MrUssek

I suppose Ciechanowski is the kind of blogger who causes an HN cascade with each new article.

Some context for those that may be unaware; Chet has been a staple in the Android developer community for a very long time, having hosted a popular podcast and been a staple a conferences. His move into comedy will surprise no one, but he will be dearly missed.

While they are out of date and not too technical (and arguably, quite biased), the two books that I've enjoyed the most on this topic are:

1. Dark Pools, by Scott Patterson, and 2. Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis.

To be clear this is a forward mode auto diff implementation, not reverse mode, as might be inferred by the reference to the SPJ talk, correct?

This post feels identical to one that I had been considering writing for a while now.

I'm nearly 28, and the past ~4 months have felt like I have been suffering from acute brain fog. And not even regarding challenging topics; most of the decline feels concentrated in parsing relatively simple logical statements and arguments. I used to be able to do this without any difficulty, and now, suddenly, it feels like it requires conscious effort. I too feel like I used to be decent at math and computer science. It's gotten so bad that I'm wondering if this is an actual medical condition (perhaps there is lead in my water? perhaps I have long COVID?).

As far as testing intellect (2), apparently it's not so far out of the ordinary to request a clinical psychologist to administer an IQ test. Additionally it's easy to get tests from Mensa or other organizations. I've been considering doing this for a while myself, but have delayed due to anxiety over the result. IQ tests are evaluated against individuals of the same age, so it won't tell you how you compare against people of other ages (including your younger self), but you can probably compare against earlier aptitude tests you have taken to see if there is a decline. I get the whole IQ discussion gets toxic really fast, so I'll just say I'm not endorsing any of the rhetoric or ideas that co-occur when people start talking about it.

For (3) I think the research on this is rather grim. I don't have time to come up with a good survey, but I'm sure the "rationalists" among us will happily chime in. I think the consensus is that it is possible to increase abilities in a narrow domain and only for a short amount of time.

I have to admit that this has been a very hard thing to come to terms with. I've already felt my work performance suffer, and I'm not sure if there is anything I can do about it. I've been exercising regularly for years now, and recently got my sleep habits in check, but to no avail.

Typo: Binutlis => Binutils