padraigf

I love it. I was introduced to it by Edward Tufte's book, 'https://www.amazon.co.uk/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informa...'.

And was just thinking about it the other day. I had a bug aggregating sleep-data from an iPhone, which comes in the form of sleep-samples.

I was trying to fix it, both by prodding Claude Code to fix the problem, and looking at debug logs of the sleep-samples, but we weren't getting anywhere. I asked Claude Code to graph the samples, and BAM, saw it right away. (the problem was that HealthKit returns you sleep-samples from ALL devices, not just the priority one)

Maybe not exactly the same thing as Anscombe/Tufte were getting at, but I was reminded of it, and the value of visualising data.

I hope they don't, I actually like it. I know it's overdone, but it still gives me a boost! :)

It's kind of idiosyncratically charming to me as well.

Definitely seems to have exacerbated the anti-trust issue. Search was search, but now they can insert AI and short-circuit the route to other products.

Don't worry about impostor-syndrome (everyone has it).

It seemed like around the time I was graduating college, there was this kind of culture of hotshot programmers, which looking back was kind of toxic.

It was all this "he's good", "he's not good", and it kind made you afraid to admit you didn't know things (for me anyway).

And for a long time I went around with this imposter-syndrome, thinking I should know everything (and knowing that I didn't).

And now, with a bit more experience, I realise, not-knowing is the default. Things change so quickly, no-one can know everything. One person might be better in one area, a different person in another. There is no absolute ranking.

Better to admit this. We're all continual learners.

Thanks, I'll try it. I have a few things knocking around.

Yes, very memorable prologue:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook...

I meditate a good bit, an hour a day, and it doesn't stop thoughts arising, so I've had some time to think about this.

My guess is, it's just an evolutionarily useful thing, for your brain to keep pinging you about various things.

It doesn't mean of course that meditation is not useful. But you want to have control over these thoughts. Without a meditative practice, it's all too easy to allow your consciousness to be consumed by these impulses (which can lead you astray).

Some feedback: looks nice, but an instant turn-off for me is the requirement to sign up before I try it out. It meant I didn't try it out, and seems unnecessary.

I'm working on https://www.americanfootballinsights.com

Its a hobby project, to play around with American Football statistics.

I'm trying to do a few innovative things with it. e.g. I generate an excitement-rating per-game. Here are the excitement ratings from yesterday's games:

https://www.americanfootballinsights.com/excitement/2024/4/

I've used that feature already today. It tells me the big Sunday Night Football game last night, between the Ravens and Bills, was not worth watching!

I'm planning to develop more as the season goes on. For updates:

https://americanfootballinsights.substack.com/

Working on an NFL stats & visualisation project, the working title is American Football Insights. It's a hobby project, I'm not planning to charge for. I did a bit of work on this a few years ago, and I found that analysing the stats, you can gain insights, which you can't really from just watching the games. It was prompted by the upcoming NFL season.

Things I'm thinking about...I had an idea for a centralised local DB where I collected all kinds of stats on my life, all in one place. They're already being collected on various platforms, I thought 'why not make them my own, and maybe there's something to gain by pulling them together?'.

That's a good project.

A few thoughts (for context, senior developer, and use chat-gpt every day as an assistant)...

In the short-term (5-10 years, I cant see them autonomously producing products), it will need an experienced programmer to interpret and use the output effectively.

An implication of this is, in the short-term, developers become even more valuable. You still need them, and these tools will make the developer significantly more productive.

I was reading Melanie Mitchell's book 'Artificial Intelligence: A guide for thinking humans' recently (which I'd recommend). She has this chapter on computer-vision. And as an example, she shows a photograph of a guy in military clothing, wearing a backpack, in what looks like an airport, and he's embracing a dog. She makes an insightful point, that our interpretation of this photograph relies a lot on living-in-the-world experience (soldier returning from service, being met by his family dog). And the only way for AI to come close to our interpretation of this, is maybe to have it live in the world, which is obviously not such an easy thing to achieve. Maybe there's an analogy there with software development, to develop software for people, there's a lot of real-world interaction and understanding required.

In terms of autonomously producing products, I see these tools as they are now a bit like software wizards, or a website that Wordpress will create for you. You get a 'product' up-and-running very quickly, and it looks initially fantastic. But when you want to refine details of it, this is where you get into trouble. AI has an advantage over old-fashioned wizards, in that you can interact with it after the initial run, and refine it that way. But I'm not sure this is so easy, to have that fine-grained control you have with code. This is where I see the challenge being, to develop tools to talk to it, and refine the product sufficiently.

I just got a new book on this subject: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, by Kieran Setiya (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Midlife-Philosophical-Guide-Kieran-...). Not got too far into it, but I like it so far.

I think it's more about not having excess calories.

As for the science, my understanding is...excess calories = excess glucose = insulin-response, which is associated with inflammation.

A good book I read on it recently is, The Intermittent Fasting Revolution by Mark P. Mattson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intermittent-Fasting-Revolution-Opt...

That's great, thanks. I've been taking notes for a while on my reading, to try and remember it better (under the idea that if you summarise and write it down, just that process will help you remember it better).

I suppose it's better than nothing, but I've found the same thing, if I don't revisit those notes, I do still forget it.

So I think a more formalised spaced-repetition process like this can help me.

Can you give a brief description of your process?

I'm familiar with spaced-repetition, and have played around with Anki a bit.

I'm just not sure how I would integrate it into my reading.

Yes, the recommendations page is awful.

For me, the stupidest thing it does is recommend you the same video again and again, when you never click on it. 'Hey, you've recommended that same video to me 20 times now, and I haven't clicked on it, maybe take a hint!'

It's staggering, with all the smart people they hire at Google, that the front page of one of their main products is so dumb.

I'm not sure there's a silver bullet, it's a lot of small things that add up to a meaningful life. So my advice would be to look at the small things, and it takes time, you can't change everything at once.

For me, physical health is important (and for everyone really), if you're not physically healthy, you can't enjoy life. There are a lot of aspects to this, exercise, daylight, nutrition, sleep, stress, fun (which contributes to stress-reduction). There are a lot of different things you can do there, and it takes some experimentation to find out what works for you.

Then in the same way, you can look at career, relationships, what you do with your leisure time. My general point is, it's an accretion of small changes, changes in behaviour, that add up and compound, not one big 'eureka' moment.

In terms of general direction. There was a book I enjoyed recently, 'The Van Gogh Blues - The Creative Person's Path Through Depression' by Eric Maisel. Maisel's idea is that depression can come from a lack of meaning in your life, and that creative people are more susceptible to this than others, because by nature, they seek meaning more.

He had one exercise in the book, which was to write down what constitutes meaning for you, a kind of a personal manifesto in a way. It doesn't need to take long, I thought about it for 15 or 20 minutes. And for me it was generally: learning/growing, relationships with friends & family, having time to relax & reflect, and not being afraid to do hard things.

This helped clarify my thinking. After doing that exercise, I could think, 'How does this activity fit into what constitutes meaning for me?'. So for example, I could ask myself 'Am I going to play some computer games?'. And I would reflect and say 'this doesn't really serve any of my criteria for meaning, so may not be a beneficial activity'. I find this useful in general, in our capitalist society that seems to want to push us all the time to fairly mindless, unchallenging experiences that don't provide long-term meaning.

The nice thing about Maisel's idea is that it's subjective, meaning for you could be a bit different, but it helps to define it.

Yes, the causation is poorly disentangled. He says:

"In our research, those who followed [a healthy, Mediterranean style diet] were 1.4 times more likely to have good night’s sleep and 35 percent less likely to have insomnia."

One naturally thinks "people who have healthy diets probably also make other healthy lifestyle choices, which may be the cause of the better sleep".

But this is never addressed.

+1, I do pretty much all these things. Sunlight in the morning, and regularity of times has made a big difference.

A few things...

- Morning sunlight, I go for a 15 min walk right after breakfast, apparently the natural light helps reset your bodyclock (bright light triggers natural morning hormones like cortisol)

- Regularity. This is key. Try and get up at the same time every day. I have an alarm every weekday for 7:30am (it's off on weekends, but I usually get up at the same time anyway). And I have an alarm at 10pm, to remind me to get ready for bed. I used to hate alarms, but regularity will help your body and sleep-patterns in the long run. Alarms are really the only way to achieve this.

- Bedtime routine. I do a simple 10-minute breath meditation when I go to bed. I find it helps clear my head and get to sleep quicker.

Yes, this is a good practice whether you're leaving for the day or not. See David Allen's book 'Getting Things Done'. A central principle of it is: the place for your todo list is on paper (or some repository), not in your head. This clears your head for focusing on the immediate task at hand. So can be helpful for getting into a flow-state during the day, as well as between days.

I'd just started a hobby project to use the Goodreads API for book recommendations. That's not going to happen now.

I feel bad for people who put more work than I did into using the API. It seems kind of short-sighted to me, I'd have thought anything promoting book-reading would be good for Amazon/goodreads.

Hopefully it's the catalyst for a good alternative to appear. I know developers weren't happy with the API, or users with the site in general.

Just got an email about this today, as I had an API key:

Your Goodreads developer API key has been deactivated

Goodreads has deactivated the Goodreads developer API key associated with your Goodreads account as it has not been used in more than 30 days. As of December 8th 2020, Goodreads will no longer issue new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire these tools.

If you wish to provide feedback on this change, please complete the developer API survey here.

If you have additional questions, please review Goodreads help here.

Link to developer discussion: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/21788520-api-deprecatio...

^^^^

Derek's book 'Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur' was definitely up there for me.

My criterion is 'influential on me', they may not necessarily be the greatest works of literature.

Mastery - Robert Greene

The Talent Code - Daniel Coyle

Peak - Anders Ericsson

The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine

The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning - Peter C. Brown

Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art - Stephen Nachmanovitch

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

Wow, think I need to read that. (not that I'm in such a bad state, it's just a good recommendation)

Bit of a straw-man argument. Ericsson's original research didn't claim that 10,000 hours of practice made you an expert. It was that no-one became an expert (in his studied domain of violin playing) without about 10,000 hours of practice.

The 10,000 hours of practice was a sine-qua-non to becoming an expert, but he never claimed it was necessarily sufficient.

For me, I use the power of habit, and just keep at it every day.

A few benefits to this:

- The power of habit can be an impetus to overcome the initial fear.

- The knowledge that you did it just yesterday, and it wasn't so bad.

- Learning gets solidified overnight, and often things are easier the next day.

- And then just doing something every day means it gets a lot of repetitions.

"I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning."

― William Faulkner