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... »
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... »
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... »
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... »
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... »
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
»
Wednesday, July 20th, 2022
Huge thanks to
Geoff Hubbard (aka insti) for a delightful
meetup in Copenhagen, including board games and nerding out about Beeminder and other topics.
We just got home and Beeminder wants us to publish a blog post.... »
Thursday, June 23rd, 2022
Beeminder user
Parrhesia recently told us about a failed attempt to proselytize Beeminder.
The person he recommended it to said they knew about Beeminder and viewed it as self-blackmail.
That it degrades trust in your future self.
They advocated behavior change by bringing your present self... »
Wednesday, February 9th, 2022
UPDATE: See follow-up post announcing
No-Excuses Mode.
An under-appreciated fact about Beeminder is that it doesn’t force you to do anything.
It just puts prices on things and you continue to do whatever you feel like doing, factoring in those prices.
Just like you might buy... »
Wednesday, January 26th, 2022
This is still pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing but it makes me very happy.
Not just because I love pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing
(we could say Product Vision if we wanted to sound more respectable)
but because a couple years ago this sounded preposterously theoretical and fantastical and now it sounds inevitable and kind of obvious.
We are making steady progress... »