I believe this applies to a large segment of the population. Diction, tonality, and "vibe" have a big effect on how open recipients are to cold calls, at least according to my SDR friends.
OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.
Personally I'm just not open to cold calls, period, ever. Not ever
I don't actually understand why anyone would be. Please don't waste my time trying to sell to me. If I'm in the market for your service, I'll let you know
The problem with cold calls is that you expect random people to stop what they are doing and listen to an advertisement; often for something they don't want or need.
Whatever you interrupted is far more important to them than whatever you're selling; especially if you haven't introduced enough filters in your process to ensure you're calling the right people.
We should either ban cold calling completely or introduce enough friction to the process that cold callers are incentivized to more closely filter who they call. (IE, I get cold calls trying to sell solar panels. The caller knows my address, and can see the solar panels on my roof on satellite photos. They just shouldn't bother calling me.)
It's because there's an imbalance of cost: It's cheaper to just nag me than to actually research if I've already bought the product or are interested in the product.
https://mit6875.github.io/ - MIT's Foundations of Cryptography is publicly available with full lectures, lecture note pdfs, and 5 problem sets. It's very rigorous and proof-driven which can be hard at times, but the professor's enthusiasm for the subject is infectious and makes the lectures a pleasure to watch.
"Hey sorry, I've got some things on my mind right now and can't really talk. Have a nice day though".
That takes less than 10 seconds to say, let's you protect your time and peace of mind, and as a bonus there's no need for fuming, blaming, and judging that the other person won't ever even know about.
The people likely to talk to strangers unprompted are also likely to ignore those kind of messages. Anything that can lead to further conversation can be used (like "oh, what's worrying you?") so actually politely nodding and smiling without giving any footing to further conversation works better than being assertive.
I don’t think it’s false, much less obviously false. On one hand I have my personal experience about it, on the other you can see there’s only a small range in the “I want a conversation” scale where they want it enough to ignore the nonverbal signs that the person doesn’t want to talk but not enough to ignore the verbal ones.
This is 100% completely on you, then. If you don't inform people you're being interrupted or that what they are doing is bothering you, they have no data to telling them to stop, and any energy you spend on silently judging them or being frustrated is only harming yourself.
No, it's on you. You can stop before you even begin by simply not interrupt and bother people for no reason. You're creating a problem and then blame me for not stopping it.
You realize _anytime_ someone needs to talk to you would qualify as interrupting and bothering someone else? Your expectation is unreasonable. Good luck with that.
I'd highly suggest joining a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym. They tend to be filled with other computer nerds (although not only) and people are very friendly in a genuine way.
BJJ is very social because you can't train alone. It also mostly weeds out assholes because no one wants to train with jerks (usually there's a single gym in an area that ends up with all the jerks lol). The other thing that quickly forms relationships is that you're trusting other people not to hurt you and vice versa. Giving and receiving this trust tends to cause relationships to build quickly.
And yes, many gyms are filled with nerds. Once you get past the basics, it's very much a thinking sport.
One of my major goals for 2026 was zero LLM use for writing, however I've found it a bit hard at times because LLMs are exceptional for research. Oftentimes I find that in reading an explanation or report that ChatGPT gives me about a topic there will be small turns of phrase or even whole sentences that capture a concept way better than I can. I then feel obstinate not using a clearly superior option, so I'm curious if you've run into that tension and if so how you navigate it.
Honestly I don't have an idea. I guess the stuff I write about I know enough to get a good first draft out, preserving my voice. But if I read a first draft by an AI I think I would be influenced.
If its in a playbook, its already ineffective. Use your own creativity to do something that isnt scalable or in any best how-to guides or books is a good start
This nitwit brought EVs to the mass market! And build a re-usable spaceflight platform that even the most powerful nation states can't rival! And helped found the world's leading AI lab!
One could easily argue the opposite too no? That new generations are surrounded by the effects of the breaking down of gender roles, and are looking to the past/other societies for an alternate model.
I am quite sure that “break down of gender roles” happened so long ago that modern person doesn't really understand that the whole experience of the world is different in a different era or place. They picture themselves as they are, only in clothing they are familiar with from media products or history book illustrations.
Say, you are in a traditional agricultural society in less than perfect climate. Then you have to sweat your guts out working on crops as much as they need, each year, from childhood to the old age. It's not an option, it's not a choice. Illness or “feelings” are not an excuse. And then bad weather can turn the hard work of many months into almost nothing.
Say, you are in a traditional patriarchal family. It is a solid productive unit, not an association of “individuals”. If it is good, it's good, if it is bad, it's bad. Everyone shares the fate. Of course, there are many possible ways for the person to act, but the frame that define the common base for all actions is set in that manner.
Even more so, the description of people as “individuals” that have “feelings” have itself appeared not so long ago, in a specific age and place. Different ones need people who think differently.
A lot of it is pretty related to company internals and is tooling specific. At a large company there is a lot of infra and tooling that can break in all kinds of fun ways, quality is very mixed, so helping the team become experts in this is very useful for productivity and unblocking oneself.
I see people on other teams that seem to be stuck for days sometimes, on a really basic error that they haven’t really tried to debug at all. Seriously, just read the error message or dig into the code!
My team also has a strong culture of just pushing code changes. This is including tons of deletions and simplifications, it’s not just writing a million lines of code.
It’s also a very senior team, so I can’t take credit for everyone’s growth from junior engineers. Another part of it is creating an environment that productive senior coders want to join, so that they can avoid process-heavy teams and get stuff done.
There is an extreme level of trust on the team because everyone is senior and frankly extremely good at their job, which allows us to be even more productive.
OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.
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