I've noticed a lot of tech businesses aiming for the "local" space, meaning they try to create a network or a marketplace on the scale of about a city. Sometimes this is because of something inherently local about the market (dating, classifieds), sometimes as a novelty (Ingress), and sometimes as a strategy to split up a big intractable market into lots of smaller markets (Facebook back when it was per-campus only). But I think it'd be interesting to go further and explore the hyperlocal: networks the size of small suburbs or city blocks.
An easy example is home cooks who can easily make extra food and sell it to people who can't be bothered to cook. It would be wildly inefficient to scale this beyond a very local region; as soon as you involve a delivery van it goes from being a slight extra cost to a huge hassle. But if all your customers are within a 5 minute walk, they could just come by when the food's ready without requiring too much logistical gymnastics.
Or imagine if you have a home coffee machine and you don't mind making an extra coffee for people once in a while. There's no way you could feasibly keep up with the demands of running a real coffee business, but servicing the needs of a few people in the local area isn't out of the question. It would also be super expensive to keep a regular coffee shop open for just a few customers, but not so if it's just running out of your house anyway.
I think there are two main things that make hyperlocal a pretty compelling idea: Firstly, it allows for businesses that operate on a super tiny scale. There are lots of tools available today for a business owner who wants to scale up, but not so many for one who wants to stay small. Secondly, it could add back a certain sense of local community that seems to have been inadvertently lost in the rush for bigger cities and better technology. Being in touch with lots of microbusinesses in your local area would be a way to engage with that community.
But maybe the most interesting bit would be that it's a way for more people to experience a taste of running a business, even if it's a very tiny one.
I've noticed a pattern that seems pretty universal when discovering and exploring systems. First, you attempt to distill the system down into its most minimal and general representation. That is, you abstract it: you can describe a shape as a mesh of triangles. You can describe triangles as lines. You can describe lines as points. You can describe points as numbers. And you can describe numbers as other stuff too. But abstraction is only half the story. After you have created this minimal and general representation, you work backwards from the abstraction to build new concrete things. That is to say, you construct.
One of the most accessible demonstrations of abstract-and-construct is cartooning. You take real people, animals and other objects, distill them down into abstract shapes, and then manipulate and distort those shapes in ways that would be impossible in the real world. You see something surprising and your eyebrows raise. Abstract: eyebrow height = maximum(surprisedness × eyebrow sensitivity, eyebrow limit). Construct: let's set the eyebrow sensitivity and limit really high. And suddenly you get surprised cartoon characters with their eyebrows flying out the top of their heads and smacking into the ceiling. (If you're interested, I recommend Understanding Comics, which I probably lifted that example from).
Perhaps a more rigorous example is the periodic table. Mendeleev was able to abstract the structure of the chemical elements into various repeating patterns, and then use that abstraction to theoretically construct new elements that were only later isolated in the real world. That's not to say that abstract-and-contruct always works out usefully. Physics, for example, has generated lots of wacky things like tachyons, perfectly reasonable constructions that have never (and probably will never) be observed in the real world.
There are some truly wonderful things you can do by distilling down to an abstraction and then constructing back out again. But a part of me also wonders: is it truly universal? The cartoon example seems to show us that there is something quite intuitive about the way abstract-and-construct works: we don't have any trouble believing that the high-eyebrowed character is just a very, very surprised person. Could this process just be an artefact of how our brains work?
If that's the case, a different kind of intelligent being might have some other way of finding truth that works as well for them as abstract-and-construct has worked for us. Maybe it would be able to view many things as being very similar to each other without needing to wrap them up in an abstract concept. Maybe if it was powerful enough it could just store all the information it learns and mine it directly for truth. Maybe the answer to the Fermi paradox is that the aliens all think we're too dumb to know how our own eyebrows work.
Of course, the most vexing part is that the only way I can think to explore that question is to abstract and construct. So let's hope that's enough.
A morbid thought today, while reading about the horrors of the US prison system: if we are going to sentence people to a lifetime of incarceration, shouldn't we at least offer them the choice to die instead? It seems to me that, as deeply uncomfortable as it is, suicide can be a rational action when faced with a sufficiently bad alternative. Suicidal desires being a marker of mental illness isn't so much an indictment of suicide as it is a signal that someone has severely overestimated the badness of their other options.
Reading about the valiant efforts of prison staff to revive and repair the bodies of suicidal inmates so they can continue to live in conditions they would rather die than endure is a particular kind of horror. I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 and being most disturbed not by the book burning, but by a particular scene where the stereotypical housewife's life becomes so meaningless that she decides to kill herself. But the medical technology in the story is so good that paramedics just come by, patch her up, and she wakes up the next morning as if nothing has happened. It's implied that they've done this a number of times.
The right to die is the final relief valve of life. You can at least know that no matter how bad things get, they can't get worse than death. Taking that away is perhaps the most profound violation I can imagine.
Sometimes I remember the wrong thing. I don't just mean an irrelevant thing or an incorrect thing, but literally the exact opposite of the right thing. For example, the order of arguments to ln, or which way to turn the lock on my bathroom door. And in those situations I often do the most mistaken and counterproductive thing to fix the problem: I think "okay, I'll just remember that it's the opposite from the way I expect". As soon as I think that, I'm doomed to a miserable cycle of doing the (correct) opposite, my expectations reversing, doing the (wrong) opposite and then getting hopelessly confused.
I like to think of the brain as being mostly an association machine: a thing happens, another thing happens, and those two things become more strongly associated. This fairly simple mechanic seems able to produce an amazing breadth of capabilities, from the more obvious pattern matching to the vastly less obvious statistical estimation. But there's one particular task this association machine is pathologically bad at: disassociation.
This is the classic problem of trying to not think about elephants: as soon as you're thinking about not thinking about elephants, you're thinking about elephants. There's no mechanism for us to build an disassociation, or break down an existing association. This leads to problems not just with elephants but with all sorts of situations: when you learn bad habits, it's hard to un-learn them; when you break up with someone, it's hard to stop thinking about them; when something traumatic happens, it's hard to forget it.
Worse still, in our attempts to create a dissociation, we instead end up creating the closest equivalent: a negative association. So we can't stop thinking about elephants, but we can say that people who think about elephants are idiots, and thus make thinking about elephants painful by association. But it's important to realise that a negative association is still an association! And building a stronger and stronger negative association only makes the thought more frequent, and the negativity more painful.
As far as I can tell, there is no way to un-make an association. The best we can do is make some other, stronger association override it. Instead of thinking about how much of an idiot you are for thinking about elephants, the better approach is to think about leprechauns.
Since then I've noticed that the single button click becomes a bit too automatic at times, so I figured I'd tweak it a bit to make it slightly less easy to click through. And my thoughts immediately turned to my previous idea of hold-to-confirm. So I brought the two together and I think the result is better and more polished than before.
I've noticed some weird behaviour with alerts as well, so I'm pretty glad to be done with them. A victory for productivity!
