I concur. And would just add two points: (1) Make it that you’re not asking for anything / don’t open with something that could be perceived as a setup to asking for money, or pushing a religion. :) 2) be sensitive to social cues or that they want to be left alone, like terse answers or shifting their attention away from you

I’ve found it can be helpful to shift your own attention after someone answers you, but not to a phone (which just makes you look like you’re communicating with someone else).

Look at a flyer on the wall, or your beverage if you’re in a bar, and they’ll follow up if they want to talk and appreciate the reduced pressure either way.

And yeah, never open a conversation with something like “can I ask you a question?” which is usually a trick of a salesperson or beggar to make you acknowledge them and start saying yes.

This actually jives with my personal experience living in NYC.

New Yorkers have a reputation for being stone cold with strangers, but the truth is that anytime somebody approaches you out of the blue, there's an assumption that they're about to ask for money or try to get in your pants. Once you demonstrate you're not looking for either (or, if the second I suppose, that you're at least smooth enough for it not to be immediately evident), people are generally really kind. With some exceptions, I've usually found that the coldest looking person will stop to give a lost tourist directions if it's clear they're in need.

Yeah NYC is the one place in America I'd love to visit.

But unfortunately it's in America so I'm not going there until you have some sane leaders again :(

The site seems to be getting crushed. Can someone summarize what it did?

What motivation would the Supreme Court have to get “back on Trumps good side?” If anything, after his recent name calling of them I’d think they’d be less inclined to appease him. The can’t be fired.

> Just what the process was in the scam that snared Mr Williams remains unclear but it appears the scammers were able to access his card details and add them to a new Google Pay wallet on their own phone.

> "We're never going to truly know how Ian's card was breached. What we do know is that he wasn't in that Coles … and that he had the proof," Ms Brooks says.

And to give them credit: WhatsApp also had brilliant engineering that was able to scale with their popularity.

Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.

And India too I think.

I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)

This makes me wonder what my Orkut email address was. My Gmail was a beta test one from 2004, so that is post-Orkut.

Orkut was launched in 2004 too

That's wild, thank you. I could have sworn it launched in 2000 and was very much earlier than Facebook.

This is more akin to a race car driver give a review of, for example, a new type of electric car. It doesn’t matter that the driver is not a domain expert in electric motors and regenerative braking; what matters is he knows how to operate these machines in their use case at the limits.

Hearing a programming legend weigh in on the latest programming tool seems entirely completely reasonable.

For me, I recently wanted to assemble a “supercut” of my videos of attempts at learning to bunny-hop a bike. The tool was able to craft a python script that used ffmpeg to edit out the no-motion portions of the videos and stitch them together.

This would have taken ages to do by hand in iMovie, and probably just as long to look up the needed parameters in ffmpeg, but Claude code got it right in the first try, and worked with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold.

I googled "edit out no motion in video ffmpeg" and found a snippet from StackOverflow which did this in about 10 seconds.

yeah but that doesn't requiring paying Anthropic $100/m

Good luck getting that StackOverflow snippet to "work with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold".

The answer described the relevant parameters for the threshold actually and gave a range of suggested parameters.

> Attend every week.

In my experience, this is the key. “90% of life is showing up.” If you are around the same people every week, for whatever reason, with even a minimal amount of openness and friendliness, you will get community.

Exactly. It can take a month or more but the secret for me is to “become a regular” at places I like.

I'm open and friendly to everyone I meet but get treated like a weirdo and ostracized (I am also a weirdo).

You don't only have to be "open and friendly", you have to say the correct things in the correct way in the correct order in order for people to accept you.

That doesn't work for everyone and everywhere.

But it works for most in most places

Yes, for years now I’ve had this creeping feeling that it’s a social version of the prisoners dilemma: if you’re the only one that puts down the phone (or gets off social media, etc) then you’re just left behind. It’s a coordination problem.