Derailing It Is Nailing It

Friday, March 24, 2023
By shanaqui
DALL-E: derailing it is nailing it, surrealistic painting featuring a bee hammering a nail

We’ve talked before about how paying is not punishment because derailing is not failing, but fellow workerbee Clive pointed out that we could flip that negative formulation around. Derailing isn’t... »

Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder

Friday, March 10, 2023
By bsoule
Silhoutted person entering a yellow and black striped gateway

That’s right my little bees: we put a commitment device in our commitment device to bring out the commitment flavor of the commitment device. Does everyone know the soup nazi from Seinfeld? Basically it’s an interesting episode in Seinfeldnomics (and boy howdy do we like economics)... »

Beeminder’s Plans To Take Over The World

Thursday, February 23, 2023
By dreeves
Some kind of apiarian vizier plotting world domination

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” — Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality I came across this draft from 2010 or 2011, before we’d publicly launched and with just a smattering of beta users we’d recruited one by one. It had a note-to-self: “rewrite this to sound... »


X-Treme Nerd Interlude: How To Upgrade Your Stripe Checkout Integration In Just Four Easy Years!

Friday, February 10, 2023
By bsoule
Beeminder hearts Stripe

Circa 2019 or so Stripe released a big update to their »

Beeminder Making You Do Self-Indulgent Things

Thursday, January 26, 2023
By dreeves
An adorable bee knitting

This isn’t a new idea but I keep noticing how great it is to have Beeminder make you do something fun. Ahh, Beeminder… hearteyes-emoji! Here’s how Bee put it in a »

Dumbest Hill To Die On: Automating Your Copyright Year is Lies

Thursday, January 12, 2023
By dreeves
A cartoon bee committing hara-kiri on a hill

I’ve been railing against automated copyright dates for years but just learned Serine Molecule scooped me in Copyright Notices Are Not Clocks: You should update the copyright year whenever you make nontrivial, copyrightable changes to your work. ... »