davidanekstein

What did you use for visualizing at the top, webgl?

I’m making an iOS app [1] that allows you to track and analyze your life. It’s all local to your device and was created to help me learn more about myself and my habits.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

now to decode the blog post’s hidden message

Thank you for writing this up, it was great to see all of the comparisons. Very well put together!

My experience is that it is much more terse and realistic with its feedback, and more thoughtful generally. I trust its positive acknowledgements of my work more than claude, whose praise I have been trained to be extremely skeptical of.

I’m surprised there was no mention of operational CRDT’s, or CRDT’s generally.

The language you use to describe this is fun, I make an app for self tracking called Reflect and would love your opinion of it, even if it doesnt suit your needs exactly.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

If anyone is interested in doing this sort of thing themselves, I make an iPhone app called Reflect meant for this exact purpose

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

o4-mini-high got it on my first try after 9 seconds

Is installing Rust any different?

https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

Isn’t this an NP hard problem?

I’ve worked in robotics before. Since you mentioned backend I think getting familiar with ROS and LCM and other middleware would be helpful to you. If you have spare time, you could play around with writing drivers for motors that you buy, but it’s less specific to your skill set which in my opinion probably consists of sending and ingesting data, especially event-based systems.

I think in the workplace this is true, and a bummer, because the workplace demands the benefits that AI augmented programming offers. As a hobby, though, like music, the need for productivity isn’t as high and you can go to the proverbial practice room and program.

Overall I think you have a good point and the bummer for me is that the practice room isn’t as available for the day job.

I think AI is posing a challenge to people like the person in TFA because programming is their hobby and one that they’re good at. They aren’t used to knowing someone or something can do it better and knowing that now makes them wonder what the point is. I argue that amateur artists and musicians have dealt with this feeling of “someone can always do it better” for a very long time. You can have fun while knowing someone else can make it better than you, faster, without as much struggle. Programmers aren’t as used to this feeling because, even though we know people like John Carmack exist, it doesn’t fly in your face quite like a beautiful live performace or painted masterpiece does. Learning to enjoy your own process is what I think is key to continuing what you love. Or, use it as an opportunity to try something else — but you’ll eventually discover the same thing no matter what you do. It’s very rare to be the best at something.

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments

This is a nice compilation of the work, it was great to see in one place

Great job, thanks for breaking it down the way you did

This sounds amazingly cool, would love to read about the process after you’re done if you have an intention to write about it.

If anyone wants a tool to show you this analysis automatically, I make an app that links with Whoop and Oura and Apple Health and it shows you all of those relationships: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

An app called Reflect to run self experiments, to prove your new habit or supplement is doing what you want, or to get to the bottom of what relationship your mood has with your lifestyle changes:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

Thanks! I’m in a very similar situation as far as simplicity goes. This conversation has helped me in finishing my latest article: https://aneksteind.github.io/posts/2025-03-26

Thanks for the reminder. I feel the same way about not playing the game. Moreso than wanting to drive the numbers up, which is not the goal, I like sharing things and want to at least be coherent so that someone can follow along. But considering your advice I think not sweating the details of scaffolding is a good adjustment.

Do you have any advice for someone like me, who has about 5 long form article ideas but would like to just get stuff out there? For example, I want to blog about matrix profiles because I just learned about them and they’re super cool. But it feels like much scaffolding needs to occur for an audience to see the light.

As an example of the type of length my blogposts have: https://aneksteind.github.io/posts2022-03-04/index.html

Yes, you can choose a random intervention schedule and also ABAB schedules with configurable number of phases and phase length.

Reflect integrates with Whoop and so can act as an augmented or relacement Whoop diary feature.

What is the feature set you're looking for? There are symptom-specific apps and track anything apps, but I'm unaware of any that combines both into a generic solution. We have a roadmap item to implement things on Android. https://changemap.co/ntl/reflect/task/9239-android-version-o...

Android is on the roadmap, but we haven't started yet. Please comment on and upvote the issue!

https://changemap.co/ntl/reflect/task/9239-android-version-o...

If anyone is interested in running their own self guided experiments, I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. We got in the top 3 on ProductHunt not too long ago [2], and I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [3].

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/products/reflect-c052fea3-a982-4...

[3] https://open.substack.com/pub/reflectapp/p/my-experience-wit...

I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [2].

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/reflectapp/p/my-experience-wit...

I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. There aren’t templates yet but you can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [2]. I think you have a point about sense of direction and premade templates being targeted and useful. Reflect is very much generic and untargeted.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/reflectapp/p/my-experience-wit...

I made this, it’s a lot less than $25/mo. Happy to take suggestions. It’s called Reflect.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...