30 Minutes with a Stranger

Niches provide spaces for statues for remembering the dead, or prayers and veneration (for Catholics), enhancing the link between the spiritual and corporeal realms. Arguably they're also used to encourage payments from patrons for a church building's upkeep or construction.

Columns allow spaces within a building to be connected, ensuring the body of the church (the people) can worship and receive teaching together. They can also reduce material cost of construction.

Yes, for historic church buildings decoration was applied, ornate capitals in the pillars and such; bright, garish paint on the statues and everything -- and expression of the vitality of the building and of worship to God.

I think perhaps your analogy needs buttressing (heh!) to make it clear? All I got really was 'I like the scrolling'.

Maybe a revolving door is a good scrollbar analogue - it's central to access to a space (website), some people hate them, but used properly they enhance access (they're really good for limiting heat exchange with the outside when compared with regular doors!).

> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.

Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.

If web page does not look like a blog or a newsletter, it is not wrong to assume the app format

you all sound like a lovely bunch. is this a modern thing?

Things I find work most of the time in Sweden to get started is complaining about something mutually bothersome, annoying or scary that you don't have any power over, things like:

- A third party being rude. So if you notice that someone gets annoyed by someone else you can huff and puff a little over that.

- the weather, obviously and often!

- if someone hurts themselves or trips (doesn't have to be as big an injury as in the article)

- children are great conversation starters, regardless if they are cute, loud, awake, still or whatever. And this is one of the few positive topics that work.

The trick is also to not keep talking about the annoying thing, because that is quite boring!

If you get more courageous you can also just ask about a place, piece of public art or even the way to some random thing, in my experience (a whole life) swedes are very helpful :)

My favourite question is to ask people who clearly hope to see me go away about the names of places, I don't know why that topic works so well to tear walls down, but it does.

That is completely the opposite of my experience. Even the handful of people who, after I got to know them, turned out to be unprincipled or toxic, I actually liked them as people and were kind of sad that they were the way they were. Their negative qualities were a mar on the their individual beauty.

There are certainly people in whom, after a relatively brief interaction, I didn't manage to see anything I liked. But I can't think of a single person whom, after seeing something to like, thereafter didn't see anything to like. Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole, but it never completely eclipsed their good side.

For me, nearly all negative interactions come from not being able to get past various masks to see the interesting part of them or vice versa.

The assumption that social-media applications are really social is robbing us of traditional ways of maintaining actual society.

I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.

I guess same thing would go for extreme fears, like, you are so scared of something that you get even more scared of it because you know it's the scariest thing in the world, until you actually meet the thing you're scared of

I find it to be exactly the opposite. It's much easier to believe someone is inherently good but just a bit misguided if you don't have to communicate with them and aren't personally affected by their "misguided" behavior.

Now we’re heavily fragmented.

It’s depressing how whenever I see people doing people stuff without a screen in their face I both smile internally and reflexively wonder how we could better infiltrate their demographic.

We have become the disease at this point, and now we work diligently to replace humans from any economic activity except consumption, so that the value extraction cycle can be optimized even as it collapses upon itself in a singularity of greed.

Soon, humans, the last obstacle standing between the uninterrupted flow of energy and resources into the event horizon of capital, will be eliminated from the process altogether with the removal of wages and eventually money itself through the wonders of automation.

Only then will the crystalline purity of technocapitalism truly shine: power as the new capital.

The power to convert resources and energy directly into the will and whim of the capital class, harnessing recursive automation in a macroscopic grey-goo scenario that sidesteps both workers and customers. An ever-tightening loop of resource concentration, building from a throbbing rhythm into a deafening turbine whine of conspicuous consumption. A hollow promise of “Progress” that leaves the 99 percent outside the gilded walls, merely insects at the pointy end of excavators.

I’m going to take tomorrow off and hug my grandchildren.

A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now.

Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising:

- I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it

- It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago.

- DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food.

- Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting.

Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.

Dwarf Fortress lever welfare already exists IRL.

I have a feeling that this is true, but my conclusion is the opposite.

If you are not the most agreeable person, but have money, you can afford to be alone - having money eases a lot of problems. On the other hand, if you are not the most agreeable person, but lack money, because you have to come to terms with other people, drama starts.

So, I would rather see the evidence on the side that a lot of social conflicts are rather a side effect of "lack of money" - people who are better left alone (and would love to) cannot afford to do this, and thus drama starts.

> Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements

Just to be clear: my work is different.

But if such a person doesn't do their duties, the implications are of course not immediate, but over some time this leads to a degradation of the stock of the respective company. So, a lot of people who invested (perhaps indirectly) into this company (e.g. for their pension scheme) would care.