Raemon's Shortform

Raemon

This is a special post for quick takes by Raemon. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:

don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)

I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.

This is a special post for quick takes by Raemon. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:

don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)

I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.

I am bottlenecked on design taste and hustle. Possibly looking to hire someone.

I have a cluster of side-projects that feel like they are nearing fruition, but none of them are ready for primetime. Vibecoding makes it easy to do the first 90% of a project, but, not the second 90% of the project where you actually painstakingly test and iterate and go out and get customers and such.

The side projects include:

www.rationality.training, which is aiming for a mix of:
- "exercises where you have solve a challenging problem, and cultivate new thinking-skills to solve them"
- a journal/writing app that prompts you to use your repertoire of thinking-skills when appropriate
- encouragement to predict-in-advance whether a given thinking-skill will turn out useful, and, to evaluate that afterwards, in a low-friction way.
- clusters thinking-strategies into "Triggers" and "Actions"
- Over time, you can see which thinking skills are most useful and do more of them.
- The "reasonably robust goodhartable metric" the site should encourage is "discovering new rationality habits, that you then go on to actually use." (implementation details unclear, but maybe something like H-Index for habits?)
Omnilog (originally a side project of mine, later transmuted into an internal lightcone project mostly run by Oliver), which:
- records all your keystrokes/screenshots-your-laptop/transcribes your microphone, for a comprehensive log of everything that's easy to then feed into whatever crazy LLM tools you want to use it for.
"Shoulder Angel" / "Trigger Warning"
- combines the previous two things into a thing that automatically suggests triggers you might want to notice, and then actions that might be appropriate given those triggers.

It feels pretty tantalizingly close to working. It's also clearly a distraction from a lot of other stuff I'm doing that will be awhile before it pays for itself and I don't know that I expect it really to pay for itself if I were the only user.

Pushing it forward require someone who is actually using to improve decisions and productivity, and design taste about how to make it more generalizable.

This is an awkward sweet spot of "requires a legibly* competent person who probably already has a main project."

But, if you're someone for whom
a) this seems interesting
b) you have some previous projects I can look at that demonstrate good design taste
c) you have some kind of part-time project that's complex and confusing enough that you actually need "rationality" to help, which you can use as the grist for seeing if the above-tools actually help and iterarting

...send me a DM!

* "legible" to reduce the trialing/onboarding cost for me.

3Xylix3mo

I have also pondered an Omnilog + Shoulder angel type of thing multiple times during the last decade or so. Never took the stab to properly implement it, partially because of the infosec concerns (which llms made worse) + didn't want to invest the time. I've been somewhat surprised by the fact that no polished product for this specific niche exists (it seems like an obvious idea for a startup), but I guess if an employer wanted to run something like Omnilog + Shoulder angel on their employees laptops it would be illegal in many jurisdictions to put that data in the cloud. Do you have examples of the type of automations that "Shoulder angel" has suggested for you that you wouldn't have implemented without it?

There's roughly 3 types of ways I imagine this being useful:

Reminding me of triggers and actions I've already thought about and know are helpful
Periodically following complex prompts (things like "recommend products / expert advisors / knowledge that'd help me").
Coming up with unique ideas in response to my situation.

So far, I've gotten very sporadic use out of #2 and #3, but mostly what's been helpful is #1 (because the triggers/actions I've mapped out are selected to be things that are useful on a day-to-day basis, that take into account subtleties of th... (read more)

4Raemon3mo

They have hit the point of being useful for me, but, the problems remaining to make them truly great are pretty deep. I'm potentially open to opensourcing but I don't really expect it to help. I expect people could fix little bugs or make small UI improvements. But, honestly, not better than Fable or Mabel (my human thinking assistant who is working on this on the side, rhyme-scheme unintended). And, they could fine-tune things to fit their idiosyncratic preferences. But the central problems IMO require some fairly deep thinking, design taste, and a mix of "personal metacognitive taste, and, ability to troubleshoot other people's metacognitive failures and turn them into UI solutions." One core problem is "the difference between just-in-time advice that is helpful vs annoying is pretty subtle." A lot of how it's currently useful to me depends on me having built up some metacognitive muscles that took awhile to develop. (for example, noticing when I've seen a few unhelpful suggestions in a row, and then thinking "okay what would the ideal suggestions here actually be?") That all said, if anyone is explicitly interested in installing it and trying out some kind of iteration, feel free to DM me about that. I think I won't go fully opensource but can add people to the project.

Raemon's Shortform

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Raemon's Shortform

22

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