At the moment I'm trying to remove any source of "artifical" dopamine: no tv, no youtube, no music, no news, no podcasts, no reddit, no social media during the week and minimal over the weekend. I've just started a week ago and it works pretty well, my mind is a lot calmer. Silence is gold.
I'm so happy that I dated pre-dating app era, between 2005-2010. There were dating apps but not that mainstream. I walked up to my wife and her friend with some BS reason at a club, kept on the conversation and boom 10+ years together.
I'm average looking, she has a beautiful face and has been dancing since the age of 4. I'd have 0 chance with these kind of girls on dating apps. Absolutely 0.
Another good thing, that time social media have not yet screwed up people's self esteem and that helped a lot -> she has not overrated herself, I have not underrated myself.
We've been dating in person for a couple of billion years, we are hard-wired for that as body language tells a lot more in a fraction of a second than any made up profile text and over edited photos.
You can still meet people today outside of dating apps. A good friend of mine met his gf at a surf hostel. I met my gf on a boat in the Maldives. I think most people would objectively say she is out of my league if they saw us in a photo together.
I think the hardest part about meeting someone is being in a situation to meet them. If your life is something like: sleep -> eat -> work -> repeat, it's very hard to meet someone.
Traveling really only makes sense if one of you wants to move or want to have a long distance relationship. Both of these are rare attributes for meeting people while traveling.
Most of the women I meet while traveling are also not single. They’re with their partners whereas many men will travel solo. Traveling solo isn’t a thing most women will do at all. Many men will.
At the same time I was using online dating site. It helped to accelerate the search and filter candidates. I could save time rejecting illiterate and/or less clever girls. Think about Google maps and real estate search - you don’t want a house on the highway.
I wouldn’t use that today. Full of fake profiles to lure paying customers and to keep them as long as they can. Free subscription is not existing anymore.
Whether you like it or not, the dating game is fundamentally built on the objectification of others. It sucks, but pretending that's not the case doesn't change the reality of it.
We're animals. We're programmed to want to bang attractive people.
It's completely different for introverts like me. I can figure out multivariate calculus or how a git merge works, but I do not have the faintest idea how to start a conversation with someone. Especially if it's two or more people already talking. The only avenues that worked for me are work and apps.
Have we been dating in person for a couple of billion years?
Setting aside that people have not been around for billions of years, if you go back in history without the tech and the mobility we have today "dating" is a complete different thing. You didn't have such a large pool of potential partners, where you were born played a huge role and you also didn't have as much freedom to do your own thing as you did today.
You better watch out though I would actually be more worried with that type of relationship because your wife will now realize she has unlimited options and start to second guess. So many divorces happen now from things as simple as a facebook message leading to an affair.
That fear of missing out could hit hard and lots of people get blindsided by it.
I work for a large company, global leader with 100k+ employees.
Originally I was hired at the business side to build internal applications. These were grey zone apps as I wasn't part of the IT and dev team and did not follow all the company guidelines.
I was free to use whatever I wanted to build apps. One of these makes over £150k annually, another one is has 700+ internal users.
My tech stack and process was the following:
-Python-Flask backend
-Object oriented plain vanilla JS frontend with Redux state management (yes, it works without React)
-MySQL db
-Docker
-Good enough documentation to be able to hand it over at any point of time if necessary
-Test cases for critical things
-Deployed everything to an on-premise server with using WinSCP
I really enjoyed the whole process as I only had to focus on the actual business problem and very actively worked together with the stake holders. The results: bug free apps that I rarely have to touch; great satisfaction and feedback from both clients and internal users; short product to "market" time.
Recently I joined the company's dev team. Mate, it's hell. We have to use React for even an app that has a login page, upload page and report page. The db is Snowflake that makes everything freakin' slow. We have mindlessly have to follow the company guidelines to pass all the "cloud gates" before we can go live. We have to pass Snyk, Sonarqube, use Azure Dev Ops, dev-qa-prod environment, 80% test coverage, less than 3% code duplication (nobody cares if it screws up readability); use Jfrog and god knows what, there are 15 different criteria that we have to pass.
The result: extremely sluggish development; slow application; the whole thing can break at 10 times more places; and it does break; the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building; user satisfaction is awful; no time for running experiments or deeply explore the problem.
We add such a complexity to so tiny apps that I could build over 1-2 weekends that it suffocates the application itself.
I'm looking for the way out, I'm sure there are better places but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense. If it's a large app then let's follow a strict process but when it's almost like a toy project then let's keep it simple and only invest in sensible amount of energy.
I've seen here the post about John Carmack notes what he accomplished on a single day, I have never got close to that but I was so productive, adding multiple features on a single day and that made me so satisfied. And now it's all about the "gates".
> but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense.
Common sense doesn't get customers. This at the end of the day is what matters. Not code correctness. Not perfection in the functions. Not how fast the application boots up/loads/executes.
Will anybody pay you for it and ever use it is the selection function that really matters.
These big companies have the users. The big companies also have insane rules (mostly to protect themselves from the massive number of incompetents they've hired). Welcome to the trap of modern software.
Yes, I know. I've been listening to podcasts about how to setup a company and create a product for some time. I have an idea about creating a physical product with software (customizing a physical product, it involves using Blender). To test the product market fit I setup a fake webshop where the customers could describe in a textarea how they wanted to customize the product but when they clicked add to cart button, it threw an error. I logged all these clicks. I advertised it on FB, only at a limited region and I could get people add the product to their cart. The cost of getting one user clicking on add to cart button was way-way-way below then the expected profit margin so very likely I can make money out of it. So now I'm 1000% on it. If I'm lucky I can make at least as much as I make now and can leave my day job. I know it's not a full sw company but a sw enabled one and that would satisfy me. I want to go live with an MVP but later on want to make the customization process fully automated -> the users would do it, I'd just create the product and ship it. My goal is to make the UX so good that it would limit others to replicate it. Later on I can think about building a real sw company. Or not.
> the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building
It probably is to them. You might be forgetting that large companies also have large exposure to liability, and so are more risk averse. The processes might have been put in place to reduce risk of such exposures, like security holes that leak customer details. If such large companies were populated only with good developers then these processes might be a waste of time, but how likely is that?
There will be a Hackathon at work and with my team mate we are preparing with some kind of hierarchical memory/knowledge solution.
Briefly: we tell ChatGPT what API based tools we have, explaines them in 1 sentence and where it can reach their documentation. We added documentations as endpoint. example.com/docs/main is always the starting point that returns high level overview of the app and all available endpoints to call. Every endpoint has its own documentation as well. E.g.: /geocoder has /docs/geocoder documentation endpoint that describes what it does, what input it expects and what it will return.
We also provieded ChatGPT with actions like read_docs, call_endpoint and end_conversation. An action is a structured JSON object with a set of parameters. If ChatGPT wants to interact with the mentioned resources, it emits an action, it gets executed and the answer fed back to it.
With this I can do a task like: "Get a 30 minutes drivetime polygon around 15 Bond Street, London and send it to Foster."
It plans and executes the following all alone. First it calls the geocoder to get the coordinates for the isochrone endpoint, then gets the isochrone by calling the isochrone
endpoint and saves it, calls Microsoft Graph API and queries my top 50 connections to find out who Foster is and calls the MS Graph API's send mail endpoint to send the email with attachment to Foster.
It can hierarchically explore the available resources so we don't need a huge context window and we don't have to train the model either. Also we could implement multiple agents. 1 would be a manager and there could me multiple agents to perform each task and return the results to the manager. It would furthet reduce reduce the required context window.
Very likely some BS app will win the Hackathon like always like a market price predictor using Weka's multilayer perceptron with default settings but we believe our solution could be extremely powerful.
This is interesting. Can you expand on how this gets around the context window problem? Are you thinking the agent does a one-off task rather than continuing back and forth with the user?
I do think this will be way less than having all of the functions listed to begin with though. I think the discoverability is a novel approach. Honestly, I'm surprised ChatGPT with plugins doesn't do something like this by default rather than making you pick which plugins you want at the beginning of the conversation.
First, the discoverability reduces the required context window. We don't have to explain every app we have, it's enough to tell ChatGPT one sentence about them and it will go deeper if it thinks that would help it to perform the task.
Also, we have not implemented it, we can have one or multiple level of managers just like at a company and each would delegate a task to a worker (who could also be a manager) and they would report back the result. Just like in real life, a manager doesn't have to know how something is done, it should only know it's done and the get the results.
We work for a large company and very likely have 100s of apps. We could build wrappers around them e.g. using selenium and we could interact with even old apps.
We could also do the same approach with databases. The db itself would have docs, each table and each field as well. So we could ask ChatGPT to query data from the db and it could fully understand the data before writing the sql query.
I've written about some hierarchical manager system with some friends when exploring how to use AI for larger set tasks. While the easy answer is simply using something with much larger context - `Claude` is amazing with an API key if you're on the waitlist - we definitely followed the same idea of splitting up the context into individual groups.
We had some success actually with layering another AI into the mix - having one AI look at a summary version of the context as a whole, and decide which pieces of context to assign to each manager. This of course requires a sidestep into another database of some kind to store the "master context" (AKA the full conversation, so you likely already have it in some form of storage), and of course a lot more calls to the AI which overall increases latency quite a bit.
1. Use an AI to provide a short summary of each piece of logical context and map it by access ID
2. Use another AI to determine which pieces contain the most useful additional context to the piece of the task being evaluated
3. Build the context from the generated ID list and pass to individual task manager AI
I have a similar story. In my hometown the owner of the Mercedes salon paid money for each emblem that was broken of a car's hood. It was around 2000-2005. I know this from the owner's son.
That's hilarious. Mercedes had a checkered repair history, especially US models that don't have a German equivalent or are post-merger frankensteins.
Mostly, mascot or emblem theft was a 90's media-generated gangster thing limited primarily to higher-crime areas to wear car emblems on a chain, so maybe they were gopniks but 15 years too late. Also why Rolls Royce invented the retracting bonnet mascot. They early ones were silver plated and later ones were optionally gold plated. (Of course like Porsches, Rolls Royce can and are customized, so I wouldn't at all be surprised if a solid platinum or palladium Spirit of Ecstasy exists.)
80's BMWs, Cadillacs, and Jaguars were big money makers for my dad. His dad and him bemoaned that they could've made more money if only they were dishonest. They both had experience working at dealerships as mechanics. They saw more tactics than these:
- Charging for parts not replaced (which is why you always ask to see the old parts)
- Magically finding other things wrong that need expensive, unnecessary parts (which is why you always get a written estimate before leaving, and appear to have a somewhat understanding of what constitutes the vehicle)
- Eyewash: overselling standard procedures or aspirational steps not performed, usually with the purpose of justifying higher prices and/or increasing customer satisfaction (if there's too much marketing, then you're the mark)
Also: In the US, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) is 99.8% a confidence scam: it's a for-profit marketing company that sells a false appearance of authority and credibility with negligible actual due-diligence or accountability.
The “better” car companies simply design systems that force more labor hours into regular maintenance. For example, BMW’s ingenious battery placement that allows them to bill $700-$900 for 5 hours worth of work. Oh, and changing your own battery will void the warranty. Fortunately for BMW most of their clientele has enough money to not care.
Automakers absolutely know this law and my experiences with warranty coverage (as an exclusive DIYer for literally everything except warranty work, tires, and paint) is that they readily and voluntarily follow it.
A classmate of mine happened to mention once that for some early models of a particular Japanese car manufacturer (1980's I think) the engine would need to be removed in order to change the oil.
I was a professional auto mechanic in the late 80s, and I'd never even heard rumors of such a beast. I'm not going to pull the [citation needed] card, but I think this is one of those tales that got taller with the telling (Nissan 300Z's, for example, are a right PITA such that you'd briefly think that removing the engine would make it easier.)
There isn't an automotive engineer in the world that would keep their job after submitting such a design, let alone get it into production.
That is sneaky! That could backfire, too, if someone got a hold of box of those things from somewhere else. “This guy pays $10 for each so we got a box from Ali Express and sold it to him”.
The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income.
> When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
French officials wanted a lifestyle more like home, including flush toilets.
So they built a sewer system. It was a perfect breeding ground for rats.
Now, Hanoi had a rat problem.
They hired exterminators, but it wasn't enough. So they offered a bounty to anyone who would kill a rat and bring in the severed tail as proof. It was much easier for them to dispose of a collection of rat tails instead of entire rat carcasses.
The locals quickly figured out that you could remove a rat's tail without killing it, and send it back into the sewers to breed more rats with fresh young tails.
I wonder if, with the proliferation of smartphones, any government will try it again with more rules to maker it harder to game, like limiting the number that will be paid out, and requiring video evidence of the kill. It's harder to
I think you should really just require the corpse; if somebody wants to setup a trap it should be fine for them to bring a bucket of 30 corpses instead of a video where an official has to count to 30.
I suspect if you time-box the reward that'll fix the cobra effect problem. Announce that you'll only pay for dead rats for ~4 months and at least in the final month people should realize that its time to kill the golden goose and provide all the rats they have instead of breeding for more.
You seemed to use the fact that a car was used as a taxi in Europe as evidence that the car is not luxurious.
My point is that cars used as taxis in Europe are often from upmarket segments, so it's not good evidence that a car is not luxurious (relatively - we're talking MB/BMW class here).
This does not mean I'm saying that a specific Mercedes from the 1960s was or was not luxurious. I find it hard to imagine any car from the 1960s would be luxurious by modern standards, my experience of older cars is they were very much metal tins on wheels.
Let me put it another way. If you want to build a giant company, selling only to the wealthy and powerful isn't going to do it. You're going to have to sell deep into the middle class. Which is what Mercedes-Benz did.
I was thinking of Evangelical Christians actually. Jews generally aren't in a position of power. What other remarks have I made that you think were antisemitic?
I'd heard about this. Their studies seem to have mixed results, and there's mixed anecdotal evidence on /r/tinnitus at best. I looked into it, there's a clinic near me that offers it, but it's $5000!
My tinnitus isn't so bad that I feel compelled to drop 5g on fixing it, but I think their idea seems promising and I hope they continue to research it and find new ways to treat it.
