Not meaning to be cynical of the work done here, but I don't know if I understand the overall concept. If you aren't staying in contact with a particular friend "enough" then maybe you aren't really friends? Sort of a natural selection of your friends.
In my experience it's very easy to grow separated from people you don't see organically. That doesn't mean you don't want to be close with them, or they're not important to you, just that life without help won't throw you together anymore.
And that help might be a schedule (work friends, social sport, regular get togethers with others who have kids) or it could be an app/site prompting contact. However you can make it work, do it IMO.
If I write down all my friends' birthdays on a calendar and use that as a reminder to get in touch, is that shallow? Some of us are just bad at remembering these things.
Also, when you work 60+ hours a week, have a kid, have a partner with whom to maintain a relationship, and spend an astonishing amount of time on chores, it's not shallow to just get distracted. For what it's worth, people remember, I think, just not as often as they'd like.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being organised about staying in contact.
Perhaps it is something best kept as a one sided thing though where only the organiser knows that they are being systematic about maintaining their friendships.
You could mostly do this with a pencil and paper. Would it still seem shallow if someone tracked contact with people in their journal under a 'Important Relationships' heading?
Out of sight, out of mind is insidious when it comes to friends.
Even for acquaintances I see it happening. My work has two offices. Someone I spoke to a lot on Slack moved to the other office and I realized today we haven't spoken in 3 weeks. Our Slack conversations were jumpstarted by things we experienced in the flesh and they we kvetched about it all day.
I find it funny/sad that 3 weeks is considered a long time between seeing an acquaintance. For me, i can easily go a year between seeing a close friend.
There's a spectrum of time that's acceptable and people fall along it differently. However, a year between seeing a close friend? If they're in the same city, that seems more like an outlier.
i don't mean this as a snarky reply, but i'll assume you don't have kids?
3, 6, or even 12 months can easily slip by between seeing some of my best friends who live in the same region. while i'm an introvert, i deeply value the time I spend with my friends. i put a good amount of energy into balancing work and family, with whatever is leftover usually being "me time" (reading, learning, building). I try and weave "friend time" into one of the former, but it usually takes more conscious effort than i can spare.
I don't think that is snarky and you are correct. I'm simply trying to understand from others' points-of-view, though apparently simply asking is controversial...
I personally would feel like it cheapens the interaction if it was initiated solely on the fact that my friend set a reminder. I'm sure not everyone thinks that way, but why not ask?
I agree that it cheapens. If everyone starts using this app the way they currently use Facebook and their concept of lots of light friendships, a lot of people will have to make decisions about meeting at any given time because someone wants to check a box in their app so the smiley face doesn't go to a frown based on some arbitrary date that one party set when they created the reminder.
To whom are you responding? The original email directed ARS to "not release any public-facing documents." That has been "retracted" for now, but still awaits final clarification.
A number of different responses in the comments were along the lines of "but I/we all own research done with public tax money! how can they do this!" which alarmist given the actual text of the article.
I ask this seriously and not cynically: What are you trying to achieve with these comments? Are you hoping to educate people? Are you trying to scold people for not knowing better? The content of the article isn't about Manning's gender association, but your comments are only about that. I would suspect any downvotes are simply because it is off-topic..?
"Even if you assume my comments are pointless pedantry..."
Where did I use those words?
Responses like this make it hard for me to learn from the other person. Maybe you feel like we should all already know these things, but that simply is not reality. It is not always because the person is "transphobic", as you put it, but simply uneducated on a particular topic.
And yet I see multiple HN commenters discussing this topic. It may not be how you would prefer it be discussed; however, this is how people become educated. I think the mistake here is to reply to civil comments in an uncivil way because you don't feel that they are appropriately aware of trans issues.
I would think anyone who wants to help educate others on these issues would welcome such a discussion.
Misgendering people is uncivil. It is insulting and dehumanizing. Why don't you start requiring civilty from your fellow HN commenters, rather than just me?
No offence, but you really sound angered and I feel somehow responsible--different people have different political views about all issues (everything is politics, after all) and we have to live with that fact. You are not going to convince others by insulting them. Also, HN is not the place to try and convince anybody to think the way you do, because that leads to flamewars (if you have an opinion, you'll stick to it, no?), and guys here detest flamewars. Just my two cents, greetings.
Yes, it's true that everything is politics! Misgendering people is transphobic politics! It shows a tremendous lack of respect for people and it's deeply offensive; that doesn't change because it's done in a "civil" tone.
While guys can sometimes be understood to refer to a group of either sex, it's best not to generalize like this. I don't think that's a particularly political opinion.
Actually, Chelsea may indeed have considered herself a he during the epoch of Bradley(we don't know and shouldn't proclaim) so by you in proclaiming that you can't use he for referring to bradley, may in fact be misgendering in of itself as you're proclaiming bradley should be referred to as "she" when for all we know Chelsea could rightfully so refer to Bradley epoch as "he". This would be misgendering.
Not defending the argument, but I suspect the author was referring to the reduction in safety equipment installed on autonomous vehicles leading to more grisly accidents.
From the article:
"One of the claims made for autonomous cars is that they can be lighter, shedding heavy metal crash cells and expensive safety gear, like airbags, saving fuel."
I would hope we wouldn't do that until they have demonstrated years of safety.
We would also need to get most of the humans off the road. No amount of self-driving AI can dodge a human with intent (or stupidity), a similar performing vehicle and a headstart.
According to this[1], Tesla has a CA DMV autonomous vehicle testing permit, but the question is whether that applies to this and to Tesla's autopilot, or whether it's for future work towards an actual autonomous mode.
That said, if Uber does want an actual autonomous more eventually, not getting that permit, and thumbing your nose at the authority who gives them out, is probably not a winning strategy...
...
Okay, just looked into a PDF[1] linked form the other article, and according to that, autonomous clearly includes what's going on here, and with Tesla's autopilot. I think Uber may have made a big mistake.
