In my imagination, some sort of referral/voucher system might work. A invites B, B invites C. C turns out to suck. Ban C, discredit B heavily and discredit A lightly. Enough discredit and you get banned or can’t invite more people.

A well written review will detail why they thought it was good, so the reader can think about if those reasons would make it enjoyable for them.

Unfortunately, most people are semi literate and writing at that level is a challenge

Part of that falls under the “don’t show up when invited” umbrella, but mostly that sucks. I’m sorry you feel like your efforts and friendship efforts weren’t appreciated.

I’ve definitely had a couple friends (“friends”) that were lopsided. I remember posting about one way back in the 2000s on some web forum, and a guy with a otter(?) avatar told me “This guy, that flakes on your plans and only shows up when it works for him? He doesn’t respect you. Don’t put up with that”. Good advice from a small furry animal, I think.

Some people just aren’t worth it. Maybe they were in the past. Maybe they will be again. But I find it’s important to have boundaries for oneself. It can be hard to balance.

A lot of our behaviors and coping mechanisms come from our parents. So if they’re lonely and have no friends, you should examine why that is, and try to change it in yourself.

One of my friends realized after therapy they had a lot of behaviors from their dad. Stuff they hated when their dad did (lashing out when uncomfortable, mostly). Once they saw it, they were able to work on it. Before that, it had been a real source of friction with friendships.

Hah, a different ex that I’m still friends with responded with “you rank us??”

No, there’s not a full ranking. I’m still good friends with 2, there’s a lot of ones I have no hard feelings about, and then there’s this one stinker.

“go home and look at Instagram” is largely a stand-in for “I’m tired and can’t muster the energy to do anything that feels more effortful”.

In my limited experience, the trick to getting out of the hole is doing the hard thing anyway. That and professional advice and medication as appropriate. You can’t to my knowledge willpower your way out of clinical depression. But ultimately if you want out of the hole, you have to climb out, regardless if that means therapy, medication, or being mildly uncomfortable. It’s not going to fix itself.

I usually recommend Meetup or similar. There’s a bunch that are just get togethers for board games or whatnot.

But you have to keep going. I think people expect to like go once and make a new best friend and partner. You usually need a lot of interactions to level up from “stranger” to “person I see sometimes” to friend.

I also ran a small meetup for a while before the pandemic. Made a few friends that way, but it’s a lot of thankless work.

Additionally they have to have time to play it.

And money to buy it! Wages are down. I was unemployed for a while so I just didn’t buy any games (or much else)

I leave reviews when the game does something exceptional (good or bad). Or sometimes when steam nags me to leave a review.

It’s funny: if you leave a negative review and keep playing it asks you if you want to change your review.

I comment. Reminds me of how I’d end up playing medic in tfc/tf2- someone has to do it.

I don’t post original stuff often, though.

I feel like a lot of people who bemoan the lack of friends also don’t invest in friendship. Don’t show up when invited, don’t organize anything themselves.

I used to run a book club and a board game club, and it was always kind of a struggle to get people to show up. The pull of “just go home and look at Instagram” is strong, I guess.

Arcanum is good shit. I played that so many times when it came out.

• straight damage dealing mage
• beat with an ugly stick orc fighter
• gun jerk
• charismatic elf girl who got everyone else to fight for her, talked the final boss down.

I think maxing out time magic and backstab might have been the wackiest. Got like 90 action points and everyone else got 4. Stab stab stab stab.

I had an ex partner get upset because I used a period at the end of an innocuous text. This is among the reasons why they are my least favorite ex. Just a mess of anxiety and arrogance, where they’d worry about bullshit but be completely convinced that they were right and their way of thinking about things was the only sensible way.

Unfortunately they’re still distantly connected to the friend group, but luckily I haven’t run into them in years.

I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.

I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.

In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.

Python.

• It’s pretty easy to get going.
• the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
• you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
• it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
• the standard library is very good.

You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.

SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)

I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.

This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.

It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.

I’ve tried both. I think part of it is friction from little behaviors that I expect to be like Google sheets but aren’t. I don’t even know what they are until I hit some keys and excel does the “wrong” (but probably reasonable) thing.

I feel like Google sheets is a better experience than Excel, at least for my personal usage. I’m not enterprise though, and not trying to run it like a database or anything crazy.

It can get pretty crowded in some places at some times. Major transit hubs like Penn station, herald square, times square, all get pretty dense.

I’ve been working from home so I don’t need to go to the busier parts at often.