We've implemented a handful of SOTA algorithms for ensuring that it maintains the writing styling, formatting, and structure of the document you're editing.
Also, with the "inline editing" tool you can choose the specific text you want to change without affecting the rest of your document (rather than the AI rewriting the whole document with each request).
looks very cool. consider putting estimated savings in the pricing area too. similar to solar where big upfront cost but amortization prob makes it relatively cheap!
I'm interested in link density and diversity in those little workflow supporting spreadsheets you mention.
Do you have some examples?
We're building a sort of highly linkable (cell level) spreadsheet-type widget builder that is supposed to play nicely with existing workflows (instead of trying to force people to build out entire workflows like many of these new breed of "CRUD-replacer" low-code/no-code apps seem to want us to do). Might interest you!
I can't share anything directly but let me describe a little scenario for you that's close enough:
We have a CRUD app that acts as a CMS with all our product listings in it. There is a team of people who are tasked with curating and maintaining these product listings. So you can go to crud.com/admin/product/<id> and modify the listing, which needs to happen every now and then.
The team of people who maintain these product listings need to coordinate their efforts and so when they need to modify some set of the products they create a spreadsheet with (product_id, link_to_crud.com, Person who is responsible, status). Maybe there's some approval process or multiple statuses or something like that that makes this all a little more custom/complex. Maybe they need to update a few things across services at the same-ish time so there might be a few links per row but it's going to be relatively bounded by what a human can handle.
If our data lived in Airtable, it'd be really easy for this team to make their tables/spreadsheets with direct relations to our core tables (which replace the CRUD app in this case). That team understands their workflows better than I ever will as an engineer. Giving them the power to create their own workflow tools is way better than trying to have engineering build it for them, and that's going to be a huge selling point for me.
I don't think we'd need cell-level links but rather row-level. Right now they use Google sheets, but a more domain-specific tool would be better.
Most current-day readers might prefer Davis, but the best in my eyes is that by the two brothers Warner: "Between 1905 and 1925, the brothers Arthur and Edmond Warner published a translation of the complete work in nine volumes, now out of print." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh I read classical Persian, I've read most of the Shahnameh in Persian and taught parts of it to English-speakers, and have been amazed by the art of the Warner's work and the depth of their understanding.
> Do you have any insight into the reason for the unequal access? Is it that poorer or uninsured patients cannot afford non-emergency healthcare? Is it that they are too far away? Is it education/knowledge/social - belief that they shouldn't go to a doctor for "nothing". Are they "too busy".
I am not a Doctor observing patient populations, but I have lived and worked in East Palo Alto, CA for the last few years, which from my perspective, is a stark case study in all sorts of inequalities (For non-SV residents, East Palo Alto is a small historically socio-economically depressed city wedged between Palo Alto, Facebook, and Google. Zuck's house is a stone throw away from crack houses)
Anecdotally, what I have seen regarding poorer/uninsured people not utilizing health services involves all the things you have mentioned.
Non-emergency healthcare without insurance is pretty much out of the question. Even with insurance, co-pays can be prohibitively expensive. There are people I know living paycheck to paycheck with zero savings and like 50%+ of income going to housing expenses. Even a $50 unplanned-for copay is a painful blow.
Distance is also an issue for a population that may not have consistent access to a car--and the bus system takes too much time. If you are working a few jobs, it's nigh-impossible to take a random 1hr+ bus ride to a medical facility.
Education/knowledge is, unfortunately, also a huge issue. I have observed some astonishingly unhealthy habits that stem primarily from ignorance. Additionally, even navigating our health system requires some level of education, literacy, and time that often seems prohibitive for many in the population I have interacted with. And, with regards to distrust of the medical system, I have observed that as well. I have also seen this coupled with exploitative homeopathic "care" providers...which is doubly sad. These are more complex issues that I don't feel well-equipped to begin to speculate the underlying reasons for. Perhaps some of it is cultural. I am not sure if that is the primary story though.
Generalized ambient anxiety and depression is also, I believe, the more ultimate, albeit distal, cause here, rather these more proximate poverty mechanics. The emotional toll of living in poverty, primarily extreme _relative_ poverty (remember Zuck across the freeway and the swarms of Tesla commuting through your city on their way to high-paying tech jobs that are inaccessible to you) results in all sorts of extremely unhealthy compensatory behaviors. Heavy alcohol and drug use--even if just Marijuana, binge eating fast-food, violent communication styles that contribute to always-on fight or flight reactions, dangerous activities like racing cars or weaving bikes through traffic--perhaps done as some way to "feel something" or perhaps find identity in the only way available--acting out anti-social power displays as a way to reify self-worth contra a system that clearly treats them like shit on nearly all levels. And more.
Frankly, unequal access is both a moral failure and also, I believe, soon to be an instrumental failure for the strength of the United States. Having a large population of enfeebled, diseased people does not bode well for nice things we care about like innovation, improved quality of life, stability of our governance systems, or even things like the strength of our fighting force.
However you want to cut it, the issue of unequal health access is a shame.
What is going on with Greece in the first life expectancy chart? Large reversal in cost increase coupled with unperturbed steady increase in life expectancy.
The question is what the lag on health effects of that was. We know from things like smoking prevention and childhood diseases that the lag can be huge, anything up to half a century.
Seeing Like A State goes into a fair amount of detail.
From my notes:
* Soviet collectivization. Inspired by huge mechanized farms in the US. Vision of doing for farming what assembly lines did for manufacturing. Both Soviet and US attempts to do so failed badly. Party resorted instead to martial law and grain seizures, creating peasant uprisings. Forcibly relocated peasants into standardized, pre-planned mega-farms which were ruled by agricultural specialists. Ignored local conditions, vastly over-simplified and over-abstracted different areas of land and differently-skilled populations. Pressure from above to deny failures led to plans quickly losing contact with reality. Peasants gained most of their food by farming their own private plots in their little free time. Peasants effectively became indentured slaves, stripped of any cultural institutions that might be a focal point for rebellion, and naturally responded with terrible productivity. More deaths from starvation that WW1 and civil war combined.
* Compulsory villagization in Tanzania. Similar story. Government (with support of the Western world) wanted to modernize the peasantry. Forcibly relocated peasants to standardized, pre-planned villages. (Was supposed to be voluntary, but top-down pressure for results led to initiative-taking). Peasants were moved vast distances, rendering their deep local knowledge worthless. (Peasants don’t come in standardized, fungible units). Forced to apply Western farming techniques which failed badly in the local climate and ecology. (The peasant practices of dense polycropping turn out to be much more effective in climates with high primary productivity than monocropping and ridging as is common in the West). Authorities heard reports of atrocities but insisted they were isolated cases.
* And again in Ethiopia. Lead to widespread famine.
"You should use wheat-growing techniques that do work for us, but don't work for you" isn't quite the same message as "you should grow wheat (using techniques that work equally well for us and for you) even though wheat is only economical for us because we have a lot of land and no people to farm it, whereas you have a lot of people but not so much land".
There are varying levels of communist madness, from "you must pursue this strategy, sub-optimal for conditions here" all the way to "you will stay in this barbed-wire pen until you all starve". In the 60s/70s Tanzania was further along this line than was Russia.
For downvoters (who perhaps don't like my swipe at commies): my point here is that not all of these were honest if misguided attempts to improve farm productivity.
Some, like in Ethiopia, were closer to ethnic cleansing -- deliberately moving people (esp from Tigray IIRC) who were violently unhappy with the government, to less fertile places where they didn't understand how to farm, especially with new crops to boot. But by claiming this was a modernisation scheme was excellent PR, people like those, and the resulting famine was seen primarily as a great tragedy, and brought in lots of aid money.
I agree with your contention that the examples of modern annoyances chosen by the author are not hidden pinnacles of humanness to be preserved at all costs.
However, I think the author's deeper point still stands, despite his poor support for the argument.
Can we not agree that the _je ne sais quoi_ of humanness is threatened, on some level, by modernity?
It is a very difficult empirical case to make, as you have made clear with your totally acceptable critique of _Bowling Alone_.
But, in my view, supporting the claim that our "humanness" is under assault is not really where we should be focusing our energies here... It is much more interesting to discuss how we can preserve the "old good" things from our past, while somehow enabling ourselves to take advantage of the "new good" things unlocked by technological progress without being undone in the process.
I'm tired of all these jeremiads bewailing the loss of all that we hold dear, ripped from our grasp by inhuman techno-corporate-behemoths.
Not sure what the roadmap for a more productive discussion is--but perhaps first we must define exactly what it is we valued from our pre-industrial, supposedly unsullied past.
I agree with you that we must be very critical any rose-tinted "back in my day it was better" line of inquiry, but I do believe that there are things worth preserving.
Another important question to answer is, why are those things valuable to us? Is it because they titillate our neurons in just the right way? Or is there something more there?
Then we need to figure out how to implement our technological progress in a way that fosters these values, rather than undermining them.
> but I do believe that there are things worth preserving. Another important question to answer is, why are those things valuable to us? Is it because they titillate our neurons in just the right way? Or is there something more there?
The article discusses the fact that there are things beyond happiness that are important to humanity/humans. The author mentions self-determinism ("...a dystopian nightmare wherein humans are reduced to automatons") as well as seredipity and randomness ("...value of searching, browsing, being bored, being lost, failing, missing out, daydreaming, being surprised, going off script...")
If we leave human rights in-tact and preserve the 40 hour work week (or less), there's no shortage of personal freedom, serendipity, randomness, and wonder to be found in this world. But if these things do not happen naturally, then we'll need to teach them.
The book addresses some of those points. Individual volunteering may be up, for example, but not forms of volunteering that are more community based. Charitable donations require no cooperation with other members of the community, so it is irrelevant.
I'm not the parent, but it's fairly straightforward to get data into the ledger format.
I have written a handful of Python scripts to convert CSV credit card statements (Chase, credit unions, etc) to ledger. Additionally, pdfquery can be used to extract data from PDF statements.
I also derive tremendous personal value from getting the opportunity to meet the people driving the cars.
Hearing different perspectives, sharing interesting stories, and generally engaging in real human interaction are something I don't get enough of in my regular life, and Lyft has materially changed that. Of course unfortunate that I don't get enough of that outside of a transactional transportation arrangement, but it's real for me.
