[volkk]

it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when

[tivert]

> it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when

I don't think this is a "trend," so much as the environment changing in unhealthy ways that we're not adapted for.

It's like a tree whose seeds will only germinate if the ground is just the right conditions, if the climate changes and those conditions no longer occur, it's not all the sudden going to start making seeds that germinate in other conditions. It's just going to fail to reproduce.

If the past, there was a lot more necessity to going out of the house, which has a lot of important side-effects, because you couldn't accomplish certain goals any other way. Technology provides easier and more isolating ways of achieving those goals, removing the necessity of going out. Now the needed side-effect are activities that require will, but people aren't set up as well to pursue them directly. That means most people won't do them or won't do them as consistently.

An example is exercise. Everyone got enough when there was no option except to walk everywhere. Now it's an option, so people are much less healthy due to lack of exercise.

[mikrotikker]

I went to a bar last week, it was like a sports bar except the TV screens were hooked up to consoles and the patrons were playing Mario cart etc, with more dedicated spaces upstairs on a mezzanine including a few PCs

[kevindamm]

one of my favorite hangouts in my neighborhood is a barcade that hosts only indie cabinets

[dpkirchner]

It's happening here, where I'm at (smallish city in the PNW). I've started going to a near-weekly board game meetup where we inevitably talk about more than games (computers, sometimes news of the day). It's not a large group but it's about the same size as the Linux/UNIX groups I participated in a few decades ago.

[ghaff]

You basically don't attend the public sessions at events to learn things you couldn't learn otherwise. At least keynotes are almost always streamed and companies give out very little in the way of datasheets and other printed information which is all available online anyway.

Yeah, there are breakout sessions, and they're a good way to have some focused time on something you're interested in. But anyone who regularly goes to conferences will tell you it's mostly about the hallway track.

[tshaddox]

I think it's trending that way, but there are still going to be niche interest groups where you're almost certainly not going to have enough other members in your geographic vicinity to have in-person meetings. In the 1990s if you lived in a 10,000 person town you'd be lucky to find 4 other people in your age group with such niche interests as, say, personal computers or video games. Obviously those two things are quite widespread now, but there are new things that are just as niche as those once were.

[strken]

I lived near a town of less than 2000 in the 90s and there were a lot more than 4 people in my age group who played video games. I had four kids in my class who were into computers enough to reinstall Windows, set up networks, and swap ISA/AGP/PCI cards with each other. I lived near a bigger "city" of 30,000 that had swap-meets and 200 person LAN parties, though I think they might have only gotten 50 or 60 participants in the mid-90s.

Might have been different for different age groups though.

[FirmwareBurner]

IRL events similar to E3 are still happening but worldwide and at a smaller scale. For example John Romero attended such an even in my insignificant EU country. It was awesome and not as expensive as E3 but of course much smaller so it couldn't cover as much as E3.

[otteromkram]

Totally not exhausted and please don't pepper that idea into HR's head.

If you need friends, feel free to do so outside of work. I'd be happy to meet up with you outside of work. Lots of folks in your area will.

But, let people who enjoy remote work continue to do so without trying to muck it up. Please.