Lovely read. Social health is my number one 2026 priority. I moved into a new city in 2025 and this hits home. I'm lucky to have a great and active group of online friends but it's no replacement for something local.
Some things that I've picked up last year that are a good starting point:
- timeleft dinners. I get dinner with 5 strangers every few weeks. Tons of fun and you meet a lot of interesting people.
- swing dancing: I went on a date to a social dance and immediately became addicted. It has taken a while to learn the basics, and some of the unwritten rules of the dance floor, but now this is an activity I can take with me to many of my city's social dances and meet all sorts of people. It has greatly improved my social skills and confidence.
I think the biggest different this year will be the amount of effort I put into organizing social events: I've found that everyone seems to be waiting for an invite, but no one wants to do the inviting! OP hinted at this in his article.
A "screwing club for men" was the scene at the Salsa dancing which I joined (with female friends). I really loved the salsa and really enjoyed everything with the rest of the learners, and with my friends. Unfortunately it took me too long to realize that the "top" men were more interested in fucking beginner women than in real socializing. Too predator vibe for me so we quit - I probably should have looked for a better group. That group was an outlier - later I've seen dancing groups with fantastic dynamics.
Dancing is amazing, and I'd recommend anyone to try it, but try to join a social group.
It looks like it would be great to travel with: I met a truly wonderful bunch of people at a LGBT friendly Tango (my AirBnB hosts took me in Argentina).
Of course tables are hit or miss - but learning how to carry a dead table is a fun challenge in and of itself. My city has a fairly extensive WhatsApp group for timelefters, usually all of the various tables meet up after for drinks and more socializing.
I went through a loop at Meta that was probably 10-11 rounds. I would have done 100. The compensation is truly life changing and the engineering problems were world-class.
I'm sure OP is correct that this is a signal for a bad org - but from the outside looking in you'll do anything.
In most of my undergrad CS classes you needed at least a C- (70%) to advance to the next course, so really anything below that was basically an "F". In grad school I believe I needed at least a B (80%) to get credit - no pressure!
Yeah, that's what I remember as well; in my case, to remedy the whole mediocre situation, they would ask you (your professors) to write a final project and present it to them so they can give you a re-evaluation and change the 'C-' to something better, even a 'B'!
fairly certain they used this: https://w.dspconcepts.com/, they used to have Spotify listed a a client. I'm guessing they cannot open source for this reason (it's not their code to open source)
Cixin Liu has a great short story 'Cloud of Poems' in which an alien intelligence seeks to write every possible permutation of traditional Chinese poetry, to show up a human poet.
I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
Ha, Cixin Liu! At one point I've read everything by him available in Polish, but I don't remember this specific short story. I guess I need switch to English :)
By the way, reading a "double-translation" (Chinese -> English -> Polish) is fascinating--at times it's more than obvious that what you're reading is not what the author has written, but you have no idea at all what the original concept was.
(Unlike "single" EN -> PL translations, where I can often figure out the idiom or concept that was used in the original.)
> but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
In fact if you formally describe how you generate the permutations that's one of such encodings of these permutations (and the optimal one - see Kolmogorov Complexity :) ).
So there is definitely enough matter to do it. Similarly we can encode PI despite it having infinite number of digits.
This seems like a reference-object error (a denotation error, or sense-reference error in philosophical terms), except the functional definition and the partial numerical expansion are both references to PI rather than being PI itself.
Is it 2 or 1.(9)? Or 10 (binary)? Different encodings, same number. Some encodings are just less optimal than others.
Same with text. Is the poem in utf-8 and utf-16 a different poem? What if you zip the file? These are just encodings, and there's no point ignoring the good ones (which for non-random strings are usually programs).
If you do, you'll realize that this solves nothing. Imagine having a set of all possible English language haiku. Almost all of them would be incomprehensible garbage. Finding a good haiku in that set would take just as much effort as coming up with it.
Some things that I've picked up last year that are a good starting point:
- timeleft dinners. I get dinner with 5 strangers every few weeks. Tons of fun and you meet a lot of interesting people.
- swing dancing: I went on a date to a social dance and immediately became addicted. It has taken a while to learn the basics, and some of the unwritten rules of the dance floor, but now this is an activity I can take with me to many of my city's social dances and meet all sorts of people. It has greatly improved my social skills and confidence.
I think the biggest different this year will be the amount of effort I put into organizing social events: I've found that everyone seems to be waiting for an invite, but no one wants to do the inviting! OP hinted at this in his article.
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