23 ms·

How fateful?

• klausjensen 4y ago
  Great hacking, great story. :)
• operator-name 4y ago
  Wow, this is really neet! Whenever I see R (and the tidyverse in general) I always can't believe how clean and easy it to to do aebitary data visualisation like this.
  • globular-toast 4y ago
    Yeah. I really enjoyed my time as a data scientist when I was fluent in R and the tidyverse stuff (in particular ggplot and dplyr). It felt like a super power. People were consistently amazed at how quickly I could visualise brand new data.
• rvieira 4y ago
  This is simultaneously scary and cool.
• zhte415 4y ago
  > It makes me feel very philosophical. Likely we had walked past each other every other week for three years with our heads down, or in the clouds, paying very little notice to the people around us. Past Channon had not the foggiest clue what impact an unnoticed stranger would come to have on her. Since learning this I can’t help but look at the passers-by in my day-to-day life in a different light. And no shame in getting philosophical. It may not have been time. Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he. In meeting at the right time, stars are aligned, it was the right time to intersect. Or perhaps a host of other reasons. There may have been better times, perhaps bounded for this success quite close to or at the time you didn 'meet'. And who knows what other 'success' could have worked out - collaborators in something, getting together when 're meeting' - we don't know, an individual's life's not repeatable, and that in itself is beautiful. It is indeed fascinating mapping and wondering, and probably applicable to a lot. But not to downplay the philosophical side, as that's important, and important the OP included it.
  • smeej 4y ago
    I was getting philosophical the other day for the opposite reason, looking at all the things that went slightly different than they would have been expected to go, or that I had previously wished had not gone "wrong," but if they had happened the "right" way, we never would have met. I don't think Google's spying can help me identify those, but in the end I'm grateful for the winding path that led here, even if I didn't love it along the way!
    • Archelaos 4y ago
      Think of all the causal paths since the beginning of the universe that led to your birth. Even the smallest difference would have resulted in what you are now being a different person, if you existed at all. Just one atom in a supernova explosion billions of years ago having a slightly different trajectory ...
      • cmehdy 4y ago
        With all due respect, we don't know that. Knowing this as a fact would mean provably demonstrating the degree of instability at any instant of the universe, essentially its whole trajectory in a potentially infinite (and at least incredibly high) dimensional space. It's just as possible that for a given person, molecules could have changed somewhere or even "bigger" events could have happened one or more times, and their existence would have remained. Automatically assuming a chaos of infinite possibilities with completely divergent universe is potentially reducing the complexity of the world and its countless smaller stabilizing feedback loops that locally do reduce divergences. Otherwise we'd never do anything for fear of spontaneously exploding or other funny things.
    • ivan888 4y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjKFb-4t_vg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjKFb-4t_vg
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Legend has it that Adam Smith (the "father of capitalism") and James Watt (pioneering steam-engineer and industrial machinist) shared proximate offices at Glasgow University and drank in the same nearby pubs. Apparently, no significant record of their connection exists.
• hownottowrite 4y ago
  Dan’s not getting away with anything.
• thangngoc89 4y ago
  This is a great article. Just to save everyone's time, here is a directly link to Google Takeout where you can download the data mentioned in the article: https://takeout.google.com/takeout/custom/local_actions,location_history,maps,mymaps?dnm=false https://takeout.google.com/takeout/custom/local_actions,loca...
• infinitedata 4y ago
  These are amazing ETL skills, but a big red flag, I thought I was watching the revival of the infamous Overly Attached Girlfriend. As someone said there, this is great and scary at the same time. Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history? There are only two reasons why someone leaves that function enabled: A) they are Google employees B) totally ignorant to the fact that Google tracks them
  • scrollaway 4y ago
    Google timeline may not be useful to you but it’s an incredible tool to record your own past. Believe me, I care far more than google in my ability to know where I was on April 24 2016.
    • seba_dos1 4y ago
      I don't think I have ever in my life thought "I wish I had location history turned on so I could check where I was at that date". Could you share some examples of how can it be useful? I do find it cool to have such data to do the kind of analysis as presented in this post, but not cool enough to let others (especially Google) possess this data as well.
      • Zobat 4y ago
        When was the last time (at the beginning of the pandemic) that I went in to the office. When was it the conference was at "that town". Sure there's other ways to find the information but I don't mind having it tracked. To each his own but I find more value in it than I think I give up.
      • daveoc64 4y ago
        It's great to be able to answer questions like "when did we go on that trip to X" or "how long has it been since we went to Y". I live in the UK, but I can go back to May 2014 and see everywhere I went in Florida on a holiday. Every restaurant, theme park, shop etc. It's a great way to take a trip down memory lane. I also use it on a day-to-day basis - e.g. if I need to record what hours I worked on a certain day, I can use it to give me an approximate time I went out for lunch.
• burglekutt 4y ago
  Love this. Such a fun, creative, philosophical project.
• seba_dos1 4y ago
  Fun fact: whatever you can do with this data, Google can do as well!
  • WilTimSon 4y ago
    Hey wait a second, that's not fun at all, that's incredibly depressing! On a serious note, it does remind me of that time police arrested a man on suspicion of a break-in, because he was riding his bike in the neighborhood at the time and Google recorded it.
  • test6554 4y ago
    While she likely got permission, having your girlfriend request all your location data is a bit like Zuckerberg requeating all your location data. On some level alarm bells are going off.
    • seba_dos1 4y ago
      Is it? My girlfriend is probably the only person I'd be comfortable with sharing my location data with, given a reasonable purpose (the one in this post would be good).
    • danuker 4y ago
      Your girlfriend won't resell it or share it with insurance or government agencies as easily.
    • Tozen 4y ago
      A girlfriend may not be as trustworthy, as some people seem to think or at least no more than what is selfishly beneficial and to her advantage. Lots of guys find this out, way too late.
    • archi42 4y ago
      This depends a lot on your SO and your relationship to her/him/them. Given exactly the pretext from the blog post: I can easily think of a past relationship where I'd totally agree with you (very distrustful person who could not have resisted the urge to maliciously interpreted the data), and another relationship where I'd be totally cool with it (except I wouldn't want the heat map to be public). For most of my past relationships (and my current, final relationship) however such a request is unrealistic anyway; they simply don't have the technical ability to do such an analysis.
• sevazhidkov 4y ago
  If you are interested in tinkering with personal data exports using SQL, my friend and I made Bionic: https://github.com/bionic/bionic https://github.com/bionic/bionic. The README includes an example of calculating songs you often listen to while walking/driving/using public transit (by combining Google Maps and Spotify data).
  • mahathu 4y ago
    That is insanely cool! I just requested my spotify data and really curious to see the results.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• HermanMartinus 4y ago
  This is delightful. I also live in Cape Town and met my girlfriend on Bumble right after the lockdowns (and curfews) ended. I’m tempted to do this as well
• mellowagain 4y ago
  Very interesting and cool tech and a very cute story! Congrats :)
• nkzd 4y ago
  Very interesting, maybe an online service could be made for this "have we crossed paths before".
• 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  how i met your mother, hands down the best tv show ever,,,,,,, did this before location tracking was a thing...... "the best burger in NY", a classic
• etothepii 4y ago
  This story reminds me of the Tim Minchin song, if I didn't have you: https://youtu.be/Zn6gV2sdl38 https://youtu.be/Zn6gV2sdl38
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  And this friends is why "third party" entities collecting your meta data and such is a concern. A lot (read: enough) can be learned about you *and who you associate* without actually listening to your calls, etc. On the surface, this article is cute. After that it's a red flag for all of us.
  • wink 4y ago
    I'd argue the opposite. People already know what Google can do, this is how you reap some benefits for yourself with the data that's already there.
    • chiefalchemist 4y ago
      The NSA, etc. is not Google. What about the Constitution?
    • anarticle 4y ago
      I've always wondered what the NSA actually thinks of me. Consider it a psychoanalysis paid for by taxes. Extra creepy, but we're already at the party.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
    All depends on your threat model. A company openly collecting your data by your say so seems significantly less threatening (to me, to many others) than all the actors who are doing it without your knowledge or consent.
    • chiefalchemist 4y ago
      The point is, any / all data collection is - or should be - suspect. Today's benevolent actor is tomorrow's victim of a hack, or simply changes their spots. Furthermore, even data that is positioned as harmless (i.e., phone call metadata) can tell stories. Finally, per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (and others) these minor privacy infringements add up and is used against us. There's no such thing as no threat.
• lynguist 4y ago
  My takeaway is this: If you want to meet your significant other, attend a university. After university your chances will dwindle down as you won't frequent that big come together place any more.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    Any social gathering is a place where you can meet your significant others, university is not the exclusive place for that. Most most introverted people tend to do though (myself included), is attending less social events as they become older. But you can still force yourself out there and meet people based on your hobbies. And who knows, maybe you meet your significant other at one of those events for your favorite hobby?
    • thatguy0900 4y ago
      Church is really the classical place. It's a shame there's not a similar place for large groups of secular people to gather once a week for social events.
      • andrewinardeer 4y ago
        Sporting events fit that bill. As long as the other is going for the same team I would think.
        • bradlys 4y ago
          Are we talking about paying for seats to spectate? Cause if so - I highly disagree. You might get lucky every so often but I found people generally keep to themselves/their friend group.
      • spicyusername 4y ago
        Can't agree more. Many of my neighbors go to church and I'm very jealous at how much social capital it provides every single week for essentially free. It's such a shame that something so good is wrapped in something so silly.
• nevi-me 4y ago
  This is a great use of one's location data. I've personally found Google's location history to be a net positive for me. From places I've been whose precise addresses I can't remember (e.g. distant family events), to tracking hospital, doctor visits. I've even used it as a proxy for timesheets when I used to work from an office on weeks where I wouldn't have recorded my activities well (like which client I visited, how long I took lunch, etc).
  • netsharc 4y ago
    It has a flaw though, if establishments change names, your record of the visit also changes. If you had lunch at a burger place 2 years ago, and the place closed down and a hair salon opened up in its place, you'd "look back" and Google would tell you you went to a hair salon 2 years ago.
  • texasbigdata 4y ago
    You just invented the next great dating app. Because I can “game” saying I like or do something, but having to both physically be there and review it is a cool angle. The catch (outside the crazy permissions) would be it would greatly hurt smaller cities: “oh you really like the only Starbucks in town? Me too!”
    • enchiridion 4y ago
      There was an app called hapn where you had to cross paths with the people it showed you.
    • SamBam 4y ago
      Bring back the old Four Square: oh, you like that Starbucks? Well, are you The Mayor of it?
      • nevi-me 4y ago
        FourSquare was great, their gamified app made it fun for us to check in to locations. My friend works for his city's local council, not too high a position. We all call him the mayor of the city, because he used to be the mayor of a lot of places there on FourSquare.
• croisillon 4y ago
  Storytime! Years ago I boarded an almost empty plane from my country to a country where I had just started to live. The crew let a printed list of the passengers on one of the seats, I took the list and stored it somewhere. Flash forward few years later: I had met a lot of people in that country, inclusive from my own country. And one day, I rediscovered that boarding list I had totally forgotten about, just to find out that I had ended up knowing one of the persons on it.
• victor106 4y ago
  > Thanks to Google’s location history quietly ticking away collecting GPS data in the background Thanks but no thanks
• oakesm9 4y ago
  This sounds sort of similar to Strava Flybys[0]. It users your run/ride location data and show people who posted public activies that passed you by. Sometimes interesting, but I bet a lot of Strava users who post their activities as "public" don't know this feature exists and might turn to "followers only" if they did. [0] https://labs.strava.com/flyby/ https://labs.strava.com/flyby/
  • infamousclyde 4y ago
    The Flyby feature has been opt-in for about two years.
    • oakesm9 4y ago
      Ah! Good to know. I didn’t see any reference to that on their product page so assumed it was still on by default
      • ydant 4y ago
        It's carved out as a specific permission on the privacy page now - https://www.strava.com/settings/privacy https://www.strava.com/settings/privacy - and also explicitly mentioned as turned off for "only you" activities, but no mention if it's exposed if your activity is "followers only".
  • ydant 4y ago
    This existed as a massive data-leak for a really long time. The "API" didn't have any meaningful protection, and the service was opt-in. It was really easy to download flyby exports for any activity and do analysis. I had a script downloading my Strava recordings of my commute and the associated fly-by data and was easily able to figure out all of the people I was seeing on the way to/from work. Since it linked to the activities and included profile pictures and names, you could easily figure out a lot. If I remember correctly, you could still see fly-bys of other peoples' rides even if your own was private or followers-only. It was a pretty massive oversight for a company like Strava - and a bit of an eye opener for me about what kind of data I might be leaking by making "harmless" activities like riding my bike into public data.
• vivegi 4y ago
  I loved the personal story of two people trying to figure out past history based on data. But the fact that his comes from centralized datamines maintained by bigtech is unsettling.
• victornomad 4y ago
  Many years ago, when everybody had Nokias with the Bluetooth on, I used to do a similar thing. I created a S60 python script that kept scanning Bluetooth mac addresses and link them with the cell tower I was connected to (no GPS yet on mobiles).Then later processed the logs to see if I encountered the same people in different locations and times. And yes, I re-encountered a bunch of Bluetooth mac addresses in different locations. For me it was fascinating at that time :)
  • FredPret 4y ago
    That’s pretty cool; you ran Python on one of those Nokias?!
    • victornomad 4y ago
      yeah. Most of the apps were made in C (or C++, I don't remember) or Java. But there was a Python port that was quite awesome to make experiments. This was before the Iphone was launched IIRC and I think it only worked with the Nokia N series.
    • FridayoLeary 4y ago
      You can. I still have a working Nokia s60 at home that can run a python script shell.
  • bentcorner 4y ago
    Airguard kind of does this: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard It'll scan for bluetooth trackers in the background (and airpods and iphones) and can give you a per-device history.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I believe the Nintendo (3)DS does something similar, but makes it into a gameplay mechanic in supported games, SpotPass and StreetPass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpotPass_and_StreetPass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpotPass_and_StreetPass > Using the console's background connectivity, a Nintendo 3DS in Sleep Mode can automatically discover other Nintendo 3DS systems within range, establish a connection, and exchange content for mutually played games, all transparently and without requiring any user input. > For example, in Rhythm Heaven Megamix, if the user passes by someone with the same software, they will take on a figure-fighting duel challenge.
• texasbigdata 4y ago
  There’s a play about this, the name escapes me, but it’s a “quantum” love story: two people meet and at each step options present; the catch is the possibility tree doesn’t converge (one character had a midlife disease, which only happened in some of the branches). It was absolutely fantastic. Just tremendous. Think it played in New York, Dallas and New York at a minimum.
  • Wuzado 4y ago
    This is not it, but the plot is somewhat similar to Makoto Shinkai's movie "Your Name."
  • defterGoose 4y ago
    If you remember what it is, please post the name, it sounds very good.
• Location-Data 4y ago
  I was reluctant to mention this kind of story in such a sweet context but a few comments have already touched on privacy, so I want to add my two cents. At some point in the past I had the surreal experience of opening a news website and seeing a familiar face on the front page. Not a celebrity, rather a man whose face had been in some small subfolder of my brain for several years. The man had been convicted of serial rape. He would drug victims and record them. He was known to be active within a certain time range from the timestamps of the videos. He repeated this dozens of times and was only caught after the final victim woke up during the act. Authorities appealed for people to come forward with any more information because they believed there could be more victims than were discovered from the videos. By cross-referencing the location data from my phone with the date of an event my Last FM profile and the location of his home, I was able to confirm why he looked familiar. This allowed me to contact the authorities and bring the start of the known time frame significantly forward. (there might be enough information in this post for the perpetrator to be identified - if you do, please keep it to yourself)
  • 3pt14159 4y ago
    I took the pragmatic approach and said to myself "look, if Google really wants to know where I am the only way to avoid it is to go into the woods without my phone, so why not?" Then one day the Toronto Transit Commission police thought I was re-using someone elses streetcar fare because of how old it was. I just prefer the streetcar to subways, so I took a longer route. As soon as I pulled out my phone with my location tracking they believed me. I didn't even have to resort to mentioning that I used to work for the TTC as a coop student. I'm not saying I absolutely love all this surveillance-lite stuff, but in an honest breakdown of the tradeoffs for law abiding people living in real democracies or other trustworthy states I fail to see a huge downside at the present time.
    • ekianjo 4y ago
    • browheresmychar 4y ago
      I'm sure people have opposite stories where instead of a quick dismissal they received attitude, general harassment, or escalation. Small "crimes" like stealing streetcar fare are sought out not because of the crime itself but because the more contact points people have with police the more people are arrested. There is probably an overlap of people who steal streetcar fare and people who are harboring small amounts of narcotics etc etc. Just like in America we're pulled over on the road for the most benign things just so there's contact with the police, which leads to a higher rate of convictions. I was doing self-checkout at Walmart and the dumb machine thought I stole something I had already scanned, lo and behold an officer appears out of the shadows with a general attitude at me as if I was trying to pull off the grand-heist of stealing GREEN ONIONS. I personally think law-abiding people have a right to limited contact with police.
• vonwoodson 4y ago
  This is interesting, if only for the fact that track data did not show a correlation between these two people. 40-ish near misses over a few years would never have made me think that these two tracks were related in any way… then an external force brought them together. I’d like to see how their tracks look now; that is to say A) here’s the tracks of people livi my similar lives w/o a relationship B) here’s the tracks of two people who share a relationship (And eventually, not wishing for anything) C) here’s the tracks of two people who no longer share a relationship, but once did Building the relationships between two objects is, by far, the most difficult part of the tracking problem. And, this source code definitely does and interesting job to measuring… something. That “something” seems like a worthy metric to look into.
• chrisseaton 4y ago
  When my wife and I combined our photo libraries later in life, we found a photo of the two of us, back-to-back at a ball a few years before we first met.
  • throwaway787544 4y ago
    The last person I dated and I figured out we had probably been literally face to face a couple years before at an event, and I was probably talking to her boyfriend about something.
  • coldpie 4y ago
    My wife and I were apparently at a party of a mutual friend two years before we met. Neither of us remembers the other being there. Apparently being the guy who brought an Apple IIc and a box of floppies to a college party in 2009 wasn't memorable enough!
    • rendall 4y ago
      > Apparently being the guy who brought an Apple IIc and a box of floppies to a college party in 2009 wasn't memorable enough! You'd be amazed at how few women find that exciting
      • c1yd3i 4y ago
  • dboreham 4y ago
    I spent a week working at the Inmos plant in Colorado Springs in 1989, thousands of miles from where I lived at the time. It turns out I drove past my wife's house every day that week. We didn't meet until 1996.
  • breck 4y ago
    Aww so sweet. I love stories like this. My wife and I met by chance in Seattle in 2014, having grown up on different coasts, but there was a period in the 1980's where we lived <50 miles apart and I always wonder whether we ever met by chance as kids. That's so amazing you found that photo. We will have to combine photo albums like you and see what we learn.
• ghostoftesla 4y ago
  That's the most dystopian sh*t I've seen here in a while.
• room505 4y ago
  My spouse and I passed each other all the time because we lived in the same neighborhood. I almost had the courage to approach her. Ironically, we ended up meeting through a dating website!
  • NoGravitas 4y ago
    It's almost as if the dating website played the role that a formal introduction from a mutual acquaintance might have played once upon a time.
• OisinMoran 4y ago
  This is beautiful! I've often had the same thought when meeting new people—"What's the closest we've been before now?", "Have we looked at each other as strangers before?", etc. A similar one I'd love to know is what's the furthest apart I've seen the same bird?
• neilv 4y ago
  > I'm glad to have gone down this rabbit hole because now I think about the 41.25 near-misses we had, where if an audience had been watching they may have been on the edge of their seats. 41.25 near-misses, until The Answer was the crossing that wasn't a miss: 42
  • nkko 4y ago
    What was the question?
    • m463 4y ago
      it involved a life partner, the universe and everything
• shultays 4y ago
  Kinda creepy how you have access to your partner's google maps history and you go through it. But hey, if he is happy with it
  • grosswait 4y ago
    He volunteered the data
  • laundermaf 4y ago
    You say creepy, I find it to be an incredible level of trust on one side and maturity on the other side. It could have easily be "I can’t tell you where I was" and "wow you met Alissa a lot in 2005, I'm gonna break up"
• scandox 4y ago
  Can people now just meet each other without an App? Is it generally possible to just kick off conversations with people you haven't been introduced to? I mean if these two were sitting under the same apple tree, they'd be on their phones checking out Bumble, surely?
  • angryGhost 4y ago
    easier said than done
  • Yiin 4y ago
    It's just so much easier to do it using an app. You are pretty much guaranteed that people you match with are also looking for something similar or at least open to the idea. No guessing or attending places for sole reason of hunting down a partner, which is quite creepy anyways. It's definitely possible to find some without an app, but not everyone is willing to just wait for that magical moment of meeting the right person at the right time.
  • tiborsaas 4y ago
    There are always people fishing IRL :) I'd argue that you have better chances compared to an app since you are there in person compared to a digital profile. It's more memorable. It always took practice to be good at this, but apps made a lot of people lazy so I'm not sure about trends.
  • m463 4y ago
    I suspect apps are icebreakers for people (arguably) not great at meeting people.
• carlmcqueen 4y ago
  This is an analysis should probably be read while listening to Dave Matthews Band Ants Marching. Really cool analysis and fun to see it written in R. Jerr Thorpe had an app that gave you your power back and tracked your phone info in a way you could have yourself for awhile but it became abandonware and started eating battery life so I took it off my phone. OpenPaths, that was it's name. https://www.jerthorp.com/openpaths https://www.jerthorp.com/openpaths
• snorlaxmorlax 4y ago
  I've often thought about it, but I'm not surprised that there is a way to figure it out with big tech involved.
• phkahler 4y ago
  >> Likely we had walked past each other every other week for three years with our heads down, or in the clouds, paying very little notice to the people around us. Or looking at your phone...
• miiiiiike 4y ago
  This is the cutest thing I've seen all year.
• elzbardico 4y ago
  Plot Twist: When google's algorithms decided those two individuals should pair, it started showing them ads for the same events in order to increase the probability of them meeting. The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI. The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.
  • literalAardvark 4y ago
    That's pretty disturbing, and not too far beyond capabilities. I think the biggest one missing would be that iirc a date going well seems pretty much random in dating service data, despite a fair bit of effort to find correlations.
    • eru 4y ago
      I don't think randomness would be an issue. Google already assume that people clicking (or not) on ads is a random process. Randomness is fine, just get enough smart people on it to learn about the distribution etc.
  • skapadia 4y ago
    That's some Black Mirror level dystopia there, and totally within the realm of possibility, if it isn't already happening. Sync that up with Apple Watch 8's ability to estimate ovulation, and poof, declining birth rate problem solved! I'm scared.
    • gambiting 4y ago
      Don't worry, knowing google they would build this just so someone could get their cushy promotion, then the whole thing will be abandoned within 1 to 2 years max. Corporate dystopia falls apart when met with the apathy at google, no problem.
      • hardolaf 4y ago
• bradlys 4y ago
  I’ve wanted detailed tracking for years. Something that logged my position every five seconds or something. I wanted this to be something that other people did too. Then we can decide to share histories and see when we ever overlapped or were near each other. For instance - I became close friends with someone this summer but it turns out we were both at the same events across the USA about 8 years ago. It made me wonder where else we had both been and hadn’t really spoken to each other. I’ve also wanted this to be a live feature as well where you can opt in to share your location and be like, “hey, Jim is just a block away. What a coincidence! Jim is usually 1500 miles from you.” As a way to run into friends you haven’t seen in a while. Another instance is that I had lost touch with a friend from years back. We had both lived in Seattle for years. I eventually moved to SF and was at an event. I stepped outside a few times to get air and on one of the times I did - I saw this old friend walk by on the street (it’s almost midnight - he was going to go home to sleep with someone). I call out his name and he’s in shock and awe. We decide to hang out for 30 minutes and decided that this was the sign we needed to reconnect. That happened about 5 years ago and we’ve been very close ever since. Sometimes I feel like these kinds of things would be cool to have. Or to do a prospectus and see a year ago - “oh interesting - that guy I gave a ride to five years ago was at the same restaurant as me… Huh - I wonder why we didn’t see each other?” The world is much smaller than we realize. I’ve run into people in small rural parking lots of grocery stores in random countries 8,000 miles away from where we both had known each other without any coordination. If I had been even 10s later in my actions - I would’ve never seen them sometimes. I have a lot of stories like this. Timing is everything!!
  • dav43 4y ago
    I've been recording my gps approx every 2 seconds or so for 18 months. Up to 1.2mil data points.I use Kepler.gl to map it. Its fun to see.
• trashtestcrash 4y ago
  I really like to know what software is used to create this blog post, the navigation is so good.
  • hownottowrite 4y ago
    Looks like Tocify to me http://gregfranko.com/jquery.tocify.js/ http://gregfranko.com/jquery.tocify.js/
  • channon36 4y ago
• nicgrev103 4y ago
  I hope you two never break up. Put this level of ability, rescources, time and effort into revenge and the results will not be pretty.
• zitterbewegung 4y ago
  This assumes that you would fallen in love if you met earlier which isn’t a good assumption. It is a fun exercise though and pretty cute to do.
• magicemoji 4y ago
  What a romantic girl. :)
• coolca 4y ago
  I really like the article layout of this website. It is something done by OP, or some framework that everyone can use?
  • channon36 4y ago
    Thank you! Its an html document that I compiled with R Markdown. Cosmo theme, with a floating TOC. :)
• thejackgoode 4y ago
  Interesting how sometimes it does not matter. You meet in spacetime. I would not have relationships with my wife, who is subjectively perfect, have we met earlier in our lives. We have discussed this on multiple occasions and the conclusion was definite.
• princeb 4y ago
  i guess the next question is of those 33 recorded instances (or 41.25 possible instances), how many people were around the two of them? if they were literally standing within arms reach of each other, but also within arms reach of a dozen other people, it may not be that interesting if they never connected. but if they were within 5 meters of each other, and there weren't anyone else within a 100 meters of the two of them, that would have been a pretty awful missed connection.
• gvedem 4y ago
  "There were doorknobs and doorbells where one touch had covered another beforehand. Suitcases checked and standing side by side. One night, perhaps, the same dream, grown hazy by morning." https://poets.org/poem/love-first-sight https://poets.org/poem/love-first-sight
• artec 4y ago
  Love is beautiful
• swyx 4y ago
  this is fascinating. i'd be interested in an anonymous dating app where i feed in my location and it matches me up with others... highly likely that if we like the same places then we might like each other (or at least, dating might be a bit easier)
  • amilios 4y ago
    There's actually a dating app with a similar-ish concept called Happn (https://happn.com/ https://happn.com/), which basically is Tinder but if Tinder only showed you the profiles of people you had actually crossed paths with in real life. Fun fact! Not exactly what you said but close!
• bitL 4y ago
  So this is how people get bombed based on phone metadata!
• donclark 4y ago
  Could this be an idea for an app? You can search your contacts and it will show location, date and time of when you were less than 20 feet from each other.
• ani-ani 4y ago
  The source is here, if anyone is wondering: https://github.com/channon036/how_fateful https://github.com/channon036/how_fateful It's an R Markdown notebook. I've been finding these to be a nice evolution on the literate programming concept. I also noticed the author has been responding in this thread but her account seems to have been immediately shadowbanned upon creation, seems to be a common issue recently.
• greyhair 4y ago
  My now wife picked me up in a bar in 1992. After we met, it was clear that we had been frequenting the same bars for about three years, and had attended many shows together/apart, but neither of us had any recollection of recognizing each other at any prior point. The shows were significant acts (for example, an ear bleedingly loud Bob Mould at the Green Parrot in Neptune NJ) that had to be the same show, could not possibly have been a different weekend with some common local band. But there you have it. No contact until she noticed me sitting at the bar watching a live band at a worn out dive bar/night club, and wanted to know what my T-shirt said. She was drunk. She was adorable. I was smitten.
• boredumb 4y ago
  What a gentlemen! How I used my new boyfriends tracking location to realize he spends almost all of his free time in one of our local gentlemen clubs!
• mikotodomo 4y ago
  > I’m glad to have gone down this rabbit hole because now I think about the 41.25 near-misses we had, where if an audience had been watching they may have been on the edge of their seats. On the 16th of August 2017, exactly one week short of three years before we would meet, we’re recorded at the same GPS coordinates in this spot where I frequently had lunch, near a coffee booth in the social sciences building. Did he just trot past on the stairs? Did he take a seat in the shade under the trees? Did we queue together in line for coffee? I guess Google doesn’t have the answer for everything. but it’s pleasant to imagine when we have our coffee together every morning that years before we may have silently enjoyed coffee near each other. This is very sweet. I hope by the time I get married I'm this good at coding, so I too could see all the times my husband almost met me! By then there might be cameras with years of accessible history scattered around the city.
• edumucelli 4y ago
  That is great, a big chunk of my Ph.D thesis was about evaluation people's mobility and identifying the routine behavior in our mobility. It is crazy!
• timtas 4y ago
  Feels like an elaborate scheme to normalize boyfriend geo tracking. :)