A few things I do: I'll point something out, and ask a question. So if I'm in a shop I'll saying something like "I've never seen that before - is it popular?"
If I'm getting a coffee if the barista says "How are you?" Rather than just saying something non-committal I'll say "I'm good thanks, it looks like you're having a busy day/quiet day - has it been like this all day?" or I'll ask a question about the beans (if it's the sort of place they regularly rotate through different beans) or I'll ask what the music that's playing is, or something like that. You can immediately tell if someone wants to continue the conversation. And obviously, if it's busy I won't try to engage them in a longer conversation unless they seem to want to.
If I'm waiting for a bus or a train asking someone "Do you know if this one goes to....{destination}?" is an easy start - obviously, even if you know it does, and you want to talk to someone, it's a good start. And then you can say "Thanks, that's really helpful, I'm going to {destination} so that I can {do a thing}. How about you - are you going anywhere nice today?"
The key thing is knowing whether someone is open to a longer conversation. That's something you can only learn by pushing through the awkwardness of people shutting you down and turning away, or making it clear they don't want to talk.
But when they do, it's almost always very enjoyable, even if it's only a few minutes.
It's amazing the difference you'll find if you go to the same shops/places regularly and make the effort to exchange a genuine human interaction with the people you meet - they remember you, and they make an effort to do things to please you. That's not why I do it, it's a positive consequence.
I think the biggest thing is to have the conversations with people with no agenda. You're not trying to achieve something, you're just exchanging a pleasant interaction with someone, and hopefully you both leave feeling a little more connected to the world.
And always ending by saying something like "Well, it was nice talking to you! See you around!/have a lovely day/something".
If you can leave people feeling like you liked the interaction, you'll gradually feel like the interactions are pleasant.
What I've learned in the several decades of life I've lived so far is that your mood day to day is almost entirely dependent on how you interpret the narrative of your life, not what is actually happening.
You mention "having a kid, covid, war, etc."
But what else is happening in your life? It's impossible that every waking moment is 100% consumed by kids/wars/disease/economic collapse/etc. That's the narrative you are telling yourself. So change it! Tell yourself how lovely that flower is on the path over there. Tell yourself how nice the breeze is that wafts over your face. Tell yourself the color of the painting that hangs in your room is a lovely shade of orange. Tell yourself the smell of the soda in your cup is amazing and nourishing.
You may think I sound rather bananas right now, but this is all part of mindfulness training. I had to learn this, because years ago I was falling into a deep depression and consumed by panic attacks. I had gone on and off to therapy in the past, but this time I ended up reading a bunch of materials about mindfulness including the book Mindsight. It changed my life.
We tend to spend most of our lives on autopilot, nearly oblivious to the world around us and instead living in a fantasy we've constructed in our heads—sometimes a very dark fantasy. The way out of that is to become mindful: mindful of breathing, walking on a street, talking to a friend, writing a comment on Hacker News. =) It's not just about "living in the moment" — we're always living in the moment. The question is, do we notice that moment is even there? Are we able to slow/quiet down our inner cross-talk in order to perceive the world right in front of us?
Our powers of observation can be an incredible tool of rejuvenation and inspiration. We just need to focus on the right stuff. Needless to say, scrolling through social media is probably not the best destination for mindfulness. Informative, sometimes, entertaining, sometimes…but most certainly not where we should derive any real sense of meaning or purpose.
Anyway, apologies for the lengthy soapbox—this is just a topic I've thought long and hard about over many moons. Hope you are feeling better soon. :)
People always look at me funny for recommending it but How To Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk can be a big help for dealing with adults too. The main difference between a child and a grown-up in terms of how you talk to them is that the grown-up has a larger vocabulary, so you need to resort to tricks like "draw me how you feel" less often.
Although written with another purpose in mind, Never Split the Difference also emphasises over and over how to acknowledge what people are feeling without adding judgment.
The "code poem" at the beginning of the post reminds me of the "Bit Shift Variations in C-Minor" [1] by Robert S K Miles (chiptune music in 214 bytes of C; featured in the computerphile video "Code Golf & the Bitshift Variations").
I submitted a link[0] of a Twitter thread to HN[1] explaining how we do it.
I often see this question pop up, either in the form of someone wanting to freelance, or someone asking about how to deal with clients. That thread has a few pointers and could be useful.
PS: For context, I live in Algiers, Algeria but we have a presence in Paris, France. All of our clients are in Europe. We make bespoke machine learning products for enterprise at different degrees of maturity (from "I want in on the AI stuff" to "we have an in house data science team but we need help" all the way to "we are an R&D arm, specialized in artificial intelligence, of a major group and I co-invented something you used to get here, how can you help us innovate faster?").
I use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS, not for any nostalgia or legacy reasons, just because it's a full-featured and highly configurable word processor that I can use in a terminal. I only use it for writing letters and so on, nothing too serious, but I prefer to stay in the terminal if I can.
It works beautifully under dosemu2, which has a terminal mode that can translate various VGA modes into S-Lang calls (S-Lang is like ncurses, so no X11 required). I find this technically impressive and makes a lot of old DOS software indistinguishable from native linux software; stdin/stdout, parameters, host filesystem access, etc all work transparently.
It can import TTF fonts and print to PostScript, which I just pipe into ps2pdf and then handle on the host.
I'm not aware of any other full-featured modern word processor that can run in an xterm. I know about wordgrinder but it's very very basic. You could use a text editor, but it's not ideal for layout because it doesn't understand things like proportional font geometries - you need that to know how lines/glyphs will fit on the physical page when it's printed. You could write it in some form of markup, html, TeX, markdown, whatever, but if I'm just trying to format a document I prefer a word processor.
(Note: dosemu2 doesn't require virtual 8086 mode, so it works fine on x86-64)
I mention this every time this comes up but it's info worth spreading... "sshuttle", make any server into a VPN without VPN server-side software, this takes the pain out of doing your own VPN, gives you far more obscurity, lots of flexibility and in my experience it also performs much better - which I believe is due to the TCP deconstruct-reconstruct vs traditional VPN which does TCP over TCP. The only disadvantage is it's only for TCP (no UDP or multicast).
For routing all your internet it's as simple as this (on the client only, no server setup):
sshuttle -r user@1.2.3.4 0/0
That's it... server requirements are met by almost anything, you don't need root access, but it does need python, which most distros have by default. Now you can use your own little obscure server, yes it's not invulnerable a VPS provider can still look at you if they wish, but it's far less of a target than a purpose built consumer VPN provider.
It's also far more powerful for slicing up and mixing subnets or only routing specific targets ... for example unblock a specific site, but don't re-route other traffic:
sshuttle -r user@1.2.3.4 sci-hub.tw
[edit]
Minor issue worth mentioning, not to disappoint people trying this out - it's currently necessary to use the -x option to exclude the server itself from being routed on Linux, I think this is due to a kernel bug? which is a little annoying, hoping this will go away eventually. This is not relevant to BSD or Mac, although on Mac you have other kernel bugs to worry about in XNUs network stack.
sshuttle -r user@1.2.3.4 -x 1.2.3.4 0/0
[edit]
As "icelancer" has pointed out bellow, please note that using your own server ties your activity to your identity more definitively if you are the only one using the server and you pay for the server in your name. Not being a purpose built consumer VPN makes it a less likely target through significant obscurity, however in the event it IS targeted, it's uniqueness will make it easier to associate activity with you via the VPS provider.
> This also ties your identity to a provider definitively. That's fine, as long as you tell people that's what is happening. A good consumer VPN that isn't a garbage one offers plausible deniability.
If I'm getting a coffee if the barista says "How are you?" Rather than just saying something non-committal I'll say "I'm good thanks, it looks like you're having a busy day/quiet day - has it been like this all day?" or I'll ask a question about the beans (if it's the sort of place they regularly rotate through different beans) or I'll ask what the music that's playing is, or something like that. You can immediately tell if someone wants to continue the conversation. And obviously, if it's busy I won't try to engage them in a longer conversation unless they seem to want to.
If I'm waiting for a bus or a train asking someone "Do you know if this one goes to....{destination}?" is an easy start - obviously, even if you know it does, and you want to talk to someone, it's a good start. And then you can say "Thanks, that's really helpful, I'm going to {destination} so that I can {do a thing}. How about you - are you going anywhere nice today?"
The key thing is knowing whether someone is open to a longer conversation. That's something you can only learn by pushing through the awkwardness of people shutting you down and turning away, or making it clear they don't want to talk.
But when they do, it's almost always very enjoyable, even if it's only a few minutes.
It's amazing the difference you'll find if you go to the same shops/places regularly and make the effort to exchange a genuine human interaction with the people you meet - they remember you, and they make an effort to do things to please you. That's not why I do it, it's a positive consequence.
I think the biggest thing is to have the conversations with people with no agenda. You're not trying to achieve something, you're just exchanging a pleasant interaction with someone, and hopefully you both leave feeling a little more connected to the world.
And always ending by saying something like "Well, it was nice talking to you! See you around!/have a lovely day/something".
If you can leave people feeling like you liked the interaction, you'll gradually feel like the interactions are pleasant.
You don't need something big to say.
And having dogs helps a LOT.