My father gave me this book when I was 12 or 13. It unlocked everything, sort of permission for my teen self to put himself out there. Years later, I've made friends all over the world, some have been in my life for more than 3 decades now, and I continue to make new ones basically by initiating a lot of conversations. I look for something to naturally lean into to start with. For example, I saw a guy in the coffee place with his work badge on so I asked, "coming or going [to work]." Kicked off a 30 min conversation about the economy (he worked at a pawn shop as it turns out and knew a lot about gold, regional poverty, etc). Saw him a couple days later and we picked right back up. The other thing I do is keep it soft focused on them, 100%, until they ask me about me. Nothing kills a conversation faster than someone with a conversational agenda, ie, an go-to opinion. Anyway, I wish more people would start random conversations - it really helps build community.

> The other thing I do is keep it soft focused on them, 100%, until they ask me about me.

This is the big one. People like to talk about themselves, and often use others' stories to segue it into something about themselves.

I realized at some point if you can avoid doing that, and instead commit yourself to investing in a person's story - ask questions, make comments, etc, they'll think the world of you and often won't even realize why.

One of us! I actively avoid talking about myself until asked. (I'm usually not.) Most people love being the center of attention.

Would you say the reading level of the book is easy enough for a young kid? Did you struggle at all in reading it?

Some of the examples are going to be corny for a young kid, but none of the core concepts are too challenging. Some fashion of the knowledge has probably already been communicated to children, it is just a codification of social interaction that not everyone has passively absorbed.

It's pretty easy to read (but disclaimer : I read the french translation) but it's still nothing more than a list of useful advices on the topic. So the prerequisite is that you have to be interested by the idea of the book in the first place. But if you are, it's nothing more than a big blog post (a good one).

Thanks, that's doubly helpful ; I was thinking of gifting the French version and was also concerned the translation might be subpar.

Don't read the original, find a more abridged copy. The original gives too many examples for each point.

To be honest, the examples stuck with me. They illustrated tons of different social interaction examples that I have seldom, if never, encountered in my life, but have plenty to learn from.

Sciencedaily is clickbait now? That headline is srsly misleading.

"We want to sell surveillance services to the US gov. MSFT was hesitant so we gave ourselves room to do it without them."

Extremely hard to believe that MSFT would have any hesitancy about working with the US government.

Proficiency scores are HUGE and extremely important, especially for classes like rogue, bard, etc who rely on them so much - especially for non-combat roleplaying ability or reflex actions.

You could consider playing Shadowdark with new players instead. It's much more friendly to new players.

I have a couple players that aggressively press for edge cases all the time. I encourage it, as it gives me the chance to push back with "ok, that's fine on flat ground but your in thick underbrush," which seems to be more immersive and encourages more roleplaying. Fun stuff.

The only comment on her post is some asshat telling her to grow up. I don't understand how a person can decide to take a cheap shot on an article about buying a DVD player but, there it is. Losers roam the internet like horse flies in Texas.

Isn't this the premise of Garfield's Ex Machina?

Hmm, it's been a long time since I watched it. I was thinking more about first contact sci-fi mostly, but Ex Machina is certainly quite prescient. It's also Blade Runner I guess.

In general I was wondering about what I would have thought seeing Claude today side-by-side with the original ChatGPT, and then going back further to GPT-2 or BERT (which I used to generate stochastic 'poetry' back in 2019). And then… what about before? Markov chains? How far back do I need to go where it flips from thinking that it's "impressive but technically explainable emergent behaviour of a computer program" to "this is a sentient being". 1991 is probably too far, I'd say maybe pre-Matrix 1999 is a good point, but that depends on a lot of cultural priors and so on as well.

> Hmm, it's been a long time since I watched it. I was thinking more about first contact sci-fi mostly, but Ex Machina is certainly quite prescient. It's also Blade Runner I guess.

I kind of felt the opposite - rewatching Ex Machina today in a post-ChatGPT world felt very different from watching it when it came out. The parts of the differences between humans and robots that seemed important then don't seem important now.

The premise in Ex Machina was to see if Caleb developed an emotional attachment to Ava. We already see people getting an attachment, but no one is seriously thinking they have any rights.

I think the real moment is when we cross that uncanny valley, and the AI is able to elicit a response that it might receive if it was human. When the human questions whether they themselves could be an android.

I wish Nvidia would drop a Linux laptop so we could all have a 3rd option.

I know, this exists in some form or another, eg Dell, but meh.

And I know Jony Ive / Altman are working on something but Altman, uhg.

Agents are ? and the answer is circular, "agents run tools in a loop." And this guy knows things?! No. BS.

Which definition of "agent" do you like to use?

I just bulked up that section by adding a couple of extra sentences, since you're right that I didn't actually define "agent" there clearly: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

10% of their workforce roughly.