One time I swiped a shitload of girls on Tinder and just invited a bunch of them to a party I was throwing where I had the same issue. I told them what I was doing and said bring whoever.
In 15 years of throwing banger parties it was by far and away the most absurdly over the top, yet somehow also the most wholesome, party I've ever thrown. Actually I'm not sure why I haven't done it again now that I think about it. And the ratio of girls to boys + enbies was like, 5:1, absolutely ridiculous.
Anyway you could try it?
Another time I threw a party on Meetup.com and had a bunch of old people show up, who ended up getting turnt the fuck up. I made a lot of good software industries connections that night and it was early in my career so that was very useful as well.
You’ve either gotta pivot the event from a party (where attendance is considered optional) to a specific gathering/dinner event or something, where people will feel like attendance is more expected. Or, have a frank conversation with your guests about your worries and expectations and see what comes with it.
Well there's the first issue. That's harder and harder to do in this economy, and the quality of people I meet aren't exactly the ones who won't flake 80% of invites.
Maybe? The Australian tech seen has always felt fairly small to me, at least in Sydney. We've got Atlassian and Canva as the local darlings, and then Google, Amazon, FB, and Salesforce have their offices, though I don't think much real engineering work gets done here. I'm not trying to throw shade at any engineers in Sydney of course, especially at those companies, I just never got the since that the engineering teams were large here.
Maybe I'm too insular, but is there much of a startup seen here, @aussieguy1234? If there is I'd love to hear about it
I feel very much the same way as the author about TikTok. I browse it far too often. I've implemented app based screen time limitations in iOS specifically for Reddit and TikTok but it's so easy to override. Deleting the apps for a few days works, but only for so long.
My takeaway from that was more "the world isn't that daunting, if you just do something consistently with effort, you're going to do a lot better than most people since most aren't putting much effort into it."
You don't have to do that with everything in life, but you can do that with the things you care about.
It could be actually practicing chess, it could be following a training plan while running, and it could be rising through the ranks at work.
I like cycling, and I know with a consistent routine I improve a lot more than my friends who just cycle on once or twice a week. I'm not trying to be better than them, I just really enjoy being a good cyclist.
I agree with your takeaway however the comment you’re replying to is reacting to the tone and the presentation and I agree with them.
The two points in the article, that 80% is done by 20% and that to get to 20% all you need is relatively little effort, if taken to heart give license to deride those who aren’t in the 20% because clearly if they cared at all they’d just try and be solid at things.
Siddhartha[0] recently was on the front page. I’d highly recommend it as a much more humanist take on “the world isn’t that daunting so long as you are intentional with your actions.”
It's been a few years since I've used a VPN with streaming, but I recall some services not working well with it. I was in Australia with NordVPN to the US on a fibre connection.
Yea it all depends on if the service allows it. Netflix commonly showed me a “sorry you’re using a vpn so disable it” message and no amount of new sessions or incognito windows or exit nodes would fix it.
Perhaps this has changed since that time, but I imagine it’s more likely a pacification measure to streaming services to point to for rights holders and if it “accidentally breaks” all the time, they can point the blame at someone else and spend 6 weeks “fixing” it, only for it to “break” again a couple of weeks later. /tinfoil
> Netflix commonly showed me a “sorry you’re using a vpn
> Perhaps this has changed
It is an ongoing arms race. Sometimes the VPN providers are winning, sometimes the streaming services make a temporarily successful counter-offensive, sometimes the battleground is a mess with things working for some mixes of vpn/country/streamer but not others.⁰
The streaming services block the address ranges of known data-centres, though not commercial addresses more generally because there is often enough a cross-over between residential and commercial ISP accounts¹² so that is one workaround VPN providers can use in their choice of exit points (though bandwidth can be significantly more expensive that way than from a DC).
I'm not aware of it actually being done, but I'd not be surprised to find a less ethical VPN business hasn't tried to use their customers as a mesh and redirecting traffic around them as needed much like botnets use compromised hosts to forward requests. There are obvious technical difficulties here that make it a less practical idea³ but I can imagine someone trying it.
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[0] Reference: I don't use a VPN this way myself, preferring the other major unlicensed media access route, bit I know a few people who do with varying levels of success over time.
[1] My home account is essentially a commercial one as that is the ISPs main customer base, I use them for a number of reasons (fixed IPv4 that I can run servers off, in fact a /29 of v4 addresses though that is a lot less important to me now than it was some years ago, native IPv6 which is still no commonplace here (though I still haven't set that up properly after all this time!), much better support when things fail, so I'm not the one spending time chasing BT OR, etc.)
[2] Similarly, many small offices actually run their access off what is targetted as a residential account. And small businesses based in/around a home are another grey area.
[3] In many places most residential users have significantly asymmetric bandwidth, throttling their ability to be used as a relay, and a mix of accounts from different countries looking to come from the same address might trip the streaming services' account anomaly detection heuristics.
There is also the very real part of life that exists in traveling. Especially if you live in Europe, you can find yourself in a different country with different media rights in less than an hour or two in a lot of cases. In those scenarios, it's important to not only manage the complexity of your own customers and the needs of the business as well.
Netflix never works for me ('title not available try another one or again later' or something, on everything). I'm not even using it to try to change my country, wish there was some other way to verify that. (Or better, that licencing was such that they just didn't care, and nobody would need to use one to change country anyway.)
Ironically the US is one of the worst countries to use as a streaming endpoint because so many of the primary rightsholders are based here, and only license content to their preferred network.
I looked it up out curiosity, it's over 2 miles along a major road that crosses a major freeway. There is a suburban route that has a dedicated bike lane crossing of the freeway (101). Yikes.
This sounds exactly like the sort of walk my wife and I end up doing when abroad. "Doesn't look that far on the map. Let's just walk it, get our steps up. It'll be fun!" End up choking on fumes the entire way...
