keyserj

I think there's a lot of good advice in these comments already, at least for individuals to think about for themselves.

I happen to have discovered a fantastic contra dancing community[1] in Chicago that could be great for some who are lonely. You have to chalk up the courage to go (if you aren't used to trying new things, or dancing), but everyone is extremely welcoming, the dancing is easy even for people "with two left feet", and the happiness going around is truly contagious.

I think it's a terrific place to find community. It's a social dance where you'll basically dance with everyone by the end of the evening. There's time before, in the middle (snack intermission), and at the end for striking some conversation. The dancing is every Monday so it's routine. The crowd (100-150 people on average) is diverse in many ways (at least in age, gender, income, interests) so you're bound to find people with commonalities that, using some of the other advice in these comments, you could try to hang out with outside of the dancing.

As far as getting people to feel like they can join, I'm not the expert, but I've had such a great experience that I'm happy to at least bring it up and "spread the good word".

For outside of Chicago: contra dancing is a bit niche, but a surprising amount of large-ish US cities have it. I think it's more popular (relatively) on the East coast. Can't speak for outside of the US.

[1] https://www.chicagobarndance.org/

I feel the author loses points (persuasiveness? respect? integrity? I can't think of the word) by not acknowledging what they think accurately happened. What's the word alternative to genocide in this case? "War" with large sprinkles of civilian casualties?

To defend truth, one must defend vocabulary

I completely agree with this. The decay of words reduces our ability to communicate accurately, which leads then to a myriad of disagreement, misinformation, disinformation, etc.

I think "semanticide" happens often when there's outrage, and there aren't accurate words that carry enough connotation to reflect the emotion and frustration in the speaker. What's the solution in this case? I don't blame the speakers for resorting to it in haste, but perhaps the issue comes when the word abuse becomes well-meditated, and repeated?

Cool, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation

Neat idea. Would you say that biggest difference from something like Kysely is the focus on extracting common calculated SELECT targets into methods that can easily be accessed when querying? Or perhaps it's more thorough with providing TS versions of all the SQL syntax available? The list of reference fields/methods in your docs is certainly massive.

That's a cool idea. Seems like there would be a ton of things contained in an individual's worldview, that it'd be hard to build all of it up. Perhaps when you encounter something that makes you think of some core philosophy, you note it and the philosophy, and eventually there would be a loose picture that forms amongst all the relations.

Certainly would be helpful for trying to understand someone else. Not sure if this is totally appropriate, but it does seem like something that a chatbot would be good at combing through to find examples to suggest why one thinks a certain way about a new topic. You could even ask it about your own worldview!

Working on a webapp for critically think with others about a problem.

The idea is that you build a diagram that contains all the details about the problem and people's thoughts on it, and it's organized in such a way that it's easy to just keep refining, down to the smallest detail. So you build this concrete, shared understanding, and move it forward and forward, until hopefully y'all can make some best decision to improve the situation.

There's a lot to do. Currently working on UX to allow hiding intermediate nodes and still have indirect edges drawn. Want to add an LLM integration to generate/update diagrams via natural language, which I think will help a lot with usage barriers to using the app.

Happy to get any feedback :) https://ameliorate.app/ https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate

I'm a big fan of modeling causal structures like this - I think having a diagram is a really good way of getting on the same page and making conversations more constructively focused on points that each party can follow and precisely provide counterpoints for. I appreciate reading an article about this! I feel like our society would benefit a lot from investing more in this kind of information management, but it's not particularly flashy.

I'm working on an app[1] for building these structures, centered around problems and solutions, with the addition that each node or edge can have its own structured auxiliary information, e.g. scores for intuitions, argument trees for supporting/critiquing the claims implied by nodes/edges, questions for identifying unknowns. Here's an example[2] of the two diagrams in the article as they'd be in the app. I want it to be easier for our discussions to be constructive, and I think software can reduce the effort required for it.

[1] https://ameliorate.app/ [2] https://ameliorate.app/keyserj/facts-dont-change-minds-artic...

I think the structure inherently enables each node to be a claim (like "this thing exists"), but that there's value in making a node even if that node's claim is not particularly disagreeable, because the edges to that node might be disagreeable, or to provide more detail about how one node relates to another (e.g. through some intermediate node). In this case, maybe the main value in modeling "Efficiency" is to convey how innovation might lead to profit.

To me, it feels less fuzzy when you assume that all nodes and edges imply their own claims, and that it's just a matter of whether or not those claims are worth arguing. The fuzziness imo is based on the fact that the curator picks which nodes and edges exist, which therefore determines which claims exist and can be agreed or disagreed with, not to mention the overall legibility of the graph itself. But I would argue that a causal graph like this is better at representing reality than something like an argument tree, and that, while it might be fuzzy to determine which nodes should exist, at least there's less opinion involved about where nodes should be placed in relation to each other. Which imo makes the structure easier to refine given time and feedback.

I want all teams to squash merge their feature into master after tests pass. One commit at the end, and one commit to remove in case of an issue affecting customers related to the release.

Hmm what's the issue with the GitHub default of merging PRs, where there's a merge commit which individually pulls in the PR's commits? You can revert the merge PR as a whole, or the PR commits individually. E.g. with this[1] merge commit, you can `git revert 0a98f570 -m 1` (the merge commit) or `git revert b30950fc` (an individual commit from the PR).

[1] https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/commit/0a98f570f63ffd...

I agree that wealth is not the same as class, but just as a counter anecdote, my dad is a (small business) plumber and I never felt like we were treated less than any other middle class family. If anything, it seemed like people were often really grateful and giving random gifts like food from gardens or tickets to local events.

I'm building an app[1] (repo[2]) that helps you visualize perspectives and details about complex problems so that it's easier to figure what to do about them.

Right now it's basically a diagramming app specifically for the domain of problem-solving. I think an issue with it is that it's too hard for new users, so I've spent the last few weeks UX designing a view (figma prototype[3]) that I think is more intuitive to use (though sacrifices some features).

I'm currently working on code design for this view and am hoping to implement in the next few weeks!

[1] https://ameliorate.app/

[2] https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate

[3] https://www.figma.com/proto/psTRolY8LTVOef3fkCJ0B4/Simplifie...

Destruction is a terrible yet inevitable end that should only be induced to protect the weak and ameliorate suffering, so be just and resolute when you seek it.

I think an issue with this reasoning is that "protect the weak" and "be just" are things that many people (admittedly not all) from "both sides" _do_ want to do, and that reality is often not so straightforward, involving tradeoffs that cannot be objectively evaluated as "just".

Personally I believe that a lot of disagreements in this realm come down to misunderstanding, in which case it's very sad to have to resort to destruction, when better communication and efforts to work together could create agreement or at least compromise. Admittedly resolving these misunderstandings is really hard, and I think a lot of us don't have the skills or tools to do so in a reasonable amount of time.

A webapp to improve how we discuss, model, and understand problems https://ameliorate.app/ (repo: https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate).

The core idea is to ground discussion in a causal diagram that ties together problems & solutions, then each node/edge can have structured details (importance score, arguments, unknowns, relevant facts, etc.) to help clarify & refine the information. It also has some features for working with this information, e.g. comparing perspectives, using a table to evaluate tradeoffs between solutions.

Right now, you basically need to be a power user to get benefit from it, but I've got a lot of ideas for making it smoother, and I'm slowly working through them.

If I'm reading correctly, they used $1000 running a Llama model, not DistilBERT.

Cool idea. FYI the GitHub link at the bottom leads to "page not found". Maybe the repo is not public?

That's awesome to hear :). I also appreciate knowing that I'm not the only one thinking about it.

I've landed at AnswerOverflow from Google before. It's a bot you can add to your server so that your server's threads get indexed. I haven't added it to a server myself but it seems decent enough. See https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow

I think if we could improve our ability to easily & precisely communicate arguments, that would be huge for humanity's ability to deal with problems. I'm building a tool[1] that I'm hoping can help with this, maybe be a successor (in some ways) to something like Kialo.

It's critically missing suggestions/approvals[2], and perhaps a simpler interface[3], but I think that, for arguments about problems/solutions, the idea of grounding arguments within a cause/effect diagram is really powerful both for getting on the same page and for making concrete progress towards improving a situation (rather than arguing for argument's sake).

I'd be happy to get your thoughts on it if you have any (I'll be making a HN post about it sometime soon^TM).

[1] https://ameliorate.app/

[2] https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/issues/11

[3] https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/discussions/541

Slightly annoying: on mobile, the navbar displays partially in front of the content "Overall Progress". I tried scrolling up to see the content better and since that's top of the page, it triggers a page refresh.

Playwright does have some docs on scraping, which makes it seem like they do want to support that as a use case https://playwright.dev/docs/docker#crawling-and-scraping. I'm unfamiliar with that though and wouldn't be able to speak to addressing issues with scraping

Does it say that the submission was sent back?

For the "suspicious" people, this seems to imply the code was final:

It is significant that [people] were all surprised and suspicious when we told them that Haskell prototype P1 (see appendix B) is a complete tested executable program.

For the people critiquing "cleverness", that seems completely valid whether or not it's actual code or pseudocode.

I really like the idea of comparing languages in a real-ish scenario of development, written by independent expert-in-language developers! As a web dev, I'm particularly interested in the idea of this for comparing the various web frameworks (including "no framework").

Some thoughts on the experiment:

- To get a better idea of the impact of the language on authors' thought processes, it'd probably have to include submissions from more authors in each language. With just one (or so) submission per language, I could see there being variation in expertise.

- I'm curious to see what the documentation looks like here, that there's so much written in some of the submissions, and that the paper authors value it so highly. Is it used to explain what the code does, indicating potentially too-complex code, or is it explaining whys?

- In the "Lessons Learned" section, it's mentioned that other reviewers were not as impressed with Haskell. I'm curious if their reactions were included in the evaluation - to me, these reactions would reduce the success for the understandability (and learnability?) criterion. The paper authors seem to have written this off as "If functional languages are to become more widely used, various sociological and psychological barriers must be overcome".

I'm in Illinois, my bronze marketplace plan was $247/mo this year, and the coverage was good (for what I used at least). 2025 plans look to be going up $50/mo or so which is annoying. Still a good chunk to have to pay, but nowhere near as bad as your situation.

Makes me curious how much marketplace costs vary per state?

In any case, as another person pointed out, the ACA plans also provide very high premium credits for low income households, covering up to ~80% of the costs (from what I've seen). But this also varies by state, I think.

I'm a big fan of the decision matrix, where you boil down a decision into options and criteria, then can score how important each criterion is and how well each option fulfills the criterion. I think it helps provide a way to make your intuitions a little more concrete, and to start reasoning about them.

Here's a very simple decision matrix web app https://www.ruminate.io/.

I'm also building a tool for analyzing problems, which includes functionality for a decision matrix: https://ameliorate.app/. Most of it centers around clarifying causes and effects of problems/solutions, which can also help you grasp a situation. Here's an example of a decision I've made with the tool for picking which ORM to use for building the tool itself: https://ameliorate.app/examples/ORM?view=Tradeoffs+scored+as....

I don't have a strong opinion on the whole, but as someone who's been building a diagramming app for 2+ years, I've found react-flow to be the most solid free & open-source node-based diagram component, by far. At least in terms of quantity/quality of features and UX/DX. Though admittedly I haven't thoroughly looked at alternatives in about a year.

It basically singlehandedly convinced me that the ecosystem was worth going with react when I started my project, despite really enjoying svelte.

Do you have a source that suggests that mental illness/drugs do not contribute to becoming homeless?

21% [1] of homeless have a serious mental illness that predates their living situation

This seems to suggest that mental illness does lead to homelessness. I would agree that financial strain is a major cause of homeless, but it seems likely that this is because it leads to other behaviors that then lead to homelessness. And those behaviors are probably not exclusively caused by financial strain.

Additionally, from the conclusion of your first link (my italics added for emphasis):

SAMHSA utilizes its national surveys and grantee data to create effective programs and services to prevent and end homelessness among people with mental and substance use disorders.

Secondly, I agree that housing is an important first step for fixing homelessness because it seems like a precondition for stability.

But this:

For many, having a safe home is the only resource needed to get clean.

seems misguided to me. "Housing First" != exclusively housing. From your second link:

we move people into permanent housing as quickly as possible and then provide them with supportive services (like case management, health care, substance use counseling, income coaching, and more)

I've also had the opposite experience. My workplace plan through COBRA was around $500/mo, while only the highest-end marketplace plans were around that range. I took a middle-end plan at ~$300/mo.

To be fair I hadn't looked closely at what all my workplace plan covered, but I was doing physical therapy when I switched that wasn't covered (had to reach high deductible) on my workplace plan and was covered on my marketplace plan!

(I'm in Illinois)

I would put visuals (images, videos, diagrams) at the center of that forum and overcome the biggest issue with visuals -- that they are often hard to make for many people.

Rather than responding to comments, you could organize comments around the associated component of the problem as it is described visually.

This might even help avoid defensive behavior since the problem is the focus rather than a particular person's comment.

These comments echo my feelings exactly. I think that building a structure that represents the concepts being discussed is critical to improving how we discuss and improve our understanding of complex issues.

I'm working on a tool[1] that hopes to make it easier for people to build and work with such a structure, though it's focused specifically in the context of solving problems, and it's still missing some important features for collaborative usage (comments are particularly relevant here, they're coming soon^TM). The core ideas[2] seem to align with your comments, though the tool further distinguishes auxiliary concepts (questions, facts, sources) from primary ones (problems, causes, effects, tradeoffs, solutions, etc).

[1] https://ameliorate.app/ [2] https://ameliorate.app/docs/getting-started/core-ideas