neuroticfish

I wasn’t really looking for pity, just sharing the perspective of a person who has dealt with moderately severe ADHD. I’m doing just fine now and am enjoying my work again. Medication was a critical part of that journey, but attention disorders don’t really work like myopia. You normally don’t walk into a psychiatrist’s office, get fitted for a dosage, and then walk out recovered. It’s one piece of a greater treatment strategy that can be complex and wildly different from patient to patient. In one sense though it is like myopia because at some level of severity there is no total correction, and you have to narrow the scope of your life in order to get things, often at the expense of other responsibilities. I think we can both agree that you have to play the cards you’re dealt, but I would just encourage you—at the very least—to not bring others down if the way they play them doesn’t make sense to you. It may be working for them in the long run.

> Picking up bits here and bits there, is not learning. It is just being lazy and clumsy.

This is at best a lack of understanding of how attention disorders work, at worst a lack of empathy.

Some people are only able to commit things to memory after putting it into practice many times over. Engineering roles nowadays often require you to be intimately familiar with a few languages, frameworks, CI pipelines, databases, cloud offerings, many protocols, and more. This job has grown well beyond the days when your sole responsibility was a small set of modules and a narrow cross section of technology.

The bandwidth for reading a manual just to lose the ability to recall it a week after changing context is just not there for a lot of people, and to be indignant about the learning mechanisms others use to get around these obstacles just seems silly. Yeah I probably would have googled “vim autocomplete” after some time, but modern tech sensory overload would likely have me googling something else.

>So you see that every base reality can contain a vast number of nested simulations, and a simple counting argument tells us we're much more likely to live in a simulated world than the real one.

>But if you believe this, you believe in magic. Because if we're in a simulation, we know nothing about the rules in the level above. We don't even know if math works the same way—maybe in the simulating world 2+2=5, or maybe 2+2=.

>A simulated world gives us no information about the world it's running in.

I don't buy into the theory for practical reasons, but this is not consistent with its proponents' argument. The simulation in question is necessarily an "ancestor simulation" and the counting argument is based on the acceptance that if we are able to simulate our _own_ reality, we will. So in this case, we would have meaningful information about the world it's running in because that's the entire point.

>Every time I explain that, in roll the fans telling me I'm somehow doing it wrong.

"Wrong strain, bro"

I started experiencing cannabis induced panic attacks first year of college and quit after the second time. People were annoying about it for a few years but as time went on I found that more and more people had the same experience I did. MM is great but I think the recreational and unprescribed "benefits" are exaggerated. It's a shame we don't have more data.

>I wonder if there’s an opportunity to teach a “how to search” class in schools.

We did this in a public middle school around 2002-2003 with boolean searches. Was this unique to my experience or has this been a common thing for awhile?

>What’s the practical alternative?

Single payer healthcare, not that your question is sincere.

what do you use now? i find that there are almost no alternatives to niche communities.

guess it depends on where you land. i'm in academia now and it's absolutely horrifying. understaffed, constantly dropped into new projects while other ones are on fire, tons of overtime, professors don't respect your standard 8-5 schedule, frequently working weekends, under endless stress, unappreciated, etc. i write software in a research facility, not university IT, so YMMV.

The only way to learn is to practice. Use practice problem sets in textbooks.

SF and NY are already competitive enough but remote positions make it 10x worse. If you're really insistent on remote work for a startup try to focus on Nashville, Charlotte, and Atlanta.

Most of the apply links soft 404. Shame because I like the concept :/

What sorts of companies are you applying to? And where? I consider myself to be about average in technical skill and I don't have much trouble passing interviews at good companies in the US South. I know I wouldn't be able to make it in the Bay Area so I don't apply to jobs there.