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.

Blog about each topic/micro topic/learning.

Any recommendations for this? I've always wanted to make a blog but I never have anything to write about. What I work on is trivial so it doesn't seem worth the time to write about. I've thought about researching interesting topics and writing a "research paper" for each blog entry but that feels like cheating and using another person's work.

If Firefox had better dev tools I might. Chrome's entire development environment feels first class, whereas Firefox's feels like an afterthought.

How are iterators functional language features? They're not unique to functional languages and they don't require function composition to implement. They're present in most popular imperative languages.

Then today morning my favorite blog closed because of an attack by cancel-police.

Isn't this still speculative at this point? Last I read about it (on Reddit) there was no actual evidence that NYT was cooking up a hit piece.

Can I ask what field you went into?

I enjoyed working in restaurants in my formative years but I don't think I'd be happy owning one. Honestly I think my dream job would be working on a cargo ship or something but sadly I'm well past the age cap for breaking into the field.

You and I are in the same boat, except I've grown to hate not only the culture, but programming too. I've not heard of former devs breaking into other technical fields, but I have heard of them getting into stuff like farming, construction, or trades (electrical, plumbing, etc.). I wish I hadn't spent my 20s dwelling in anxiety. I wish I had moved around, become a trail guide, or got into scuba diving, or even joined the coast guard. Sadly the best I can hope for nowadays in my 30s is to program in a domain I don't totally despise.

If in order to get a job as a senior architect I have to have experience that I can only get by having access to come inside your house, then yeah I kind of do.

Developers should not need direct production access.

Then stop telling me I need years of experience with Docker, K8s, AWS, etc. on dev job listings.

Sometimes I'll highlight things but I'm a terrible note taker I think. Do you know of any good resources for taking notes while reading?

Please stop. We are in the middle of a global crisis. Can HN stop obsessing over opportunism for one minute?

Also requires an account to read the article. No thanks, I'll just move on.

Why would a company and a person ever have aligned values, unless that person owns/runs that company? Companies are ultimately tethered to the will of its stakeholders and the stakeholders only hold stake because they expect a return on investment. People value things like family, travel, friendships, romance, spirituality, pursuit of passion, personal fulfillment etc. Why would a company ever value these things?

Genuine question: why is DevSecOps a thing? What is the difference between it and DevOps? Or separate DevOps and SecOps teams? Or InfraOps? At what point does it become systems administration with inflated titles? I've even seen business people call themselves "BizOps".

A whole food, conservative, omnivorous diet of your ancestors instead of becoming vegan or carnivore.

Not sure how that's low tech or ancestral. Veganism is quite sustainable and many peoples of the past have practiced it.

I've been trying to learn to cook off and on for years now and I get so discouraged all the time because I'm still either overcooking or undercooking something, still not getting the flavors right, not using the right amount of oil despite the recipe's prescription. I can't be alone in feeling that way.

think how easy Rails was in 2006

So why not use Rails?

a step towards converting paragraphs of text or conversations into easily stored images

If the Major system is for memorizing numbers, what's the link between numbers and text?