I set up a Hermes agent for our company and connected it to BigQuery, Stripe, Amplitude, etc so that our nontechnical teammates can ask and answer their own data questions via Slack. It works great!
I similarly haven’t found it useful to run a bunch of these agents in developing the product, but it’s a nice interface for people who don’t live in their terminal all day.
I did some research into this - the public budget is actually reasonably detailed. The biggest gap between your analysis and the actual expenditures are the SFUSD faces much higher facilities costs, higher admin cost due to Teacher coaching, and specialized programs for English language learners and special education
Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
I agree gaming the system is always a temptation with accountability systems.
I’m not sure it would work like how you are proposing, since purposely stunting a student would penalize the school exactly as much as they would “gain” as the student catches back up.
Also, the SBAC test administered in California, Washington, and many others is now adaptive, but still schools are measured based on point-in-time aggregates.
For those interested in this topic, I’d strongly recommend Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education”: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th.... He does a much more thorough analysis of the value of a college degree than any other I’ve seen, including factoring in dropout rate, majors, meeting potential spouses, opportunity cost, university prestige, etc.
The summary aligns with common sense: college degrees are typically valuable, especially in in-demand fields and from prestigious universities. But the college dropout rate is around 50%, so many people incur the cost of college with little of the benefit.
If you’re a high schooler considering college, it’s worth it if you are “good at school” and so confident you can finish in four years and are going to a high quality state school or better. Otherwise, you’re better off going directly into the workforce.
Your comment made me think as well! I suspect we might be caught in a definitional discussion of the word “feedback” - feedback is a subset of “words someone says to me”.
My working definition of feedback is “things I tell you about something you did with the intent to help you do better next time,” which does warrant the “feedback is a gift” mentality, even if the feedback is poorly delivered, misguided, or wrong. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy.
As other have mentioned, sometimes people say things to you that are not feedback, and are primarily them seeking status, expressing hurt, etc. a caution though that “this person is just having a bad day” is an easy, universal response for dismissing valid but critical feedback.
I understand the phrase “feedback is a gift” differently than the author: people are not obligated to give you feedback. If someone has taken the time to give you feedback, this is a generous act, regardless of whether you agree with the feedback or find it helpful.
Like many others, I think this is super cool, and something that I think has been missing in the ecosystem for a long time.
I feel like the thing that would really make this over-the-top powerful is deep integration with a component library, either a company's in-house one or an open-source library. It would allow for super fast UI prototyping that would also serve as scaffolding for the full-featured product.
Likewise re. Jonathan - we sold filepicker.io (now Filestack) to Jonathan and Xenon Ventures in 2014 and it was a very positive experience. For companies with solid revenues but not venture-scale growth looking for a clean exit, I would highly recommend reaching out to Jonathan and team. Happy to make an introduction if helpful.
As PG recently shared, when an investor puts money into a company it is a calculated bet that the company is actually worth _more_ than the valuation they are investing at. No one invests $1 for a 10% chance of making $10. So if the valuation goes up, it basically eats into an investors expected “profits”.
I write at http://brettcvz.com - I primarily write about “teachable points of view” I’ve learned about product management and startups, along with an occasional electronics project.
Agree, the waveshare modules are great. They’re also (surprisingly) available via Amazon Prime, which is nice when you’re excited about a project idea and don’t want to wait 2-3 weeks for a shipment from China.
From my experience with this project, all ePaper displays _can_ do partial refresh, but some may have the drivers (LUT) included, others you might have to find some community-sources ones or design it yourself. In the post I link to my drivers for partial updates for the 4.2”, and in the footnotes there is a YouTube video going into lots of detail on how the drivers work if you wanted to write one or update it for a different display.
This was a labor of love, so it’s definitely not that I don’t have time - more that no project of mine has ever been this popular, so normally no one asks for the tutorial!
As others have commented, this project is mostly software and would be a great introduction to building physical electronic gadgets.
How about this - I think there’s enough context in the blog post and source code to recreate it, but if you start out and run into any issues, send me an email and I’ll get you unstuck. In exchange, I’d ask that you take detailed notes of your process and post a blog post/github readme of how you got it running for others to follow, and I’ll link to it.
I similarly haven’t found it useful to run a bunch of these agents in developing the product, but it’s a nice interface for people who don’t live in their terminal all day.