helldritch

3 年前議論

In a way, this post gives me the same feeling I had when I read the story of Terry Davis, author of Temple OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis), and his gradual slide into homelessness.

OP: I've been homeless before, I don't really care if post is truth or a lie, a scam or a sincere cry for help. Desperation takes many forms and I'd like to help either way.

A $5,000 pledge would unfortunately be a terrible financial decision at a time where I'm saving for a house, but I won't hurt purchasing the yearly newsletter subscription for $50. It's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, especially if it helps you get on your feet. Send a payment link to shane at my username dot com.

helldritch

4 年前議論

My ADHD was diagnosed last year, around the age of 30. I started medication in January and I've been able to turn my life around - I no longer have that awful feeling that my next crisis is constantly flying towards me, just waiting to happen.

I was open and honest in my interview with my current company about my ADHD, and that I didn't need any form of special treatment (with the exception of a keyed locker to keep my medication in - it's a controlled substance in the UK). Everyone was understanding about it, and I have a lot of support on offer from them, but ironically I no longer seem to need it, my medication has completely removed my symptoms.

Large companies these days want to appear welcoming and care about things like diversity. We have a disability, and it's important we see it that way. Without my medication, I struggle to integrate with society, I struggle to focus on tasks (or obsess over them to an unhealthy degree).

There's also a lot to be said for hiring developers with ADHD who are being treated: We spent decades learning behaviors to allow us to focus on tasks, once we're being treated, the issues goes away but the behaviors remain. It can be a superpower sometimes.

I spent my life wondering how people focus on work for 9 hours a day: It turns out that they don't, but decades of trying to emulate that combined with "performing enhancing" medication means that we _can_.

helldritch

4 年前議論

A little bit different to software, but the big kicker for me was a standing desk.

When I'm on calls I compulsively wander around the apartment with my wireless headphones on, I can't stand still. If I'm in a call for 4 hours, I will be walking constantly for 4 hours (often covering 20km in small circles in my apartment).

I got a powered sit/stand desk with presets so I can press a single button to have it raise up or lower down, and it's made me a lot more present at my desk during discussions, because I can sort of fiddle about on my feet while still being in front of my screens.

Strongly considering adding a flat, miniature, quiet walking machine underneath my desk for this stuff, if I can find one which meets my specs.

helldritch

4 年前議論

I've just been emotionally effected by this work at a deep, almost uncomfortable level.

I've worked as a mental health support worker, and this short story poked at some of the darker parts of the field: the dream of people getting "better" and wanting to "fix" them, the subtle (and not so subtle) jokes made out of their failings, having to deal with the basic human urges they don't fully understand, subjects consenting to treatment they don't have the capacity to understand, etc.

In myself, I see my own inevitable cycle of depression and elation. I'm disabled not mentally, but emotionally. I could be happier than anyone, but in the end some part of me is always dragged back into anguish. Charlie was a genius, but in his infantile state it's brought him nothing but pain.

The saddest part of all of this is that even when Charlie became smart enough to understand the world around him, he spent so little time in the relatable range of intelligence that the people he cared about struggled to communicate with him. They didn't understand, they were worried. Charlie never truly had a friend. Ms Kinnian cared for him, but they spent so little time able to meaningfully interact that friendship didn't have the chance to properly form.

I'm going to go and pet my dog, I think, until this reaction passes.

helldritch

4 年前議論

This is run by BunnyCDN, I've been one of their smaller users for a few years now (live video hosting and delivery, mostly .m3u8, mpegts, HTTP Live Streaming type of stuff) and I've always found their service reliable and cheap. One of the primary reasons I liked them was that their API is REALLY fast at making changes to the files (you make the call and 100ms later the file attributes / content have been updated throughout all their delivery locations) and the interface is pretty easy to use.

This isn't an advertisement, I had a very specific use-case, but it follows into this:

Of course, just like with Google, we are the product here. Google Fonts is an analytics data collection platform, Bunny Fonts is an advertisement for their CDN services.

I'm going to stick with a /fonts/ directory, I think, despite being one of their current users. It's really not very much bandwidth for the fonts, it's not 2010 anymore, and I prefer the control (and the local development environment being the same, I don't always have internet and I don't want a dev toggle for something as silly as fonts).

helldritch

4 年前議論

Gosh, you weren't kidding. Even ignoring the painful contrast and small text, the background characters not being regular (lined-up) is setting off my ADHD something awful, I keep getting distracted, couldn't make it through the first paragraph.

helldritch

4 年前議論

Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't.

From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact

They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon.

By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.

helldritch

4 年前議論

Generally I prefer a mid-saturation blue-tinted grey in the #111111 horizontal line for my base text colours, which is basically indistinguishable from black but works better with the other hues on our website.

That being said, it's easy using the prefers-contrast CSS property to override that to #000000 for people who are hard of sight.

It's supported by edge, safari, chrome, opera but it's a bit finnicky in Firefox.

helldritch

4 年前議論

I do! I was on 30mg for a week, then increased to 50, and I've been stable there ever since.

I was worried at the start I would end up on 70mg, but it just seemed to work from day one onwards.

Do you get the reduced appetite? I basically don't eat from 11am until 8pm most days, which has worked quite well for weight loss. I wasn't super heavy (18st, now 14.5st) but I had put on quite a lot during COVID.

helldritch

4 年前議論

Absolutely. But you first have to factor in that my ADHD is performance degrading.

As an example: Mirtazapine is an antidepressant used to treat major depressive disorder, but that doesn't mean you can give it to an otherwise emotionally healthy person and it'll give the same effect delta to them.

If you put a crutch on a healthy leg, it doesn't suddenly become a better leg.

My medication allows me to experience the world without crippling anxiety and constant distraction, it just so happens that 30 years living with those issues means that a large portion of my attention and time was devoted to dealing with them.

So, yes, my ADHD medication is performance enhancing, but that's an incredibly reductive way to look at it. That doesn't mean that anyone can take it and perform better, in fact studies of studies have found that the results of stimulative medication for people without ADHD (such as those who are using it to try and improve cognition during studying) can be similarly triggered by placebo effects:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/

    As it remains unclear whether stimulant medication has the same effect on healthy individuals as for those with ADHD, it is possible that many reported effects of prescription stimulants in healthy individuals may stem from placebo effects. Looby and Earleywine (2011) examined whether placebo effects influence reports of subjective mood and cognitive performance among college students who endorsed several risk factors for prescription stimulant misuse (e.g., low grade point average, fraternity/sorority involvement, binge drinking). Interestingly, participants believed that they had better ability to focus and persevere, particularly for a sustained amount of time, when they expected to receive MPH (Looby and Earleywine 2011). This is similar to circumstances in which participants may engage in nonmedical-stimulant use to study or cram for extended hours. On the other hand, when experimental participants did not expect to receive MPH, their attention appeared disrupted resulting in inconsistent reaction times throughout the CPT.

I take my medication because I have a disability. I was diagnosed later in life and have a well tested / carefully controlled history of use with this medication where I'm frequently checked against diagnostic guidelines. In almost every metric of my life the disability had a negative effect, you can see a history of that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28739990#28741432

If my medication is performance enhancing, then literally any antidepressant, antianxiety, anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory, antihistamine, antibiotic, etc., is also performance enhancing by the same thought. What we need to consider is the baseline it lifts you from and the place it takes you to.

It's probably worth mentioning that I'm in the UK, not the USA, where access to stimulant medication is a _lot_ stricter and it can be very difficult to get a diagnosis of ADHD. I had to go through several hour long sessions with specialised psychiatrists to receive the diagnosis after spending years being tested for other conditions like Mixed-Anxiety Disorder.

An excerpt from my remission notice is here showing the clinically recognised reduction in symptoms, it mentions that the decision was based on both subjective and objective justifications: https://i.imgur.com/RJQCAs6.png

The diagnostic screening questions for the ASRS1.1 are here showing the areas where I subjectively improved: https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnair...

On a side-note, your comment came across very harshly. It's very easy to make a short, pointed statement like that about a topic you aren't very familiar with, but you should consider how informed your statements actually are - if they're backed in data or long term subjective beliefs. Sometimes, brevity imparts a lot of information in few words, sometimes it just comes across as rude.

helldritch

4 年前議論

I don't use this, but I also don't really use any traditional social media. I have an account on HN obviously but it feels a lot less tracked and invasive than Facebook, etc. Probably because the business model is different, on Reddit we're there to look at overt ads for paying third party companies, HN is tailored towards us looking at more subtle ads for the companies they invest in and building their social capital in the dev community.

That being said, I'd be very wary about using a service like this (from a user's perspective) where one company, one WAF, one person, one error is the only thing stopping all of my data being deleted or exfiltrated. It seems like a single point of failure waiting to happen.

If I was the company (and I have been), I'd just make it easy and fast to let my users delete and manage their data and collect as little as possible. Don't hide it behind 5 menus, 4 pages, 3 password entries and an email confirmation with a 14 day waiting period; instead focus on providing a service people don't feel creeped out by and decide to leave.

https://assets.website-files.com/61251391cad0dc5676f648d0/61...

They have a typo for "integration" on their landing page imagery. A typo is obviously a small thing to nitpick, but this is a landing page, from a business perspective this is likely the most important page on their website so you would expect this is where all their internal eyes would be. It's also something I'm almost confident I would have caught in a pull request so it doesn't point to great testing standards on their end.

helldritch

4 年前議論

That's a fair point, although some people do constantly multitask.

I have ADHD and I'm capable of doing work while focussing entirely on two tasks, often I'm looking at one screen where I'm writing code while reading an article on another screen.

Sometimes I feel like "reality" is too slow and I've already figured out the code for the unit test (or whatever I'm working on) in my head and I'm impatiently waiting for my hands to catch up while filling in a boilerplate template. I often focus on two things at once because the main work I'm doing isn't stimulating enough.

A lot of people question how I'm able to do this without making constant mistakes, but before I started on my medication my brain and the world around me was so incredibly noisy. Not necessarily sound, it's just that everything around me was a distraction. When I'm taking my medication, the distractions don't exist and there's almost so little happening that I find it unsettling.

I don't really know how to describe it properly so this probably made little sense. Just imagine you have a really angry baby screaming at you 24/7, it would probably effect your work? Now the baby is suddenly being quiet and you're able to work really effectively, but you got so good at coping with the baby distracting you that now you have all this spare CPU time in your brain which used to be devoted to denoising.

helldritch

4 年前議論

The equation for escape velocity is: v = √(2GM/R)

R = distance (radius, really) M = Mass of the body G = Universal gravitation constant

We can modify this equation to find for the distance at which you can escape:

r = 2GM/v^2

The answer is largely: it depends on how fast you can go, at the speed of light you can escape from further away, since the pull will increase the closer your are to the "event horizon".

I'm in a car right now (as a passenger ofc) doing this from my phone so not in a situation where I can put together a model, but you should be able to plug in some numbers and estimate a result, just make sure you convert to SI units so you don't accidentally end up 3 orders of magnitude off.

A black hole with the mass of the earth would have a radius of about 2cm, so things less massive than a planet start to get very small, very fast, and you end up fighting quantum effects which become less intuitive.

コメント