I’m hesitant to use software licensed under the GPL in my own program, as convenient as that sounds. I’d like to release it under a (even) less restrictive license.
jamesf
Karma: 351
I’m researching that right now. Recommendations are welcome.
That seems extremely sane in retrospect; thankfully I haven’t done very much work on the statistics side, and sunk costs are therefore comfortably low if I were to take that path. I’m also not worried about glamour at all in that case, since I’m the one doing the work of “make it something people will actually want to use and that is useful”. There are indeed many of them—do you have a specific recommendation?
Yes, I’m pretty sure this is currently the most significant hurdle to getting people to want to use it (this isn’t the ’80s!). Adding some kind of browser-based GUI is my current task.
Maybe some of this is a little far fetched but god would it be fun to dig into.
My sentiment exactly! This seems like the sort of thing that would enable people to seriously improve their lives in a lot of different ways, but there are also many more ways to use it that probably wouldn’t help much or at all. That’s why I’m trying to focus on ease of use—the more people out there experimenting with measuring different things in combination, the sooner everyone gets to benefit from those methods and combinations of measurements that actually do help.
All the ones I’ve found so far have some combination of the following traits:
Proprietary and expensive
Steep learning curve/assumes the user will be a technical professional
Not designed to use data from other services
I think a program that avoids all of those things simultaneously will be able to fill a useful niche for many people. If you know of a free program that an intelligent layperson could learn to use with minimal effort, and that’s made to collect data from a variety of existing Quantified Self apps and devices (or at least be easily amenable to such extension), I’ll happily stop development and use that instead.
It looks like getting editline to talk with my Clojure code would be somewhat non-trivial. Using the Clojure REPL is probably the better alternative for serious use until I get a GUI working.
Reading CSVs is now on the todo list.
It can take command line arguments and therefore be put into a shell script, if that’s what you mean. Here’s an example:
java -jar familiar-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar “(open! some-other-experiment)” “(new-var herons boolean? false)” “(data herons true)”
Just reading its documentation has been very helpful so far. Thank you!
Introducing Familiar, a quantified reasoning assistant (feedback sought!)
Low level crack dealers in gangs face worse pay and conditions than workers in most minimum wage jobs. My friendly independent neighborhood pot dealer makes a good living. There is still a risk of being robbed etc. without any legal recourse, but I’d imagine it’s a lot lower if you aren’t selling crack in the inner city.
Status-seeking, essentially. Gang leaders are very high status in some circles, dealing drugs through gangs is a necessary part of becoming one. Of course actually becoming a gang leader is extremely unlikely, but then there aren’t many self-described rationalists who deal crack.
I’m writing a Bayesian inference/quantified self assistant for my Hacker School project. Once I have it somewhat usable I’ll make a discussion post asking for feedback, but you can follow development now if you want.
It’s not like money because it’s not scarce. I could generate karma easily by saying the right things on new posts, if I ever felt the urge to, which I never will because it’s accreted anyway with no specific effort toward that goal. I’ve abandoned two other accounts to change my username and the reset to 0 karma didn’t affect me one bit; I’ve never tried giving away all of my savings, but it would probably change my day-to-day life a lot.
Karma is a numeric representation of how people reacted to your post, including the votes by people who don’t feel compelled to respond verbally—a substitute for the voting by attentive gazes or intentional ignoring that would serve the same purpose in meatspace. It’s body language for the internet.
Wow! Do you have any insight into why programmers there make so little on average? Programming interns in the US make the equivalent of $30k-$50k a year while working, often with benefits.
musicForProgramming(); is essentially video game music but slower. It’s supposed to be just interesting enough to reduce boredom, without being interesting enough that you end up choosing between tuning it out so you can get work done and listening to it actively and not getting work done.
I think the main sin of Objectivism is that, though most Objectivists don’t really think of it as a closed belief system, they focus too much on the writings of Ayn Rand, who for reasons of both insufficient rationality and insufficient available evidence, believed a lot of things that are now generally thought to be false (humanity’s “state of nature” probably the most relevant and fundamental thing she was wrong about).
Depending on your personality, how much you know already, and the kind of places you would want to work, a programming dojo might be a good complement or alternative to college. I would guess that most companies don’t care much about the difference between software engineering vs. computer science degrees.
I’m going to Hacker School this summer. It has a lot of praise for making people good at programming in a very short amount of time, and it works on exactly this principle; students are selected almost exclusively for desire+ability to get better at programming, and so everyone pursues their pre-existing goal much more effectively than if they weren’t all reinforcing/teaching each other.
Hooray, people with credentials! Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
This was my most convincing reason to try to bother implementing the statistical guts myself in the first place; it was pretty easy to put together a little naive Bayes classifier that calculates the maximum likelihood estimate for all your other variables/predicates given the value of one variable/predicate intended to be minimized or maximized, and I’m pretty sure it works mostly correctly, and I’m pretty sure the additional return from using virtually any of the existing more sophisticated ML algorithms that I’ve yet to hear of won’t be nearly as high as the initial return from being able to answer the question “if this is the case, what other stuff was most likely the case?”. I’m starting to get the suspicion that the next most useful modeling-related task may be to focus on generating lots and lots of different compound predicates given all your raw variables in some way that doesn’t reek of unhelpful combinatorial explosion, then calculating the maximum likelihood and probability of that value for all of them using my existing dumb little classifier, which isn’t something I can recall seeing any work on. If that reminds you of something then I will desperately consume whatever resources or names of algorithms that come to your mind.
In the near term, very low-frequency events that have a very clear impact on other variables might be usefully grouped under the raw variable “significant and obvious other things that aren’t worthy of their own variable in my opinion”, and many of the more useful terminally-valued predicates could imaginably require that variable to take a certain value/range of values. Maybe “rejection by people currently in my social circle” with a holistic, multi-valued rating could be its own variable, if that happens unfortunately often for some people. I don’t expect to automate measuring something like this any time soon, but it is undoubtedly important to know about in figuring out optimal conditions for “normal days”, which makes me think the manual data entry part will be unavoidable if you want this to be particularly useful.
In the more distant future, I see no reason why such a thing couldn’t be learned into a variable that actually does an okay job of carving the important parts of your personal reality at the joints. If you have a software system that knows relationships are important to people, knows which of your relationships are important to you, knows who you were talking to, and knows the valence, arousal, duration, frequency, etc. of your interaction with that person over time, then, yes, something like “ended a relationship today” probably could be inferred. It doesn’t sound trivial but it sounds absolutely plausible, given sufficient effort.