Todays https://ripplegame.app/ had an interesting connection to this topic...
It seems that once again striving for efficiency in society is bad in some way for the social part of humans...
Readit Newskruffalon commented on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? · Posted by u/publicdebates
kruffalon commented on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? · Posted by u/publicdebates
There are, of course, multiple causes for loneliness. We can't fix them all with one clear action. Here are the main five, in my view:
First, social media. It's too easy to temporarily forget about your loneliness by staying home and doomscrolling or watching TV.
Second, increased mobility. People move around the whole continent now for work, removing them from their closest and oldest social connections.
Third, God is dead. Churches as community centers are dying out. Young people don't trust them anymore, because they don't believe in God, and because churches had many scandals. Secular community centers are very rare and struggle with funding.
Fourth, work is more stressful now. There used to be more time to socialize, but in our quest for productivity, work became denser with fewer idle times.
Fifth, fewer people want to have kids. Much has been written about this.
Now what can we do at societal scale? First of all, study the phenomenon more closely. Who is lonely? Who isn't? Which interventions work? Which cultural factors are important? At your local scale, you can just call or meet a friend.
> Fourth, work is more stressful now. There used to be more time to socialize, but in our quest for productivity, work became denser with fewer idle times
The we here is not most people.
The quest for higher productivity is not something people really care about.
kruffalon commented on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? · Posted by u/publicdebates
The US is structured to promote loneliness.
If you want to fix it:
- More free public spaces (parks with benches, squares)
- More free public events and activities (free concerts, art installations, plays)
- Greater physical proximity (it's hard to make eye contact if everyone drives)
- Wealth distribution (create a society where one's value is not based on their net worth)
- Encourage days off for community service
In other words, provide socially-funded incentives for people to be close to one another physically and remove income as a measure of value.
Unionize! Unionize! Unionize!
So much of the pressure comes from horrendous working conditions from top to bottom.
And as a secondary effect unions require meetings and hopefully cross organising with other unions having different people in them.
When we get better working conditions, we will have more time to meet other people rather than to sit exhausted with our phones having all the parasocial relationships that drain our social batteries without really connecting with a real person.
This is a meta-game. I got curious about related topics in game theory once and found out about [1,2]. There are also a few papers directly trying to study calvinball and so-called minimal-nomic. It's pretty crazy how little we know theoretically about this stuff, considering how relevant games with dynamic rules actually are for daily life.
Of course, there's probably no clean solutions in this space short of lots of sims. Regardless of whether new agentic stuff works for everything else in AI.. agent-based modeling seems likely to benefit from some kind of renaissance and that should be really interesting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_economics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
(I have not read your links)
What do you mean by "solution" here?
Wow, I'd visit play.net from time to time to get that nastalgic dopamine hit. Sad to see that's gone.
LLMs could really make this genre incredible. Too bad they probably don't have the funding to do something with it.
No, they could not actually.
The important thing is to relate to other humans and to be sure of what kind of human you're interacting with: the creators of the game or other players.
The staleness that actually "shipping once"[0] gives is precisely the space where human player creativity grows and thrives in.
---- [0] I understand you can get the similar results and better base games if you patch things occasionally, but constant patches[1] hides the jank and repetitiveness with novelty.
[1] And dynamically creating "content" with LLMs is like a constant stream of patches.
What are the rules? What did it teach you?
They have evolved to the general idea that it is always OK to just walk away :)
They started as: Books have to something interesting every 50 pages. And with interesting meaning something I want to know more about. Pretty low bar!
So many... In different ways, but the one that changed me the most profoundly was "The mists of Avalon" by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
I read it as a depressed 15yr old, in a time when I read everything I could get my hands on. From cover to cover. Often doing nothing else but going to the bathroom, eating and sleeping from exhaustion once I started a book until it was finished.
This book was so bad that I gave myself rules so that I wouldn't waste another 900 pages of reading on something so utterly uninteresting.
It made me suspicious of text and stories in a way that nothing else has.
I'm still grateful for having read it, it did teach me something.
Thank you for reminding me <3
kruffalon commented on UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/vekerdyb
This looks like an interesting comment, to me
But I'm having a hard time parsing it.
Is it a quote? Who is Moxley?
Where do the different statements begin and end?
kruffalon commented on How we lost communication to entertainment ploum.net/2025-12-15-comm... · Posted by u/8organicbits
I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back.
At some point I realized those people were just like that.
I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.
We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
Docker for humans!
It would be great to see some home made efforts now with so many amazing off the shelf bits of tech and 3D printers.
The site is also a nice compliment to the Technology Connections series on old pinball machines [1].
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg
Then my mother found out about me "stealing" all that cardboard and my days of pinball manufacturing where over...
Honestly one of the happiest weeks of my life!