how the hell am I supposed to meet up with people repeatedly when I have to bend over backwards to fit socialization in between work, feeding myself, exercising, and cleaning (let alone other tasks)? Not to mention that, even working remotely, I'm often so drained after a workday that I don't feel up to socializing.

The only place to 'hang out' in most parts is the library (not conducive to chat) and bars/breweries (expensive, unhealthy, and home to a... certain demographic).

I've heard that other countries supposedly have better work/life balance than the USA. Do folks who have experienced this contrast find it easier to make friends elsewhere?

One more reason I'm glad I connect my phone with a headphone jack. Just an analog connection carrying audio. The car doesn't even know what it's playing, as far as I know. Though some cars do seem to extract track names and artist names over the aux jack, so I think there's a little more than just an analog signal?

Indeed. Sidewalks (and on large roads, cycle/ped shared paths) are incredibly common in the UK. Not everywhere, of course. But considering the fact that even in US city centres you frequently can't find a sidewalk, it's a large difference. Just a lot easier to navigate places on foot, even if it's not always pleasant to be 10 feet from a motorway on a walk.

There are places in the UK where you can catch a ferry round-trip to Europe for less than 100 quid. There are places in almost every European country where you can catch a train to another country for less than 100 euro.

Unless you're traveling to Mexico or Canada (which are just not that different from the US in terms of infrastructure), Americans face at least a $500 round-trip plane ticket and around 10 hours of travel each way. More realistically, ~$1000 for a ticket at a reasonable time between reasonable points.

It's just a different order of magnitude of cost to visit places with different infra and culture.

Maybe those riders live on that street, or need to use the larger road briefly to access a turn that isn't safe to access via the bike lane? Or maybe they're riding faster than is comfortable on a shared path (kudos to them -- racing is not safe in an environment shared with pedestrians). Bicycles have every right to the road that cars do, so those bikes are perfectly entitled to use that road. Do they really slow down traffic that much? If that stretch of road has traffic lights, it probably doesn't make much of a difference.

Notably, Europe doesn't just accommodate bicycles in cities: it's also much more comfortable to bike on rural roads, thanks to lower speed limits, smaller cars, better drivers, and more conscious design when it comes to designating roads vs. streets vs. highways. Bicycle routes (sometimes called byways) are also a hell of a lot better, and are actually viable ways to travel between nearby cities in many cases.

I just spent a month bicycling around the UK. I knew the infrastructure was better than in the USA, but it blew my mind to see how even motorways often had bicycle & pedestrian paths off to the side. And almost all bridges seem to have a sidewalk, often one big enough to comfortably fit bikes and pedestrians. That's something we don't even get in the most pedestrian friendly US cities (citation: the Queensborough bridge in NYC).

And the funniest part? People in the UK complain about their infrastructure constantly, and frequently asked me why I was cycling there instead of the Netherlands, or France, or Spain, or Italy, or any other European country.

Infrastructure in the USA is a nightmare and an absolute embarrassment. I fear for my life every time I walk or bike here in shared space with drivers. I suspect a lot of this stems from the fact that around half of Americans have never left the continent of North America [1]. It's hard to realize just how bad our infrastructure is when you have no point of comparison and all of our infra sucks.

It's so frustrating because it's so simple: I just want to ride my bike and walk around. That requires very little infrastructure. I shouldn't have to wrap up my entire identity up in bicycling and walking just because most of our country doesn't bother with those activities.

[1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/lealane/2019/05/02/percentage-o...).

I have heard that bicycle commuting has dropped significantly in Portland since 2020. And I've experienced enough of an increase in broken glass, aggressive driving, tents, and trash in bike lanes in other US cities to be a bit worried about the current state of bicycling in Portland. But I'm also aware that reporting has significant biases, and I haven't been back to Portland since 2019 or so. What's the current situation like?

Long support (5+ years), physical first-party stores for support every 100ish miles in the USA, compatibility with Apple's proprietary iMessage and FaceTime protocols. An OS that's generally considered easier to use, with more walls in place to protect users from malware. A simple $400ish price point.

Not a huge difference from Samsung's cheaper offerings on paper, but a lot of little things that add up to a better experience for many older users.

Good question. I've read a lot of local news here in New England in the last year that recommends freezing, but looking up formal sources... it isn't so simple. Seems like freezing means you still end up using tweezers for the removal, but the risk of pushing toxins back into your bloodstream is lessened because the toxins themselves are frozen inside the tick.

So I guess the recommendation remains: remove with tweezers carefully, targeting the head so as to avoid sqeezing the body and flushing toxins back into your body. Which is easier than heading to a drugstore for freezing wart removers anyway.

No strong reason, but Mastodon allows various goverment officials and agencies to create accounts on the same server and probably has more functionality baked in than most self-hosted alternatives. It's got a better interface than a CMS and even allows those government officials to follow and interact with other accounts in an official capacity.

Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the web.

Meanwhile, I find NYS's inundation of billboards downright depressing. It's just ugly, even in places that ought to be beautiful upstate. When I cross the border into Vermont, which bans ads on roads except for simple business signage, the difference is tangible.

I'm astonished that the Memmy app is this good after just a week or two of development. Very curious how the dev will monetise eventually; as far as I know, they don't have significant overhead costs beyond an Apple developer account and their own dev work. Ought to end up somewhere like Apollo.

And don't forget that Lemmy and Kbin federate, so you should also check Kbin for 'magazines' (their term for subreddit) that interest you.

I am continually astonished at the lack of monetary discipline in the USA. For your average american, saving is a substantial amount of effort. Investing, diversifying, etc is 5D chess.

It's easy to forget that a lot of us exist in a highly educated, highly compensated, 99th percentile of the population, and most people struggle to pay off their minimum credit card payment each month. Not to say that tech workers and HN denizens are better than other people -- in general, we're lacking a lot of skills and most of us would starve within days if we had to exist in any time period of human existence before 2000. But there is a VERY wide spectrum of financial competency out there, and folks commenting on this forum are likely very near the top of that ranking.

IIRC the recommended approach now is to freeze them off with those wart removers you can find at drug stores. Even the special tweezers were hard enough to use properly that it's no longer the recommended approach.

Doubtful that it will kill it. But if it can jumpstart some alternatives and normalize video hosting outside of YouTube, we'll get a healthier market of options for watching videos. Like you, I probably watch a single-digit number of videos per month on YouTube. But there's no other option for the folks who I follow, who are simply following the path of least resistance to "get people to watch my videos on the internet." Paying for YouTube Premium isn't even a real option for me because I'd end up paying multiple dollars per video based on my viewing habits. Strange that YouTube seems to want to incentivize heavy viewership per user, even for paid accounts -- I suppose that tells you that the user data is actually the most valuable part of your account!

Exactly. Snow Crash explores the idea of a "mind virus", which seemed a little silly when I originally read the book. But nowadays, it's clear that most ad campaigns are exactly that: hacks of the brain.

Just think about the ad strategies of, say, Coca-cola and Pepsi. They don't tell you about a new product. They don't inform you about any benefits of their product, or advantages relative to the competition. They purely exist to keep the brand names in your head, and associate the brand names with images of people having fun. And the saddest part is, it works! We desperately need regulation to prevent companies from hacking consumer's brains into zombies who grab products on the shelf based on how many times they've heard the name spewed out of their television in the last 24 hours.

On the flip side, I would be happy to allow purely informative, contextual, non-tracking ads in my browser. Objective statements about new products I'm actually interested in? Sure! Privacy invading, mind manipulating mental malware? No thanks.

Nothing wrong with those. But if you buy great meat you can grill a steak with absolutely nothing on it and it comes out fantastic.

Steak has only one ingredient, meat. That's why I make it so often, it's impossible to mess it up.

Most states have something like this:

- at ~16, you become eligible for a driving permit which allows for supervised driving only

- getting the permit requires you to "pass" a pathetic 10ish question exam for which the literal questions and (multiple choice) answers are publicly available

- after 6-12 months (again, variable) you become eligible to get your full license

- to get a license, you usually need a guardian or affiliated adult to sign a form saying they taught you for over 40 hours of supervised driving.

- sometimes you also need a "safety class" or possible a "driver's education" class. Driver's education can be useful, since it's literally just a teacher riding around in a car driven by students and pointing out where the students go wrong. Safety classes are almost invariably useless, since they mostly just regurgitate rules of the road and obvious safety tips that most students immediately forget.

- Once you become eligible for a license, you go to a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the same place where you got your permit. Schedule an appointment, and an employee will take you for a driving test. In the driving test, you have to show your mettle at serious challenges like parallel parking a car, stopping at stop signs, looking over your shoulder while changing lanes, and looking both ways before making a turn at a stop. This basic test has a less than 50% passing rate, but you can take it as many times as you like so even the worst drivers eventually jump through the hoop.

So basically the process you imagined but with more time and hoops where the government gets to charge you $$.

Reddit coasted for a long time on goodwill from the early 2010s, even though the current site and company seem pretty poorly run and stagnant.

This latest debacle killed that goodwill for a lot of us. Why bother contributing -- through moderation, posts, or even upvotes/downvotes -- to a site that clearly doesn't value the rest of us?

On the bright side, HN has continued to host decent conversations for years running now. There are a few decent communities growing on Lemmy, Tildes, and Squabbles as well. I'm excited for the distributed future, I think the Fediverse is going to provide a lot of decent competition in terms of hosting, UI, and moderation over the next couple of years. It's much needed after almost two decades of stagnancy from Reddit.

Same in my experience. The tech scene, as with Twitter, has changed the most -- all of the tech subs I used to follow have slowed down considerably in the last couple of weeks. I suspect that we'll see another big hit July 1 when the API dies, and maybe a couple of days before when the big third-party apps kill their API keys.

Meme subs will rage on as always, but I honestly wonder how much of those are majority bot-generated content at this point. In the last couple of years there's already been a serious uptick in recycled content from prior years, same or similar subs, to harvest upvotes on accounts.

Much like Twitter, I suspect certain communities will linger on. Local city subreddits, cesspools that they are, seem to be going strong still. But I don't consider that much of a loss, it's basically a (slightly) better Nextdoor.

I suspect third-party apps make up a huge portion of power user interactions, simply because the alternatives on mobile are really crappy. I guess we'll see for sure on the 30th.

Sounds a lot like the folks who claim that AI will replace music and literature. What makes you think that LLMs will make the jump from mediocre creation to high-level abstraction any time soon? I'm sure you can tell that I'm skeptical, but I am genuinely curious what indicators you're seeing in the AI landscape today that suggest this.

Maybe once we figure out how to reliably prevent hallucination, LLMs can displace the most banal docs.

As far as long-form tutorials, information architecture, and concept doc? I'm not concerned about the future of technical writing for at least a couple of decades. LLMs write the kind of inflated, roundabout garden path sentences that I used to write in middle school to pad page counts. Tons of unnecessary adjectives and redundant sentences. It's hard to ask a question to an LLM and end up with a statement that doesn't contain a contradiction.

Maybe crappy technical writing will end up displaced. But great documentation is a lot more than just spewing words and facts on a page. You have to think about niche edge cases, API design, and higher levels of abstraction. Not to mention figure out how to actually use a new interface that, more often than not, doesn't match the original design spec in subtle ways.

Anyone who replaces technical writers with LLMs in the next couple of years will reap more than their share of developer discontent when the docs literally lie to them.

I envision a world where a portion of senior workers -- 40%, I would guess, based on vague approximations of folks who prefer in-person or hybrid work -- work in office, with mentorship representing a huge portion of their responsibilities. Junior workers probably ought to spend at least a year or two in office to acclimate to office job life; high performers can escape once they've proven their abilities.

That being said: I wonder how much of remote work preferences are actually a result of affordability and quality of life issues in cities, especially in the USA. I would have no problem working a hybrid or even full-time in-person gig in an office... if I could afford to buy a house, walk or bike to work, and live in a quiet, clean, interesting neighborhood. Being paid a decent salary in tech that should be possible, but it's really hard to manage in the USA at the moment for most definitions of quiet/clean/interesting. And before anyone claims that cities can't be "quiet" or "clean", I've spent enough time in nice European cities that do satisfy all three criteria to know that I'm not just being overly picky. Even if I had a million dollars, I doubt I could satisfy those criteria in the USA.

Anyway, as long as we're stuck with an imperfect housing market, remote work is such a blessing. I'm sure it's helpful for some junior workers, too -- if you don't have to move to a $2k+/mo apartment in a major city straight out of college, you'll have a much easier time paying off loans and saving up money early in life. I suspect that's opened a lot of doors for folks who previously couldn't work the most prestigious tech jobs.

Agreed, but I would argue that the PS3/Xbox 360 generation was the first where the majority of console owners played online. I was an adolescent/teenager at the time and it was almost a guarantee that any other boys in my class had one of those consoles and played online. Almost invariably first person shooters.

Very different from today's pay-to-win manipulative Skinner Boxes, but probably not very healthy. Living someplace where I couldn't physically hang out with other kids easily after school (thanks, car culture) it probably helped me build better social skills. But at the cost of my attention span and physical social skills.

It certainly makes me wonder what skill tradeoffs today's video game kids are making.

Not to be a bandwagoner, but Lemmy has really picked up over the last few days. There's plenty of scaling issues right now, but take a look at the centralized community browser (https://browse.feddit.de/) to see if there are enough interesting budding subreddits there to pique your interest.

Will 90% of Redditors move over? Not immediately, and likely not ever. But if maybe 10% leave -- largely comprised of enthusiasts, moderators, and power users who benefited the most from old.reddit and third party apps -- then we've got a community the size of 2007 Reddit anyway. Which everyone seems to agree was a better-sized community than Reddit today anyway.

I was on the fence for the past couple of weeks. But this interview (https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...) pushed me over the edge. Huffman's doublespeak, white lies (I'm certain there's a bunch of third party apps that you won't name that are still "in talks" about the new API pricing), and actual lies (trying to smear Christian's name) point to a company that simply cannot be trusted. Even if Reddit fixed all of the API issues today, I wouldn't want to go back.

And you bring up the most important issue anyway: every single Reddit community I've participated in has become noticeably worse over the past decade. They don't care because we're not the meme-and-ad-slurpee sipping target audience who will mindlessly scroll pictures and videos on the official Reddit app.

I experienced exactly this a couple of years ago in /r/espresso. Fortunately the low-quality memespam pushed me to look for alternatives, and I found Home Barista forums, one of the best quality web forums I've ever participated in.

Something similar happened to me in the bicycle space, which turns out to have a lot of forum activity as well. Seems some of the oldguard never switched to Reddit in the first place in both communities.

Why don't niche subreddits just start web forums up again? It's simple enough to pay the hosting bills with some sideroll ads (that clever admins could even sell at a premium, thanks to their highly niche audience). Of course, today's Reddit mods would have to reskill a bit to run a forum, pick up some admin tasks, etc. But if they're already donating tons of free time to moderate that might not be a huge deal.

I use maybe 2-5 subreddits at this point because Reddit has rotted out so much. At least half of those are shutting down permanently as a result of the API changes, and the other half are participating in the blackout. I don't need a shared account across all of those services. In fact, I tend to visit subreddits individually anyway so I don't have to guess about the context of every post.

None of my favorite subreddits rely heavily on photo posts, which keeps hosting costs low. In fact, I notice a strong association between quality and text-only subs, likely because it keeps the lowest quality memes away.

It might not work for every subreddit -- I don't anticipate the denizens of /r/funny would embrace a web forum -- but for hobby, book, and series-related communities, web forums have been around a whole lot longer than Reddit. Reddit only took over because it was marginally cheaper and easier to host; if mods lose their useful mod tools and power users lose bearable and efficient methods of browsing, forums start to look mighty attractive again.