what a fascinating thought experient!! it never crossed my mind, to be honest. so naturally, until i read through the “do you want a nannybot?” forum thread linked above by @dreev, i was firmly in the camp of:
… please, this sounds very horrible!
so, i wouldn’t have even come here to add my two cents …
until i read this answer given in the straw poll way back when:
now that sounds interesting!!
i think i could very much benefit from a compassionate, non-rigid, artificially intelligent nannybot! something that periodically reminds me: “hey, it’s been a while since you did X, maybe you would enjoy doing that again?”, “hey, you’ve now spent 4 hours straight doing X, are you still enjoying it / is it still useful, or do you want to do something different for a change, like Y or Z?”, “hey, you’ve now spent 5 hours straight doing X, and it’s already 1 a.m., you should probably consider going to sleep …” etc. etc.
(it’s just that i don’t want to have to be near my phone 24/7 all day ever day. so i guess my dystopian ideal is a chip implanted in my brain that functions as a sort of voice in the back of my mind :P [and would work even without a wifi connection / without having to be near a phone, etc.])
for various reasons, i would hate to have my day rigidly planned out in advance, minute-to-minute (even hour-to-hour, probably). i want flexibility! i want spontaneity! i very much don’t want something like this:
there is a very, very strong, inherent rejection inside against this idea. XD i want to do positive things when i feel like i need them / want to do them. even if the ai would perfectly mirror all of my wants and needs, i kind of imagine it going like this:
ai: “you seem to feel down, maybe try Positive Thing That Could Make You Feel Less Shitty?”
me: “since you mentioned it … no!” *does not try*
versus
me: “i’m feeling down. i could maybe try Positive Thing That Could Make Me Feel Less Shitty?”
me: *tries it at least*
(yes, that’s probably bad, and it might not even be accurate. i might very well be wrong in my self-assessment in this case. but at least theoretically i feel strongly enough about this point to mention it here.)
i also don’t want to bother with thinking about what my “ideal weekday” or “ideal saturday,” etc., would look like. especially since there’s so many different ways these could go! i don’t have a regular 9-5 job that makes my weekdays all similar. weekdays are usually kind of simialr to each other, as far as structure is concerned (last monday is kind of similar to next monday, etc.), but that also changes periodically still, with my uni schedules being different each semester / during uni breaks. and ideal saturdays could go a million ways, not all of which are predictable/plannable in advance.
tagging @dreev for some feedback-y thoughts about the blog post linked above: (all quotes are from the “known issues” section)
“1. You can’t currently have a deadline before noon. We’ll be changing this but for now the interface isn’t good enough to make clear the distinction between, say, a 6am earlybird deadline and a 6am night-owl deadline. I.e. all morning deadlines are of the night-owl variety.”
is this still accurate, is a change for this still on the eventual roadmap? or is it currently regarded as fine as is? (i personally think it works good enough, but obviously people use beeminder differently.) either way, the point might benefit from an “UPDATE: insert_status_quo_here” notice. (considering that the blog post is from 2014.)
“3. Some autodata sources make this difficult by only giving us data at day granularity, which means we have to honor their notion of what the day boundary is. Or maybe we can work around it by adjusting the timezone in the external account. For now, you can only customize deadlines for non-autodata goals.”
same question here, is this still on the eventual roadmap? could it ever be technically possible to set deadlines for autodata goals that differ from the autodata-source-deadlines? this point might also benefit from an “UPDATE: insert_status_quo_here” notice.
“4. Some of us are very used to the midnight/3am deadlines and we’re worried that people (including ourselves) may change deadlines and forget they’ve done so and accidentally derail. So we’re working on various ways to make the deadlines more in your face. And if you do accidentally derail because of this, definitely reply to the legit check to let us know!”
its been almost 9 years since that blog post went live, i would assume that nobody is confused about this anymore. so this point is probably most definitely deserving of another “UPDATE” notice.
after the 4 known issues are detailed at the end of the blog post, it says: “UPDATE: Ongoing tracking of the aftermath of deploying this is on the forum.” i apologise if the points i quoted above are discussed in that forum post; i don’t have the brainspace to read through that forum-thread right now. (among other reasons also because i believe it might be too technical for me to fully understand it / stick with it / search through it.) i do think that the blog post itself should still get UPDATEs, even if these things are mentioned in the forum post, for various reasons (people might read over the forum link, they might not want to dig through the forum discussion to find current info about things mentioned in the blog, etc.).
ps. not sure if old blog posts get corrected for minor typos, but just in case, here’s another quote from the same one: “For the sake of tidiness we may run some updates in the coming the weeks to correct timestamps on old datapoints,”