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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... »
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Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder
Friday, March 10th, 2023
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 23rd, 2023
“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 10th, 2023
Circa 2019 or so Stripe released a big update to their Checkout product, the previous iteration of which we’ve been using to collect your payment... »
Dumbest Hill To Die On: Automating Your Copyright Year is Lies
Thursday, January 12th, 2023
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. Not every year, and definitely not automatically. If you do it automatically, you... »
Beeminder ♥ Beeminder: Introducing the Meta Integration
Friday, December 30th, 2022
Imagine if signing up for Beeminder meant committing to use Beeminder. As part of signing up, you’d create a meta goal measuring the number of total datapoints added on all your other goals. Now the clock would be ticking to get an object-level goal created and to start adding data to it! That vision may... »
Kavka’s Toxin Puzzle and the Superpower of Commitment Devices
Friday, December 16th, 2022
There’s a famous philosophy thought experiment about how the concept of forming an intention might not be as coherent as it seems. Suppose some magic mind-reading aliens (you know the type) offer you a million dollars to drink a nasty but ultimately harmless toxin. Let’s say it makes you puke your guts out for a... »
X-Treme Nerd Interlude: Silky Smooth Beeminder Trend Lines
Friday, December 2nd, 2022
As you likely know if you’ve ever beeminded your weight, you can add a moving average line on top of your data on your Beeminder graph. You can also add a so-called aura around your datapoints. The idea is to see trends in your data without being distracted by daily fluctuations, particularly when data is coming from... »
When Beeminder Fails
Thursday, October 27th, 2022
Beeminder is very good at keeping you on the wagon but it’s still possible to fall off. When that happens, why does it? We’ve asked people that a lot over the years and thought we’d collect the reasons. 1. Bugs or other technical issues with Beeminder From our perspective, there are still plenty of bugs and technical issues with... »
Psychological Pricing
Thursday, September 29th, 2022
The other day (a Very Other day, because I’ve pulled this from the bottom of Quite A Pile of blog post drafts) we were musing idly amongst ourselves about what the psychological effect would be if Beeminder pledges were amounts like $4.99. The answer is it doesn’t matter because I can’t stand so-called »