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orasis

2,094 karma · joined December 31, 2012

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orasis··on AI is going to kill app subscriptions
This is a terrible take. Competition in the app space is competition for distribution/attention. Subscriptions are just how apps convert that attention to dollars. Consumers almost never price shop apps.
orasis··on Tao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
This is most likely a copyright violation. I follow these translations and I’ve seen no evidence that the publisher put it in the public domain.
orasis··on Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew
Is this translation public domain?
orasis··on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B
Of course. Apple removes their cut first before paying out. I’m in the US.
orasis··on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B
As a professional iOS app publisher, I feel 15% is fair.
orasis··on New tools and features in the Responses API
Reasoning models can now call tools during the reasoning process.
orasis··on Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
There have already been class action lawsuits against both Apple and Google that have paid out to developers so who knows.
orasis··on Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads
App Store ranking is determined heavily by install volume.
orasis··on Intentionally Making Close Friends (2021)
This could be. At this point in my life I doubt I’ll become close with anyone who is incurious about psychedelics as there seems to be a strong dividing line in mindset between pre-psychedelic and post-psychedelic humans.
orasis··on Intentionally Making Close Friends (2021)
Do it during the day, properly dosed, don’t mix with alcohol, and get plenty of sleep that night and this is not a problem. The MAPS studies have shown this again and again that the Tuesday blues is related to partying and not intrinsic to the medicine.
orasis··on Intentionally Making Close Friends (2021)
Before I tried this process I would have agreed with you, however, we focus on longevity when it’s really intimacy that leads to deep lasting connections. It’s just that with the decades long friendships there is more time and opportunity for intimacy, vulnerability, and going through some shit together.

MDMA + the 36 questions is deep intimacy, vulnerability, and often going through some shit together.

We’re also not seeking friends to do MDMA with. On a few occasions, we’ve met interesting people that there is a strong initial spark of connection with and let them know about the practice. These friendships are now very deep and loving even if only a year or 3 old. They are anything but shallow.

As for short lived, only time will tell, but even if they were to end tomorrow I will have deeply cherished the present experience of these connections. I have one 10+ year friendship that is fading and while it breaks my heart from time to time, I still love this person and would do it all over again.

orasis··on Intentionally Making Close Friends (2021)
I will second using “the 36 questions that lead to love” to create close connections quickly.

Combine this with MDMA to supercharge the intensity and speed of connection. This can also be done with a group of 3 to create a tight group that instantly has each other’s backs.

orasis··on Apple Intelligence comes to Apple Vision Pro in April
I haven’t found much use for AVP besides watching movies on an airplane.
orasis··on Ketamine for Depression: How It Works (2024) [video]
The low dose lozenges very rarely lead to negative experiences.
orasis··on 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says
On a larger level, if the active & skilled people are taking the deal, doesn’t it mean they’re likely moving on to something that is a better fit and thus good for society anyway?
orasis··on Lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)
It’s best for immediate rewards. If you have delayed rewards there is a paper on sampling from the “delay distribution” that solves this.
orasis··on Lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)
lol. My first MAB implementation also used HyperLogLog for tracking unique conversions. We over engineer alike it seems.
orasis··on Lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)
Having significant experience with bandits in production, I strongly recommend only using them for immediate feedback. If the rewards are at all disconnected from the action you likely won’t be happy with the results.
orasis··on Lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)
Thompson Sampling is trivial to implement, especially with binary rewards. ChatGPT can do it reliably from scratch.
orasis··on Lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time (2012)
Check out improve.ai if you want to see this taken to the next level. We combined Thompson Sampling with XGBoost to build a multi-armed bandit that learns to choose the best arm across context. MIT license.
orasis··on Agent Graph System boosts GPT-4o multi-step function calling success rate by 4x
TLDR; They only pass in the valid functions for a given state rather than all functions. It’s just function calls that update a state machine.
orasis··on Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization
This is absurd. There is just as much AI low hanging fruit today as there was mobile low hanging fruit 10 years ago as there was web 10 years before that.
orasis··on Ask HN: How to Price a Product
Start with reading Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers.

You’ll gain wisdom in a few hours that takes most entrepreneurs decades to cultivate.

Basically you need to see pricing as just a single variable in the offer equation with the goal being to craft the perfect overall offer and not just focus on price.

orasis··on Perplexity's grand theft AI
Isn’t it ironic that journalists themselves aggregate content in a way that discourages the reader from clicking through to the primary source?

This type of summarization and aggregation seems to be exactly what consumers want.

orasis··on Sora: Creating video from text
Master the tools to create value for other humans and you’ll be just fine.
orasis··on The dating app paradox
The problem with dating apps is that most people on there are looking for validation and dopamine hits, not actual dates.

The value of the dating app for most people is the dopamine hit they receive upon getting a new connection and the expectation that when they open it again they might see someone new and interesting. Once they’ve gotten the validation of the match there is very little reason to move forward with an actual date.

orasis··on Introduction to Thompson Sampling: The Bernoulli Bandit (2017)
It can learn faster and generalize learning to unseen variants by learning the impact different features have on the conversion rate.

It can also learn how different variants perform in different contexts.

orasis··on Introduction to Thompson Sampling: The Bernoulli Bandit (2017)
I built a contextual bandit combining XGBoost with Thompson Sampling you can check out at https://improve.ai
orasis··on Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union
We wouldn’t drop our prices for an alternate store - we already know the user’s willingness to pay - we would either increase our margin or increase our ad spend at the same margin. The big winners here would be developers and Google/Facebook.
orasis··on Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union
Sure I would like higher margins, but I’m running a business, and if the rent I’m paying is worth the location then it’s worth it.
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