evklein

Haidt is first on my personal list of "people who don't really know what they're talking about but who I nonetheless mostly agree with." The "If Books Could Kill" show did a good episode about some of his works that indicate he has a fairly nonrigorous methodology and implements some iffy statistical controls to support what is probably a pre-conceived viewpoint. He doesn't have the best reputation in the academic space he operates within.

That being said, this stuff is hard to study, and I have no doubt that things like social media and AI are bad for a developing brain even if you can't arrive at a statistically satisfying conclusion. I can tell that this shit is bad for me, and I'm a fully grown man.

I don't disagree with your idea at all, just with the approach. I think if you exist within an environment where you can still thrive leeching off of an ineffective organization, and you're okay with this because you understand that they view you as an expendable asset, then the right thing to do isn't to just keep doing that; the right thing to do is find a better spot to work.

All of this is easier said than done, and there's lots of reasons to stay put and half-ass a good thing while you can. I can't fault anyone for making that choice, and I don't even really view it as particularly malicious. Just not something I can do and simultaneously go home feeling good about my place in the world.

Something the author sorta neglects to mention is that this makes you feel like shit, if you have any sort of conscience at all. Corporations largely don't care about individuals, and so maybe you shouldn't care about loyalty to your employer, but if you pride yourself on a skill or being able to do your job competently then doing mass time theft comes up with a nasty side effect; the time you spend planning trips or doing hobbies, or doing anything that you shouldn't be, isn't time that can be fully enjoyed. Additionally, you're taking a big risk, and you're opening yourself up to all kinds of scrutiny and potentially even losing your job if you're caught.

This is what I am seeing more and more of, both in tech online and in the minds of people around me. Despite peoples' innate curiosity of how LLMs work, they still don't understand at the end of the day that they are just models. Augmented with tools and more capable than ever, yes, but still a piece of math at the end of the day. To expect of it anything other than credible output is science fiction.

Not really, but I'm happy to share more here :)

In all honesty, under the hood it's a bit of a mess. I may have eschewed some of the software engineering best practices in lieu of building something quickly that I wanted. I'll get around to going back through and retrofitting the app with some cleaner code, but for now I couldn't even open-source it without a self-perceived hit to my portfolio.

The project largely started out as something else. I initially wanted a combined TO-DO list and journal. Rather than checking things off I would run the journal content through a local LLM and have it check things off for me based on what I wrote each day. That's yet to be implemented. Then I moved on to an "ordering" system - I was inspired by the way that medical practitioners put in orders once they determined a course of treatment, and thought that might be a useful model to help motivate me to get things on my list done more effectively. I built this, but have utilized it less than I thought. Since then it's mostly been focus on the integrations and scoring system. The whole thing is highly modular, so for each integration I grab a template for the visualization I want to build and then need to reason out how to get the data into the system, which usually involves an API integration, scraping from some online data source, and/or data engineering. It's very fun, because each integration module has its own challenges.

I built the app using a standard stack of .NET core, Blazor server, and the data is stored in SQL server and data operations are handled with EF core. I use the Radzen component library, which I like a lot from a developer perspective but it's challenging to retheme and I'm largely unhappy with the look/feel of the app. This is something I plan on getting to eventually.

Happy to answer any/all questions. It's such a personal, homebrewed app that I can't imagine anyone else would get as much use out of, but it's very powerful and I think the hobby aspect of it could translate to pretty much any other developer.

Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals.

So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect.

It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.

It's easy to live in shareable spaces when you're young and unattached - it becomes a lot more difficult as you age and want to grow a family. I'm not sure I want the kind of life where I have to share a kitchen or a bathroom, spaces I consider very private, with people I'm not related to. Maybe this is a uniquely midwestern/American sentiment, I'm not sure. But I am confident that there are more people like me than there aren't. The picture of the American dream is familiar, it's a house with a car in the driveway. I feel that may just be who we are now, regardless of any way we used to be.

Edit cause I had more thoughts: Honestly, probably one of the biggest mistakes we've made as a country have been not putting up enough resistance to RTO. The single family home is, I believe, probably one of the nicest standards of living in the world. Plenty of space for hobbies and activities, privacy, usually some community among neighbors. The only problem is that it's hard to square the circle when it comes to single family living and living close to an economic hub. To afford this standard you have to live close enough to a hub that you can afford one of the well-paying jobs that exist there, but not so far that your commute significantly eats into your life. With RTO, I think we lost a pretty good opportunity to weaken our dependency on the geographic economic hub. We could have had a diaspora of knowledge workers which gave people the opportunity to pursue a better life at a lower cost, and we sorta just threw all of that away.

Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms).

It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.

Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it actually is.

If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision making?

I'm imagining something probably horrible and fascinating at the same time:

You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.

A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.

Anytime I create a new cloud resource, I always wonder how catastrophic things would actually have to get for toggling GRS to _not_ feel like total overkill. If you're an infrastructure dev doing any work in the mideast, I guess you're gonna learn.

"Interests." I'd love to know what the price per barrel the U.S. has paid in the last few years when you factor in additional costs incurred due to involvement in Iraq and Syria.

I would imagine U.S. foreign policy, particularly the prolific use of sanctions contributes to this wane as well. There was some discussion about this a while ago - effectively as the U.S. continues to rely on a strategy of imposing sanctions against foreign adversaries, those adversaries increasingly reorient their economy towards non-U.S. economies such as Russia or China. The more the U.S. utilizes sanctions, the less effective they become.

You're still captive to a product. Which means that when CloudCo. increases their monthly GenAI price from $50/mo. to $500/mo., you're losing your service or you're paying. By participating in the build process you're giving yourself a fighting chance.

The way god intended