loves_mangoes

The visuals you get from psychedelics and the visuals from imagination are different. Psychedelics seem to affect your real visual field. You're not imagining textures melting with colors and walls turning into liquid, it becomes what you see.

I normally have aphantasia, at about 2/5 on one those pop scales that show various versions of an apple. I can sort of rotate geometric shapes without the notion of color or texture.

But rarely, while lying in bed I get these full vivid pictures. It feels like a whole another visual field. I can't really control it, but these are fully detailed like a painting.

It's dizzying how fast I can imagine these when my mind decides to switch into this mode, and how it can switch from one painting to the next fully detailed picture in a fraction of a second. I normally have to strain hard to hold just a few outlines of simple shapes in my mind, evaporating the moment my focus wavers.

That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post.

4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users happy. And as you'd expect from a library that parses a bunch of horrible undocumented formats in C, it's a huge insecure mess.

Several heap overflows and arbitrary writes all over the place. Heap spray primitives. Lots of user controlled input since you provide your own JPEG. Everything you could want.

So I wrote a little PoC out of curiosity. Crafted a little 20kB JPG that would try to allocate several GBs worth of heap spray. I submit my post, and the server dutifully times out.

And that's where I'd like to say I finished my PoC and reported the vulnerability, but in fact I got stuck on a reliable ASLR bypass and lost interest (I did send an email about the library, but I don't think it was actively maintained and there was no followup)

My impression from this little adventure is that 4chan never really had the maintenance and code quality it needed. Everything still seemed to be the same very old PHP code that leaked years ago (which included this same call to the vulnerable EXIF library). Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.

Maybe not, but it's okay to not be the very best, and it's okay to fail. And it's especially okay when comparing ourselves to one of the few dozen names from before the Julian calendar that everyone still remembers to this day!

You're in good company, because the other ~100% of us are also imperfect and make mistakes all the time.

You're right, of course. There is a difference between methylphenidate and other amphetamine-class stimulants for ADHD, but I didn't know what to call it.

I should have said it's not a direct agonist. Instead of directly causing dopamine release, it acts as an allosteric modulator on DAT to affect reuptake.

I had a study in mind that found switching to MPH was effective at lowering the equivalent dose (the tolerance did not carry over), but my Googling is failing me right now. Appreciate the correction.

>Sorry for the slight divergence from the focus on ketamine, but more generally, does anyone know if this applies to other medications that alter the brain's function?

Tolerance is a phemomenon where after using a drug regularly for enough time, you will eventually need higher doses to achieve the same effect. A tolerance effect exists for many classes of medication, but in this case there is something specific to Ketamine.

With Ketamine, it can (reportedly) be much harder to reverse this built-up tolerance. That's what they mean by "even after prolonged periods of abstinence". Heavy abusers of Ketamine report having stopped for several years, and finding that the tolerance comes right back the first time they use it again.

With stimulants, this tolerance goes down after a period of abstinence (e.g. switching to a n̶o̶n̶-̶s̶t̶i̶m̶u̶l̶a̶n̶t non-amphetamine ADHD medication like Metylphenidate for a few weeks is known to lower tolerance to other ADHD drugs).

I would generally not worry about tolerance to stimulants at prescribed doses. You should try to avoid taking medication you don't need, but if you need the stimulants to function, the cost/benefit of stimulant medication for ADHD is highly favorable. Even if there is a slow tolerance effect, it can be reversed.

Taking stimulants for ADHD is not dangerous like taking Ketamine for partying is dangerous. Stimulants have the highest efficacy of any known drug in psychiatry. The medical interventions with the lowest NNT are things like insulin for diabetus, or not very far down, stimulants for ADHD. It's more than fine.

It doesn't recognize Tor Browser as such, but in this case calling its anti-fingerprinting user agent a "desperate lack of personality" happens to be more a compliment than a roast!

On the other hand, it's disappointed that the browser claims to only have two cores and uses a resolution "from 2009".

More backstory: The ID assigned to posts is a sequential incrementing number. So it is possible to "aim" for a nice round number by posting at the right time

When people notice that their post IDs start approaching a large whole number, a bunch of people might try to get ("GET") the post with ID, say, 2000000 by timing it

It's not really a marker of anything, just a semi-random event that people have fun with. It's sort of... tolerated, as long as it's infrequent and doesn't cause too much noise

Ah, fair enough! I'm only trying to describe the state of things today, but certainly those uses of the word are not new

For the record, that's not it.

People calling each other "autists" is a WallStreetBets practice, from Reddit. It's not a thing on 4chan, not even on the interesting place that is /biz/.

4channers would use the "friend"-word as a neutral term (oldfriends, newfriends, etc), or less often "schizo" as an insult, but not autist.

Don't ask me why I'm taking the time to type all of this out, or who cares. Slow news day.

I had heard that there's a community of people who insufflate caffeine on Reddit, but this one is news to me.

Seems a little funny to go through all the trouble and extreme stigma of injecting yourself with an IV drug, only to pick ground up coffee beans as your poison of choice (!)

The study is interesting mostly for the fact that someone tried it, but ultimately the results don't show a very strong effect. I wouldn't put too much confidence in how well it would replicate either, these kind of studies can have a lot of variation.

>Every drug seems to have a “right” way to take it. You [...] booty bump ecstasy

That is not really typical. People normally eat it as ecstasy pills, or as MDMA powder.

Most recreational drugs can be taken rectally, that usually makes for a higher bio-availability and a faster peak plasma concentration. Some people do that a lot, with everything. It is not specific to ecstasy, that I know of.

>But you wouldn't say the same thing to a diabetic who needs insulin, right?.

Yes, that's where I'm conflicted. At the same time that I try to pretend using psychedelics for ADHD would be an addiction, I'm actively seeking metamphetamine instead. Which doesn't exactly have a reputation as a non-addictive healthy substance to be self-medicating with.. I can see the idea that medication is medication and shouldn't be stigmatized.

Still, I think I feel that way because I can make a reasonable point about side-effects and how much therapeutic benefit I get vs impairment, in my personal experience. LSD is pretty effective, but for me (and this might not generalize) it works best when it's a full introspective trip where I'm going to have amplified emotions. Which is also where I'm most impaired and least able to interact with the rest of the world. If I compare that with the effects of stimulants for ADHD, at least in expectations they seem like a much more functional thing to be on, on a frequent or even daily basis.

Though I admit if microdosing works for some people, then that seems potentially just as good a medication, too.

>There seems to be this cultural issue around mental health problems, this stigma associated with them. You wouldn't tell someone in a wheelchair they just need to try harder to get up the stairs! But with brains that's basically what most people say.

For a long time I used to have had some strong bias against using any external help, instead just trying harder or trying to better myself through sheer force of will. I instinctively never liked the idea of depending on any medication, like it was a crutch. I was wrong, but I think there's still a bit of that instinct resisting treatment. You're completely right about the stigma existing, too.

I'll have to read The Woman Who Changed Her Brain. I've found one sort of mental trick that helps me get things done, but it's about getting into a mindspace where I have to admit to myself that procrastinating is wrong/makes no sense, until that forces me reject the wrongness out of a weird childish sense of right and wrong manifesting as determination. Probably no one else can relate to that part :) It borders on guilt-tripping or emotionally manipulating myself, and I'm only half happy with exploring that idea further.

Trying to transform your self-image sounds like a whole other thing, that's a really interesting idea! I feel like a small part of me would hate that, because that feels dangerously close to 'lying' to myself (which my childish intuitive sense of right and wrong frowns upon pretty strongly). But on the other hand I can absolutely see how that'd be effective. Self image is a powerful thing, and there's something about the mindset I'm in that completely changes how much difficulty I'll have starting things.

I'll definitely try to apply that idea, of acting like someone who might think differently and see themselves differently. I feel like I've spend many hours circling the problem, but I still haven't found some effective way of getting from a mindset where I'm facing strong mental barriers to a mindset where things are easier. But I have all the time in the world to try, so, thank you for sharing that idea =)

>As a ground-level example, you can have a task on your mind all day, to the point where you can't relax or do anything else productive, but still get nowhere with it.

>I had some (limited) success with microdosing LSD, which I tried because I do not tolerate stimulants well. At its peak effectiveness, it became literally impossible to procrastinate because I would just be consciously, excruciatingly aware of trying to avoid a task. The only way to get it off my mind would be to deal with it.

This almost exactly matches my experience. I relate completely. A few months ago I spent about 6 hours trying and failing to do some basic everyday life task. As a last resort, in the evening, I took a small threshold amount of a psychedelic. I knew full trips in the past had filled me with determination, so I wanted to see where the lower bound was. Can a smaller push than a full trip get me past the barrier? It did work in the end, but only after a few more hours of trying and 964 lines of notes on why exactly it is that I'm not doing the very thing I want to be doing right now.

For me, psychedelics get me in an emotional mindset where I start caring and being a lot more emotionally involved than normal, eventually filling me with enough emotional determination to can overcome almost any mental barrier. The only problem being that some tasks can't very well be done when you're far from sober, it's not a very functional tool above light doses.

And unfortunately using it like that feels way too much like an unhealthy dependency to me. I could never accept using it as anything more than as a last resort, because psychedelics have so many side effects and changes in perception. If I started depending on tripping to do anything hard, I feel like that would be an addiction, and surrendering a small part of myself to replace it by a chemical.

I'm trying to explore other potential solutions that would work better for infrequent to semi-frequent use, even if I know I can always as a hail mary resort to psychedelics, and if nothing else worked that should get me to guilt trip myself into having the determination to attempt anything that needs doing.

Thank you, I appreciate particularly all attempts at harm reduction, that's very thoughtful and kind of you.

Narcan (naloxone) is a wonderful thing, that I wish was more broadly available. I would still worry that sometimes people are not able to self-administer Narcan, so in addition fentanyl test strips are a very good idea to also have. They're a little false-positive heavy, but that seems better than the alternative.

You're right. I use it as a euphemism, I think because the stigma is so strong even I feel uncomfortable writing it. It is in fact mail-order "street" metamphetamine from an online reseller.

My understanding is that the production of metamphetamine has increased in quality over time, so that it should be possible to get something reasonably potent with a little trial and error. The idea is to optimize both on cost and size, because if it turns out to be viable as a tool, having to order smaller packages less frequently should contribute to reducing risks.

On point 2, I'm aware of the acetone wash, I think that's definitely worth doing (though it can't wash every impurity). I haven't attempted it yet due to fire safety concerns, and because I see it more as an optimization I can make down the line, if this whole insane experiment turns out to be practically viable as a potential tool in my toolbox.