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Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life
- ZeljkoS 9y agoMax's randomized living apps: https://maxhawkins.me/work/randomized_living.html https://maxhawkins.me/work/randomized_living.html
- throwaway2016a 9y agoThis is an awesome idea. I've spent a lot of energy making apps to automate my life and management my schedule. Now I'm tempted to also have it throw in something random now and again. I couldn't go to these extremes (I couldn't pick up and move to another country for instance) but it would be cool to say do things less extreme... like pick a random place for dinner or watch this random Netflix movie.
- Bedon292 9y agoYeah it is a very interesting concept. But, I don't know if I could do things like show up at a random person's house for their Christmas party. I just don't think its in me. But I definitely could do random restaurants / movies / public locations. So a much less extreme version.
- 628C6l0 9y agosay you're going to live in NYC for 3 years and will eat out pretty much every other night. you can do your online research and decide yourself each time. or you can randomize. can one really be certain that, in the long run, after 3 years, the overall outcome from letting the coin decide will definitely be worse than deciding yourself? i strongly doubt it. the time spent making each of those decisions will definitely pile up, though.
- uncle_d 9y agoRandom dinner location is certainly worth a try, for dipping a toe in the shallow end, so to speak: http://www.restaurantgenerator.com http://www.restaurantgenerator.com
- passivepinetree 9y agoSimilarly, Netflix randomizer sites already exist. I've had good experiences with https://netflixroulette.net/ https://netflixroulette.net/, for example.
- magic_beans 9y agoHow does this work? I though Netflix shut down their public API?
- k-mcgrady 9y ago:/ This was exactly what I was looking for but doesn't seem like it's location aware. Every movie so far it has suggested is not on UK Netflix.
- tswartz 9y agoI built an app a few years ago that does this for bars. Bar Roulette. It's free in the app store...give it a try. I've had a lot of fun using. http://barroulette.cool/ http://barroulette.cool/
- clamprecht 9y agoSee also, Geohashing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohashing "Geohashing is an outdoor recreational activity inspired by the webcomic xkcd, in which participants have to reach a random location (chosen by a computer algorithm), prove their achievement by taking a picture of a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or another mobile device and then tell the story of their trip online."
- leovailati 9y agoLink to comic: https://xkcd.com/426/ https://xkcd.com/426/
- lolc 9y agoWell he won't meet me. I live in the No-Facebook Bubble. Though sometimes the parties I help organise are listed on the Facebook by third parties. So there's that slim chance...
- AndrewOMartin 9y agoHow do you know when someone isn't on Facebook? ;)
- twothamendment 9y agoIs there a site to sign up on so people can find you and find out that you are not on facebook? That would be great! Maybe facebook could integrate those results into there people search. "John Smith, Anytown, USA isn't on facebook. Try emailing him".
- passivepinetree 9y agoI think most people on Facebook are that way because they don't want to be reached. That would be a tough sell to us privacy-conscious people.
- lolc 9y agoWell joke's on us because they could already do this. The Facebook knows about my existence. It knows my name, my face, and my friends. My email too. I'd have to avoid contact with all people that use the Facebook to prevent this. Infeasible. They just don't publish the data because they have little to gain from it and there's no reason to needlessly antagonize people. They sell it without telling anybody.
- AndrewOMartin 9y ago... They'll tell you.
- reustle 9y agoI actually met Max while we both happened to be in Thailand in 2015. We spent the day on bicycles following the directions his script told him, without hesitation. Regardless of where it was in the city, that's where we went next (a laundry mat, daycare, cafes, and the zoo iirc). Nothing was skipped, because it was what the software told us to do. Here are some pictures from that day https://goo.gl/photos/gyCNRz2rs7zLJrt79 https://goo.gl/photos/gyCNRz2rs7zLJrt79
- dopeboy 9y agoThat's really interesting. I was thinking of doing a social experiment that's similar but the script would be crowd sourced and determined at the last possible moment.
- tdb7893 9y agoIf you followed a crowdsourced script wouldn't that essentially just be "twitch plays pokemon" for real life?
- maxhawkins 9y agoYou might like Lauren McCarthy's work: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/Social-Turkers http://lauren-mccarthy.com/Social-Turkers
- jimjimjim 9y agocrowd sourced... boaty mcboatface.
- davidcelis 9y agoThe app took you too a daycare? Where people leave their children? Did you actually enter it, or just move on? I'd feel pretty uncomfortable with a random stranger and his friends showing up to my kid's daycare. I hope the apps have gotten better location filtering in place since 2015.
- ng12 9y ago
- driverdan 9y agoI love the idea of random surprises. I created a simple app that picks random items from a Chinese ecommerce site within a set budget. My long term goal was to use ML to learn what each user liked and send them random items on a schedule, selecting from multiple sites. I never finished it because other things took precedence but the random selection part works. Anyone interested in this as a service?
- distances 9y agoSomeone built a similar thing a couple of years ago to get random things from Amazon: http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-consumerism http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-...
- dogruck 9y agoMax should meet Luke Rhinehart -- The Dice Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
- agumonkey 9y agoI have to finish that book. Very nice first half.
- clarebear 9y agoWhat is the chance that would happen? ;-)
- lukerhine 9y agoPretty good actually. Just write me at lukec@taconic.net or comment on one of my Facebook pages.
- Kaibeezy 9y agojust finished reading that yesterday, as a matter of fact - if anyone is feeling trapped and debating major change versus incremental improvement, it will provide some perspective, for sure - also some insight into our dicepresident
- doktrin 9y agoThis book is at times both brilliant and hilarious. I definitely recommend that anyone curious at least pick it up and read the first few chapters. As a bonus for those with a soft spot for 90's pop punk, it was also the inspiration for the Millencollin song 'Random I Am'.
- Kaibeezy 9y agoalso "Six Different Ways" by The Cure
- 1337biz 9y ago... there is only one Dice Man and, tickery ticker tock, that's not him.
- stillhere 9y ago>And Max acknowledges this privilege. Closed article.
- wccrawford 9y agoI understand the overwhelming influx of SJW stuff, but this is actually quite appropriate here. As a fellow white guy, I know it's a lot easier for me to walk up to stranger and have them trust me than many minorities would experience.
- 628C6l0 9y agoit's not just trust. a minority person (by which i mean to include all and only the less powerful in society, which has a heavy overlap with racial and ethnic minorities) can seem completely non-threatening, but still won't receive the kind of treatment he gets because the other party cannot muster the mental energe to do it as they finds it hard to imagine such treatment "leading to" anything.
- sol_remmy 9y agoAs a very short white guy (5'1 here), I can assure you that height and attractiveness is much more important than race
- djtriptych 9y agohave you ever been a tall attractive black guy?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoYour attitude is part of the very problem, not of the solution.
- DanBC 9y agoYou wanted to read an article about someone escaping a bubble, but closed the article the first time it challenged your bubble?
- simmons 9y agoThis is great. I think that the illusion of time speeding up as we get older is due to getting into a routine where we do the same thing every day, and the brain begins compressing memories as our everyday experiences become less novel. Using a "randomizer lite" program to shake things up might be a good start to breaking the routine.
- taheca 9y agoprotip: do this before having children, as it will be virtually impossible after.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoWhat, your children mind when you don't pick them up from school because an app randomised your life and sent you to a massage parlor? :-)
- joezydeco 9y agoSpeaking as a parent: children are excellent life-randomizers by default.
- jpatokal 9y agoThe hard part is letting them be random instead of forcing them into Adult World schedules. "Johnny, stop having a blast in the beach with the new friends you just made, or their parents might invite us for dinner or something! We need to drag you to the Museum of Boring Things right now so we can maximize the value-add of this vacation!"
- bonniemuffin 9y agoThis is one of the top reasons I'm interested in having kids. I think I need my life randomized a bit more, but "the app that sends me to random facebook events" won't come see me for Christmas when I'm old.
- chris_wot 9y ago
- owenversteeg 9y agoAh, but what was his source of randomness? Perhaps he didn't have enough entropy and now he's got to do the last few years all over again ;) I think I naturally do a bit of that myself: whenever I have some empty time, I fill it with something "random", only instead of choosing randomly I often choose the cheapest option. For example, I once booked a flight to Iran departing hours after I bought the ticket, simply because it was the cheapest option for an interesting place to fly (under $180 round-trip.) I think the design choices really impact the end result, though. One minor design flaw might result in completely eliminating a whole lot of interesting places or things, which is what I'd be scared of. For example, that cheap fare to Iran was only on one travel search site, which didn't have an API. By selecting one booking website as an API, and letting the algorithm decide for me, I wouldn't have gone to Iran. Similarly, there are a lot of things that wouldn't seem like an "option" to a computer but are an option to me. I've wanted to see Greenland from the air, so I've been taking a lot of flights that pass over Greenland on the way to places I needed to go anyway. But if the algorithm decided for me, it would probably have booked air tours over Greenland - substantially more expensive in terms of both time and money. It wouldn't be able to say "hey, you know that trip across the Atlantic you have in a few weeks? Why not pay $25 more to have it fly over Greenland?"
- yebyen 9y ago> I once booked a flight to Iran departing hours after I bought the ticket, simply because it was the cheapest option for an interesting place to fly (under $180 round-trip.) ... ... I'm trying to decide which part of this sentence is the least surprising part. It's definitely not the part where you could fly to Iran and back for a grand total of $180? I don't think it's the part where you figured out that this was a thing you could do, and then decided to do it with only hours notice. There has to be a follow-up question, but I'm still too baffled by this sentence to think of it. Bravo? I would not have the fortitude to try this, as a white American of European descent. Even knowing some Arabic (if you know any Farsi, that would obviously take some of the surprise out for me...)
- owenversteeg 9y agoWhen I arrived in Iran I knew zero words of Farsi, or Arabic. (In Iran I learned about 80 words of Farsi but have since forgotten most.) I was flying from Amsterdam, on a budget airline with a long layover in Ukraine, so that contributed to the low price, although that was a remarkably low fare. My only "connection" so to speak was that a friend is Iranian, but he hasn't been back to Iran in many years and can't go back without facing execution. I am also a white American of European descent, although I'm a dual Dutch-American citizen, so my Dutch passport was what I used to enter the country.
- avip 9y agoInspiration from Borges maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon (it's in the highly entertaining Ficciones collection)
- thebigspacefuck 9y ago"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God"
- 628C6l0 9y agoi've been doing it for almost four years now, and it's amazing to see how wrong and how frequently wrong your preconceptions and expectations can be. you don't need an app to do that though. a spreadsheet is perfect for that purpose (and telling Google Assistant to 'flip a coin' or 'give me a random number between 1 and 20') and gives unlimited flexibility and less reliance on developer to implement features you want. not a lot of people appreciate this, but sometimes trying to accomplish a task with the general-purpose tools you have at hand can lead you to discover solutions so good it is in fact superior to any dedicated tool.
- dingdongding 9y agoEveryone has their own way of randomizing. You like spreadsheets, that guy likes creating an app for that. Big deal? To each his own.
- cbcoutinho 9y agoBut in your case you still have to pre-select a range of options right? How do you avoid missing the 'unknown unknowns' that a separate service might help provide?
- 628C6l0 9y agotake restaurant choice for example. yes there's a range of options, but some of the fields instead of saying "go to restaurant A" say something like: "let google pick a random number X between 1 and 50. google "restaurant near Penn Station" and go to the Xth result." multiple times this procedure led me to dine at fine-dining establishments that i would never consider going into with the clothes i have on (the experience almost always ended up better than i imagined). a nice thing about randomizing is that you become psychologically dissociated from your actions. when things go bad you don't blame yourself and take that to reflect on yourself ("well, i was just following orders"). when things go well you just feel thankful.
- maxhawkins 9y agoIf you want to try this out check out my Facebook group, The Third Party: https://www.facebook.com/groups/the3rdparty/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/the3rdparty/ You can send us a message to receive a randomly selected event near you. People from all over are attending the events and posting about their experiences in the group.
- Tade0 9y agoGreat idea, but I don't need an app for that. My fiance takes on this role - we've been living in another country for almost two years because of one idea she had. I'm picking the next place once both of us get bored with this one. Suggestions, as always, welcome. Has to be in the EU though.
- nugator 9y agoCome to Sweden!
- michalskop 9y agoCzechia. It's the EU country with the newest English name hard to beat (-; And after some 2 years you will be happy to move on(-; Just avoid Prague-this city hates itself
- Tade0 9y agoTwo of my friends moved to Prague just recently. I heard it's weirdly expensive.
- narrator 9y agoThis is the plot of the indie movie called "Buggaboo": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206610/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206610/ The main character, who is an Indian engineer living in Silicon Valley, says to his friends : "What if you could randomize your life?". That's all I'll say. It's a good movie. I'm not going to spoil it for you guys.
- ghosttie 9y agoSo basically diceliving
- dubin 9y agoAnyone who's interested in more ideas along these lines should look at Tyler Cowen's list of how to be less complacent: http://tylercowen.com/complacent-class-quiz/ http://tylercowen.com/complacent-class-quiz/
- icebraining 9y agoIt said I was a trailblazer. Doesn't sound like me at all. I guess not being American might throw it off.
- et-al 9y agoTo a certain extent, this how we used to travel back in the day. You hung out in a hostel, had conversations with other travelers (instead of thumbing through Instagram), and let the randomness of other people and life, not apps, dictate your itinerary. You walk down a street, "oh hey that looks interesting", and wander down a quiet alley that leads to cute cafe, or jump in the back of a tuk-tuk headed to a waterfall that may or may not really exist, but who cares? You're riding the wave. One of the main reasons for travel/holidays is to break from routine, and the single most significant one can do, bear with me Silicon Valley, is to put away that smartphone. Try exercising your intuition instead of apps. Many folks nowadays have optimised their lives so much that they've needed to create a noise-generator to bring back some humanity.
- losteric 9y agoSpot on, apps have optimized our lives... to local maxima. Apps can't guide us to peak happiness because the best is disconnected from the rest. Even when it comes to something as "simple" as music, I've never found a "favorite" band through something like Spotify. Good music, sure, but the "bar raisers" alway comes from randomness - radio, odd bar show, personal recommendation, cabbie's CD player, etc.
- thegreekfish 9y agoThat's why I ditched the Spotify recommendation engine and started letting other people pick music for me: https://www.jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm
- throwaway91111 9y agoThis is still subject to a popularity distribution, although you may want that.
- msla 9y agoThe more popular that gets, the more it will approximate Top 40 radio, pretty much by definition.
- 9y ago
- user432468 9y agoNPR so diligently points out white privilege. It couldn't be that he dresses well, has good hygiene, is educated, well off, and speaks politely. It is only because he's white? In San Francisco of all places? > At first, he was nervous: What if people wouldn't let him in? But, as a kind of unassuming white guy, he actually didn't have this problem. (And Max acknowledges this privilege.)
- to_bpr 9y agoIt's 2017. If you're not virtue signalling whenever and wherever possible, you're simply not with it.
- tomjakubowski 9y agoAnd if you're not virtue signaling, be sure to constantly say everyone else is doing it, to signal your own superiority.
- jimjimjim 9y agoyour reality seems to make you think that 'virtue signalling' is a thing. you keep using that phrase in your comments on posts.
- yttrium 9y agoReally? You think that this is exclusively a matter of hygiene and style? I don't know what's worse, that you're so misinformed about the existence of white privilege, or that you feel comfortable trying to bring some edgy socio-racial nonsense into this conversation.
- hysterix 9y ago"White privilege" aka modern civilization. Considering the entirety of modern civilization and inventions were made by white people, everyone lives in the glory of white privilege, even minorities living in america. I have an idea, if you truly want to get away from "white privilege" how about you go into the forest and start a new civilization from scratch but this time without white people. Surely it would become a paradise in no time because you wouldn't have the white devil holding you down?
- countryqt30 9y agoI think that's a great idea to find inspiration. HOWEVER, there is a huge drawback: you life will be completely random and indirected. The "Techie" here visited a bunch of random places, random hostels, met random people without any focus, or direction. This will let you be absolutely average, and with poor skills (you are lacking any focus)
- jonbaer 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism
- bartread 9y agoMy immediate reaction to this was, "hey, this is awesome," and actually it really is. I think it's an interesting and creative solution to a problem a lot of us share - admittedly whilst recognising that for large swathes of the world's population this would be a great problem to have. Still, there's that nagging little voice in the back of my head: part of me can't help wondering what will happen, and how people will come to view it, if/when his apps catch on (as I suspect they will).
- jackvalentine 9y ago> Still, there's that nagging little voice in the back of my head: part of me can't help wondering what will happen, and how people will come to view it, if/when his apps catch on (as I suspect they will). That was my thought too - once a critical mass of people are going to 'random' events it'll be Portlandia Over.
- allard 9y agolike John Cage
- rnprince 9y agoReminds me of undergrad class registration, when everything satisfying a general education requirement would fill up and the server would crash the instant it started. I didn't choose to take History and Religion of Ancient Israel, but it was the class I got the most out of.
- jpatokal 9y agoThe Degree Confluence Project is an interesting version of random travel: people visiting arbitrary lat/long intersections. http://confluence.org/ http://confluence.org/
- Mz 9y agoThis "I'm bored with my life. I shall appify it and travel to random countries" stuff is a whole level beyond First World Problems. It is something like First World Problems of the Jet Set. Yet, this article doesn't cast him as a member of the Jet Set. Modern Life has gone to some rather weird places that were simply inconceivable until incredibly recently.
- coldtea 9y ago>Modern Life has gone to some rather weird places that were simply inconceivable until incredibly recently. You'd be surprised. Humans are not animals. They can have such worries and desires regardless of their material status. Even people in eras that were horribly materially constrained, had to fight wards, work their ass off, people in anything that we can define as "First World Problems" had similar (and even more extended) concerns. The movement of existentialism in Europe, for example, was created and popularized by people who had participated in major wars and struggles, and then were left to make a living in the ruins of post war Paris and Berlin and such (Sartre himself was drafted, caught, and spend a year as a prisoner of war in Nazi camps). And there have been people with wanderlust (desire to travel to "random countries") for as long as there have been people -- including tons of people in dire economic situation, from third world countries, and what have you, sailing etc.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 9y agoNot only "I'm bored with my life" but: "I'm bored with my life of relative luxury that 99% of the people on the planet would murder for". Sheesh!
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoluxury != personal growth.
- barsonme 9y agosome people use apps, others of us have ADHD that works just as well :-)
- gehwartzen 9y agoThe past eqivilent was flipping to a random page in the yellow pages, throwing a dart at a map, or flipping a coin. It's funny that we need a app to randomize our life at all. I suppose it is largely just how we acces information now.
- cconstantin 9y agoJust imagine someone hacking into this algorithm
- zoom6628 9y agoBrilliant way to actually take a break, or holiday, for those with the means to do it. I only plan my holidays down to which airport to arrive/leave and where to stay (yes im picky about that). Everything else in between arrival and leaving i prefer to depend on what I see/find/hear when walking around. That is my idea of a real holiday. Each to their own - YMMV.
- somberi 9y agoTo quote NY Times - "Algorithms lead us to Anagrams"
- zer0th 9y agoI've noticed that problem in my life as well. As a result, I decided to consume media a bit more randomly. My harddrive has a folder called "todo". This folder contains subfolders labeled "watch", "listen" (which includes "music" and "podcasts"), "read" and (a fun one) "pilates". The folder "watch" includes mostly movies and documentaries, sourced from my public service broadcaster's VOD service (which I scan weekly for interesting stuff) or youtube. The "music" subfolder of "listen" contains first and foremost dj mixes I've collected from eclectic rss feeds. "read" has all kinds of PDFs and HTML pages (mostly scientific papers, long-winded articles and e-books). The "pilates"-folder contains videos of individual exercises (I find it more exciting to not always do the exact same routine) On top of that I've written a script which prompts me to choose a category (i.e. one of the folders delineated above). It then randomly opens a file from the respective directory. When I am done using a file the script asks me whether I'd like to archive it, keep it (in case I am not done with it yet) or delete it.
- JunkDNA 9y agoIf your life needs more randomness, I highly recommend having or adopting children. Having three of them 7 and under, I can attest that the entropy in my life is off the charts. I have no need for an app.
- monksy 9y agoI've been looking to do something like this for my own side project. Unfortunately Yelp is pretty restrictive about working with their review data. (They only give you 3 reviews per business on the APIs, also they're hostile against scrapers) Hasn't anyone seen projects that do similar things with Facebook/Foursquare/Yelp data?
- mcrad 9y agoI'm not a developer but I did once build a prototype that sent text message inquiries throughout the day (within hours configured as "open" on my calendar). The questions were customized around a few goal areas, as a way to measure my progress. I never found much support for it, but the concept was intended to give techies with the hyperactive schedul tools a chance to leave "generic" hours on the calendar while still being accountable to being productive during those times. Tried a similar idea with a diet-specific set of goals. Aiming for 100% comprehensive tracking of your calories seems a bit crazy to me.
- darioush 9y agoI don't like NPR's attitude of conflating social anxiety of meeting a random bunch of people and whether they're going to accept you with racial issues. This makes me like them significantly less.