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I like Carlin. I like the joke. The problem is we're taking a huge number of species with us. That is after all what makes Earth special compared to any other barren rock.
> By the time I'm down in the weeds I've forgotten what I'm doing, what the purpose of the actual API call is.
If I can craft tests up front in terms of the higher level goals then when I finish a subcomponent or get distracted by something else the higher level test is there for me to fall back on to figure out what to do next.
A Confederacy of Dunces is amazing. It’s in my top 5. Not in the same vein but I read Flowers for Algernon for the first time as an adult and it really touched my soul.
This new wave of social investment platforms is really exciting. Stocktwits is just noise. I'm still shocked Twitter hasn't capitalized on cashtags by at least showing market data. I've recently been a big fan of Commonstock: https://commonstock.com/ it actually allows you to link your broker through Plaid and shows a leaderboard based on actual % gain on positions.
That said, I like you bringing more competition to the scene!
Twitter is crawling with scammers and pump-n-dumpers. It's impossible to use it for investment talk. You spend all your time blocking people, and ticker hashtags are abused by people selling their discord channel or other crap. Also, if you express negative emotion toward a stock, its investors go out of their way to dox you or harass you. I had to set my account to "protected" because of this.
Twitter missed out on a huge opportunity. They should have listened to investors who user their platform.
Interesting insight! Do you use Stocktwits? I see a lot of the same issues you describe with people abusing the cashtag & spamming their discord channels. Working on a new discussion site and I'd like to attract a community of people interested in stock/RE/investment etc.
If you're interested I'd like to connect and learn about your plans for a discussion site. I think there is significant demand for retail investors looking for a quality community to learn and invest with.
Thanks for the shoutout! (I'm David the Commonstock founder). We're sprinting to finish some things to improve content algos and sorting before we grow so it's very cool to see you and @joadha call out the value of that and to stay disciplined focusing on quality over quantity. It's actually the exact reason I started building it as a side project in 2016: I wanted a community for signal instead of noise. The original pitch deck said, verbatim: "stocktwits/reddit/twitter but without all the noise/garbage".
Anyways, Thanks for the kind words!
(I'm all for more competition too, btw)
Yeah, I agree - Commonstock is a nice/minimalist platform and the ability to see and investor's portfolio is useful. The issue I see right now with commonstock is that they are heavily reliant on twitter for content - which can be mixed in term in terms of quality of investment information.
We do have broker integration on our dev roadmap because we see that as a key aspect of the overall investment process: decision, execution, tracking.
If you're in to the space race, don't miss Public Service Broadcasting - Race for Space album. They have an epic track for Gagarin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY-kAnvOY80
The entire album is one of my favourites of all time.
A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.
The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.
Here's what I'm planning next:
- Detecting the checkouts and extracting the checkout total generally across websites still needs refinement.
- Storing the purchases/savings locally in the extension storage to show you a graph of spending and saving.
> A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.
> The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.
I like the idea, but this could backfire on me =/
app: "it will take you 10 minutes to afford this"
me: "but it took 30 minutes to decide which one! now i need to buy three!"
As someone who has worked from home my whole career - not really. You still have to get your work done because there is no butts in chairs measure of productivity in wfh. You will be judged on your output. In fact you often have to work harder than the people in the office because of this.
Taking time off during work hours usually means making it up in the evening or on the weekend.
As someone who has just started working at home, not really. Instead of sitting at my desk at work browsing the internet while I keep some terminals open to make it look like I’m doing stuff, now I can just explicitly do whatever I want at home.
Small purchases easily eat up way more budget than most people realize. I bet a “you’ve $$$ in the last $TIME” feature would really help with that use case.
Oh I got you, I was just piggybacking for the OP’s eyes if they see it. Because lots of people do end up having budgeting difficulties due to a large number of small, seemingly inconsequential purchases.
It also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe they'll decide to not buy all 3. Not guaranteed to save everyone or anyone.
That's a really nice idea! I like that. What helped me from impulse buying is a simple thing; I always when I encounter something I want to buy I store it in the bookmarks (I have a folder in bookmarks called "To buy"). I only buy after a couple of weeks have passed and I decided I really need that thing. When I have a free time I go through my list and delete things that are obsolete. The second thing is, I have a limit of buying 1 thing per week (this includes also things like basic necessities, for example deodorant, that I need for myself). Needless to say I got the inspiration from my wife, she practices this for a few years already. The best thing about this is that it actually makes me feel good.
I'm not sure how one would word this exactly, but there are many additional costs to each product that we buy.
Plant space, animal lives, tainted ecosystems, busted up terrain, displaced humans are all contained in most of the products we buy, and especially online.
It's one thing when it's a bare necessity, but I shudder when I think about how many animal lives were lost in order to produce just one faux-animal beanie baby with cute oversized eyeballs.
A local group is building FairSharesApp, which is an app that tries to make you aware of the additional costs to a product. And allow you to buy that off.
AFAIK they only do CO2 emissions, yet. But when I spoke to them, they had more planned.
My problem with such products, is that they will reach the people who need it less: people who already care and try their best, will be able to do a little better; but people who don't care, won't install and use it, yet their impact is probably relatively much larger.
If you fly from Rome to Barcelona, you could "offset" the CO2; often directly when buying that ticket.
This works in two ways: 1. they "plant trees" and/or 2. they buy && hold or destroy certificates.
Certificates are limited regulated and deflationary. E.g. the EU buys X certificates from the market every year and destroys them and grants less certs each year.
Every company that emits "significant" CO2 needs to have, buy or be granted certs to do so. The setup makes those certs more expensive, so every year, there's a tradeoff: do I buy certs, or do I invest in lowering my emission.
Apps such as Fairshares allow public to buy (pieces of) such certs.
When agricultural (or similar) lands are transformed back to forests, that has a real and direct effect on the ability of the environment to absorb CO2 emission.
Obviously it needs to be done well, which often is not the case. Quite often there's no tree planted IRL, just some "promise to probably do so in some future" sold instead. And quite often the tree is planted but then abandoned (so that each 2 years everything dies off and the same plot can be re-used to "plant more trees"). But that is not the only modus operandi.
CO2 compensation cannot just be done by planting trees, either. I'm sending a monthly donation to a project that goes into remote villages in Africa where people still cook on open fires and provides portable stoves to them. Since a stove loses much less heat than an open fire, the villagers can cook the same amount of food with only a tenth of the original amount of wood, thereby reducing CO2 emissions.
Curious how much CO2 is emitted by fires in remote African villages compared to, say, power plants in industrialized countries, particularly since all the literature I've seen pins the CO2 issue of late on the industrial revolution.
Still, does sound like a good efficiency gain for those villages.
How much CO2 is emitted in the travel, all the supplies that the travelers have to bring, and the production of the stoves and presumably the refillable fuel containers for them? Meanwhile, the wood has already absorbed CO2 in the process of growing from the air...
My (highly imperfect) solution to that problem is usually to go find the niche internet forum/subreddit for whatever thing I'm looking to buy and try to see what people there are interested in in my price range.
I'm sure I end up with results biased towards whatever's in vogue for that community and likely something a bit more expensive, but it seems to have been a reasonably successful strategy in terms of getting things that fit my needs.
Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.
> Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.
Indeed, it's a freaking scourge. My current tactic is to append "reddit" to my searches. Often there's a subreddit of mostly genuine enthusiasts about $thing.
It says a lot that so much of the "genuine" opinions on products are all siloed in Reddit. They call themselves "the front page of the Internet", which speaks of arrogance to me, but it might slowly be starting to come true. But if it works, I don't see it as a completely bad thing, I guess.
Same here. Seems like there's a subreddit for just about everything (for instance, I consulted r/backpacks recently). Good advice, but unreliable in terms of finding an active community.
I subscribe to Consumer Reports and always check there first to see if they have rated items in the category I’m shopping.
In the last year I’ve bought a great garbage disposal, some all weather tires, a pellet grill, and a dishwasher based off their recommendations. Often times instead of getting the very best rates of something I’ll buy the second best which is often 1/2 the price. Sometimes the best of an item is really cheap compared to other brands that are shinier but objectively worse at the core function of the product.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ is an interesting stop for that kind of thing. I'm cheap and usually inclined to pick the cheapest 4-star option on Amazon (with the trick of &sort=review-count-rank). Browsing /r/BuyItForLife usually helps provide some pre-emptive buyer's remorse.
One thing I'll tack onto this in case someone with the right knowledge comes by: anyone know a site for good reviews of charging accessories?
We ask a lot of our chargers these days (e.g. 100w USB-C PD), and the price-quality curve seems to be very jumpy. Have had good experiences with companies like Anker or Aukey, but also seen tear-downs of failed units one price tier down that had zero isolation between mains voltage and what's going to the device. Would love to find some better guidance on buying such things.
I generally agree, but with charging especially it seems to be hard to figure out what exactly "name brand" means. Obviously you've got companies like Anker that've been around for a good while, but, in my opinion at least, it can be tough to distinguish up-and-coming brands pumping out great products from not-so-great brands producing junk.
For instance, I've bought stuff from Aukey and Ravpower that's worked well so far, but I wouldn't necessarily call those name brands yet in the US, unlike Anker.
Wish someone would do teardowns/testing of these cables/chargers on a wide basis (or that I had the skills to do it myself). I've seen a few people doing such things for computer PSUs, multimeters, and the like, but not for charging devices. Too bad.
I mean, at least in the US, you can buy utter crap in the store at crazy prices. Plenty of stuff that just barely hits the regulatory requirements but doesn't do any good engineering work beyond that.
This is an interesting idea. If people know they should not buy a trashy set of knives that they'll throw away in a year that would indeed reduce consumption. I'll think more on this. Thanks for the idea!
They shouldn't buy it, yes, but this is fundamentally a privilege to even consider. That's what I struggle with, that I'm in this privileged position to discern to what degree do I want to be complicit in my presumably negative impact on the sustainability of Earth and Life.
Manufacturing ridiculously cheap shit at scale to where more and more people click a button and have anything they want delivered to their door in a fucking day... is absolutely disgusting to me. But that's me, in my privilege. This machine adds ever more people up to the "consumer" class from out of abject poverty and welp that is a good thing.
I'm just conflicted because I feel like that has to be so doesn't it? We get to pontificate about "post consumerism" and derive meaning and such and such and such. Meanwhile that literally-worth-2-cents-t-shirt actually happens to be a good thing, at history scale, to all the people that have not being able to clothe themselves =/
sigh, I don't know what my point is, your comment just compelled me to share.
Thanks for your response. The extension itself won't solve global overconsumption, poverty or climate change in the same way that any one individual won't. I do believe that by being more mindful of our purchases it can influence other parts of our lives though - we start to consider "the machine", consider more closely our impulses against the negative impacts our choices have and perhaps then we begin to demand something more from "the machine". Maybe if enough people become mindful they will vote for politicians that represent an interest in saving the environment, drastically increase environmental protections and incentivize sustainable manufacturing which I hope in the long run benefits all.
Like some others hear I'm more interested in the carbon cost of purchases. How long it takes to earn the cost is something my brain automatically calculates! (maybe younger folks don't do that).
I recently worked on an idea to try and build a movement to rally people around taking action to benefit the CO2 problem during a specific month of the year: https://march2zero.com
Could it also estimate CO2 output from delivery? I always try to buy local even if it's online when possible. Luckily this is usually possible in the bay area/California :)
That is actually where I was going to start. Tracking the CO2 output for the production of millions of individual items across the internet is hard but I believe there are some services that can estimate CO2 for deliveries based on country + zip.
Haha, I love this - yeah there's lots of incentives available so maybe I allow the user to select which types of metrics are most meaningful to them. This is going on the list for sure!
For a number of bay area devs I suspect this might have the opposite psychological effect. A $50 price tag might put some people off until they realize it's only 15-20 minutes of work.
Yeah this is exactly what I was thinking. I am certainly more put off by $50 than N minutes.
On the other hand I often base my purchases based on "Will this $50 spend save more than N minutes of my time"
For example a top-filling humidifer may cost $50 more than a bottom-filling one but I spend an extra 1 minute fighting with the bottom-filling one and cleaning up water spills so after 15 uses it makes up its price difference.
The extension also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe it won't help everyone, but I hope that it reaches some.
I think a great opportunity could be the FIRE community. I think a lot of them think in terms of "if spend X amount I have to work Y more days before retirement". At least I try to do that. The problem is I don't really know how to calculate Y, if your plugin could translate the dollar amount on the checkout page to the number of days I have to work extra that would be really cool.
This of course depends on my savings rate, current assets and expected return on investments.
It does not except in a single case. All the data is stored locally in the browser extension storage otherwise. As part of the onboarding flow you can choose to anonymously submit your money saved to the online tally at https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/
I realize there have been browser extension authenticity issues recently with some sketchy things being published like The Great Suspender https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1.... I've got to spend more time investigating a way to remove this question for users, but my intent is to never collect any data beyond the anonymous online tally of the homepage which is opt-in only.
Sorry, I need to replace that email address it is unfortunately a placeholder. Side project has some loose threads. I'll do that tonight.
I think it’d also be useful if there’s a way to render stacks of cash (paper money and possibly coins) to show how much money you’re spending represented visually.
I want this but with a squeeze grip that shocks you for N ms for each dollar that you are about to spend. If you can’t hold down the grip and bear the shock, then you’re not allowed to run the charge.
Super into the CO2 estimate part. I think incorporating shipping is a easy first place. While much harder, future iterations could consider the composition of the product. Is it plastics? Etc
Wow, this is exactly what I need. I've recently been thinking a lot about how much less likely I am to purchase a product if I map its cost back to my hours worked. Thanks for this!
Thanks for trying it! So unfortunately I can't launch an extension popup over top of the checkout, it's just not in the browser extension APIs AFAIK. One alternative was to inject the popup in to the checkout page but I figured if this got any traction it's possible then a checkout page host could read the data (ie, your salary) from that. Thus, I landed on the intrusive redirect. Open to other ideas though!
Cool. What are you planning on exposing in the SDK? Will it simplify the process of sending data between the clients? Will you be able to get raw access to the audio and video data to create filters?
What apps are in development or available now to use?
The SDK gives developers a functional interface to responding to user interactions in the different touchpoints of a meeting app. These include things like a toolbar button, a sidebar view, and a video overlay. When responding to these interactions, the SDK assists apps to perform a few key side effects, things like mutating a shared state or sending an event to another client. The SDK handles all of the connections and consistency there so developers can focus on the unique value their apps can add.
We're currently working on a way to access raw audio + video, but it will likely not be available in the initial release of the SDK.
Some of the apps that are available right now include
* an agenda to keep your meetings organized
* a handraise app with a built in queue
* an airhorn for blasting people who talk too long
* a minesweeper game you can play while you wait for meetings to start
* A shared youtube watching experience that anybody can pause or fastforward.
I've been building a browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you're on a checkout page for a website and redirects you to a screen that shows you how long you had to work to earn the purchase you're about to make. The idea is to get people to more consciously consume and in general reduce their consumption.
It's currently working, but I've stalled a bit because I'm not sure of the best way to promote it. ProductHunt is probably a good first step, but other suggestions welcome.
I want to thank you for making a Firefox extension. As a fellow WebExtension developer, I'm shocked to see how many extension "product" teams just skip adding a version for Firefox, when most of the code is the same (due to the shared standard.)
The Adobe Podcast team is looking for a Senior Software Engineer with a passion for creating great product experiences. Be part of a tightly knit team developing cutting edge innovations in the world of audio on the web and help define the future of this medium as it takes over the world.
Senior Software Engineer, Web Audio Products & Services: https://careers.adobe.com/us/en/job/R138749/Senior-Software-...