elefantastisch

Great.

What I really want is mandatory opt-in to be able to contact me.

Unknown numbers get to send a single standard length SMS, carrier embeds the full legal name and, for businesses, legally registered mailing address, and I can choose whether to accept. If I don't, no other contact from that number is connected to my phone. Ever.

I can also report the message as unsolicited and every company's unsolicited contact stats are made available to regulators.

Grid-powered public transit replacing 80% of trips by personal vehicle.

Every year at Christmas, I get a card from a family member with a short, personal hand-written note and a 1-page, generic printed update on how their year has been, usually with some pictures.

This is what I want from a social network.

I want to be able to keep up some regular connection with people I don't see on a regular basis. I want us to remember each other, know about major life events, and have a convenient way to reconnect more personally when that makes sense.

For people I see (or want to talk to) regularly, I'll just send messages or group messages.

For more of the topic-centered type of internet community I may want in my life... well HN already does that perfectly.

Thank you, kgr, for writing and posting this. I find this a much more digestible summary of the topic than the other recent posting on Statistical Process Control.

This article seems like a good reminder to know what your fundamentals are and to be deliberate about picking them.

But I'm not convinced that this advice can be used to pick your fundamentals, your core business model.

Amazon opted for more choices and lower prices.

Barnes & Noble stuck with faster solutions to problems (get your book today not after a week of shipping as was common when Amazon started), deeper human interactions (you can go into the store and ask someone for recommendations, meet authors, etc.), and increased confidence/trust (you know what you're getting because you can hold it in your hand and read it before you buy it).

Low-cost carriers have moved in on traditional airlines because while it's true that people will never stop caring about added comfort, it turns out they care about lower prices much more.

But Apple built a staggering market cap relying on the assumption that while people care about lower price, they care about great control of your time (just works) and higher social status more.

So it seems like this article provides a good framework for thinking about your business, but doesn't give any answers as to the actual strategy you should use.

Or am I missing something?

Right, this is a values problem, not a technical problem.

Who should get to see Taylor Swift? How much should they pay? How should profits be distributed?

These are philosophical questions. If you assume a particular set of answers to these questions, designing the correct sales process is not difficult. But everyone has a different set of answers.

Judging by the majority opinion in this thread, it seems pretty clear GitHub could have asked and gotten enough people to opt-in to have no problem training their model. They probably would have been thrilled to do it and proud of being included in the training data.

But the preference of the majority does not override the conditions placed by people who prefer not to participate.

We have an even better example of mistaking the numbers for the whole picture. Becoming famous for winning obscene amounts of money greatly increases your chance of being harassed, murdered, or driven to mental breakdown. The expected value of a losing ticket (a chance to fantasize, enjoyment, etc.) is much higher than the expected value of a winning ticket (a lifetime of being hounded for money in increasingly desperate and violent ways).

Definitely this. I have been an Android user since my first smartphone. I've been a Gmail user much longer than that. I still to this day don't have the slightest idea what the distinction between Hangouts, Chat, and Messages (and whatever else I'm forgetting... Wave?) even is. Sometimes my new phone has an app called Chat, sometimes it's Messages, one time it was Hangouts... they all seem to be the same app to me.

So I just use WhatsApp.

Highly recommended book on this topic:

https://www.retrievalpractice.org/make-it-stick

Site seems overloaded. Internet Archive has a capture.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221028111744/http://simia.net/...

Idagio is a great alternative for classical.

Maybe I'm not the only one who resubscribes just for Great British Bake Off...

My understanding is yes, and honestly, this was my biggest sticking point with Obsidian. I'm happy to pay for software. I pay for Dynalist pro (same team for anyone who didn't know), but the separate commercial license on top of paying for sync just felt like a lot. Especially with commercial use being defined so broadly.

Fourteen days to trial just isn't enough to see whether it would be worth the cost to use for my own personal use at work. The Dynalist freemium model where I could use a smaller feature set for a longer time and then decide it was worth upgrading was just much easier.

Erica, would you consider a discount on add-on services for commercial subscribers? A 25% discount would put the price a bit closer to Dynalist pro and make it feel like I was actually getting something for the commercial subscription other than just permission to use it for work. Or maybe a discount for existing Dynalist pro subscribers?

I really love the work you all are doing, here and on Dynalist, just a bit hung up on the cost here.

This seems really cool, but I don't understand the use cases. Someone help me out?

Read through the thread. Look how many stories there are of people losing years and years to something that they now regret. The realization is that this is the norm, not the exception. We're all just fragile and fallible and trying to make our way through life as best we can, and we all end up messing up big somewhere along the way.

It's easy to look back on 10 wasted years and think you failed, you blew your one chance at life. But if you come to realize that looking back on 10 wasted years is actually a common human struggle, it can help you reframe your regret as just another one of the trials of being a limited, mortal human and not take it so personally as your own failing.

Idagio is really good for classical. Much nicer browsing than Spotify.

https://www.prestomusic.com/classical also has good weekly recommendations.

Are you worried that you're trying to solve a process/people/culture problem with a technology solution?

Is this right? Experts in software like Jest and Storybook think an hour of specialized consulting in the software is worth only $116? There's definitely a market opportunity if this is true, but it seems too good.

I do think there's a challenge in that... as a developer, paying $58 for half an hour that may save me 8 hours is a no-brainer, but this feels like a difficult thing to ask "the boss" to pay for. It gives off Fiverr vibes, and usually there's much more ceremony around billing contractors/consultants.

But if you pitch this to big business needing big support (a context in which this feels like a stupidly good deal), it may also drive up the price by changing the expectation from the ringers as to what they are providing.

I'm rambling, I know... I wish you luck. I'm definitely watching this space. It seems like you've found a definite potential market, but I think it's going to be hard to capture it.

It is, but I will accept this as a valid critique that I probably didn't make my original point as well as I could have.

Absolutely.

Josh W Comeau has a fabulous article about hands-free coding that I think every developer should read: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/hands-free-coding/

Everyone has a different optimum for sure.

As someone who types quite fast, if you haven't watched someone who types 20-30 wpm, then you probably haven't seen what a hindrance it can be.

Yes, thinking is more important than typing, but after you've had a thought, you need to see it "in writing" and execute it to evaluate it and see if it was a good thought after all.

Fast typists can go through many more iterations of that process in the same amount of time.

It has often been remarked by writers that writing is thinking. That you don't even know what you think until you write it. There is something very fundamental to the thought process that comes from actually recording the thoughts and seeing them "in print".

A good typist (which I'll call 100 WPM, a point beyond which I diminishing returns make further improvement less important) can do the writing-is-thinking process 4x more in the same amount of clock time as a 25 WPM typist.

The point is that Cloudflare thinks due process, not DDoS, is the right way to bring down horrible websites. Thus they protect them until such due process happens.

So, if someone is standing trial for murder and it turns out the evidence against them was collected illegally, they will end up getting away with it even if everyone knows they did it.

It's not that we value police procedure more than we value the life of the victim. We value rule of law and due process as a society more than any individual gap in applying justice in a given case.

Yes, if we ignore procedure and lock that murderer up anyway, we will have done better justice for the victim. But then we will no longer have a functioning criminal justice system, and that's much worse in the long run.

If Cloudflare allows DDoS to take down these horrible sites, the world will definitely be a better place in many ways. But then it will also be a world where we deal with problems via DDoS and whether you get to keep your site up or have it DDoSed is subject to the whims of Cloudflare. DDoSing sites won't be "wrong" anymore, it'll be a question of whether they deserved it or not.

This is not how we do justice as a society. If someone punches you in the face without instigation, we don't ask if you deserved it, we charge them with assault.

Cloudflare allowing DDoS of content they don't like would be a bit like allowing assault of people we don't like. Maybe there are some people we're happy to see punched in the face, but in the long run, our society suffers.

Protecting people from getting punched in the face, even when they deserve it, is fundamental to maintaining rule of law in society. Wrongdoers are punished after due process of law, not arbitrarily by any vigilante who decides to give them what they deserve.

That is essentially what Cloudflare is arguing.

They address this:

> Giving everyone the ability to sign up for our services online also reflects our view that cyberattacks not only should not be used for silencing vulnerable groups, but are not the appropriate mechanism for addressing problematic content online. We believe cyberattacks, in any form, should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

No they aren't. They are saying they would provide *security services* to these companies. They won't host it, but they also won't let it get taken down through cyber attacks. They are preventing vigilante justice against these companies, that's all.

Basically the same here. I looked for a way to report the issue to PayPal. There was no way to do it, so I just deleted my account and gave as a reason that PayPal didn't take fraud seriously if they didn't have a way to report / get advised on suspicious emails.

Oh well. Guess they don't care.

Genuinely curious where in the world taking home leftovers from a restaurant is uncommon.

I think this is somewhat similar to what I often do when I need to work on something and never seem to get started: Define the absolutely minimal next step very concretely.

Procrastinating on filing taxes. Next step is to log in to tax preparation app.

Procrastinating on cleaning office. Next step is to pick up a piece of paper off the desk and throw it away.

Whatever it might be, once I get to something absolutely concrete and absolutely doable... I can usually get started and make some progress.

It's much easier (for me) to procrastinate on "do your taxes" than "log in to tax prep app." Once it's that clear it's like... ok, why procrastinate on that?

I think something not measured here but potentially important is the amount of acquaintance contact people have.

If you imagine living in a time before high-speed travel and big cities, the people you interacted with day-to-day were basically the same throughout your life. Maybe you weren't "friends" with these people, but just in order to live your life, you would inevitably be bumping into people that you had known in some capacity for years.

Nowadays when we go shopping or for a haircut or whatever, we are mostly interacting with basically anonymous people that we are unlikely to remember even if we do ever see them again.

The level of loneliness we can manage to achieve now seems quite a bit higher than when no matter what you do, just to get food to eat, you're going to have to go see someone who've you known for a decade and make small talk.

Probably not saying this well, but when I imagine day-to-day life in a small village, this seems like one of the most significant differences. It seems like it would be hard to ever go a day not interacting with other people that you knew in some capacity. Now it's so easy you might not even notice when you do it.