Or!—hear me out—one woman whose 8 co-gestators were just laid off by someone who doesn’t understand what their job was

“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.

This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

“How are you?”

“Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.

Mosquito baiting

I’m gonna sound a little “old man yells at cloud” here, but the majority of original movies are trying to jam way too much into a 2-hour runtime. Characters are dropped into the plot out of nowhere, protagonists change their minds for no apparent reason, 30-second montages are substituted for meaningful emotional beats, the pacing feels rushed after the first half hour, it’s just a mess of stuff happening because the scriptwriter wanted it to. (Or maybe it’s the editor’s fault, idk, I don’t make movies.) A movie is the same length as a short story, not a novel, and trying to do a novel is going to make it feel like a super-long trailer instead of a movie 99% of the time. Critics are gonna pan it and no one is gonna watch it.

Sequels and franchise films can sometimes overcome this by benefit of familiar terrain. You already know the setting, you already know the characters, so we don’t need to spend time on that. It’s a definite advantage.

(The downside is that a lot of sequels forget to tell a story. I didn’t tune in to “hang out” with my favorite superheroes. I was expecting, y’know, an emotionally compelling plot.)

Ate the plane

https://youtu.be/B5zvp480jMc

One of my best friends in high school was a Norwegian exchange student. He was easygoing and smart and we rode the bus together because his host family lived nearby. Some of the funniest conversations of my life happened on those bus rides.

When he went back to Norway we lost touch. I think it must have been difficult for him to be here—the isolation, the culture shock, the language barrier, I can only imagine. Maybe it was a relief to leave our little town in the rearview mirror. But I’m forever glad I met him.

This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.

I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).

Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.