Feature Announcement: The Uncle Button

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5. Published at http://blog.beeminder.com/uncle on 2024-12-02
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Cognata

• http://doc.bmndr.co/uncle
• https://github.com/beeminder/beeminder/issues/2376

Verbata: new features, feature announcement, PSA,

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let's review what an Uncle Button is. 👴 🆘

1. it means crying uncle and accepting an impending derailment early
2. why? to get a beemergency off your dashboard and to make the reminders stop, so you can focus on the beemergencies you're actually going to dispatch
3. (also we expect this to be revenue-increasing for beeminder and awesomeness-increasing for users. for one thing, it promotes a derailing-it-is-nailing-it mindset. intentional derailments are 💯 (to a point))
4. what hitting the uncle button really means is paying a goal's current pledge in order to get the post-derail respite flat spot inserted immediately into your bright red line. [EDIT: and stepping up the pledge if you're not already at the pledge cap]
5. (in theory / conceptually, the uncle button could be generalized as paying to make a change to the bright red line that violates the akrasia horizon constraint. but choices are bad, so)
6. silly open question: should we ever paternalistically gray out the uncle button? or should we be maximally anti-magic?

musing on point 6: maximal anti-magic means taking point 4 literally. you click the button, you get your post-derail respite's worth of flat spot inserted. even if you just did that and already have a flat spot, you can do it again and get more. the other extreme might be to say that there's no such thing as crying uncle unless you're in the red.

intermediate options:

• (a) gray out the uncle button if you have a week or more of safety buffer, when it can't possibly make sense to pay for more respite. just go to the graph editor and extend the flat spot for free.
• (b) just prevent accidentally crying uncle twice in a row but otherwise no restrictions.

the answer to 6 may depend on if there's a use case for crying uncle on a goal that's not in the red. one can imagine this... 💭 ... like if you strive to keep all your goals green maybe you'd love the option to cry uncle as soon as a graph goes blue?

RPERCE: I could totally see uncling an orange goal personally, or like if you have a weekly goal that you normally do on Wednesdays, but it's Sunday and you know you have family coming to visit tomorrow and you're absolutely not going to get the Thing done this week, sure, go wild

RPERCE: I thiiiiiiink I would actually do it in practice, but I have low confidence in that claim — I can come up with a scenario where I'm confident I would, but it's not super likely as imagined. i definitely wouldn't much mind waiting for it to tick over to red first, I don't think.

from out-loud discussion with bee: graying it out on non-beemergency days may be fine but it may be easy enough to do something more elegant and non-dangerous: only if you already have a full respite's worth of safety buffer, then gray it out. so for example, if you have your respite set to 0 then you can only cry uncle when it's a beemergency. if it's set to 7 or more you can cry uncle to put yourself back in the dark green, even if you're already normal-green.

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uncle button:

after:

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