Re: "apathetic about tech in general" -- At the org where I'm a member, we hired a former Maker Nexus GM and had him on staff for about a year. His proposal for an income stream from kids' summer programs never quite landed. And apart from events organized by members, there was little initiative to bring in outside events, partnerships, hackathons, or new members through the door. Our slogan was some nonsense about being the heart of Silicon Valley, and the our space was basically 90% vacant most of the time.

The now-defunct maker space I used to visit inherited a former general manager from Maker Nexus, he was very... apathetic about tech in general.

  - Places you visit often might be fundamentally antisocial: e.g., a gym where everyone wears headphones.
  - Tickets to popular events (AC/DC) are astronomically expensive and sell out long in advance.
  - Inviting people who you don't know well to smaller, local, less spectacular events tends to bore people.
  - If someone is your first local prospective friend, inviting them and only them out constantly can stress an already tenuous relationship.
  - Introducing people to each other may reveal that they don't enjoy each other's company, so now they're both less interested in hanging out with your group.
  - Your prospective friends might have no local friends of their own, so they depend on you disproportionately for all of their socializing.
  - Your prospective friends might not drink alcohol or enjoy hanging out in bars, so hanging out at a bar no longer feels very inclusive.
  - Some people have a tight budget and don't deal well with the perceived obligation to spend money when out with friends.

Any environment where you can meaningfully help each other: a group for new parents, a study group at school, joining a non-profit advisor board.

> Did you not make one single lasting connection (friendship) from that?

I made a lot of activity partners: people I could talk to about that topic, and maybe some adjacent topics, but who didn't have a lot of interest in making me a part of their life outside that general topic. They wouldn't join invitations for dinner, they wouldn't hang out outside the club's context, and they would eventually flake out.

On advice like yours, I started a niche club and ran it for 3 years. When people join your club, they're not there to meet you! They're joining to participate in the club. Now you're in the awkward position of responsibility as the club's host/organizer, with the additional distance between you and the other participants.

  > here in Switzerland

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son...

Lots and lots of well-sponsored AI meetups, especially in SF, but every single one I've been to has been 100% fluff.

  > I work on Bun and this is my branch
  >
  > This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
  >
  > I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.

The first is certification for high-growth jobs that exist as short-term accidents of history and policy-making. Think of the droves of people doing rote medical billing and coding, mostly as an artifact of the current state of the US healthcare system. Or think of an over-saturated nursing specialization.

The second role of education has been the lowest rung on the ladder to join a prestige profession, like medicine or architecture. It takes a significant chunk of your lifetime, and there are ingrained cultural expectations around the age at which you do it and what your future prospects look like.

A lot of people who fantasize about a midlife pivot have no personal history with any other profession, and mostly seem to aim for occupations that are easy to describe and get saturated easily.

Why make this assumption so confidently?

The arrival of the electronic computer did not turn human computers into programmers, it simply eliminated them en masse.