11 ms·

Randomized Living

106 points by _zhqs 6y ago

tlarkworthy 6y ago
Not as extreme but I watch YouTube psuedo randomly with a tool https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/random-place-on-youtube https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/random-place-on-yout...
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  Does YouTube expose an API to get a full listing of all videos available?
  - tlarkworthy 6y ago
    no I am using the search API with randomized words from word lists
Rainymood 6y ago
Very very cool, but at the same time it feels like we are so privileged sometimes that we are able to do this kind of stuff... Made me feel a bit melancholy and grateful at the same time.
galuggus 6y ago
There is a cult 70s novel about this way of living called the diceman.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  How dare you call one of the most influential novels of my life "a cult"! :) No, it wasn't the explicit sex and violence that was influential (though who knows!). It was the notion that the concept of "the real you" is broken, and that we all contain multitudes.
mellosouls 6y ago
It's an interesting approach, could take away some of the "stress of choice" (first world problem?), but might perhaps run the risk of disengagement into irresponsibility. Concept is reminiscent of The Dice Man https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
esperent 6y ago
Interesting, but definitely a life of privilege. Only a good passport and a full bank account or investments will allow you to roll the dice and move anywhere. Given that, it's an interesting experiment I guess. But as an analogy, consider the privilege to run this experiment as being like having a million dollars in a bank account. If someone said to you, yeah, I've got a million dollars to invest but putting the effort into to deciding where is too stressful, so I roll the dice and invest it in random companies 50k at a time, what would you think?
- ulucs 6y ago
  If you have remote work, you could re-roll the dice until the constraints hold up in terms of passport and living costs. Although, people manage to travel the world with very low amounts of money, so the real deciding factor would be your tolerance of "bad" living conditions.
  - ajconway 6y ago
    Some nationalities would have to re-roll quite a lot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Pakistani_citizens#Visa_requirements_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Pakist... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_citizens#Visa_requirements_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Chinese_citizens#Visa_requirements_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Chines... And that’s about 3 billion people. So the real deciding factor for a lot of them would be finding a country that will allow you to get a proper visa.
    - ulucs 6y ago
      Well I'm also from a country where many countries require a visa, so not having to obtain a visa to travel was never my expectation. Being able to have that expectation might be your privilege instead.
      - esperent 6y ago
aitooltime 6y ago
For those that don’t know, this website and lifestyle were actually heavily inspired by CS/Machine Learning work done by Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman. They co-authored a book, Why Greatness Cannot be Planned, about the philosophy and results behind an algorithm they developed for evolutionary computation with no explicit objective other than finding new artifacts: Novelty Search. You can see a review of the book here: https://medium.com/@John_Saunders/what-ive-been-reading-why-greatness-cannot-be-planned-88eef4d02d9b https://medium.com/@John_Saunders/what-ive-been-reading-why-... As I understand, the author of this site took the work quite literally! If you’re into the intersection of CS and philosophical topics, I’d highly recommend reading the book.
- bfieidhbrjr 6y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation, it touches a number of hobbies including GA. What else should I read? Seriously.
foreigner 6y ago
I'd like an app which randomly choose what to order from restaurant menus (would have to be sophisticated enough to choose a decent meal).
- tasuki 6y ago
  This is one of the reasons I like lunch specials: one doesn't have to choose what to eat (the other reason being the discount).
  - foreigner 6y ago
    Yep me too.
- K0nserv 6y ago
  I’ve discussed this with colleagues over lunch several times. The idea wouldn’t exactly be random, we’ve discussed a hash of the current date modulo some number of choices. So for any frequent choices, come up with n options and then take the hash of the date or weekday, or just pick a random number. Then do modulo n to determine the choice for the day. The nice thing about a hash is that the result feels random but could exhibit a recognisable pattern over time.
- mFixman 6y ago
  I usually narrow it down to 2–5 items I know I'll enjoy, and them choose randomly using the minutes of the current time modulo the amount of options. The system works great: it's chaotic enough so I can't estimate in advance the answer, yet stable enough so I can't "cheat" by re-throwing the dice. It also sometimes helps me find out what I _really_ wanted when I realise that going randomly was a bad idea.
- dreen 6y ago
  Sometimes I ask to get whatever they feel like making. Or if someone else got something and didn't want it, I'll take that. Helps fight food waste and makes your waiter's/chef's day a bit easier, which is nice.
xvilka 6y ago
Quite similar to the antifragility[1] principle - but not all areas benefit from randomness. The key is to understand which is which and apply randomisation there. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  As with kalman filtering, one wants to take the strength of a ranking and make the "best" choice under that noise: so arbitrary decisions get made completely randomly, and perfect information decisions get made completely deterministically, but all others make an arbitrary choice from a larger or smaller pool of highly-ranked choices. "Be just," I once heard a judge advise, "and if you can't be just, be arbitrary."
dreen 6y ago
I love this idea but seems like the documents about how this works are deleted.
owenversteeg 6y ago
For those saying this is only possible with a good passport and a full bank account: I see people doing similar with crappy passports and nearly no money. Sure, they don't have a computer program telling them what to do, but I've heard standard dice are more random than PRNGs anyway. As far as expenses go, most people do Couchsurfing or something similar. With housing taken care of, you can feed yourself on a couple bucks a day, and hitchhiking is free. Sure, with a crappy passport you can't go absolutely everywhere, but with a South American or African passport you can travel your entire home continent visa free, with a Russian passport you can travel the CIS countries, etc. If anyone here (rich or poor, good passport or bad) would like to try their hand at this kind of random, see-where-life-takes-you kind of living, feel free to come stay at my boat home (currently sailing from the Netherlands to France.) I take tons of Couchsurfers of all kinds, many of which live the low budget version of this guy's life :) My email's in my profile.
- sebastiangraef 6y ago
  For sure. I've been living a nomadic life for three years now, not randomized because I prefer picking my locations myself but I could do that. Good passport, so this problem doesn't apply to me. But I've also met plenty enough Indian or Filipino nomads in Asia. If you got the remote income stream then you can solve the visa problems.
  - dorchadas 6y ago
    I'd love to do this for a while, but getting that remote income stream is the issue for me, especially with student loans to pay off. Any advice?
    - sebastiangraef 6y ago
      I basically quit my job without income and got freelance clients after traveling for a while. That might be not everyone's cup of tea so probably better to get that sorted before leaving. There are quite a lot of fully remote jobs now but tons of competition and mostly "US only". Freelancing is probably the fastest way to get remote income. Best is to have some kind of retainer deal for x/month in my opinion, instead of always hunting new projects. SaaS or any kind of online business is more of a long term play.
cblconfederate 6y ago
I think we have to accept that this is how the next gen will live. Not random living but unrooting and rerooting frequently. There were a few million nomads pre-covid, now almost everyone is realizing they could be one. Not everyone wants an unrooted life but most people would be positive to a few re-rootings per lifetime. This is hindered by borders and immigrations control at the moment, but at some not too distant point the majority opinion on them will shift.
- FooHentai 6y ago
  I anticipate things will go the other way - Less power in passports, stronger border controls for many nations. Climate refugees will prompt this response from nations. IMO we've been living in a golden age for anyone that wants to see the world for the past half a century or so.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    And also the other way -- most nomads are actually immigrating TO the warmer countries. Ultimately i don't see this ending up being gatekeeped at the national level but rather at the city-level.
    - fock 6y ago
      and these nomads in the warmer countries are actively participating in the struggles there to keep them liveable for another century? I doubt it.
      - cblconfederate 6y ago
        Of course not. But humans tend to follow the least action principle, and if it's easier to escape a problem, they will. At some point, trying to force them stay in place en masse will become authoritarian.
        fock 6y ago
headalgorithm 6y ago
If you're interested there was a recent article about the value of uncertainty in your life that talks a bit more about Max: https://aeon.co/essays/use-uncertainty-to-leverage-the-power-of-your-predictive-brain https://aeon.co/essays/use-uncertainty-to-leverage-the-power...
quantumwoke 6y ago
This reminds me of Randotron [0] from Rick and Morty :). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wezE6RLlcDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wezE6RLlcDA
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  (a) mixed strategies are a rational game theory thing (b) the units are J⋅s (c) continuity error with the dryer sheets?
geekit 6y ago
This reminds me of one of episodes of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon uses a dice to take every little decision. It was hilarious.
ethanwillis 6y ago
As a joke at the last office job I had, I would roll dice on an app to make decisions. More often than not the dice would have had the same or better outcome than humans bikeshedding.
- specialist 6y ago
  In other words, you were the Dungeon Master. Project management as an RPG is a great idea.
Bendy 6y ago
Looks like an extension of psychogeography.
waynesonfire 6y ago
this is how i order my sanwiches at subway. i also try to minimize the number of questions asked. it's not easy.
jancsika 6y ago
> things to do Wouldn't defining those things be both more difficult and more important than the decision-making process itself? For example-- if you choose the list of options by intuition, how do you know it's not full of aliases? To borrow from the old joke: flipping a coin to decide whether to listen to "country or western?"
devit 6y ago
My concern is that if you randomize uniformly based on geography or event, you'll get a very uneven distribution of place types. E.g. if you go to a random public place, you are very likely to go to a uninteresting bar or restaurant or shop and very unlikely to find yourself in a very unique place. And I'm not sure how you could automatically randomize in a a way that doesn't have this issue.
- jfim 6y ago
  > if you go to a random public place, you are very likely to go to a uninteresting bar or restaurant or shop and very unlikely to find yourself in a very unique place. That's kind of the point. Does every experience have to be rated 4.9999 stars on Yelp?
  - devit 6y ago
    My goal for random experiences would be to experience new, unfamiliar and interesting things. Obviously restaurants, bars and shops are quite uninteresting, with very rare exceptions (regardless of Yelp rating).

106 points by _zhqs 6y ago

Not as extreme but I watch YouTube psuedo randomly with a tool https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/random-place-on-youtube https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/random-place-on-yout...

tachyonbeam 6y ago
Does YouTube expose an API to get a full listing of all videos available?
- tlarkworthy 6y ago
  no I am using the search API with randomized words from word lists

Rainymood 6y ago

Very very cool, but at the same time it feels like we are so privileged sometimes that we are able to do this kind of stuff... Made me feel a bit melancholy and grateful at the same time.

galuggus 6y ago

There is a cult 70s novel about this way of living called the diceman.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
How dare you call one of the most influential novels of my life "a cult"! :) No, it wasn't the explicit sex and violence that was influential (though who knows!). It was the notion that the concept of "the real you" is broken, and that we all contain multitudes.

mellosouls 6y ago

It's an interesting approach, could take away some of the "stress of choice" (first world problem?), but might perhaps run the risk of disengagement into irresponsibility. Concept is reminiscent of The Dice Man https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man

esperent 6y ago

Interesting, but definitely a life of privilege. Only a good passport and a full bank account or investments will allow you to roll the dice and move anywhere. Given that, it's an interesting experiment I guess. But as an analogy, consider the privilege to run this experiment as being like having a million dollars in a bank account. If someone said to you, yeah, I've got a million dollars to invest but putting the effort into to deciding where is too stressful, so I roll the dice and invest it in random companies 50k at a time, what would you think?

ulucs 6y ago
If you have remote work, you could re-roll the dice until the constraints hold up in terms of passport and living costs. Although, people manage to travel the world with very low amounts of money, so the real deciding factor would be your tolerance of "bad" living conditions.
- ajconway 6y ago
  Some nationalities would have to re-roll quite a lot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Pakistani_citizens#Visa_requirements_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Pakist... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_citizens#Visa_requirements_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Chinese_citizens#Visa_requirements_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Chines... And that’s about 3 billion people. So the real deciding factor for a lot of them would be finding a country that will allow you to get a proper visa.
  - ulucs 6y ago
    Well I'm also from a country where many countries require a visa, so not having to obtain a visa to travel was never my expectation. Being able to have that expectation might be your privilege instead.
    - esperent 6y ago

aitooltime 6y ago

For those that don’t know, this website and lifestyle were actually heavily inspired by CS/Machine Learning work done by Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman. They co-authored a book, Why Greatness Cannot be Planned, about the philosophy and results behind an algorithm they developed for evolutionary computation with no explicit objective other than finding new artifacts: Novelty Search. You can see a review of the book here: https://medium.com/@John_Saunders/what-ive-been-reading-why-greatness-cannot-be-planned-88eef4d02d9b https://medium.com/@John_Saunders/what-ive-been-reading-why-... As I understand, the author of this site took the work quite literally! If you’re into the intersection of CS and philosophical topics, I’d highly recommend reading the book.

bfieidhbrjr 6y ago
Thanks for the recommendation, it touches a number of hobbies including GA. What else should I read? Seriously.

foreigner 6y ago

I'd like an app which randomly choose what to order from restaurant menus (would have to be sophisticated enough to choose a decent meal).

tasuki 6y ago
This is one of the reasons I like lunch specials: one doesn't have to choose what to eat (the other reason being the discount).
- foreigner 6y ago
  Yep me too.
K0nserv 6y ago
I’ve discussed this with colleagues over lunch several times. The idea wouldn’t exactly be random, we’ve discussed a hash of the current date modulo some number of choices. So for any frequent choices, come up with n options and then take the hash of the date or weekday, or just pick a random number. Then do modulo n to determine the choice for the day. The nice thing about a hash is that the result feels random but could exhibit a recognisable pattern over time.
mFixman 6y ago
I usually narrow it down to 2–5 items I know I'll enjoy, and them choose randomly using the minutes of the current time modulo the amount of options. The system works great: it's chaotic enough so I can't estimate in advance the answer, yet stable enough so I can't "cheat" by re-throwing the dice. It also sometimes helps me find out what I _really_ wanted when I realise that going randomly was a bad idea.
dreen 6y ago
Sometimes I ask to get whatever they feel like making. Or if someone else got something and didn't want it, I'll take that. Helps fight food waste and makes your waiter's/chef's day a bit easier, which is nice.

xvilka 6y ago

Quite similar to the antifragility[1] principle - but not all areas benefit from randomness. The key is to understand which is which and apply randomisation there. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility

082349872349872 6y ago
As with kalman filtering, one wants to take the strength of a ranking and make the "best" choice under that noise: so arbitrary decisions get made completely randomly, and perfect information decisions get made completely deterministically, but all others make an arbitrary choice from a larger or smaller pool of highly-ranked choices. "Be just," I once heard a judge advise, "and if you can't be just, be arbitrary."

dreen 6y ago

I love this idea but seems like the documents about how this works are deleted.

owenversteeg 6y ago

For those saying this is only possible with a good passport and a full bank account: I see people doing similar with crappy passports and nearly no money. Sure, they don't have a computer program telling them what to do, but I've heard standard dice are more random than PRNGs anyway. As far as expenses go, most people do Couchsurfing or something similar. With housing taken care of, you can feed yourself on a couple bucks a day, and hitchhiking is free. Sure, with a crappy passport you can't go absolutely everywhere, but with a South American or African passport you can travel your entire home continent visa free, with a Russian passport you can travel the CIS countries, etc. If anyone here (rich or poor, good passport or bad) would like to try their hand at this kind of random, see-where-life-takes-you kind of living, feel free to come stay at my boat home (currently sailing from the Netherlands to France.) I take tons of Couchsurfers of all kinds, many of which live the low budget version of this guy's life :) My email's in my profile.

sebastiangraef 6y ago
For sure. I've been living a nomadic life for three years now, not randomized because I prefer picking my locations myself but I could do that. Good passport, so this problem doesn't apply to me. But I've also met plenty enough Indian or Filipino nomads in Asia. If you got the remote income stream then you can solve the visa problems.
- dorchadas 6y ago
  I'd love to do this for a while, but getting that remote income stream is the issue for me, especially with student loans to pay off. Any advice?
  - sebastiangraef 6y ago
    I basically quit my job without income and got freelance clients after traveling for a while. That might be not everyone's cup of tea so probably better to get that sorted before leaving. There are quite a lot of fully remote jobs now but tons of competition and mostly "US only". Freelancing is probably the fastest way to get remote income. Best is to have some kind of retainer deal for x/month in my opinion, instead of always hunting new projects. SaaS or any kind of online business is more of a long term play.

cblconfederate 6y ago

I think we have to accept that this is how the next gen will live. Not random living but unrooting and rerooting frequently. There were a few million nomads pre-covid, now almost everyone is realizing they could be one. Not everyone wants an unrooted life but most people would be positive to a few re-rootings per lifetime. This is hindered by borders and immigrations control at the moment, but at some not too distant point the majority opinion on them will shift.

FooHentai 6y ago
I anticipate things will go the other way - Less power in passports, stronger border controls for many nations. Climate refugees will prompt this response from nations. IMO we've been living in a golden age for anyone that wants to see the world for the past half a century or so.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  And also the other way -- most nomads are actually immigrating TO the warmer countries. Ultimately i don't see this ending up being gatekeeped at the national level but rather at the city-level.
  - fock 6y ago
    and these nomads in the warmer countries are actively participating in the struggles there to keep them liveable for another century? I doubt it.
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      Of course not. But humans tend to follow the least action principle, and if it's easier to escape a problem, they will. At some point, trying to force them stay in place en masse will become authoritarian.
      - fock 6y ago

headalgorithm 6y ago

If you're interested there was a recent article about the value of uncertainty in your life that talks a bit more about Max: https://aeon.co/essays/use-uncertainty-to-leverage-the-power-of-your-predictive-brain https://aeon.co/essays/use-uncertainty-to-leverage-the-power...

quantumwoke 6y ago

This reminds me of Randotron [0] from Rick and Morty :). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wezE6RLlcDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wezE6RLlcDA

082349872349872 6y ago
(a) mixed strategies are a rational game theory thing (b) the units are J⋅s (c) continuity error with the dryer sheets?

geekit 6y ago

This reminds me of one of episodes of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon uses a dice to take every little decision. It was hilarious.

ethanwillis 6y ago

As a joke at the last office job I had, I would roll dice on an app to make decisions. More often than not the dice would have had the same or better outcome than humans bikeshedding.

specialist 6y ago
In other words, you were the Dungeon Master. Project management as an RPG is a great idea.

Bendy 6y ago

Looks like an extension of psychogeography.

waynesonfire 6y ago

this is how i order my sanwiches at subway. i also try to minimize the number of questions asked. it's not easy.

jancsika 6y ago

> things to do Wouldn't defining those things be both more difficult and more important than the decision-making process itself? For example-- if you choose the list of options by intuition, how do you know it's not full of aliases? To borrow from the old joke: flipping a coin to decide whether to listen to "country or western?"

devit 6y ago

My concern is that if you randomize uniformly based on geography or event, you'll get a very uneven distribution of place types. E.g. if you go to a random public place, you are very likely to go to a uninteresting bar or restaurant or shop and very unlikely to find yourself in a very unique place. And I'm not sure how you could automatically randomize in a a way that doesn't have this issue.

jfim 6y ago
> if you go to a random public place, you are very likely to go to a uninteresting bar or restaurant or shop and very unlikely to find yourself in a very unique place. That's kind of the point. Does every experience have to be rated 4.9999 stars on Yelp?
- devit 6y ago
  My goal for random experiences would be to experience new, unfamiliar and interesting things. Obviously restaurants, bars and shops are quite uninteresting, with very rare exceptions (regardless of Yelp rating).