here's a writeup I shared that might be of interest[0]
it's mainly been product-led growth. I've always just been a guy that likes building cool things, and I spent most of the early years head-down coding. anything marketing-oriented was new to me, and not my natural skillset.
gradually PL started getting some attention in the FI / FIRE space, and recently I've begun building out a small team while staying bootstrapped.
The author says "it might be trivial for anyone to hack your server." "Might" is doing way too much heavy lifting here. Actually, the author has no idea if there is any actual exploitable vulnerability on the server. They just Googled a version number and fired off a "vulnerability report," which "might" be worth as much as the dozens of emails I get a month about "huge vulnerabilities" related to my SPF record, or those CVEs that boil down to "if someone has root on the machine they could do something bad on the machine."
I can't help but feel that the author's motivation was to get some sort of reaction, and now they've gotten it. If this vulnerability was so vital to be patched, why would it be bundled into a "by the way" DM on Twitter along with a post heavily criticizing the app developer? Both people involved can be idiots here.
To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
> Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
There's something more to it than this.
For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly distract yourself. But consciousness IMO should have the idea of a threshold baked in.
For another, the brain will unify things that don't make sense. I assume you mean something like consciousness is what happens when there aren't obstructions to stitching sensory data together. But the brain does a lot of work interpreting incoherent data as best it can. It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as
> It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
There are specific failure cases for non-integrability:
1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing.
2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat.
3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible.
At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.
Yeah to be clear I like this mental model a lot, and I give it extra points for invoking sheaf theory :). I was just saying it doesn't seem complete to me from a psychological perspective.
The way I look at it is that the sensors provide data as activations and awareness is some output with a thresholding or activation function.
Sense making and consciousness in my mental model is something that happens after the fact and it tries to happen even with nonsense data. As opposed to -- as I was reading you to be leaning toward -- being the consequence of sensory data being in a sufficiently nice relationship with each other.
Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.
Glad to hear it resonated. And also glad I didn't start this project with the expectation of quick success, hype, or exponential growth. If I had, there's no way I would have made it through the slower early years.
We've done some pricing experimentation over the years, and it's possible we're actually still positioned too cheap right now for the value the platform provides.
Personal finance is a pretty broad space, and it's common for different people to come to this with varying desires and expectations.
In our experience, the people who see the value in a good long-term DIY financial plan view our current pricing as extremely affordable, especially compared to traditional financial planning services which often charge $3-5k for a PDF and a pat on the back.
Anyway, if automated tracking is the piece that's most important to you, it might be worth noting that we do plan to add more options for that. But that work -- and all the other controversial implications of it that I mentioned in another comment -- just needs to be prioritized against all the other highly requested things on the product roadmap, based on what the community really wants the most.
I noticed most tools neglect international scenarios because the US market is big and it's easier to focus on that. So I decided to be different and try to build with as much international flexibility as possible. We have a bunch of international account types and tax preseta, including some for the UK.
