Bounties-in-Everything-We-Care-About on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Incentivize grandchildren by writing them into your will

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of economics-inspired solutions to otherwise hard problems. The other day I happened across an old post by GMU economist Bryan Caplan which I think does this very elegantly, for a problem of some interest to me.

The vast majority of wills evenly divide the residuary estate between children. Mine evenly divides the residuary estate between (children and grandchildren).

I like this a lot. It makes it unambiguously clear where your priorities in the case of your untimely demise lie. It is also self-reinforcing; children of yours who have no children themselves will recieve less, but when it comes time to write their own wills, they won’t have any children or grandchildren to bequeath to anyway. Children of yours who have many children themselves, perhaps inspired by this very policy, might decide in the end they were duped - but it seems far more likely to me they’ll cite it as one of the biggest reasons they ultimately went for 4 instead of 3, or 2 instead of 1, or 1 instead of none. After seeing it work in practice on themselves, they might decide they want to incentivize bringing their own grandchildren into being in kind.

The second wave of spaced repetition apps

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Spaced repetition has been around for a long time. If you’ve never heard the term before, it’s best described as flashcards on timers. an algorithm such as SM-2 or the more recent FSRS keeps track of how you did on the flashcard, makes a guess as to how long it could possibly wait to show you the flashcard again before you below, say, a 90% chance of getting it right the next time, and then schedules the flashcard for a new day.

Enforce GPL compliance by offering bounties?

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Epistemic status: Very unclear, also I Am Not A Lawyer This Is Not Legal Advice Get Off My Lawn

(N.B.: I"m using “GPL” with broad strokes here, to point at “open source licenses it’s straightforward to run afoul of”.)

Policing is always hard in a world of limited resources. Especially when one is targeting sophisticated, well-monied criminal organizations, it can take an awful lot of time and effort merely to credibly reveal that wrongdoing has taken place. Would it surprise you if I said the average criminal software organization is probably, on the margin, more sophisticated than the average criminal organization? If so, you should probably expect that the former’s crimes are brought to life even less often than the latter’s.