Ask HN: Who Wants a Penpal?
Surely I'm not the only lonely computer nerd here :)
If you're interesting in finding a penpal, post in this thread with the following format:
alias:
interests:
language(s):
link to something you think is cool:
contact info:
101 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadIf by far center, you mean unbiased, well, we're all biased to some degree. Actually it's very hard not to be quite biased in some way, whether ideologically or stylistically, or any of the more gross forms of bias most of us have to wrestle with, being human.
A bias scanner can be useful in identifying bias, but you can be ideological and non-biased, in which case, you're just using the bias scanner to reduce your bias. That's a good thing to do, but I'd call it, a kind of self-moderation, which might attenuate partisanship but for sure isn't necessarily centrist at all.
A "centrist" when talking about a layperson might suggest them having an amorphous, indifferent position.
In our here local politics, a "centrist" politician is strongly assumed to be a political prostitute, a puppet in search of a generous master.
I take a "far centrist" to mean compromise-seeking in a deliberate way, which is a fun concept to consider.
By this definition, most reasonable people are centrist. We are forced to pick a team to get the numbers but our positions can and do differ from the party line.
Feel free to email me using the email address from my post and I can show you some good apps, introduce you to people, etc. It's fun.
In my area, we had the Cleveland Freenet with an IRC server. Met a lot of friends in real life from there—I believe they also had periodic picnic meetups but I never went to one of those. Briefly dated someone in HS after we met in an IRC channel, and one of my real life friends met his future wife on a freenet in neighboring state that we could access.
I also had a personal site that a random girl my age a few states over found. She emailed me and we started corresponding for years over email, AOL/AIM and hand written letters. We still do on occasion. We met in person about 13 years after we first emailed.
My handle was more embarrassing out loud than it was on the internet :).
hah, i had a similar experience. originally i spelt my nick "embe", but once i heard someone on an in person meeting pronounce it with a stress on the first e, and a short low stress second e, that sounded totally wrong, so i changed the spelling to "embee" to get them to pronounce it right.
It also had a way better sex ratio, for reasons I don't really understand in hindsight. It was at least ~30% female. Many a match was made on those sites, not just hookup stuff, but people actually forming real relationships.
There was also that one game where you went deep down into some dungeon, and had the option of taking various drugs for buffs while also dealing with side effects. It was weird, and fun.
And contrary to what people might think, BBSes weren't full of neckbeards. There were people from all walks of life (lawyers, doctors, people with families, singles, men, women, kids like me). For something so "techie" it was unexpectedly diverse.
I remember my BBS days fondly. I wish we had something similar that was local (and no, not like Next Door which is full of busybodies and complainers)
I wonder if it's possible now or if that kind of experience simply belongs to a bygone era. Next Door should in theory be what you're looking for, but it seems like now that everyone's online instead of just early adopters, the current state of Next Door is just what you get with a location-based community that anyone can join.
In the early days, BBSes were frequented by cognoscenti because not everyone had modems. There was a natural curation mechanism which kept the quality high. There was also moderation -- BBS systems like WildCat allowed sysops to appoint moderators.
Quora in the early days was a community of curious people, and many were startup founders and well-known people in the valley. It went downhill when it tried to growth hack, which attracted a flurry of low quality answers that made it devolve into a Yahoo Answers.
The problem with Next Door is that it is democratization without curation. It doesn't have to be this way. HN for instance is democratization with curation (thanks to the efforts of @dang), and it works very well.
I think the problem with Next Door is that traits like these (which HN tends to aggregate) are rare in the general population. To get the vibe you want, you'd probably need to curate to the point that you'd be blocking like 70% of people or more. And that has its own issues, since it would then feel like some kind of closed elitist club—which also definitely wasn't the atmosphere in the internet's early days.
The first internet based BBSs, which now enabled people to login via telnet and could host magnitudes greater number of users, really started to lose alot of that community aspect of the local systems.
- Your immediate friends who you personally knew and exchanged ICQ numbers with to add each other. You couldn't just find them... you needed to know their numbers.
- Everyone else you "found" by searching / randomly connecting with when they / you set your status to "Free to Chat" as opposed to just "Online".
Features:
- Until the MSN Messenger / AOL IM years, ICQ was p2p - both parties needed to be online in order for conversations to take place. So, in a way there was a more skin in the game in order for it to work. Conversations meant more.
Community:
- It being the early days of the internet, it felt more special - ICQ, BBS, IRC, and web forums is how people found each other. There was no Reddit, even Digg came much later.
1. I wrote countless of times on my site that I love emailing with people so if you want to engage in conversation my email is public and it’s also in my profile here
2. I’m also more than happy to send actual mail. Like handwritten on paper. If you like that send me an email and I’ll give you an address.
3. If you like the concept of having penpals this app is worth checking out https://slowly.app/
Edit: crashes on my phone, can't sign up :(
interests: Programming Languages, Mathematics, poetry, art (paintings mainly), books (interesting non fiction like Simon Singh, novels by authors like Marquez, Greg Egan, Neal Stephenson), Philosophy, mysticism, anything that tickles my brains, really
languages: English, Bengali
link to something I think is cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorio
contact info: mail on profile, @<last word of scientific name of humans>_rg_telegraph on Telegram (remove <>)
alias: jah
interests: essentially every branch of philosophy, hacking/infosec, startups, cooking unusual meals, literature, math, theories of intelligence, sharing life stories, listening to smart people talk
language(s): English and a little bit of French (still learning)
link: http://www.hutter1.net/ait.htm (I like AIT a lot)
info: вцудды0ч@gmail.com (English but typed with Russian keyboard)
interests: mathematics, cooking/recipes, culture/arts
languages: Please write to me in any language from anywhere!! And please send math papers!! I'm trying to learn as many languages as I can right now. My current focus is French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German – then Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Korean, Arabic, and Haitian Creole. I'm going to focus op top-30 most spoken-by-people, then top 30 most spoken-by-countries, then a survey of languages without any incentive (Navajo, Irish, Greek, Hawaiian, Latin, Sanskrit, in general, Classical Languages, Medieval Languages, Modern Languages). I started this journey in August 2023 knowing only N1 Japanese.
link to something you think is cool: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3027072 I would so love to do whole Erdős wanderer thing and focus on publishing papers in different countries with different people in different languages. I like the whole peripatetic element of thinking and living and working and dreaming.
link to something that does not exist: I am building a 'tiny' LLM that is taking a novel approach to language translation. It is incredibly nice to continue this research because I have begun to actually understand more people now and I feel less lonely. It is getting better, but I am absolutely not in any hurry to capitalize on it. I can send you samples of its output by hand in parallel to my own manual translation.
Contact: Write me an email, and we can exchange mailing addresses!
> info[U+0040]odomojuli[U+002E]com
Note: I really love postcards, postage, lettering and hand-made art prints. If you have any appreciation for these things, please let me know – it can take a bit of effort.
What is helping is that this is training my ear and tongue, it's becoming more comfortable to transition between grammars and pronunciations.
I don't think it is actually. Lot of shared interests here though
The problem is one of degrees - Anyone you notice on a big site is likely posting very often - "Terminally online" is the word. The more niche you go, they are alternatively deeper into their own fantasy worlds. I haven't figured out how to arrange coincidence; Repeated coincidental meetings have long been studied to be the basis of friendship, and intentionally going to "meetups" where the attendance is common but not fixed is the best way to foster that.
Online matchmaking has been the biggest problem here - You are guaranteed a game, but you'll never run into the same people twice. Once upon a time you had localish communities form around servers that were low-ping to them, which really worked well - You were likely to run into the same people, and they were likely to be nearby but not so close that you'd have run into them anyway.
language(s): English, Polish, Un poco Español
link to something you think is cool: disroot.org
contact info: penpal.axis093@aleeas.com (will be removed after some time or if I get too much spam)