orasis

I didn't find the author's argument compelling. The "Hero's Journey" continues to be a useful model to understand both myth as well as an individual's growth into mature adulthood.

What brings you joy on a daily basis? I’m a black belt in Jiu Jitsu and as my mastery continues to deepen it just becomes even more fun and rewarding and I now have a global network of extraordinary people. It’s been well with the thousands of hours.

Many gym’s business models don’t work without subscriptions. Should they simply cease to exist or is it maybe a decent thing that customers subsidize each other?

This is an interesting result from a real world data set. It’s certainly got me thinking about how budget constraints might be best used with https://improve.ai.

For me, it was an intentional MDMA session focused on shame that spontaneously cracked open my self love. The result is extraordinary - I really don’t care what people think about me because I no longer need validation and “love” from strangers. I’m now free to fully express myself without fear and love others without judgement.

Another similar result from intentional MDMA use:

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-i-attained-persistent...

Thank you. I’m surprised that anyone read that part. Thank you for noticing.

Thanks so much for pointing this out. I’ll get that fixed!

We use XGBoost as the core learner for reinforcement learning at https://improve.ai despite the popularity of neural networks in academia.

With tabular or nested data a human has already done a lot of work to organize that data in a machine friendly form - much of the feature engineering is performed by the data schema itself.

When I was burned out in my late 20s, I wish someone had made me aware of MDMA-assisted therapy. This book is a nice introduction:

https://www.amazon.com/Dose-Hope-Story-MDMA-Assisted-Psychot...

A JSON array doesn't allow easily appending a row. JSONLines is a bit better.

async/await is FAR less error prone than explicit threaded concurrency.

I think we've done a pretty good job on the scoring side with a fast and simple to use API that runs in-process: https://improve.ai

It is now up on pypi:

https://pypi.org/project/improveai/

We’ll be updating the docs with examples over the coming weeks. Are there any specific use cases you’re interested in?

For our initial launch we decided to go with Python and Java. For the time being for other backend frameworks we figure people can fairly easily spin up a Python microservice. We are listening to the requests for other SDKs so thanks for mentioning it.

Wow, thank you so much. What a nice thing to say!

The inspiration comes from way back in the early 2000s. My team invented HTTP Live Streaming and there were a lot of performance sensitive places in the code where I was essentially making guesses on the values of buffer sizes, initial bitrates, etc and I wished that the variables could just auto-tune themselves in production.

I started working on this in earnest 7 years ago and this release is the result of countless hours of iteration and refinement. It means a lot that you feel like the API is good.

I'd love to learn more about what you're envisioning, you can e-mail me at justin@improve.ai or hit me up on Discord at https://discord.com/invite/mxtdJxfyRk

I hear you on the AI vs ML thing. I doubt the debate will ever be resolved, but the domain name is .ai so I went with that.

The reason to use a full machine learning model instead of a simple statistical model is three-fold:

1) The framework supports any arbitrary JSON encodable data structure as a variant, this includes nested dictionaries, lists, etc. A full ML model allows capturing the entire complexity of the data stored in the variant - numbers, strings, booleans, etc and those can even be changed and the model will still be able to predict performance.

2) A full ML model allows generalization across complex variants. So if later on you introduce new variants, it may already be imply some things about how that variant will perform. For the most part simple statistical models must learn each variant from scratch.

3) The models don't just seek to make decisions that are a global optimum, like you would do with A/B testing. They are seeking to find a contextual optimum given the current conditions. This type of modeling also requires the generalization that ML gives you.

Thanks! For updating variants remotely you can query them from a database or use something like Firebase Remote Config. We've intentionally separated updating variants from the decision of which variant to choose so that decisions don't block on network requests.

The machine learning models actually perform wonderfully on continuous variables, but for this initial launch we're having developers specify the increments of those variables manually, so you'd put in [10, 11, 12, ...]. Soon we'll also likely provide a 'Variant Generator' class that automatically hill climbs to find the best value. If that's something you'd like to have let me know and we can make it a priority.

Thanks so much! fixed!

Hi there, Justin here, the creator of Improve AI. I would love any feedback and feel free to ask me anything. Thanks!

What license is the MIT license itself released under? Can licenses be copied and modified willy-nilly or do you need to license a license?

I’ve been caffeine free for 10 years. It has greatly improved my ability to fall asleep and stay sleeping for ~8-9 hours.

When I’m underslept my mood is significantly worse. I am one of the most consistently happy people I know.

If I need a cognitive boost I take Alpha GPC.

When it comes to code, we’re all in over our heads. I can reason about significantly more complexity than most developers I know and it’s still laughable how little complexity I can manage.

That’s not really true. Consumers have a fixed willingness to pay and professional app publishers are good at discovering that number, so there really isn’t much passing costs onto the consumer.

If it is a safer, smoother driving experience it should be legal. The same with drifting across lane lines when appropriate.

“noise” is integral to all ML systems. You can view this through many lenses, but generalization can be thought of as decoding a noisy signal.

THANK YOU! I agree wholeheartedly! Downvote this comment into oblivion for providing little substance other than enthusiastic solidarity!

However, most services that are around for a long time experience bursty traffic so provisioning is still difficult.

Our minds are conditioned to operate from a place of fear. The fear feeling is real. The fears may even be founded.

The difference is whether you’re existing in the grip of that fear or thriving from a place of love.

You could try reading something like “The Mastery of Love” by Don Miguel Ruiz to get a taste, but the healing has to come through the body and nervous system. You can’t will your way through this.

Edit: Important note: The right antidepressant can help!

The bad news is it’s going to take a long time to heal. The good news is you can come back happier than you can imagine.

In an ideal scenario you would quit working entirely to focus on your health, but I’m guessing this is not an option.

You need to focus on the body first. The most important is sleep, but that is also difficult to address directly, so it’s best to focus on diet and exercise. You’ll likely have to design your entire day and week around these two things.

Try the Whole 30 program first. It’s a way of eating that eliminates inflammation causing foods. DONT TRY TO LOSE WEIGHT! Weight loss is important for overall health but you’ll usually sleep worse during a weight loss phase. That said you’ll probably lose weight naturally anyway.

Give up the alcohol for 30 days and consider weening off caffeine at some point since both of these will mess up your sleep.

For exercise, you just have to find something enjoyable enough to do at least 3x per week. It really doesn’t matter what it is as long as it makes you a bit sore. Consistency is key - don’t overdo it by jumping into something like CrossFit.

Lastly, WHY are you burning yourself out? Are you afraid of failing? Afraid of being broke? Afraid of being perceived as a loser? The WHY is a spiritual problem and may be addressed through meditation (slow), psychotherapy (slower), or psychedelics (fast but more risk). Until you resolve the WHY of your burnout you’ll likely remain stuck in this cycle.