Good for you, OP! Climbing gyms are especially good for making friends because you are working on problems with people. My gym has a weekly meet up for people looking for belay partners as well as classes where folks talk. Crossfit might also do the trick, as might a running club. Good luck!
The other thing with climbing gyms, especially bouldering is that you only spend maybe 20% of the time climbing. With 80% time off, that's a lot of opportunities for socializing.
You don't get that with the high intensity training like Crossfit where you spend maybe 70% of the time working out and 30% of the time dying.
And socialisation happens naturally. You're waiting and lots of other people are doing the same. You are working on problems and can exchange tips or complements or cheer people on. It's inherently social.
The gym is not inherently social unless you are actively spotting / alternating uses of a single machine. You either join that group of gym rats (who in my experience spend 80% of their time talking) or you put your headphones on and crack on solo.
I'll second climbing gyms. My entire core group of friends in my city (that weren't already friends prior to my moving here) are people I met from the climbing gym or yoga classes at the climbing gym.
Its a great space to meet new people, there are inherent breaks in the activity, shared problems to work on, and its a non-competitive space. Everyone just wants everyone else to send hard.
I relate a lot OP's situation but every time I think about trying to talk to someone else I just get worried that if it does go "bad" (i.e. very awkward) then it will become to mentally hard to stay at the gym for the rest of the session or even come back and since its a place I actually like being in I end up never trying anything in fear of ruining a place I like. I don't know if anyone else feels like that but I just felt like leaving this comment.
As long as you don't bring up politics, religion, or money, you would be hard-pressed to make it so bad you wouldn't be able to stay or even come back. If things are SUPER awkward, just move to the other side of the gym or go to the bathroom for a little bit (~5-10m or so) then feel free to return, just don't talk to that person again other than a simple "hi" if warranted.
It’s probably mostly your social anxiety speaking there. If you go in not expecting anything in return it won’t get that awkward just go alright I’ll let you get back to it and go back to doing your thing.
I had like 20 years of social anxiety and it’s actually very anti-climactic when you can have a normal short conversation with a stranger. Not dramatic and no one’s traumatized
I had the same issue! I was nervous/awkward around the people who didn't want to talk to me. I can't say if it will be the same for you but after a week of me seeing them, them seeing me, and us doing our thing, I got used it and lowkey forgot about it. I don't think it's as big of a deal as we think
It’s a similar thing for me at coffee-shops that I frequent quite often and where I often see recurring faces. In a way it’s natural, “making contact”, so to speak, would only help transform those third spaces into potential-friends spaces, which might be good for some, but which might also seem less desirable for others.
+1 from me. I always find it very challenging to speak to strangers, but not at the Boulder gym. There's just so many opportunities to start a natural conversation:
- new climbers asks you for advise
- you can ask a new climber if they'd like some technique tips
- you finally top your project and someone commends you for it
- someone tops your project and you ask them for advise
- you're trying to top a boulder on a new set and are solving it with others
- you're _constantly_ in the gym so staff starts talking to you
I used to rock climb in gyms a lot. I stopped going because I found the people there incredibly irritating (didn't matter on the gym). The things that irritated me:
1) People would immediately jump on the route I was on after seeing I struggled. Cool flex.
2) Unsolicited advice. Thanks, but I'm here minding my own business
I generally have a hard time connecting with people like OP but found that I was able to find good climbing partners outside as opposed to in the gym.
I now do crossfit and while I know it's not for everyone, it's a decent community. I still don't talk to folks in the gym, I don't want to but I like that we're all in it together and pushing ourselves pretty hard. I feel connected in that way.
I would really not like a stranger tapping me on the shoulder in the gym. That's my "alone time". That's just me though.
You know the old adage about if you meet one jerk in a day, it's them, but if everyone you meet is a jerk...anyway I'm glad you like CrossFit, if climbing weren't my thing, I'd probably do something in that category instead :)
I can see why people would be irritated by 1 and 2 and they happen to me too, but I have just reframed how I think about them.
If someone jumps on something I'm struggling with, I take it as an opportunity to really pay attention to what they're doing and try to learn. They might just be way stronger, but they probably also have some better technique ideas.
For #2, I just take it as a slightly awkward attempt to reach out and socialize. Advice isn't harmful. At worst it's a mild spoiler (oh well), or just wrong (then ignore it). At best it's a great chance to learn something.
I'm awkward and it's rare for me to start a conversation, so I just take someone else talking to me as an opportunity to connect without having to make the awkward first step, and try to spend a minute or two (at least) talking with the person.
> People would immediately jump on the route I was on after seeing I struggled. Cool flex.
I find it highly strange to assume malicious intent ("flexing"), rather than charitable one (they're just interested in this route regardless of you being on it, or your attempt made this route seem fun/interesting and made them want to try it for themselves).
People seem to assume bad intent all the time when there's obvious equally-or-more-likely charitable explanations, to the point that I wonder if it's me who's naive.
I'm lucky enough that I live in a city that has a newbie-friendly group that climbs every week and goes for dinner and board games afterwards.
I consider myself an introvert, but after going for a while, I got to figure out who are regulars, and they recognise me as a new regular too, at which point they're more open to socialising more, even outside the weekly meetups.
Even when I'm bouldering alone, I've had random people cheer for me when I'm about to send, or show me the beta for a route I'm struggling with, or ask for help with a problem. It just provides a very natural conversation starter, at which point you can pivot to other topics, provided they seem open to talking more.
"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."
Every so often the Trump administration seems like they might actually care about getting my vote. A recent executive order making it easier to do research on psychedelic therapy is another example [0]. A policy shift to reform IRB review for social and behavioral science [1] would be really targeted at me.
I know politics is hard to talk about, but I generally think that we underappreciate the importance of being agentic in politics. Obviously I prefer that our government follow the law and uphold the constitution. But the many ways in which the current administration got things done by being quick, by "flooding the zone" [2], and by using tactics that apparently no one noticed before [3-4] are worthy of study and emulation.
I know the obvious response to this is to note that a lot of what they're doing is illegal, and again, I think that's bad. But they really make the current Democratic leadership seem out of touch and old [5] by comparison. Combined with policy positions that are far from the median voter's [6], it doesn't make for a winning look/platform.
I agree as a political science grad. In hindsight, the only surprising thing about Trump's rise to power was that WE were surprised. Trump was doing the #1 thing politicians are supposed to do; tell the people what they want to hear. Our establishment is just so out-of-touch with reality and in love with the status quo that they can't change.
While I agree that Dems have a long history of being dithering and feckless, and I like the cannabis and psychedelic changes, those wins just seem so incredibly small compared to the insane amount of corruption, incompetence, and maliciousness from this administration.
The spiteful killing of so much research funding alone dwarfs all of their minor wins. Wrecking clean energy projects are total self sabotage for the country. The utter lack of pollution enforcement will cause untold cases of cancer and other disease in Americans. Trump's family has stolen billions for themselves while destroying hundreds of billions of dollars in value with this idiotic Iran war they can't even articulate a plan or theory of victory for.
This is far from an exhaustive list. Trump is good at making minor high profile moves seem like a big deal, but it can really distract from the orders of magnitude worse decisions he's making elsewhere.
St. John’s college is a great place that draws a special type of young person, but its graduates are not very STEM-legible. As far as I know they still offer no choice of major & no hands-on classes — just the great books.
Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.
Huh. I graduated from there and about a third of my class (including me) works in tech in some form. Though being a sysadmin seems to be more common than being a programmer. But I had no idea the Wesnoth dev went there too!
No, the email system was a Unix server you telneted to from the Mac SEs in the computer lab so I just kind of picked up Unix usage. Then once I graduated I got a job tending a BIND and sendmail cluster for a local ISP (the "training" was handing me the Cricket book and the Bat book on the first day). The jaw-dropping salary for that was $22K at the time (this was the 90s; about $46K in today's money). That led to learning Perl (via the Camel book) to automate some of the tasks, which led to some CGI work, but I've never really been a "programmer" per se, always a sysadmin.
Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).
Much appreciated. I find is that referencing code in conversation is hard -- e.g. "underscore foo bar" vs `_fooBar`, "this dot Ls" vs `this.els`, etc happens often. Lower-powered models especially struggle with this, and make some frustrating assumptions. Premium models do way better, and at times are shockingly good. They just aren't remotely economically viable for me.
My solution so far is to use my instructions to call out the fact that my comments are transcribed and full of errors. I also focus more on "plan + apply" flows that guide agents to search out and identify code changes before anything is edited to ensure the relevant context (and any tricky references) are clearly established in the chat context.
It's kinda like learning vim (or emacs, if you prefer). First it was all about learning shortcuts and best practices to make efficient use of the tool. Then it was about creating a good .vimrc file to further reduce the overhead of coding sessions. Then it was about distributing that .vimrc across machines (and I did a LOT of ssh-based work) for consistency. Once that was done, it became unimaginable to code any other way.
It has been even more true here: agent-based workflows are useless without significant investment in creating and maintaining good project documentation, agent instructions, and finding ways to replicate that across repos (more microservice hell! :D) for consistency. There is also some conflict, especially in corporate environments, with where this information needs to live to be properly maintained.
maybe you've done this already, but my first thought would be to make a preparser script that would take your likely voice inputs like "underscore foo bar" and translate to "_fooBar" which you would then pass on as input. i do something similar for a local TTS generator which often stumbles on certain words or weird characters
> Something that surprised us early on: only a tiny fraction of farmed fish species have been through genetic improvement programs. Chickens grow 4x faster than they did in 1950 because of decades of selective breeding.
I agree that there is an opportunity here for getting more calories per fish (and especially per input of feed, which is really what decades of chicken optimization are about). But the consequences of these changes for chicken welfare have been disastrous [0] and we're seeing a concerted effort to move to higher-welfare breeds (though still more efficient than ancestral breeds). Likewise, intensive salmon farming has led to widespread '“environmental dewilding,” or the process of modifying natural water bodies with artificial infrastructure — in this case, fish farm pens and cages — and polluting them' [1]. It sounds like there are lots of ways in which using more robots can make monitoring less-invasive, and therefore less stressful for fish. I certainly hope to see those attributes, rather than the potentially disastrous ones, emphasized as you move forward.
This is a really important point and something we think about a lot. You are absolutely right that chicken optimization has come with serious welfare tradeoffs. Breeding purely for growth rate without considering the animal's ability to actually live comfortably is how you end up with birds that cannot walk properly. We do not want to enable that trajectory for fish.
The good news is that the data we are collecting can be used to select for more than just growth. Body shape, fin integrity, spinal curvature, and other morphological traits are all signals of fish health and welfare. Farms that care about sustainability can use this data to breed fish that are robust and healthy, not just fast growing. The tool is neutral but the selection criteria are up to the breeder.
On the environmental side, our focus right now is on land based hatcheries and recirculating aquaculture systems rather than open net pens in the ocean. These closed systems avoid a lot of the dewilding and pollution concerns you mentioned. They are more expensive to operate but they keep farmed fish separate from wild populations and give you much more control over waste and water quality.
And yes, reducing handling stress is a big part of what we are building. The manual process today involves netting, anesthesia, and physical manipulation. Our system can measure fish without any of that. Less stress on the animal and better data for the farmer.
> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while... If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble.
From my POV, the author spent their innovation tokens on a political commitment. I would not recommend this path to someone starting a company. It's hard enough already.
Also, many American companies that might have been useful to the author were founded by Europeans, e.g. GitLab. There's plenty of European talent for making widely adopted infrastructure. If those companies aren't in Europe, it's worth asking why [1].
But the argument is reversed! The more boring your tech stack, the _easier_ it is to host it anywhere (including Europe). So choosing boring tech is actually an enabler of this (and other) choices down the line.
It's only "a political commitment" as long as it doesn't affect you yet; and from the European perspective I'd say "the affecting has begun".
I'd say from this author's POV, his commitments cost him in terms of headaches, costs, and time not spent optimizing for meeting customers' needs:
> The parts that were extra hard
> Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap.
The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway's TEM works, but the ecosystem is thinner. Fewer templates, fewer integrations, less community knowledge to lean on when something goes wrong.
The choose boring technology essay notes that as you get further along you might get more innovation tokens to spend. but when you're starting out, "not choosing sendgrid because they're American" is a token gone when they're most scarce.
Fair enough... though if I were to push my point: one could also say that dumbing down your mechanisms of email sending (i.e. ditching templates, or pulling the templates to your own codebase) would give the same advantage I talked about earlier of vendor-independance
But unfortunately, you get Windows
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