rafabulsing

I always find that characterization of Grey and the Cortex podcast to be weird. He never claims to be a productivity master or the most productive person around. Quite the opposite, he has said multiple times how much he is not naturally productive, and how he actually kinda dislikes working in general. The systems and habits are the ways he found to essentially trick himself into working.

Which I think is what people gather from him, but somehow think he's hiding it or pretending is not the case? Which I find strange, given how openly he's talked about it.

As for his productivity going down over time, I think that's a combination of his videos getting bigger scopes and production values, and also he moving some of his time into some not so publicly visible ventures. E.g., he was one of the founders of Standard, which eventually became the Nebula streaming service (though he left quite a while ago now).

Yeah, it can be pretty difficult at times. I'm quite proud of my 75% solve rate with Connections, which I'm slowly but surely improving (though the last week or so has been a bit of a regression).

I'm almost tempted to include that stat in my next CV as evidence of my grasp of the language :p

I always find it interesting to take a look at the Connections Bot, which gives the puzzles a difficulty rating based on how many people solve it or fail. It's not rare that I nail one rated 5/5 difficulty, just to completely fail the next day on a 1 or 2 out of 5. The gaps in general knowledge that you can have as a non native can be pretty funny at times! The groups relating to sports team names always get me.

Yeah, it tastes like medicine to me.

Although to be fair, the last time I had a diet coke, I was, dunno, maybe 10? So like 20 years ago at this point. So maybe if I had some now, I'd have a different opinion. But I don't think diet coke is even sold here in Brazil anymore, It's been years since I last saw one. I was actually not aware that it was still sold in the US!

Yeah, I feel ya. I don't mind it, but I'm far from loving it. What particularly stresses me out is how I can be screwed even doing everything correctly, if someone else screws up.

All reasons why I think public transit is the better solution over self driving cars. They're generally much safer, and also you get to do something while you're on the go. Pretty nifty, I think.

I'm not a self-driving believer (never had the opportunity to try it, actually), but I'd say bad traffic would be the number one case where I'd want it. I don't mind highway driving, or city driving if traffic is good, but stop and go traffic is torture to me. I'd much rather just be on my phone, or read a book or something.

Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.

Can confirm, could never stand the taste of Diet Coke, but Coke Zero tastes pretty close to the original to me! To the point that I pretty much never drink regular Coke anymore, if Coke Zero is available. There's basically no downside to going with Zero, imo. And the upside of no calories is pretty great.

Well yeah, but then any discrepancies that are found can be discussed (to decide which of the behaviors is the expected one) and then added as a test for all existing and future implementations.

As a Brazilian fellow, 100% agreed. US international is the least bad compromise I've found. I can't say I mind the dead keys too much. And I do enjoy that all combinations are sensible (i.e. key for the symbol + key for the letter). Memorizing the (not quite random but not exactly 100% logical either) position for some of the diacritics would be very annoying to me.

I guess I don't mind it too much because the standard portuguese keyboard layout also rely on dead keys for accented letters, instead of having dedicated keys for them. (Or at least the Brazilian Portuguese layout does, not sure about the European Portuguese layout). So that's just what I've always been used to.

Brazilian here. That is indeed the standard way dialogue is represented in literature. We call the em-dash a "travessão".

There's nothing wrong with research that doesn't make it to the public. There is definitely something wrong with making false promises to the public, who buy tickets to your park based on what you advertised could be an attractions there, which never materialized.

Make the threshold "won't kill you 99.9% of the time, even if you have little to no training at that specific activity" then. Is that specific enough for you to engage meaningfully with the conversation at hand, and show why you think driving is at the same side of this threshold as eating grapes or using crayons?

Swimming pools are absolutely inherently dangerous. Why do you think lifeguards are a thing?

Like, really man? If you can't even recognize as dangerous the one activity that famously requires someone specifically trained to save people to be present, then I'm happy to end this conversation right here. It's clearly just a waste of time all around. I just hope there's no one in your life depending on you to judge what's safe and what's not.

Cars are inherently dangerous, though. They're multi ton hunks of metal moving at high speeds. That's dangerous from literally any angle you can imagine.

There are ways to make it less dangerous, sure. But they're never 100% safe. Which makes them, by definition, inherently dangerous. That's... What those words mean.

Re: JS based CAD, there's also replicad, which I've used previously and found to be really good.

https://replicad.xyz/

(I believe) OP's point is about a company being global relative to amount of users, not just their geography. If you have single digit thousands of users or less, you still don't need those optimizations even if those users are located all around the world.

Those are different levels of abstraction. LLMs can say false things, but the overall structure and style is, at this point, generally correct (if repetitive/boring at times). Same with image gen. They can get the general structure and vibe pretty well, but inspecting the individual "facts" like number of fingers may reveal problems.

To get that, you could pass the ratio explicitly. C = 5A + 7B

LLMs learned from human writing. They might amplify the frequency of some particular affectations, but they didn't come up with those affectations themselves. They write like that because some people write like that.

Trying it with Alton Brown's cookies led to some bugs:

https://onlyrecipeapp.com/recipe-details?canonicalUrl=https:...

- 12 ounces bread flour became just "12 ounce" - Yield of 2 dozen cookies became just "2 servings"

Also, not really a bug per se, but the site contains both metric and imperial measures already, and I see that you only take the imperial units and convert them on demand. For some of the measures, like for the butter, the difference is significant. Not huge, but enough to be noticeable.

All that said: this is pretty great. I've actually been thinking about making a recipe app for quite a while now, and I see the most interesting features I thought of you have implemented. Scraping recipes on demand, interactive timers, recipe scaling. Really cool!

Only idea I had that I don't see here is automatically estimating nutrients and calories. But that's probably for the best: When I tried making the aforementioned app, I started by diving right into that particular rabbit hole, and, well... I still don't have any recipe app to show for it :p Here be dragons!

I think the author's (ex) friend believes the same about the hair salon thing. That there is a hierarchy of power and potential for intimidation in the context of a worker and a client. E.g. the guy at the restaurant being flirty with the waitress.

I still find that one to be one of the better photography subreddits, but I do agree that that's been happening a bit too often lately.

(I'd also love recommendations of other good photography related subreddits, if you have any!)

I've said before that the age of an internet user can be estimated by how many free image hosting services they have seen come and go, like rings on a tree trunk.

That's a mindboggling take, to be honest, to the point I can't help but suspect that you're being contrarian just for the sake of it. I'm absolutely sure that you, yourself, have gone by some terrible scene which you couldn't help but stare at for at least a bit, which you would not classify as something you would like to see more of.

There's a huge difference between something people want to see and something people can't ignore. There is some intersection between those categories, but they are by no means one and the same. And news reports, headlines, thumbnails et al. optimize for the latter, not the former.

That's a good point. As I pointed out, I'm ok with global state (total votes, how recent is a post, etc). Randomness could be thought as a kind of global state, even if it's not reproducible. As long as it's truly random, and not something where user A is more likely to see it than user B for any reason, then I'm fine with it.

I really do think that would be annoying enough to snap a good amount of people out of the mindless autoscrolling loop. There's a reason why companies love 1 click buying, for example. At scale, any extra interactions costs real money. The example of the ad is a good one where that's already a kind of high friction interaction, so one extra click is not that much more annoying, but that's not the case for the vast majority of interactions.

Granted, some people will certainly have a higher tolerance for this kind of enshittification. If companies find that the amount of money they can extract from highly targeting a given amount of users is greater than the amount of money they can make from more numerous but less targeted users, then they could choose to go down that path. That's a function of how tolerant the average user is of the confirmation prompts, and how much more money they can make from a targeted user.

We can't control that last variable, but we ultimately could control that first one. If we find that a simple confirmation prompt is not annoying enough for as many people as we'd like, we could make the confirmation prompts more annoying. Maybe make every confirmation prompt have to be shown for at least 5 seconds. Or require a cooldown between multiple confirmations. Or add captcha like challenges. And so on.

In the limit, I think you'd agree that if you had to wait 24 hours before confirming, that would probably be enough to dissuade almost everyone from going through with it, to the point most platforms would try to not have any personalization at all. (I wouldn't be happy with this end result either)

I think even a single, instant confirmation prompt would be enough to cause a sizeable difference. Maybe not enough. Maybe you're right, and it would make barely any difference at all. Then I'd be totally in favor of these more annoying requirements. But as a first step, I'd be happy with a small requirement like this, and progressively making requirements stringier if it proves not enough.

As I pointed out, I agree that defining what should be deemed acceptable and what shouldn't is a bit subjective, and can definitely be debated. Reasonable people can disagree here, for sure.

That's why I proposed that maybe the solution is:

1. only explicit actions are considered. A click, a tap, an interaction, but not just viewing, hovering, or scrolling past. That's an objective distinction that we already have legal framework for. You always have to explicitly mark the "I accept the terms and conditions" box, for example. It can't be the default, and you can't have a system where just by entering the website it is considered that you accepted the terms.

2. explicitly labeling and confirming of what is an suggestion algorithm altering action and what isn't. And I mean, in band, visible labeling right there in the UI, not a separate page like that Meta link. Click the "Subscribe" button, you get a confirmation popup "Subscribing will make it so that this content appears in your feed. Confirm/Cancel". Any personalized input into the suggestion algorithm should be labelled as such. So companies can use any inputs they see fit, but the user must explicitly give them these inputs, and the platforms will be incentivized to keep this number as low as possible, as, in the limit, having to confirm every single interaction would be annoying and drive users away. Imagine if every time you clicked on a video, YouTube prompted you to confirm that viewing that video would alter future suggestions.

I'm ok with global state being fed into the algorithm by default. Total watch time/votes/comments/whatever. My main problem is with hyper personalized, targeted, self reinforcing feeds.

People also slow down to look at the flipped car on the side of the road. Doesn't mean you want to see more flipped cars down the road.

Either way. Do you have any points other than that you think any and every action, no matter how small, is explicit, and therefore it's ok that for it to be fed into the recommendation engine? Cause that's an ok position to have, even if one I disagree with. But if that's all, I think that's as long as this conversation needs to go. But if there's any nuance I'm failing to get, or you have comments on other points I raised such as labeling of recommendation altering actions, I'm happy to hear it.

Even that, I don't think is entirely true. I'm pretty sure they use signals as implicit as how long you took to scroll past an autoplaying video, or if you even hovered your mouse pointer over the video but ultimately didn't click on it.

Same with friends, even if you have the exact same friends, if you message friend A more than friend B, and this otherwise identical account does the opposite, than the recommendation engine will give you different friend-related suggestions.

Then there's geolocation data, connection type/speeds, OS and browser type, account name (which, if they are real names such as on Facebook, can be used to infer age, race, etc), and many others, which can also be taken into account for further tailoring suggestions.

You can say that, oh, but some automated system that sent the exact same signals on all these fronts would end up with the same recommendations, which I guess is probably true, but it's definitely not reasonable. No two (human) users would ever be able to achieve such state for any extended period of time.

That's why we are arguing that only explicit individual actions should be allowed into these systems. You can maybe argue what would count as an explicit action. You mention adding friends, I don't think that should count as an explicit action for changing your content feed, but I can see that being debated.

Maybe the ultimate solution could be legislation requiring that any action that influences recommendation engines to be explicitly labeled as such (similar to how advertising needs to be labeled), and maybe require at least a confirmation prompt, instead of working with a single click. Then platforms would be incentivized to ask as little as possible, as otherwise confirming every single action would become a bit vexing.

I think the best way to put it is, users with the same user picked settings should see the same things, in the same order.

That's a given on HackerNews, as there's only one frontpage. On Reddit that would be, users subscribed to the same subreddits would always see the same things on their frontpages. Same as users on YouTube subscribed to the same channels, users on Facebook who liked the same pages, and so on.

The real problem starts when the algorithm takes into account implicit user actions. E.g., two users are subscribed to the same channels, and both click on the same video. User A watches the whole video, user B leaves halfway through. If the algorithm takes that into account, now user A will see different suggestions than user B.

That's what gets the ball rolling into hyper specialized endless feeds which tend to push you into extremes, as small signals will end up being amplified without the user ever taking an explicit action other than clicking or not suggestions in the feed.

As long as every signal the algorithm takes into account is either a global state (user votes, total watch time, etc), or something the user explicitly and proactively has stated is their preference, I think that would be enough to curb most of the problems with algorithmic feeds.

Users could still manually configure feeds that provide hyper personalized, hyper specific, and hyper addictive content. But I bet the vast majority of users would never go beyond picking 1 specific sport, 2 personal hobbies and 3 genres of music they're interested in and calling it a day. Really, most would probably never even go that far. That's the reason platforms all converged on using those implicit signals, after all: they work much better than the user's explicit signals (if your ultimate goal is maximizing user retention/addiction, and you don't care at all about the collateral damage resulting from that).

Regardless of what you think of the parents, it's certainly not the kids fault their parents failed to provide them food, for whatever reason. I don't care if the reason their parents couldn't afford the time or money to pack a lunch is because they spend it all on collecting nazi memorabilia and kicking orphaned puppies. I still want their children to be appropriately fed.