mabcat

It's often said that to be outstanding, you should master two different fields then work at the intersection of those fields. For a lot of people the model of "real greatness" is Leonardo, who mastered about 7 fields.

To even get close to that you need to be the sort of person who changes fields every 5 years or so. I think this temperament is relatively fixed, perhaps because it's a feature of some kinds of neurodivergence. If ND and innate ability are both fixed, what you need to reach greatness is a bag of tricks like the author has so you optimise the many parts of personality and behaviour that are not fixed.

What I think is sad about modern times is, it's increasingly difficult and impractical to make a career change into a regulated profession. You can switch to CS, painting, or poker any old time. But if you're not a doctor by the time you're 40, forget about it. I bump into many people who are interested in medicine and would be great at it, but the switching cost is insurmountable. A shame because there's so much greatness to unlock at the intersection of CS, medical research, and clinical practice.

Closest name I can think of is "commitment and consistency". People tend to behave as they have behaved in the past, doing so is both a cognitive shortcut and a source of positive emotion. We go to great lengths to maintain consistency (see also: confirmation bias), and being consistent even in the face of conflicting evidence feels better than being inconsistent but right.

From Cialdini: "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."

VB was probably the charmingest language I’ve ever used, especially for GUI. It takes the cake for “rather complex runtime” though. As I recall, they bundled the entire VB interpreter into every executable. This seemed scandalous to me at the time.

Agree. Shimmer is currently in the "assume good faith" category and it would help everyone if commenters gave feedback and asked questions from this perspective.

From what I've seen of Shimmer, the rapid-fire negativity in this discussion is not warranted. I have run a mental health startup. Criticism is constant and highly energised, and it really wears you down after a while. I expect they're also copping it from established practitioners, their industry bodies, and various regulators.

I currently use Shimmer, I have used BetterHelp and TalkSpace. These last two are... not in the "assume good faith" category. Perhaps they could show up to HN for some "robust discussion".

The thing I would like from Shimmer is a policy and mechanism where if you stop accessing the app and showing up to coaching, they stop billing you. Of course this would be startup poison, businesses are built on subscription revenue from non-users. But only billing for care you provide is the strongest show of ethics and consumer-centering I can imagine. Especially when your client base is ADHDers! Shimmer, if you currently do this, put it on the front page in bold.

I know a nuclear physicist who got paid to go through the scripts and turn "CHARACTER: [insert science thing here]" into dialogue

It's an alternative, does a similar job, depends on/abstracts over langchain for some things. It's easier to use than langchain and you'll probably get moving much faster.

They've aimed to make a framework that starts concise and simple, has useful defaults, then lets you adjust or replace specific parts of the overall "answer questions based on a vectorized document collection" workflow as needed.

This works well overall, but some bits have kept me scratching my head for hours. Partly due to huge holes in the documentation when it comes to specifics ("plenty of examples but little documentation" another commenter wrote and I agree). Partly due to the frenetic release schedule, this project is highly active even by frothy LLM craze standards and interfaces change rapidly.

Overall recommend, LlamaIndex has helped me make good progress on my project

My situation somewhat overlaps with yours. I ordered a "water flosser" from everyone's favourite ecommerce site, and use it daily in the shower.

It seems to be doing something, and can't possibly be worse than my previous flossing regime which was: "twice a year the day before a dentist visit".

I wasn't willing to shell out for the name-brand water flosser, other options do the same job at the same water pressure for 1/4 the cost.

It took about a month to move up through the power settings. Start on the lowest and click it up when that starts to feel a bit tame.

I've now been using this thing for 6 months, it's just about time to find out whether I get my bi-annual nagging about the importance of flossing. My personal opinion: Cochrane's probably right, flossing is most likely bunk, but I'm pleased to have found a way to do it that I can stand

You do need to separate medium of exchange from store of value. Real estate is useless as a currency while being the primary store of value for most people. Most of your objections also apply to real estate: can't know how much wheat a house is worth, houses are notoriously illiquid, price discovery is difficult and quite opaque, the sector is rife with misrepresentations. I wouldn't go so far as to say fraud, but where does "real estate agent" sit on those polls of "most trusted professions"? Houses aren't even fungible!

And if anyone thinks BTC/ETH transactions are slow and expensive (me!), around here the gas fee on real estate transactions is ~5% with a 6-month processing time...

From the study, in-person schooling increases teen suicides by 12-18%. Is this fatality rate acceptable on the basis that it's "very necessary" to socialize the remaining children in this way? Is there evidence that kids in online classes wouldn't have "grown up"?

I find this line of thinking abhorrent. If it will reduce suicides by 15%, in-person schooling should be stopped outright until someone fixes what's wrong with it.

masto.host was an option yesterday, now it looks like it won't be an option for the next few days.

I was about to install self-hosted Mastodon but the machine load and amount of admin chores seemed too high. I've installed self-hosted Pleroma instead. Pleroma has 2% the DAU count of Mastodon, I'm starting to wonder if I'm missing out on the main experience, but I also don't want the main experience to be "server administration".

That's such a strange piece of UX. As a typical user, who on average consumes content rather than produces it, what I care about is that my list of followed accounts migrates with me so that my feed stays relatively consistent. As a content producer I would also care about my past posts migrating with me, which they don't. Having followers continue to follow me after migration is only the primary concern for the "influencer". I get that "my friends can still find me" is an important feature but who thought it was ok to skip the other two?

Thank you, against my better judgement I've set up a self-hosted Pleroma