One would develop Popeye forearms gaming on that thing. Get in your arm, neck, and shoulder day while gaming!
I had a Toshiba Satellite around the time this was out. It weighed 12 pounds. That millstone went everywhere with me. Now my laptop weighs about six pounds minus the brick, and I might carry it from my desk to the settee. I look back at what our devices used to be and always think "Damn, I've gotten soft!"
Hello (former) fellow Lehi worker! Although I was remote except for the onsite weeks. I'm not a fan of 99% mobile apps, maybe more than 99%. I didn't work on mobile, but I am quite sure that it is in fact a PWA.
Different financial institutions (FI) will all have different appearances, because of the nature of how MX is implemented, and whether on desktop or mobile. In the case of my credit union, it's right here:
The interface of MX Platform on desktop looks like this:
You might see something like this in your online banking home page:
There are two ways that MX can get data from other accounts which you have to explicitly link in your bank/CU interface. The first method is through Open Banking protocols, which are mercifully obfuscated from the end user. Seriously, if you're having trouble sleeping, try reading some of the Open Banking specifications. :D One selects their FI from the list, and enters creds and 2FA challenge. The other method is screen-scraping, but again this is abstracted away from the end user.
One of the features where MX slaps more than anyone else (for now) is identifying the source of debits and classifying them. Underneath the hood, debit and credit card transaction strings are chaos. But even if MX gets it wrong, you can manually re-classify your expenses, and it will apply that to future transactions (optional). I already mentioned the burndowns, but if you have an idea for a saving schedule, MX will provide reminders and factor in your growth. Platform will also provide reminders for almost everything.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Sure thing. On which part would you like more detail?
Happy to help however I can. The founder of hOurworld is amazing; he's been super helpful and always happy to answer questions. He's been at this a bit longer. :D Also, other timebanks with longer histories are another great resource. Nobody goes it alone when setting up their timebank.
Negative all around. I was replying to OP. The company to which I referred is MX. The public-facing product (API) is actually called Platform, but it's very explicitly white label software. Customers will generally have little to no idea that they are using MX Platform. It might actually say MX somewhere, but that can be eliminated in implementation.
Welp, you found hOurworld, which has a large knowledgebase. I think their links are poorly organized and mostly targeted at people looking to start a timebank. So here are some of my more common talking points.
As the US economy craters, we have to come to full grips with the fact that there is nobody coming to save us except us. Timebanks enable even impoverished communities to build resilience and interconnectedness. In a timebank, relationships based on trust and mutual aid are forged and reinforced. "Oh, JayleneSlide, you know computers? Can you also help my friend with this technical thing?" And all of a sudden, my neighbors are on Linux, following Louis Rossman, and we're setting up a mesh network in our sparse neighborhood.
A common concern I fielded when launching our local timebank was: what about people who use services without offering services? This is a common refrain in capitalist theory. There will be people who do that, but the overarching experience of timebanks in the US is that a majority of people provide services without ever using their time dollars. In our timebank, we allow people to go into arrears as much as they want. Not a single user in our timebank has a negative balance. Don't let the possibility of a scant outlier undermine a great system.
But what about bad elements? At the risk of answering a question with a question: what about bad elements in your day-to-day life? There are no guarantees in life, and you learn who you can trust the same way we always used to do it. Meet them, talk with them, check their references (hOurworld has an endorsement function), and listen to your gut. In my town, the stories of shady contractors are legion, hypothetically legitimate businesspeople. By removing that financial motive, most of what's left are people who want to do right by their communities. Moral hazards (in the economics definition) are greatly reduced. It's super easy to get a felony charge in the US, speaking from firsthand experience. This is by design, so as to create a slave labor class (see: "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander). Even some misdemeanors can lock citizens out of the "legal" economy, exacerbating the conditions that may have led to their felony in the first place. Timebanks (can) short-circuit that treadmill, giving neighbors the chance to be contributing members in their communities if they so choose.
"I helped my neighbor with a [a bunch of things] but they are not in the timebank." Most (all? not sure) timebanks, including ours encourage members to log their time, even if the recipient is not a timebank member.
As I mentioned in my original comment, everyone's time is valued equally. This is the huge appeal to me. I bang on a keyboard for a living, underpinned by some head work. Yes, there was a huge learning curve, but my most important professional lessons were given to me freely. Also, even if software engineering didn't pay well, I'd still be doing it, like music, cooking, sewing, bicycle repair, etc. It chaps my ass that a person growing my food makes a fraction of my income. I understand the economic reasoning, but I don't agree with it, i.e. my salary is based on the cost of replacing me, not on the difficulty of my work and definitely not on the value of my work. In the US, chances are we won't ever get to realize the full value of our labor; I'll gladly "settle" for an alternative case where everyone's labor has equal value. I want to move our world to a more egalitarian model.
Everyone has something to offer in a timebank, whether they know it or not. The list of services one can offer or request is exhaustive.
Because timebanks are a network of 1:1 volunteerism, the IRS has no interest. There are service exchanges that allow users to value their time asymmetrically; the IRS is very interested in those.
Bonus round, not exactly timebanks: co-ops were successfully turning the tide of the Great Depression and "invented" credit unions. Cooperatives were massively successful, bringing utilities (okay, electric) to rural areas where investor-owned businesses refused to invest. WWII and the subsequent Red Scare stemmed the growth of cooperatives with a massive propaganda campaign. (Source: https://resources.uwcc.wisc.edu/History_of_Cooperatives.pdf; and "Food for Change" documentary) Bringing it back to timebanks, co-ops and timebanks can be some of the bootstraps (god, I hate that term) our communities need.
As others have said, a spreadsheet is the simplest. If you do your banking with a credit union, chances are they make MX available to you in your online banking. A lot of banks use MX too. Their software provides the projections and forecasting you seek, as well as Open Banking connections to all of your other accounts. If you have loans, it also has burndowns of outstanding debts. Extra bonus: MX doesn't sell your data.
Disclosure: I used to work for MX.
The US needs a movement to funnel people into ways of helping each other.
For anyone who might want an easy win on this point: timebanks. A timebank is a means of exchanging services wherein everyone's time is valued equally. All trading is done without the exchange of money.
If there isn't a timebank in your area, they are pretty easy and inexpensive (in terms of both money and time) to get started. For example, my costs are up to a whopping $20 per month, which is for collaboration services for board meetings. My time amounts to approximately two hours per week, with three other board members putting in about one to two hours per week. For software, hOurworld is a free, hosted solution for managing a timebank, finding local chapters, and enabling inter-bank requests. There are other software platforms out there.
If anyone's interested, I'm happy to yammer at any length you can tolerate on how to start or join a timebank.
Source: founding board member of my regional timebank, and a timebank member for over 20 years.
You raise good points. Thank you for your replies. All of this still requires planet-cooking levels of power for garbage and to hurt workers.
And an additional response, because I didn't fully answer your question. LLMs don't reason. They traverse a data structure based on weightings relative to the occurrence frequency in their training content. Loosely speaking, it's a graph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type)). It appears like reasoning because the LLM is iterating over material that has been previously reasoned out. An LLM can't reason through a problem that it hasn't previously seen unlike, say, a squirrel.
This article feels a little disingenuous and seems written by someone who has only heard their friend complain about David Brooks. In his book "The Second Mountain," Brooks goes into his mea culpa moments. He has on more than a few occasions admitted his errors. I would share citations, but it was a library loan and it's on hold.
Those of us who protest against power, aren't we looking for exactly the kind of change of hearts and minds such that Brooks is showing?