I will readily admit that even when I know my counterpart is neurodivergent, I still have issues adjusting my expectations and reactions. Without practice with repeated interactions over time it’s hard to mentally pivot. Sometimes I find it’s easier for me if we have the same conversations over a voice call where the body language element is removed entirely.
Agreed with what you said, when you're only considering security and usability you're often not at a Pareto optimal state, but once you add cost into the picture you see a lot more cases of being on the Pareto optimal boundary, or at least in case where the next improvement only comes with significant effort (by re-platforming, for example).
I guess that makes sense. as you get to higher dimensions, most points sit very close to the surface. So if we're trading off N things and N >> 1, expect to basically always be at the pareto boundary.
On the other hand, we should recognize that, to put it plainly, not all dimensions on the frontier have the same level of importance.
Any technological and societal progress is going to have negative consequences. To give just one example, completely curing cancer will put many doctors (and other healthcare professionals who aren't paid as well as doctors are) out of a job. It will definitely cause at least a few children to go hungry. It will probably cause a few suicides when some oncologists start to "feel useless." This does not mean we shouldn't cure cancer if the opportunity arises.
Our society, driven by clickbait, rage and social media hot takes, tends to overweight the dimensions at which new technology makes things worse. There are many news stories about social-media-fueled teen suicides or AI datacenter water use, very few about how talking to family abroad no longer requires astronomical long-distance bills.
For one we need to start talking about taking off the weights from security dimension, because it's becoming ridiculously overemphasized for things where it frankly doesn't matter much for. All at the cost of "usability", which is a fancy word for saying people's time and effort, which is literally the only truly non-renewable, priceless resource we have.
My experience has been that security is mostly treated as some contractual obligation that has little benefit and just costs money so the minimum amount of effort that prevents charges of gross negligence is put in. But I’m glad to hear that apparently there are places that take it more seriously.
Passkeys, 2FA being deployed the more intensely the more trivial and non-critical for users a site is, mobile platforms getting absurdly locked down, naive takes on "lethal trifecta" sucking out whatever little air in AI discussions that was left by IP apologists". In the real world, everyone in this industry seems to be showing off pointing out potential vulnerabilities and security considerations in any new idea or concept that appears - as if that were something to be proud of, instead of a solemn duty that more than likely will just prevent a nice thing from existing in the first place.
From where I stand, the industry is obsessed with security, way past the point of rational thought.
Yes, I don't mean to imply that this is some sort of clear majority situation or anything. I just mean that I've definitely both seen on HN and participated in real life in some conversations in which it was taken as given that we must give up one thing to get another when nobody had in fact established that we were on the Pareto frontier. Or, considered from a local point of view, whether the tradeoff really was inevitable. I have had cases where we could have had both, with no difficulty.
I’m very high dimensional spaces as they occur in real life projects with difficult to measure dimensions (eg how much does implementing something cost and how much does not implementing something cost) it seems very difficult to determine where you are in your space. Most companies run their product mostly on feels because anything else would quickly lead to analysis paralysis.
My experience with AI-written documentation is that, as a category, it contains just enough technical errors that more often than not I end up spending time running down confidently stated errors the old fashioned way: cross-referencing API documentation, reading code, etc. At that point you inevitably end up trying to get in touch with a human from the other team.
In other words, it's not because I don't know it's there, or I don't want to read it, it's because my priors tell me it's going to waste my time. What I end up doing is searching, finding the docs, and reading until I start to get the feeling of hallucinated factual errors.
I'm sure there's AI-written documentation in there where the authors really did a good job reviewing it, and I just didn't notice. But I've also had engineers under me lose weeks of productivity at this point because of documentation confidently presented, insufficiently vetted, that turned out to be wrong.
The step that a lot of people leave out is the revising: it is worth the human hours to go over the outputs of AI for this kind of thing with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it is usable, readable, accurate, etc.
I would then have to wonder if all the time saved in the first place at all. I have heard anecdotes of verifying AI output to be more time-consuming and generally even more painful/stressful than doing the whole work yourself perhaps.
As an employee, I would prefer to not be stressed and as an employer, I would prefer to not additionally stress my employee on all times so that I can have them use the stress for the works which truly matter the most (which is a limited resource as an employee shouldn't be burnt out or shouldn't be given unlimited stress)
Also its probably the ethical thing to do but even rational logic dictates so in my honest opinion (not sure how much of it works exactly on documentation stuff though*)
> I would then have to wonder if all the time saved in the first place at all.
From my experiences using AI to write documentation, if your bar is high quality documentation, yes, you do save time, but it's on the order of a 1.5-2x efficiency boost, not 10x. The AI basically saves me one draft iteration and saves me the trouble of creating charts by hand, and that's substantial, but I still need to take a fine toothed comb to the output.
The biggest issue I run into is that AI is good at the tone to address an intended audience but is not good at framing and structuring the information for said audience.
If it’s a problem you’re willing to solve with money and don’t want any special stuff like mods, you can pay for a server with Realms and then you don’t need to think too hard about it.
But the canonical way to do it that is both free and infinitely customizable is to host your own server. It’s pretty straightforward to do these days. However, before you do, I would suggest playing the game a bit to understand what the settings are/mean. You and your kids could play together a bit on a Realms server or a community/public server to get a feel for what you want in a custom server.
If you're not set on a "survival mode" design, could you design it as counting up instead of counting down? And maybe showing a "par" time, that way players can opt into the challenge vs. just a morning brainteaser.
Another idea: maybe time how long you take for each word, and for the competitive among us, show stats on how long you took compared to everyone else, and a leaderboard for who took the least total time.
> I've been around many conversations over the years where people would say goofy things like they couldn't use Python because it's untyped.
I'm not sure I would go that far, but I would definitely say that I remember many, many moments where a Python codebase hit critical mass and the amount of time I spent documenting and checking types exploded. It wasn't really about static, explicit typing, so much as "once my tools (IDE) are taken into account, how much time am I spending trying to reason about correctness?" Reasoning about types was the main contributor to that with Python before type annotations.
> The whole “you could only possibly pretend to care about other people” response to the book is vaguely psychopathic.
I prefer to interpret it charitably: the line between influence and manipulation can be pretty fuzzy, and some people come to a conclusion of, basically, "don't do it at all because it's always selfish."
I think it's a flawed view because it's impossible to go through life not influencing anyone and not wanting anything from anyone, so you may as well try to do it in a way that is generally win-win or at least not win-lose.
I think the most charitable interpretation would be that people expressing that view are deeply self-conscious. They are afraid if they followed the advice in the book, they might be perceived as manipulative and they want to avoid that possibility. They hide from that fear by insisting that it actually must be manipulative.
Outside of that, I can only see less charitable interpretations. e.g. The idea that the only reason someone could ever compliment another person is to manipulate them says either that the person holding the idea literally can’t imagine interacting positively with someone for non-selfish reasons (psychopathy) or that they hold such low opinion of the rest of humanity that they believe no one else could (misanthropy).
> for some reason I got it in my head that it's a sort of red pilled book that teaches you how to manipulate people.
It's two sides of the same coin. Many techniques in that book are things that both genuinely kind people and manipulators do, the difference is intent. In that sense the idea of the book is a bit of a Rorschach test, although the way the author goes about it makes it pretty clear it wasn't meant to teach manipulation.
When I read the book over a decade ago, it did not feel like a red pilled book, it felt like a guide for well-intentioned people to learn how to express that more effectively. On the spectrum between "people orientation" and "task orientation", I was a task oriented person learning how to navigate personal and professional relationships more like a well-adjusted person would, and I suspect I and everyone around me was happier for it.
Makes me think that anything taken too far can be a bad thing. Pity in its raw form is an incredibly empathetic side of our human nature and can be extraordinary.
However, if pity is made a reward system for the people receiving the empathy, it can be used manipulatively. I believe CS Lewis called it "a passion for pity" (I could be wrong).
It’s rough at first but you will learn the baby’s rhythms and preferences. If you track their sleep and wake up times (I did it the old fashioned way in a notebook) you’ll see a pattern emerge pretty quickly, and then it gets easier because you will figure out how to work with it.
Every baby is different so most of the advice you find won’t work, but if you try enough things you’ll eventually find something that works consistently. Or you might just luck out and get a good sleeper.
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