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Human contact is more scarce than ever, it's not fungible with podcasts or audiobooks, and most people are starving.

I've backpacked/hitchiked through Ireland few years back. It was easy to catch a ride, even easier to find somebody to let me pitch a tent on their land. People were open and kind and wanted to hear and share stories.

Also you really don't need 1000s of cycles in military drones, so maybe some more "crazy" chemistries can be used.

If the drone can fly 10 times it's probably good enough.

The funny thing is that when you have one big customer (a country) - you get good prices.

When you have 30 insurance companies, 10000 companies buying insurance policies and millions of individuals - you get shit prices.

That's why the drug in question is 200 USD in US (after deductions) and 20 in Europe (including taxes).

I am a narcissist. I haven't been diagnosed (yet), but I certainly recognize the traits and patterns, and I'm in therapy for it.

> People with NPD don’t go and get help, they just run around ruining other peoples lives.

This is objectively false. There's lots of people in therapy for NPD. And there have been case studies with people who recovered.

Which brings another point

> The DSM basically took all those “traits we think of as evil” and said “we shall make some disorder categories”.

DSM criteria for narcissism are part of the problem. You can have the exact same mental struggle but stop yourself from hurting people (at least to a reasonable degree - "normal" people also hurt others sometimes after all). And you won't be diagnosed as NPD. But you'll still have all the other problems - lack of human connection, vastly higher chance of suicide, autoimmune diseases, relationship problems, etc.

Which is like saying you only have alcoholism if you beat people on the streets. If you define it that way - of course all alcoholics are violent.

But it's not a productive way to define mental health problems. It leaves out people who struggle with it but don't cause harm.

> The rest of us don’t care if they can be saved, we just don’t ever want to interact with another one. Ever.

That's unlikely given that estimated 0.5-5% of the general population have NPD and about 20% have strong narcissistic traits.

In IT it's probably much higher by the way, it's the perfect job (little human contact, high status, well paid).

Narcissism is a spectrum; everybody's a little narcissistic, and it changes over time. All kids are VERY narcissistic early on, most grow out of it as they experience unconditional love from their parents and are allowed to be their authentic selves in various social contexts.

For various reasons - some kids don't. Bullying can certainly contribute.

So they develop maladaptive strategies (which can look like the first few "stages" in this article) and have to undo the damage later in life (which can look like the later "stages" from the article) to have a chance to experience real human connection.

I think the article can be very beneficial for people who struggle with this, even if it doesn't explicitly mention what the technical name of the struggle is (and BTW it does not have to be NPD - there might be other reasons for people to have similar problems). Maybe even BECAUSE it doesn't mention narcissism (cause narcissism is currently villified on the social media as "they are actual demons that cannot be saved" - so people are very wary of identifying with it, which makes it less likely they will work on themselves).

BTW I'm very disappointed in the current fad on social media of villifying one mental health issue after another only to then come to realize "oh wait, they're actually people not monsters". I've seen it with BPD, now it's the NPD turn. It's usually done for ugly reasons, too (somebody hurt by a person with $mental_health_problem search for validation, so influencers jump in with feel-good validation that portrays the other side as demons).

You don't usually realize that's why you're the way you are until much later.

At first it might feel like "these people don't like me cause of how much better I am than them", or "these people don't like me, well fuck them, I don't need anybody".

People have all kinds of excuses they tell themselves to feel better about the needs they can't satisfy.

I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.

After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.

Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.

Just solving these problems made me giddy.

Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.

But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.

TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.

There was an article on hackernews a few years back (before LLMs took over) about jobs that could be replaced by a sign saying "$default_result" 99% of the time.

Like being a cancer diagnostician. Or an inspector at a border crossing.

Using LLMs is currently a lot like going to a diagnostian that always responds "no, you're healthy". The answer is probably right. But still we pay people a lot to get that last 1%.

IQ is just CPU power.

There's no CPU that can't be wasted by bad code.

Significant part of what separates 99.9th (or even 90th) from 99.999th percentile is ego management.

In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.

There's no lesson. It's hard. Your brain will search for the silver bullet to skip the boring self-improvement work and feel good NOW. It'll likely detach your current self from your past self (I was bad, I discovered this, now I'm great, exceptional and heroic again). Then you'll again avoid the boring day-to-day work (becaue you feel exceptional again) and fail again.

Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.

What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.

It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.

When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.

At least that's the theory, I'm not there yet.

This syndrome is called "eternal child" (puer aeternus) in psychology.

You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.

So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).

Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".

When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.

You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".

I kinda heard lots of whispers when I was very young (like 6-7) and now I'm 40 and haven't had any such problems.

I blamed it on the drugs I got prescripted for sleeping (I had bad allergy and was scratching myself to the point of bleeding during sleep so I got some "pacifying" drugs).

They also colonized Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, etc.