Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/06/08/531796329/eager-to-burst-his-own-bubble-a-techie-made-apps-to-randomize-his-life

by ZeljkoS • 9 years ago

410 143 9 years ago

npr.org

ZeljkoS• 9 years ago

Max's randomized living apps: https://maxhawkins.me/work/randomized_living.html

throwaway2016a• 9 years ago

This 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• 9 years ago

Yeah 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.

628C6l03• 9 years ago

say 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• 9 years ago

Random dinner location is certainly worth a try, for dipping a toe in the shallow end, so to speak: http://www.restaurantgenerator.com

passivepinetree2• 9 years ago

Similarly, Netflix randomizer sites already exist. I've had good experiences with https://netflixroulette.net/, for example.

tswartz• 9 years ago

I 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/

clamprecht• 9 years ago

See also, 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• 9 years ago

Link to comic: https://xkcd.com/426/

lolc2• 9 years ago

Well 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...

AndrewOMartin2• 9 years ago

How do you know when someone isn't on Facebook? ;)

twothamendment• 9 years ago

Is 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".

AndrewOMartin2• 9 years ago

... They'll tell you.

reustle• 9 years ago

I 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

dopeboy• 9 years ago

That'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• 9 years ago

If you followed a crowdsourced script wouldn't that essentially just be "twitch plays pokemon" for real life?

jimjimjim• 9 years ago

crowd sourced... boaty mcboatface.

33W• 9 years ago

Reminds me of a "game" some friends would play in the early days of turn-by-turn GPS.

"Garmin Knows Best", where you input a location and follow the GPS exactly. Driver beware.

giggles_giggles• 9 years ago

Michael, that's a lake!

notdang• 9 years ago

Just stay alert, in some parts of the world it can end tragically: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/07/british-woman-...

corobo• 9 years ago

Oh damn wait, she made it? I read the article with the context "it can end tragically" - I love reading the news when the twist is someone survives.

jpatokal3• 9 years ago

What does accidentally making a wrong turn into the bad part of town and getting carjacked have to do with the original article?

driverdan• 9 years ago

I 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?

distances2• 9 years ago

Someone built a similar thing a couple of years ago to get random things from Amazon: http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-...

dogruck• 9 years ago

Max should meet Luke Rhinehart -- The Dice Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man

agumonkey• 9 years ago

I have to finish that book. Very nice first half.

clarebear• 9 years ago

What is the chance that would happen? ;-)

lukerhine3• 9 years ago

Pretty good actually. Just write me at lukec@taconic.net or comment on one of my Facebook pages.

Kaibeezy2• 9 years ago

just 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• 9 years ago

This 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'.

Kaibeezy2• 9 years ago

also "Six Different Ways" by The Cure

1337biz• 9 years ago

... there is only one Dice Man and, tickery ticker tock, that's not him.

lukerhine3• 9 years ago

Thank you. To be mentioned in the same breath with the Orange Man is enough to ruin my day.

lukerhine3• 9 years ago

I'm really quite meetable. Just drop me a line at lukec@taconic.net or if you use Facebook you can contact me there.

simmons• 9 years ago

This 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• 9 years ago

protip: do this before having children, as it will be virtually impossible after.

SubiculumCode• 9 years ago

What, 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? :-)

joezydeco2• 9 years ago

Speaking as a parent: children are excellent life-randomizers by default.

coldtea5• 9 years ago

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.

That's part of it. Another part is that, even if everything you see is novel everyday, if you are 1 year old, a year, e.g. getting to 2 years old is 100% increase in your life experiences. Getting from 31 to 32, not so much. It gets exponentially less, to the point of going from 40 to 50 a mere 25% extra lifetime for a whole decade. Whereas a decade when you're 1 is 10x more lifetime.

nazgul17• 9 years ago

I get the math, but the reasoning feels unjustified: why should we assume our brains work that way? It would make sense if we remembered the same amount of stuff every year, but reality is, you have fewer memories of the past.

I am on the "routine makes every day the same and days just pass unnoticed" camp.

throwanem3• 9 years ago

The world will do this for you if you let it. Drive less. Be on your phone less. Do anything else more.

owenversteeg2• 9 years ago

Ah, 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?"

yebyen2• 9 years 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...)

owenversteeg2• 9 years ago

When 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.

Eduard• 9 years ago

What if the algorithm chooses a destination you cannot go to (for reasons such as visa, vaccination...)

thebigspacefuck• 9 years ago

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God"

628C6l03• 9 years ago

i'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• 9 years ago

Everyone has their own way of randomizing. You like spreadsheets, that guy likes creating an app for that. Big deal? To each his own.

cbcoutinho• 9 years ago

But 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?

628C6l03• 9 years ago

take 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.

maxhawkins3• 9 years ago

If you want to try this out check out my Facebook group, The Third Party:

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.

a3_nm• 9 years ago

Looks like a great idea! Pity that it is not possible to see anything on this page without a Facebook account. :-/

aembleton• 9 years ago

Looks good. Why do I have to sign up to your mailing list to continue though? I just want some random events.

Tade02• 9 years ago

Great 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• 9 years ago

Come to Sweden!

michalskop• 9 years ago

Czechia. 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

Tade02• 9 years ago

Two of my friends moved to Prague just recently. I heard it's weirdly expensive.

narrator2• 9 years ago

This is the plot of the indie movie called "Buggaboo": 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.

distances2• 9 years ago

It's a good movie.

Score 5.2 in IMDb disagrees.

narrator2• 9 years ago

Well, just my personal opinion. YMMV :)

ghosttie• 9 years ago

So basically diceliving

dubin• 9 years ago

Anyone 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/

icebraining• 9 years ago

It said I was a trailblazer. Doesn't sound like me at all. I guess not being American might throw it off.

avip• 9 years ago

Inspiration from Borges maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon (it's in the highly entertaining Ficciones collection)

et-al2• 9 years ago

To 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• 9 years ago

Spot 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• 9 years ago

That's why I ditched the Spotify recommendation engine and started letting other people pick music for me: https://www.jqbx.fm

throwaway911112• 9 years ago

To be fair, you can get "true randomness" with apps (spotify particularly) too; it's just something you need to proactively do.

SolarNet2• 9 years ago

This is why I subscribe to internet radio instead. It's cheaper and has better discovery features. For example di.fm

toomanybeersies2• 9 years ago

I've found a lot of great new artists through Spotify's discover weekly.

maxhawkins3• 9 years ago

Check out my Daily Random playlist on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/user/machinebrother/playlist/6p21dR...

It updates with 30 random songs every day.

toomanybeersies2• 9 years ago

The 'old way' is exactly how I traveled Vietnam. My and my friends didn't have any plans at all, all we had booked was our first night's accommodation in Saigon. The rest we planned from talking to people at hostels, we ended up with a big group of about a dozen of us by the time we got to Hanoi.

In my opinion, it's the only way to travel.

I have never understood planning in advance your entire holiday down to the hour. I guess it's more important if you're American and only get 2 weeks of holiday a year.

dfmooreqqq• 9 years ago

When I was in grad school, this is how I traveled each summer with my brother and cousin. We'd pick a country and have our first night (maybe a couple of nights) accommodations picked out and then let the feel of the day guide us. Some of our best times were with random people we'd meet at the hostel and then travel around with for a couple of days before going our own way.

YouKnowBetter• 9 years ago

I am >50 with grown up kids: this is how we spend our holidays and we get not much more then the "American 2 weeks". Planned is just the timeframe & means of transportation, the rest is pure accidental. We run in to the most boring places and move on, we hit the most surprising gatherings, fall in love and stay. Whatever happens we decide on an hourly basis what to (not) do next, exactly that what we cannot do in our daily lives. We find that it takes on average 3 days to completely reset from city slickers to travelers: hygiene rules change, food preferences, clothing & make up, luxury requirements, sleep rhythms & most of all the perception of time.

vosper2• 9 years ago

On the flip side, having just spent a year traveling to 18 countries - including most of SE Asia - the internet has made travel a hell of a lot easier (I've done it pre-internet, too). My wife is vegetarian, so rather than wandering around trying to find something she can eat in Vietnam (one of the least veggie-friendly countries we went to) we can do a little research on TripAdvisor and know where we're going for lunch and dinner. Likewise, with a few hours working on the laptop we can book several weeks worth of flights and accommodations, and not have to worry about that anymore. I think you end up with a lot more free time because you can take care of the necessities so easily.

Why take a tuk-tuk to a waterfall that might not be there (that sounds like what you'd call a scam, to me) when you can take a tuk-tuk to a waterfall that definitely is there?

galfarragem2• 9 years ago

Because "life begins at the end of your comfort zone." -- Neale Walsch

Some people travel for sightseeing, others for personal growth.

3131s• 9 years ago

Why take a tuk-tuk to a waterfall that might not be there?

Because if it is there, it will be pristine and untouched save for the few local people that know about it. And meeting the locals might be more interesting than meeting the other tourists at the crowded waterfall on Trip Advisor.

brightball• 9 years ago

My wife and I bought an old RV last year and that's exactly what we've done. We plan a general route and make sure we have stops lined up...and just explore. Do whatever looks interesting along the way.

johnfn• 9 years ago

I agree with the substance of your comment, but these types of comments would be much more effective if you dropped the superior air that you treat the people you're conversing with.

et-al2• 9 years ago

Thanks for the critique. (Admittedly, I did roll my eyes pretty hard at the original article, so I could've tried more to reduce that tone. Cheers.)

moneytalks• 9 years ago

The article strikes as very Anglo-centric and the worst of first world problems with a solution that is both condescending and out-of-touch.

His problem was the monotony of life and a feeling of being basically too secure and too happy.

With all the homeless shelters, soup kitchens and other places where people have tremendous need within a short Uber ride, it just strikes me as odd to devote so much time to building first world toy to take you far away.

Want to live and feel like your life has a purpose? Volunteer or pick a random needy person to send on the trip Europe. Give them a camera and hope they bring you back some pictures.

I know this is an unpopular perspective, but when your job and life isolate you from the suffering and need (and risk and danger) around the corner, then the answer shouldn't "build me an app so the world can dance for me. Dance, world, dance! I'm boooorrredd."

Hell, build an app that actually helps more than one person. The irony of ironies was acknowledging his white privilege while being clueless to the larger Western-world-privilege and too-much-disposable-income-privilege.

Bahh. By all means travel. By all means make apps to entertain yourself. But do we need an national news agency covering the guy who got bored with life so found a way to make it work harder to please him? And what the hell, NPR, really? The guy who burns tons of CO2 cause he got bored -- no environmental impact assessment?

And don't get me wrong, the guy sounds like a good guy. I'm sure he's friendly, sociable and all the good things.

galfarragem2• 9 years ago

It's more positive to see this app as the way he found to get courage to change his life. Paradoxically he is still following rules..

maehwasu• 9 years ago

Life is way too short to spend in soup kitchens worrying about how much and what form of privilege you may have.

throwanem3• 9 years ago

All the good things you're not being right now. Why? What does the contempt help, do you think? Why do you think it helps at all?

JoshMnem• 9 years ago

I worked in the hostel industry for a long time. In "the old days", it was ridiculous to even travel with a cell phone. Laptops made no sense unless you had to work remotely. (I'd argue that they still don't make sense while traveling unless your work requires a laptop and you're going to work on the road.)

These days, the common areas of hostels are full of people staring at glowing screens, while hostel managers try to figure out how to get the guests to interact...

cannonpr• 9 years ago

Feels to me like romanticising certain experiences more than they have merit. Yes I've also traveled before the Internet, and frankly we just sought information from books and locals or friends that had gone before. In some ways collecting the information was slower but less prone to gaming via online methods/interests. There were also several regions where taking the tuk-tuk to the non existent waterfall was a pretty good way to end up in very bad to your physical safety situations, and burdening the locals with bailing someone one out of their own 'exploration'. Saying this from having to rescue several brits from risk of death from dehydration and sunstroke.

aninhumer• 9 years ago

I think this romantic view of bohemian travelling is also betraying a certain amount of privilege. It's a lot more comfortable to wander where the world takes you when you know you have money to throw at problems if you really get in trouble.

Not to mention, people who frantically try to optimise their time on holiday do so because it's the only week off they can afford this year, and they don't want it to be wasted.

ensiferum• 9 years ago

Yes indeed, this is the "app" equivalent of backpacking.

I did 3 backpacking trips (total around 27 months) back when smartphones weren't prevalent and it was (and has always been) mostly about trying out weird shit (such as fruit picking) going to places and meeting (loads) of people.

Sadly even that is probably changed now and I bet that the modern hostels are places were people stay in isolation and stare at their phones instead of socializing with each other ;-(

user432468• 9 years ago

NPR 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.)

yttrium• 9 years ago

Really? 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.

SolarNet2• 9 years ago

he dresses well, has good hygiene, is educated, well off, and speaks politely

Have you seen the videos of two people, one white, and one black, who are all those things being treated radically different by various different groups?

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf5TEoo-EY0

It may not only because he is white, but it is a significant part of the equation. Let alone the socioeconomic things that cause educated and well off to be things that white people have greater access to.

monksy2• 9 years ago

They've got to inject politics when they can.

I mean, sure it can't be other factors (such as social conditioning, how much does he pose a threat, that the party people were actually pretty open). /s

The whole bringing up race is silly. If it is about race and they mention it, they should also be aware that one of the places this took him was in Iowa. His skin color would pose issues in particular neighborhoods in Chicago. They would be less willing to inviting him in or treat him with hospitality.

jonbaer• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism

bartread• 9 years ago

My 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• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

like John Cage

rnprince• 9 years ago

Reminds 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.

jpatokal3• 9 years ago

The Degree Confluence Project is an interesting version of random travel: people visiting arbitrary lat/long intersections.

http://confluence.org/

Mz• 9 years ago

This "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.

coldtea5• 9 years 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.

ryandrake• 9 years ago

Not 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• 9 years ago

luxury != personal growth.

barsonme• 9 years ago

some people use apps, others of us have ADHD that works just as well :-)

gehwartzen• 9 years ago

The 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• 9 years ago

Just imagine someone hacking into this algorithm

zoom6628• 9 years ago

Brilliant 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.

somberi2• 9 years ago

To quote NY Times - "Algorithms lead us to Anagrams"

zer0th• 9 years ago

I'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• 9 years ago

If 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.

monksy2• 9 years ago

I'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• 9 years ago

I'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• 9 years ago

I 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.

Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life

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