HN user

fishtoucher

10 karma
Posts0
Comments7
View on HN
No posts found.

It's a ridiculous and extreme example but it actually did happen. I was going skiing quite often at the time though so maybe it didn't have the sticking power it would've normally.

In general, without some kind of trigger my ability to remember specific episodes is nonexistent. The OP talks about this too but those times when you have to give 3 fun facts about yourself or when someone asks my hobbies are moments of of existential dread because I genuinely have no idea what to say.

I realised recently that there are whole years of my life I'm basically missing when I think back. Like I know where I was living, what job I was working, and my general circumstances, just not anything specific I actually did.

I think I have a fairly similar experience to the author. Different in some respects, I'm not aphantasic, but I resonate strongly with the lack of autobiographical memory and feeling like an observer in my own history.

I can't describe how many times someone's asked me what I did last weekend and I told them that I did just had a quiet one at home, then later I'm reminded I actually went skiing or something notable that I completely forgot. Not just passing conversations with strangers either, this happens with family just as much.

I take a more pessimistic view on how it affects my life than the author does though. He handwaves the downsides even saying that he '... had learned my lessons from them [trials in university], even though I forgot how they unfolded.' I understand the desire to think that but I'm not sure how you can really justify it. The brain definitely learns to compensate in other ways and I have really unbalanced cognitive tests I took as a kid as evidence, but memory deficiencies are undoubtedly a disadvantage.

Fuchsia may not be outright dead, but it's definitely on life support and would've been killed a long time ago if senior people at Google weren't personally backing it. It had great foundations but without a concrete use case or product development was constantly pulled in different directions. It seemed like every year a new niche for Fuchsia was on the horizon, 6 months of development time would be dedicated to it, an extremely hacky demo would get the public hyped up, and then the whole thing would be abandoned because it didn't make any business sense. Starnix, for example, has been completely deprecated. There was even a newer system to replace it which also got cancelled.

* My knowledge is a couple years old at this point and I haven't kept up with recent developments so maybe the future is brighter than I think.

This merging of semantically different concepts into the same language feature was the biggest mistake of Go in my opinion. The gains in simplicity are entirely offset by the losses in correctness and comprehension.

The worst example is pointers since they're used to represent both references and optional values. It's often very difficult to know which meaning a function is using at first glance.

A new operating system done right gets engineers salivating and a lot of very senior staff have personal attachment to Fuchsia.

Personally I think it's a lost cause; every few years they change direction in hopes of finding a concrete use case that doesn't displace some existing Google project. The Nest was Fuchsia's greatest achievement and even that was held together with strings and glue behind the scenes.

Neurotypical people actually get a kind of high from amphetamines This is intellectual dishonesty to the point of nausea. Amphetamine is very well understood as far as drugs go and affects those with and without ADHD in the same way. Neurotypicals also experience increased focus at therapeutic doses, just ask anyone who's taken it as a study aid, and ADHD-sufferers also experience a high from the flood of dopamine. The most damning evidence for me is the absolutely obsessive relationship many ADHD patients have with their medication. It's immediately obvious and unlike any I know of.

Society (American society in particular) has just decided that the medical benefits of amphetamine outweigh the risks for people with ADHD vice versa for those without.