37 karma · joined April 18, 2024
Edit: I am a poor survey respondent to non-opt-in polls, and do not opt-in to polls where possible.
--> Claude informs me ("why are there bogus respondents to polls you have to opt-into anyway?") that most are there because surveys pay a little money; so it's botted too.
Nobody enjoys that experience; I personally am a "bogus" respondent.
Tech is objectively interesting.
>> Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge.
I disagree:
(1) It's knowledge with the meta-effect of enabling acquisition of more knowledge.
(2) The thing we do, which catapulted us over all other species, our defining hyper-adaptive trait, is that we are tool-making; that we have technology.
Somehow, most EVs have curves and "bounciness" (and why such odd headlights??) in all the right places to make it look childish. I find the Tesla sedan extremely aesthetic though, that might be the one exception. The bigger Teslas (especially in color white) remind me of pandas for some reason.
I'm still trying to understand what users want. The origin of this site was a friend's issue - everytime he wanted to make a contract and send it to someone he would (1) generate w/ gpt (2) paste in google docs (3) export as pdf (4) drop into docusign and drag signature fields into blanks (5) sign + send.
After I talked to another person who recounted the same story, I thought there could be something here.
I did learn that people have their own existing contract templates they want to use instead of generating new ones each time (though sometimes that's nice), and that feature is in dev.
But all my data on what users want is from very low sample sizes :(
An AI-native DocuSign
It's been around a month I've been working on it. Struggling with getting people to actually use it - this week I've set the ambitious goal of 10 new contracts sent *and completed* by people I don't know (last week's was 10...by people I do know).
It's hard because I feel I'm in a weird hole - in order to have a good product I need people to use it and give me feedback, but in order for people to use it and give me feedback I need a good product. It's like wth!
Another thing I'm struggling with - enjoying the process. I get daydreams like mad. I feel I'm always living in the future in some way, especially with this software, and it's taking away from being present in this work. Which sucks, because I want to be excited to *work* on this and NOT fake my own excitement towards this as a manifestation of my greed to get rich off it.
But MAN am I greedy. It's ugly sometimes, to myself.
But god how I love to work on software also. How I love making stupid bash commands on my terminal. How I love to feel like the old gods, who conquered the infant digital world.
^I really like living like this. I couldn't imagine being the "good student" ratting out the guy in front of me for gambling! We have to make our own way, school is like this bubble - even if you excel within it, you're just excelling WITHIN it. It's meaningless to me.
Is there really any benefit in these small changes? Certainly a good laugh out of it!
One thing I feel is often overlooked in this conversation are our physical urges, specifically the ones motivating us to action that is different from what the 'character' we want to be would do. That adds noise to our personality, and widens the gap between what we are and what we want to be.
There was a time when I felt unintelligent and incapable of great, technical things. So I kind of just did things that it seemed capable people did. I felt like people who are smart, capable, and rich now, hacked things when they were young and were rebellious and broke the rules and did whatever they wanted and put lots of effort into random interesting things because they were interesting.
So, because the end goal was attractive to me in a way, I tried to do those things too - maybe consciously, maybe not. I feel like that process made me different though. I have genuinely changed into someone far more capable technically, way more interested in super 'nerdy' things.
Anyway, I don't know what it means to think this through ego. I don't really get it.
But sunsets are nice - I like seeing them too. Yeah I suppose what I mean was that the commentary changed. Interesting that for you there's no commentary, I think I've felt like that before. Sometimes I feel like I just exist in a nice feeling - no words, nothing. Just experiencing. But that doesn't last very long, or it turns into something negative like boredom or something. Then I get up with a bad feeling lol
But as I'm writing, the words are full of meaning, to just me, and I'm really saying something honest that I know is honest. After a while though, they seem dead.
So I write all the time (literally, and all over the place too) and I don't really care to share it because the words I've written aren't even all that impressive to me - it's more how I feel about the words I'm writing.
Or maybe I'm just saying that. I feel like when people say (share with others) that they think something, it's actually just a ploy to trick themselves into thinking that way - because being the person that would genuinely think that way is an attractive thing for them.
What can I say.
Lately, I've had this intuition that we change by sort of tricking ourselves. The mechanism for that change is by settling on like this one kind of character, like someone out of a movie that’s playing in your head, and acting like that person. Then, as time passes, we simply forget who we were before we started acting and the only way we know how to act is as this one character.
You say you've lost your 'story' and your 'character', that you don't 'act' anymore.
But, it just feels like you've made another story and another character for you to fit into. You've got a new aesthetic, a new ideal, and your appreciating sunsets and nature is another thing you do because that's what the 'character' you try to fit would do.
And by acting like that person in your head would, you start to feel the same way too.
I think it's a lot more complicated than how I'm thinking. But I really do have a strong intuition that people feel the way they think the person they're acting like should feel, when physical feelings are non-factors.
Really, I don't actually know. Like, what we actually do and what we say we do; what we actually think and what we say we think. What we say we do and think feel like things we're saying to trick ourselves into doing and thinking those things. That's I guess the core of my intuition.
I'm in college and looking to work for a startup when I graduate. I want experience, I want to learn about what building a company is really like - because I have ambitions of starting my own. Your comment felt to me very raw and real, and I'd love to talk more about your experiences working for startups.
And if these comment threads are insufficient, please feel free to contact me at ruchirkavulli[at]gmail[.]com
But if you have a probabilistic setup, then the key has some chance of retrieving data from the right and from the left. Then we have {expected goodness = p * f(right) + (1 - p) * f(left)}.
Where f is some objective function that tells us the 'goodness' of the resulting data the key got from going right or left. If you differentiate the expected goodness with respect to p you get f(right) - f(left). Which is how much the expected goodness will change if I increase the probability of going right.
Suppose the derivative f(right) - f(left) was positive, so going right was better than going left, then I can write some script to change p positively so that next time when I get that key the probability of going right is higher. That way we can optimize p for given keys.
Very interesting! I hope I got everything right; where I couldn't understand, I used gpt to help me out (when it told me f was a 'goodness' function, I had a breakthrough lol). The discrete way feels like clean, understandable logic while the probabilistic way with changing p values feels really messy, but I can see intuitively why the latter gives better results.