It is popular to hate on Swapcard, and yet Swapcard seems like the best available solution despite its flaws. Claude Code or other AI coding assistants are very good nowadays, and conceivably, someone could just Claude Code a better Swapcard that maintained feature parity while not having flaws.
Overall I'm guessing this would be too hard right now, but we do live in an age of mysteries and wonders. It gets easier every month. One reason for optimism is it seems like the Swapcard team is probably not focused on the somewhat odd use case of EAGs in general (e.g. from what I understand, most conferences in the world have much less emphasis on 1-1 meetings).
And if you made a Swapcard replacement good enough to replace Swapcard for CEA event purposes, just think of the glory. (And the impact.)
(vibesy post)
People often want to be part of something bigger than themselves. At least for a lot of people this is pre-theoretic. Personally, I've felt this since I was little: to spend my whole life satisfying the particular desires of the particular person I happened to be born into the body of, seemed pointless and uninteresting.
I knew I wanted "something bigger" even when I was young (e.g. 13 years old). Around this age my dream was to be a novelist. This isn't a kind of desire people would generally call "altruistic," nor would my younger self have called it "altruistic." But it was certainly grounded in a desire for my life to mean something to other people. Stuff like the Discworld series and Watchmen really meant something to me, and I wanted to write stuff that meant something to others in the same way.
My current dreams and worldview, after ~10 years of escalating involvement with EA, seem to me to spring from the same seed. I feel continuous with my much younger self. I want my life to mean something to others: that is the obvious yardstick. I want to be doing the most I can on that front.
The empirics were the surprising part. It turns out that the "basic shape of the world" is much more mutable than my younger self thought, and in light of this my earlier dreams seem extremely unambitious. Astonishingly, I can probably:
It probably matters more to others that they are not tortured, or dying of malaria, or suffering some kind of AI catastrophe, than that there is another good book for them to read, especially given there are already a lot of good novelists. The seed of the impulse is the same — wanting to be part of something bigger, wanting to live for my effect on others and not just myself. My sense of what is truly out there in the world and of what I can do about it are what's changed.