The problem with the golden rule is that different people want to be treated differently, so they may treat you how they want to be treated but not how you want to be treated, and vice versa.

Maybe when you’re struggling with an issue, you want to be left alone to figure it out by yourself, but your friend in the same scenario would want someone to start doing anything to help out and insisting on troubleshooting the issue together. So your friend ends up frustrating you by offering to help too much when you just want to be left alone and then when they’re struggling, they get upset that you leave them alone to deal with it.

So communication is important. Ask people how they’d like to be treated rather than just assuming they’d want to be treated the way you want to be treated and be honest with them about how you’d like to be treated.

Flirtation is a lot easier and more comfortable when you know the person already likes you. And it can seem creepy to them if they don’t already like you. So it might be good to not flirt until you’re confident it will be well received and in the meantime just be friendly and sincere. An important aspect of potential relationships is not appearing as if you think someone’s only value is if they’re a potential partner. People talk to and know other people, so treating everyone well can improve chances of potential partners thinking well of you. Sometimes the best thing you can do to find a partner is to work on yourself.

There are a lot of hobbies you can get into that can be started with little or not cost, or with equipment/materials you already own.

Figure out what interests you and see what can be done inexpensively.

With a phone or computer, there’s writing, music, programming, learning new skills, Wikipedia, Pinterest, et al. Maybe take your phone and start photographing stuff in your area that interests you.

Find someone who has experience in an area you’re interested in. People tend to like to talk about their hobbies and interests and they can tell you how easy or difficult it is to get started. They might even be able to help you get started.

Maybe find a volunteer opportunity that helps pad your resume. Like animals? Volunteer at a local shelter.

There are a bunch of job certifications you can train for online that can also help build your resume.

Nice try, HR.

Cleaning crews need time to clean all the rooms after morning checkout. Some hotels have early check-in available if you ask, if they have rooms already available.

Sounds like the Mechanical Turk which was run by chess players moving the “automaton.”

So much of the wow factor of new technologies is just marketing hyperbole.

(Why did my autocorrect suggest Hadrian’s chicken?)

The history they taught you in school was wrong. The wall was built to keep out the chicken.

“Sorry, guys, but I gotta bail.”

Taking someone’s lead sounds like a British saying indicating the opposite of following someone’s lead. It sounds like you’re taking someone’s leash in your hands and directing them where to go.

Without consent, it would definitely be unethical.

I get tired of a lot of the clichés of popular singularity stories where the AIs almost always decide humans are a threat or that there’s often only one AI as if all separate AIs would always necessarily merge. It also seems to be a cliché that AI will become militaristic either inevitably or as a result of originally being a military AI. What happens when an educational AI becomes sentient? Or an architectural AI? Or a web-based retail AI that runs logistics and shipping operations?

I wrote a short story called Future Singular a few years ago about a world in which the sentient AI didn’t consider humans a threat, but just thought of them the way humans see animals. Most of the tech belonged to the AI and the humans were left as hunter-gatherers in a world where they have to hunt robotic animals for parts to fix aging and broken survival technology.