adamzerner
My prediction is that the rise in diagrams would be much larger, based on the following model. 1) Making diagrams is currently not a thing that crosses peoples minds, but if it were an option in the text editor it would cross their minds. 2) Having to save and upload a file is a trivial inconvenience that is a large barrier for people.
A majority of the users won’t use this feature because their favourite software is better in some way.
I’m not clear on what you mean here. It sounds like you are saying that even if Excalidraw was integrating into the LW text editor users would still find their favorite drawing software and use it instead. But that almost never happens currently, so I don’t see why adding Excalidraw would change that.
But I think the delta usability/ delta dev time is low. The software needs to have all the basic features and have a good UI before it starts offering any advantage at all.
If what they said in the docs is correct, it wouldn’t actually require too much dev time. Usability-wise, I’ve found Excalidraw to be one of the rare pieces of software that is intuitive to use out of the box, and doesn’t have much of a learning curve.
Yeah I see the appeal in that. But for this app it didn’t seem worth investing in that sort of either or functionality, and if I have to pick one, I expect people are more interested in matching with those who agree than those who disagree.
No and no. I didn’t think it’d be worth doing either of those things before I knew there’d actually be enough users to justify the investment of time. So I ended up just sending the emails by hand.
Agreed that the name is pretty bad. I don’t suspect that it is part of the problem though. In my Hacker News submissions, the text was “Show HN: Video chat with like-minded developers (connect-developers.netlify.app)”. And the header on the website is “Video chat with like-minded developers”. So “Connect Developers” doesn’t seem like it is being used in any meaningful ways. The reason I stuck with the name is because I couldn’t think of something better and wanted to be agile/lean about not letting it be a timesink.
I am not, it looks awesome, thanks for sharing! I will pass it along to my friend.
My experience with the EA chats project was that, although there were lots of people who’d be happy to connect with likeminded folks, they were nervous about taking the initiative to reach out to specific people and ask to chat. Having a mechanism by which they could be assured of being connected with others who wanted the same thing seemed to eliminate this problem. Likewise, while I’m sure there’s an internet message board for almost every interest at this point, that doesn’t meant there’s a way for people interested in forming real-life relationships to do so.
Great point, that makes sense.
In fact, that might be a way to start seeking out passionate people to connect via such a service: just find subreddits with a high activity-to-members ratio.
That does sound like a good idea! There are a few other projects I’m feeling more excited about right now so I don’t think I’m going to pursue it. But I have added it to my list of ideas.
If the tech catches on, how will you deal with trolls, thieves, complaints, and so on?
Yeah that is an important question. It seems like a very difficult problem in general. I think big companies like Facebook have some sort of AI thing that tries to detect it, but my impression is that they haven’t had much success.
great happiness and congratulations for “did a thing”!
Thank you!
I think the “write a business plan already” is absolutely key here. And really, you often only need a business sketch, not a plan.
Yeah, I agree. As my thoughts settle after this experience, that’s the main thing that keeps swimming around in the back of my mind. And that’s so true about only needing a sketch, not a plan.
Btw, it’s good to get this data point of someone really liking the “write a business plan already” idea. The post didn’t receive many upvotes, which surprised me and makes me question whether there is something unwise about it. I guess what I’m saying is that I notice some confusion, and so data points here are helpful to me.
What customers/developers have this need to connect, and why is this method any better than the hundreds of other community and discussion sites that exist?
Well, there are places to chat with people, but a) it’s usually centered around some topic. Like if you join a Discord group for a particular programming language, the types of conversations that are expected are different from the types of conversations you’d have if you sat down to get coffee with someone. I’m not actually sure where you would go if you were looking for the latter type of conversation. Anything come to mind for you?
b) I think having those types of coffee shop conversations via text is different from having them via video chat (which is different from having them via email, which is different from having them in person). Perhaps the differences aren’t very large, and there is a substitute good sort of thing going on. OTOH, perhaps not. I don’t feel particularly confident that text is sufficient for the large majority of people, and they wouldn’t be excited about video chat.
What IS success for this?
I think success is utilons generated. If you have fun filling out the survey and then decide not to follow through and actually do the video call, that generates a pretty small amount of utilons. If you have one call and it is ok, then that generates some utilons. If you make a long term friend, that generates a ton of utilons.
I agree that it is hard to tell these things though. I was thinking that you can ballpark it and assume that something like 50% of the matches end up having a video call, and 1% of those end up being friends. And that if the app actually did get a lot of users, I could email them asking them to report on their experiences. Definitely not perfect, but a) I don’t see better alternatives, and b) it doesn’t seem imperfect enough to make this idea a non-starter.
That light blue group may be a VERY thin tail. I think “chatting with strangers over the internet” is probably NOT attractive to the vast majority of people, and software developers even less likely to want that.
Yeah, the more I think about it the more I think you might be right about that.
You also have the problem that this thing is poisoned by a few bad actors, and that happens SO frequently in other domains that it’s a fair assumption that if I give any contact information to a stranger, I’ll regret it.
Ah, that’s a good point. Well, what exactly did you have in mind? The app feels extremely side-project-y, so I wouldn’t expect people to be worried about data harvesting. But now I’m thinking about stuff like chat roulette and how there is such a high proportion of weirdos there. Seems like moderately strong evidence that it’d be an issue for Connect Developers too.
You can answer as many or as few questions as you’d like. Perhaps I should have made this more clear though.
Many (20%?) Of the questions used jargon on at least one end of the scale. I happened to know about half of it, but that’s quite a filter even within the programming community
Yeah, that’s something I expected. Eg. a front end developer not knowing what an ORM is. But I figured that it’d be ok since it’s all optional.
This isn’t eHarmony, I don’t need a compatible life partner, just someone vaguely in the same mindspace.
I actually disagree with this. I expect people to be attracted to the idea of filling out a long-ish survey and then being able to be matched with someone who is very similar, rather than vaguely similar. Vageuly similar feels notably less exciting. I don’t feel strongly though, maybe I’m wrong. Good to get this data point from you.
A 10 point scale, while common, didn’t fit on my phone.
Huh, that is surprising. I actually did try to make it look decent on small screens. The buttons are supposed to wrap, eg. 1-5 are on a top row and 6-10 are on a bottom row. Is that not what happened for you?
I was actually envisioning connecting niche communities as just a separate thing entirely from what I was trying to do in connecting people from a broader community. But I think what you’re saying about how the former often paves a path to the latter makes total sense, and Facebook is a great example! I’m not sure why I didn’t see that at first; it’s funny how many things become obvious in retrospect.
That second version of the simplify idea is interesting. I agree that the difficulty is in finding that group of people. The first thing that comes to mind are niche programming languages/libraries/frameworks. But there the people who feel passionate about them very well might already be in touch with each other.
The internet used to feel more wild, perhaps, and so open-ended exploration felt more valuable. Now, finding the needle of interest in the haystack of content is more challenging.
Hm, an analogy that is coming to my mind is walking around a town with lots of mom-and-pop shops versus walking around a city with lots of chain stores and fast food places. Stumbling across a mom-and-pop shop feels kinda random because it’s new, whereas seeing another McDonalds doesn’t feel random. Is that what you’re going for? Do you also remember you or people you know connecting with strangers in a way that lead to eg. phone calls?
The thing that jumped out to me about this is that it seems too open-ended. In my experience, meeting with strangers is much easier and less scary if there is some point or goal other than “meeting with strangers who have similar views as you”.
For sure! This is something I thought about actually. I agree that it’s a little tough to just bootstrap the conversation. Having prompts would be better. I wanted to do something like http://36questionsinlove.com/, but for friendship. I just couldn’t figure it out quickly, and didn’t want to sink too much time into the project. But if I or anyone else does figure out the right prompts for friendship, that strikes me as the seed of an interesting project.
One thing you might have tried is to simplify. Instead of asking all the survey questions, just randomly match developers with no additional criteria.
Yeah, maybe. It didn’t take very long to deal with the survey part of it, and my sense is that it added value versus having a short description, because it seems cooler to match with someone who is like-minded versus someone random.
A friend and I did this for the EA community, and it got quite a bit of use. People also sent us pretty extensive feedback, indicating they were getting substantial value out of it.
That is super cool that you and your friend did this successfully for the EA community! Kudos to you guys! That makes me happy to hear. I’m thinking now that doing it for small communities like that makes a lot more sense than what I tried. I expect that in small communities like the EA community, where there is some existing sense of connection and where it is a pretty safe assumption that people are like-minded, people would be a lot more willing to meet over video-chat, and would probably get more out of it.
Seems applicable to LessWrong as well. If it had success in the EA community, that seems like very strong evidence that it would also have success with LessWrong. Anyone wanna give it a go for LessWrong? If not I probably will at some point.
The internet used to have much more in the way of random connection with strangers for open-ended conversation, and I think people miss it.
Huh. Care to elaborate, or point me to any resources? I’m interested to hear more about that.
Reflections on Connect Developers
One thing you could do is use microCOVID to look at how risky various events are when the other person has covid, and use that as a baseline to make adjustments off of. For example:
Outdoors, masked, and ~3 feet away from people for an hour is approximately 150 microcovids.
Indoors and ~6 feet of distance is about 1,500 microcovids.
Indoors, ~3 feet of distance and unmasked is about 35,000 microcovids.
From there you can make some educated guesses about how much the risk goes down on day N. Microcovid had a blog post a while ago, pre-delta, that has this image:
From what I remember about omicron, the infectiousness window is smaller. Ballparking it, I’ll throw out some numbers and guess that on day 5 maybe you are 20% as infectious, and on day 10 you are 1% as infectious. Which would yield updated numbers of 30, 300 and 7,000 microcovids respectively for the above scenarious on day 5, and then 1.5, 15 and 350 microcovids for day 10.
So that gives you a sense of how much risk you’d be exposing others to in various situations, which can inform your conclusion on the broader question of how long and in what ways you should isolate for.
From various sources, I have become convinced that rapid tests taken from nose swabs are likely to often be several days slower at detecting infections than rapid tests that use throat swabs.
I’m confused about how this works. Does the test have to be designed for throat swabs rather than nasal swabs? I see some language about adding a throat swab, which would indicate that the answer is “no”, but other language feels like it points towards a “yes”.
Noticing confusion about the nucleus
In school, you learn about forces. You learn about gravity, and you learn about the electromagnetic force. For the electromagnetic force, you learn about how likes repel and opposites attract. So two positively charged particles close together will repel, whereas a positively and a negatively charged particle will attract.
Then you learn about the atom. It consists of a bunch of protons and a bunch of neutrons bunched up in the middle, and then a bunch of electrons orbiting around the outside. You learn that protons are positively charged, electrons negatively charged, and neutrons have no charge. But if protons are positively charged, how can they all be bunched together like that? Don’t like charges repel?
This is a place where people should notice confusion, but they don’t. All of the pieces are there.
I didn’t notice confusion about this until I learned about the explanation: something called the strong nuclear force. Yes, since likes repel, the electromagnetic force is pushing the protons away from each other. But on the other hand, the strong nuclear force attracts them together, and apparently it’s strong enough to overcome the electromagnetic force in this instance.
In retrospect, this makes total sense. Of course the electromagnetic force is repelling those protons, so there’s gotta be some other force that is stronger. The only other force we learned about was gravity, but the masses in question are way too small to explain the nucleus being held together. So there’s got to be some other force that they haven’t taught us about yet that is in play. A force that is very strong and that applies at the nuclear level. Hey, maybe it’s even called the strong nuclear force!
young people are still very unlikely to die and shouldn’t take minimizing death risk as a major life task except when considering doing actively risky things like skydiving, or putting oneself at risk of violence.
This is probably assuming that people have “normal” expected lifespans of something like 80-100 years. But if we take seriously ideas like the singularity and accelerating technological progress, perhaps we should be expecting much longer lifespans, in which case minimizing death risk would be an important life task.
I was talking to a friendly recently who is an experienced software developer looking to get into AI safety. Both of us have been reading LessWrong for a long time, but were unclear on various things. For example, where can you go to see a list of all job and funding opportunities? Would jobs be ok with someone with a software engineering background learning AI related things on the job? Would grants be ok with that? What remote opportunities are available? What if there is a specific type of work you are interested in? What does the pay look like?
These are just a few of the things we were unclear on. And I expect that if you interviewed other people in similar boats, there would be different things that they are unclear on, and that this results in lots of people not entering the field of AI safety who otherwise would. So then, perhaps having some sort of comprehensive career guide would be a high level action that would result in lots more people entering the field.
Or, perhaps there are good resources available, and I am just unaware of them. Anyone have any tips? I found 80,000 hours’ career review of AI safety technical research and johnswentworth’s post How To Get Into Independent Research On Alignment/Agency, but neither seems comprehensive enough.
Edit: As an alternative, we could also have some sort of page with a list of people in the field of AI safety who are willing to chat on the phone with those who are looking to enter the field and answer questions. Now that I think about it, I suspect this would be both a) more effective at “converting” new “leads”, and b) something that those in the field of AI safety would be more willing to do.
Why do I believe (a)? Having a career guide that is comprehensive enough where you get all of your questions addressed is hard. And there’s something about speaking with a real person. Why do I believe (b)? Chatting with people is fun. Especially when you are able to help them. It also is low-commitment and doesn’t take very long. On the other hand, writing and (especially) maintaining a guide is a lot of work.
So then, here is a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XlvUpShIuO_kSFu8IFfhX7lKpr10EypDKXGN-CaS7FM/edit?usp=sharing.
If you’re in the field of AI safety, it would be awesome if you added your contact info.
If you know someone in the field of AI safety, it would be awesome if you brought this to their attention.
I just threw this together haphazardly. If someone is willing to take over the project and/or make the doc a little nicer, do something better in Notion, or create a real website for this, that would be awesome. I’d pursue this myself if there was enough interest (I’m a programmer and would build a real website de
If you are a LessWrong moderator, it’d be cool if you considered linking to this prominently. I feel like that might be a necessary condition for this succeeding. Otherwise it feels like the sort of thing that would rely on word of mouth to know that it exists, and that it probably wouldn’t spread well enough to survive long enough.
If you are someone looking to get into the field of AI safety research, it would be great if you could share your thoughts and experiences, positive or negative, so we can update our beliefs about what the pain points really are.
My biggest thought is that the bar for experimenting is a lot lower than the bar for, say, committing to this site-wide for 12 months. And with that said, it’s hard for me to imagine this not being promising enough to experiment with. Eg. by enabling it on select posts and seeing what the results and feedback are.
Funny timing. I’m actually in the process of working on https://calibration-training.netlify.app/ and am planning to post some sort of initial alpha release sort of thing to LessWrong soon! I need to seed the database with more questions first though. Right now there are only 10. I have a script and approach that should make it easy enough to get tens of thousands soon enough. This is helpful though. I’ll look through the existing resources and see if there’s anything I can use to improve my app.