temporaryvector

The problem isn't so much signing up, the problem is that from their website, without signing up, I have no idea what their service does and what are it's features.

A small paragraph and maybe a screenshot would do wonders for my willingness to try their service. But I'm basically complaining for the sake of complaining because I dislike this trend.

I'm specifically referring to https://spatial.chat

Kinda off topic, but I'm starting to see this kind of website design more frequently these days, just a big "Join" button (or something) without any information whatsoever about what is it I'm joining up for. I hate it and I don't know why anyone thinks it's a good idea.

I've always been a bit curious, do these types of programs make any attempt to identify whether they're running in a VM?

I agree with this. I have though about it extensively, as an introvert who hates large cities, and I think (at least for me) a city between 500k and 1 million inhabitants spread out over a sizeable area is ideal. It has some of the benefits of a large city and some of the benefits of a small town, and I think it strikes a good balance between being anonymous in a crowd while having enough space for myself to live comfortably. Such a city would also have the population to find enough people with similar interests/hobbies to have clubs and meetups.

I'm overall surprised at how unpopular/unknown wxWidgets is when the discussion turns to cross platform UI toolkits.

I've used it a lot, as well as other popular toolkits (Qt, GTK, etc.) and I find that wx is, at the very least, the least bad option and overall programming in it hasn't been a pain, regardless of which binding I used.

I guess my only complaint would be that it's a bit harder to do something way outside the norm when compared to Qt, but at that point it might be better to use native SDKs or straight up OpenGL or something for your GUI.

While not exactly a convertible, the Honda e sounds right up your alley.

It's probably the only electric car I'm looking forward to anymore.

The thing worth mentioning is that becoming a famous author and writing quality books are different goals, achieved through different means. Cynically, I would say that they're unrelated, but in reality I'd say writing quality books is one avenue towards becoming a famous author but likely the least reliable one. Similarly, getting rich writing books is also another separate goal, which can also be achieved without the other two.

Thus, I disagree that goals like "becoming a famous author" entirely out of your control. There are definite steps one could take towards such a goal, but as with anything in life there's never a guarantee. Granted, you do have less control over the outcome if your goal depends on other people, like becoming famous, but those steps still exist and could include things like networking extensively, spending a lot of time self-promoting, polishing your image, hanging out with the rich and famous, etc.

The problem, I think, is that a lot of people tend to think that goals like "becoming a famous author" and "writing good books" are the same, or that the latter will automatically lead to the former, and when they figure out that the strategies for getting there are different they become disillusioned.

The complaint isn't about the capability for mass surveillance, but the normalization of it, in the public mind.

The capability has existed for a pretty long time, mostly out of the public eye, with occasional bursts of outrage when something caused it to become public, quickly forgotten afterwards.

The capability is there, that genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to put it back in. This isn't really about the technology, it's about the legal frameworks and social attitudes surrounding this capability that are worth talking about. Putting your hands up in defeat is not useful, and at this point probably neither is trying to prevent the technology from spreading. I am unsure what the solution is but the conversation needs to happen, and in all likelihood the end result of that conversation will be that corporations can't be trusted, just like they couldn't be trusted with food safety, for example, thus the FDA was created. What actions will be taken after that, I cannot predict.

You can definitely live with a voice-only phone

This is likely to be untrue in the immediate future. This is probably already true in places like China, where mobile payments are the norm.

As a personal example, and I know this does not yet apply to the US, but where I live it is impossible (or so inconvenient that it might as well be not possible) to do some banking operations without an Android or iOS device, as even accessing my bank's website requires me to have the app installed for token generation. I'm sure if I shopped around I could still find a smaller bank without such a requirement or live with the limitations, maybe finagle a way to use an emulator or something equally inconvenient, but I'm quite certain that this will not last and a smartphone will become essential. A lot of other things are also quite inconvenient without a smartphone around here.

I know the US and Europe have a distinct resistance to the smartphone (or even the computer) becoming required to live as anything but a homeless vagrant because their economies and infrastructure developed before smartphones were even an idea, which gives them the luxury to resist these technologies on moral grounds, or even on the grounds of not wanting to learn the new thing. On the other hand, countries whose economies developed in lockstep with cellular technologies and smartphones (China, India, much of Africa, South-East Asia, much of Latin America, etc.) don't have that particular luxury or simply take a much more pragmatic approach to the whole thing. In these places it is already incredibly inconvenient to get by without a smartphone and will likely become impossible in the near future, if it isn't already.

When smartphones and the internet do become essential to life, I can only hope that the laws of the land have managed to catch up by then. I am not particularly optimistic on this aspect, though, and I suspect it will take some kind of major disaster and/or abuse of human rights (or more likely, a series of them) to happen for another "age of enlightenment"-like period to happen, focused on information technology this time.

EDIT: spelling

Besides that you could always click on the drop down menu in the upper left and use the TOC to jump around, or skip something.

I think that was kinda the main problem for me, actually. When you have a PDF article or book or a plain webpage, you can jump around without much penalty, and you can skip ahead then go back and so on, you can skim parts and can check if something relevant appears ahead. At least, that's how I read scientific articles: read the introduction, skim through the text, go back to read the more interesting parts and jump around until you grasp it and so on. Any supplementary data or figures provided I usually have open in another window for quick reference as I'm reading the text.

The best UX for scientific articles for how I read them is still paper for the text and a computer for anything else. Second best would be a good PDF reader.

Thus, for this kind of interactive visualization, I would have preferred it if they had made a good visualizer and an accompanying article, instead of mixing the two into a single thing. Feels like they added unnecessary friction to both sides of the presentation and overall the effect would be better if split. For example, an apparent problem is if I want to jump back to a piece of text I read before I have to remember where in the TOC it was (can't just scroll back up) and then wait for all the 3D inserts to load when what I want is just the text.

A project that I think did this mostly right is GeaCron (geacron.com), at least the visualization part. It's not really comparable since GeaCron is a world map, but with it I can visualize a particular point of interest and then read up the information at my own leisure. I've wasted hours with that map this way.

I don't want to diminish the effort of these authors, for it is impressive and the 3D-inserts are great and I still enjoyed it despite the UX problems, but as someone who is a bit passionate about visualization in academic environments, I often see projects like this that I feel could be so much better if they didn't try to reinvent certain wheels.

For me, it's a pretty interesting article on a topic I very much enjoy and they did some very impressive work, but it's ruined by some pretty bad UX.

Reading this felt like a chore. I would greatly prefer a PDF file or flat website with the text and a separate viewer.

A lot of car guys just aren't going to rip apart their wiring harnesses and do testing to make sure it'll work with their onboard sensors.

I'm not so sure about that.

My go-to mechanic is an older gentleman, late 60s, and oftentimes I'm surprised how quickly he updated his workshop to include electronics. He went from barely having a multimeter and not knowing how to use a computer in the early 2000s to having a well equipped electronics bench with oscilloscopes, scan tools, soldering equipment, etc. He told me he went to a bunch of courses to get updated on modern car technology because his clients started bringing newer cars. Keep in mind this is in a developing country (Mexico) so he has to keep repair costs down to keep clients, because the more affluent people will go to dealerships to get a proper fix. A lot of his repairs that I've seen involve what I'd charitably call "bodging" using parts that aren't original or intended, but they get the job done on a budget.

Similarly with car guys I hang around here, there has been a noticeable uptick in electronic knowledge, maybe not to the level of custom ECUs yet, but stuff like making an arduino controlled radiator fan or making a custom box to read the CAN-bus to get the steering wheel controls do stuff they weren't intended to do is pretty commonplace.

People working with cars are already used to complexity and learning new things, after all, so I don't think electronics will scare them off. We don't see as much of it yet because of all the lockdown and manufacturer's insistence at straight up replacing parts, but now that modern-style fully electronic cars (2010 or so) are becoming affordable enough to be "project cars" for average car guys, we'll see more and more stuff like this. A car guy might not want to rip into the wiring harness on his daily driver that he paid 15k for, but a 3k shitbox he bought as a second car for fun? Well, people are already doing that.

Legal alcohol limits are a guideline and not a solid rule. Ideally, they were designed with the idea that personal responsibility would play a role in your decision to drive after having a beer.

After all, you can have zero alcohol in your system and still be impaired in some way like other drugs, sickness, donating blood, lack of sleep, etc. This is why DUI arrests usually involve some judgement on the side of the police officer, and they can make the decision that you're driving impaired even if you are under the legal limit.

I am ambivalent on the idea of reducing legal limits. For one, it's never been easier to avoid driving drunk, with Uber and the like, and anecdotally it seems that the propaganda against drunk driving is working, with it becoming largely unacceptable among younger people these days (although this would be purely anecdotal, I have no evidence either way). Additionally, seeing how I don't drink, any reduction to the legal limit wouldn't really affect me much. On the other hand, I don't like the idea of zero tolerance laws and I think they always do more hard than good, and additionally I don't believe that farther reducing the limit will have any effect on drunk driving. I also don't much like the idea of farther restricting the decision making power of police officers, there needs to be a balance here: enough restrictions to prevent abuse but also enough freedom to allow officers to account for circumstances and not turn them into law-enforcing robots.

Increasing police budget to get better enforcement of existing laws would be another approach but doesn't seem like a good use of money. I think the most cost effective way of reducing impaired driving related fatalities has been, and will continue being, education and public transport when it comes to urban areas. Ride hailing apps and self-driving vehicles will eventually do the rest.

One kind of legislative change I'd consider taking a look at is reducing or removing penalties for sleeping in your car, particularly in rural and suburban areas. Letting someone sleep it off in their car is far better than them driving drunk, and I think any fears of homeless people setting up camp in their cars, which is the origin of many such laws, is vastly exaggerated.

Taking a look at that report, it seems to be missing an important statistic when it comes to motorcycle crashes.

What is the fatality and serious injury rate when comparing when the motorcyclist is at fault vs when the other vehicle is at fault.

An accident involving just a motorcycle, intuitively, seems a lot less likely to be fatal to a properly geared person. Often times such an accident will be because of operator error and result in a low-side crash. Crashing into something on the road could result in serious damage, but that's a lot less likely than losing traction and falling off. If I recall correctly, the Hurt report supports this.

Similarly, in a two-vehicle accident where the motorcyclist is at fault, the motorcyclist is likely to see it coming and attempt to prevent it in some way. Additionally such a statistic will also include motorcyclists low-siding and then their motorcycle (or them) sliding into a vehicle.

Overall, it seems believable to me that while a in majority (56% isn't even that much more) of motorcycle crashes the rider is at fault, if we take a look at only fatal crashes and crashes resulting in serious injury, cars will bear the majority of the responsibility.

All that said, I also find that report to be a bit alarmist and disingenuous with statistics, particularly when compared to the Hurt and the MAIDS reports. I would assume this was done in the interest of "scaring" riders into safer behaviors and not with any malicious intent.

It took some time to find a combination of medicine that worked for me, and I was pretty lucky as far as that is concerned. So my first bit of advice to anyone considering medicine is to stick with it and follow directions. It's also important to find a psychiatrist who will work with you, in my experience (your mileage will vary) it takes roughly a month or sometimes two to see if something is working, so sticking with it (unless you start having really serious side effects) is important even if it appears not to be working. Also, a good psychiatrist, in my experience, will give you a phone number so you can reach him at almost any time with questions and concerns.

As far as medication itself goes, I started with Atomoxetine (Straterra) and that barely worked for me, I also tried Methylphenidate in extended release form (Concerta) which does work but came with an annoying amount of anxiety. What works best for me is Lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse), which is basically extended release amphetamine. I take 70mg daily in the morning and it works really well and doesn't produce any side effects for me. 70mg is considered a large dose, but seeing how I can sleep well and even take naps during the day (if I want), and have no anxiety, irritability or tachycardia when taking it, it seems to be an appropriate dose for me. A friend of mine suspected he had ADHD and took a much lower dose of Vyvanse (10 mg), and he was shaky and irritable right away, so in the end his diagnosis wasn't ADHD but depression, which can have similar symptoms.

Also when I started, I took fluoxetine and clonazepam to help with depression and anxiety that was caused by living with untreated ADHD, but I'm not taking that anymore because I don't need to, following doctor's advice, of course, never stop taking anti-depressants by yourself, withdrawal can be harsh if you don't take care and taper the dose off gradually. These helped me keep my mood in the right space so I could get started on working towards fixing my problems. Now I'm just taking Vyvanse, and while the dose might decrease in the future, it's likely that I'll be taking it for the rest of my life, or at least until heart problems make it impossible to keep taking it.

I hope this helps, even if it's more information that you asked for. The point I wanted to make is that while medication is there to help, it doesn't magically make the problems go away (even if the right combination can feel that way), and the same symptoms can mean many different things, so psychiatric medicine can involve a lot of trial and error, especially if you're unlucky. I found it very important to keep careful track of how my state of mind changed as I took the medicine and to report it as accurately as possible to my psychiatrist.

I suppose I should clarify the kind of mindfulness I'm talking about. Basically what I was taught was how to pay attention to what I'm feeling and where those emotions are coming from. This helps a lot with lowering my anxiety and stress levels. Unlike meditation, this isn't something that I stop to do, aside from maybe a brief pause to take a couple of breaths, it's something I do throughout the day when I start feeling bad.

Meditation didn't work for me because it implied taking some time out my day to do it, and that would just and either become a way to procrastinate or something that I would procrastinate doing and contribute to my anxiety.

That aside, I think there's a lot of confusion about the terms "meditation," "mindful mediation" and "mindfulness" and I'm not sure I know the correct way to use them, but the above is what I mean when I say "mindfulness."

The beauty of communities like these is that I can make an account and talk about my experiences without tying it to my real identity. Unfortunately I don't have the courage to do that yet, it's easier to be honest when the stakes are low. Somehow, HN also seems a better place to do so, rather than a community dedicated to the disorder. Probably because it's mostly about other things and only occasionally warrants posting about my experiences when the topic comes up instead of being 100% about it.

Yes, mediation, mindfulness and several other techniques for controlling emotions were things that we tried with my psychiatrist. Meditation didn't really work for me but mindfulness sure did.

I definitely understand. As I got older, I found myself doing the first type of procrastination (the do nothing type) more and more, and after talking through some things with my psychiatrist we came to the conclusion that it's because that bad feeling you get after the second type of procrastination (the do something else type) started overpowering the good feeling of doing something, so I would end up paralyzed and doing nothing more often.

Now, on the good days I actually do the things I want to do or need to do, but on the days when I procrastinate, I tend to do the type where I do something else. The days where I get completely paralyzed are far less frequent now. Part of it is the medication but another part was learning to control my guilt and anxiety over not doing what I'm "supposed to." This is why I tell people that medication is not a magic solution to your problems, it'll help but you'll still have bad days and it won't work automatically, you still gotta put in the effort to get better, the medicine will just help a bit with that.

Not always true. I frequently procrastinate on things that I actively enjoy doing and want to do. There are times when I want nothing more than to be doing something and I still procrastinate doing it. This applies to things that aren't work or aren't productive just the same, things that take little effort like watching a series or playing a video game.

Medication does make it a lot better and I don't procrastinate nearly as much as I used to, but before I started taking it, there were times where I'd lie on the sofa with the remote control next to me and I would just stare at the ceiling thinking about watching that movie I've been wanting to watch and I still couldn't bring myself to do it.

The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived

I don't think so. Airplane autopilot automates away the safe, boring parts of air travel, much like highway driving, so in that sense I agree with you. Truly autonomous landing is still a big deal, and planes that the benefit of ATC, and I don't think there are any planes that taxi or takeoff autonomously. Furthermore, accidents involving autopilot are always at the edge, when control changes from computer to human unexpectedly or when the human has to take over the autopilot in less than ideal conditions. I don't think there's much perception in the public eye of "robot pilots killing people"

I think once autonomous driving accidents go through the courts a few times, the same will happen to cars. After another decade of development and legislation, people will die not because the robot made a mistake per-se, but because it encountered a situation it can't cope with and the human wasn't ready to take over in an emergency, or because the robot tried to cope with the emergency situation the wrong way and the human didn't notice in time and took over too late (if at all). This may still sound like the computer making a mistake, but the subtle difference is that the mistake is made in an extraordinary situation, as opposed to the current accidents that happened in regular driving conditions. I think this subtle distinction will be enough for the PR people to spin the blame away from the manufacturer.

Call my cynical, but I can also see successful lobbying efforts in the future by corporations to reduce liability in class-4 and lower autonomous car accidents involving unusual situations, citing the fact that the driver should have been paying attention and taken over.

That aside, road safety is better than ever these days, with a lot of what would have been fatal accidents being merely property damage due to modern safety systems, and highway driving is probably the safest kind of driving out there, thus it is not clear to me (and I have no data either way, I don't think a study has ever been done) that current offerings (Tesla et al.) are any safer compared to similarly priced modern luxury cars per mile driven, and I'm not sure that will change in the future. The only reason I see for adopting highway autopilot is not safety but comfort. You might argue that comfort contributes to safety and enables longer driving times, but driving for 8 to 12 hours is pretty safe regardless, and I don't think I could do more than that even if I was a passenger.

This is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I don't think we will see a meaningful reduction in fatal accidents or serious injuries due to self-driving cars for a long time, but I do think we will see a reduction in accidents involving only property damage or minor injuries from low to medium speed accidents, and I see a sharp decrease in parking-lot scrapes and dings in the near future. Low to medium speed streets and tight maneuvers is where I see most "bad" human drivers have the most trouble and already things like parallel parking assist are a godsend to these people.

If I were to put wires in roads, it would be for wireless charging, so that autonomous taxis and delivery vehicles could keep driving forever (or at least until they require maintenance) without needing to stop to charge.

I can see this happening gradually, beginning with docking stations, followed by parking spots with wireless charges and then downtown roads and highways. With each step reducing the required amount of space destined to parking.

I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now

Aside from the fact that the Tesla is not available where I live, if I was only going to own one car, it would not be a Tesla. A Tesla (or any other EV, really) does about 80% of what I need a car for, so it would be perfect to buy as a second car for me, to be used most of the time and have the other car be a backup for when I really need to.

If I had to settle for only one car, it would probably have to be something like a Chevy Volt, which I am quite sad got discontinued. Even then, that would get me about 95% of the way there.

To a certain extent I agree. I had already written at length in another post about this topic, but my opinion is that what we think of as a "car" right now will never be fully autonomous.

I see the future diverging into two paths, fully autonomous commercial vehicles, like taxis, delivery vehicles, semi-trucks, etc. that work within urban areas or other designated, mapped and specially prepared areas. This will possibly involve a centralized system of control and communication, something like an ATC but for cars. These will be owned by corporations and only used by people. It makes no sense for a person to buy one of these fully autonomous vehicles, although I imagine some people would pay extra to have priority access so they always have one available.

The other side of the coin will be privately owned cars that have autonomous capability, or autonomous cars with override. These will be able to go anywhere the driver wants, including unmapped villages, small towns, off road tracks, etc. I suspect these will be the domain of enthusiasts, people who really need them for work (ranchers and farmers, for example) and people who choose to live away from urban centers. They will be more expensive than cars now, but the need for these vehicles will never go away. Even if we get true AI capable of driving anywhere with only the sensors aboard the vehicle, there will still be the need for a human to override it, even if that involves just authorizing a risky maneuver or putting the AI into "unsafe driving" mode.

I think the movie I, Robot (with Will Smith) got the future of autonomous cars surprisingly right, autonomous inside cities and on highways, and using the manual override comes with penalties (higher insurance, being at fault in an accident, etc.).

On a personal note, and this may sound bad, but I would never buy a car which I cannot use to break the law. Even if I never plan to do it, being able to speed, jump the curb, intentionally crash into a wall (or another car) or even run over a person (for example, in self defense) may be at some point required or the least bad of many bad options. In this case any consequences should fall on me, but I don't think a thing I own should be designed to prevent me from breaking the law or doing something stupid if I really want or need to, although providing warnings or an optional safe-mode is fine. I suspect many people feel the same way, even if they don't put it in such an extreme way. This can be seen by the fact that a lot of cars, particularly those focused on performance or off-roading, come with switches to turn traction control off, and if they don't, it will get mentioned as a negative in any review done by publications focused on those audiences.

This simply is a misconception and myth perpetuated by uneducated people

I think it's less of a misconception and more of the fact that people whom stimulants noticeably calm down are a lot rarer than people with ADHD, if that makes sense.

I know personal anecdotes are not data, and I've not taken Adderall itself, but when I got prescribed Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine) for the first time, and pretty high dose at that, the difference was immediate and notable. I went from being anxious, waking up a couple of times a night, generally sleeping badly when I did and always feeling tired to getting a full 8 hours of restful sleep and a nap during the day if I wanted (despite taking the strong dose of Vyvanse) and being a lot less shaky during the day. Before that, I had never taken any stimulants besides coffee, which never seemed to do anything for me anyway so I wasn't one of those people who "couldn't function without their morning cup of joe" so I skipped it most days because I wasn't feeling up to breakfast.

This has been the greatest change in quality of life for me and if you had told me 5 years earlier that I would feel this way I wouldn't have believed you.

Improved quality of sleep aside, I don't really get euphoria when I'm taking stimulants. If I had to compare it to anything, when I started taking ADHD meds (I started with Straterra but it was only partially effective) it was like no longer being drunk.

Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic.

I tend to do that, I also save a lot of scientific papers, ebooks and personal notes. I've found that doing so does not help me at all. The main problem I have is that when I need to look something up (an article, a book, a bit of info) I reach for google first, usually end up finding the answer and go to save it, only to find that I had already found the answer beforehand (and perhaps already made clarifying notes to go along with it) and then forgot about it.

This, and not dead links, is the fundamental problem with bookmarks for me. Not only bookmarks, it extends to my physical notes and pretty much everything I do. If I haven't actively worked on something for a couple of months, I forget all about it and when I come back to it I usually have to start from scratch until I (hopefully) refresh my memory. Some of it is also usually outdated information.

I think this is a big, unsolved problem and I'm not even sure how to go about starting to solve it. I can envision some form of AI-powered research assistant, but only in abstract terms. I can't envision how it would actually work to make my life better or easier. It would need to be something that would help blur the line between things I know and things that are on my computer somehow. If I think of my brain like it has RAM and cache, things I'm working on right now are in the cache and things I've worked on recently or work on a lot are in RAM, but what's for me lacking is a way to easily move knowledge from my brain-RAM to long term storage and then move that knowledge back into working memory faster than I can do so now. I'm not even talking about brain uploading or mind-machine interfaces, but just something that can remind me of things I already know but forgot about faster than I can do so by myself.

I am convinced that figuring out how to do this will lead to the next leap in technological development speed and efficiency. Not quite the singularity that transhumanists like to talk about, but a substantial advancement.

I don't have time to read the entire article right now, but after skimming it, it seems to focus on what we might find but not on what's not there.

Focusing on Earth right now, if human civilization were to go extinct in the near future, whatever comes after us will have a much harder time getting to an industrial civilization (or maybe any civilization) because we have used up a lot of non-renewable resources that aren't ever coming back. Namely, things like abundant and easily accessible coal and oil. There's also things surface metal deposits (tin, copper, iron, etc) which are essential for making those first steps. Granted, we, as a civilization, have placed a lot of metal on the surface but it's scattered all over and I have no idea how much of it will be usable by the roach-people that come millions of years after us with no prior knowledge.

Still, all of that aside, the fact that we have coal today strikes me as a pretty convincing argument that there was no industrial civilization before us. It doesn't rule it out entirely, of course. I can imagine an industrial civilization without coal or oil, but I do have to stretch my imagination farther.

There isn't much to paraphrase, really. When my doctor was prescribing fluoxetine he offhandedly mentioned that he would start me off with a lower dose than he normally would for a person of my size and issues because I was already taking amphetamines, which meant that I wouldn't need as high a dose. The offhanded way he mentioned it gave me the impression that it was common knowledge and later another doctor also mentioned the same thing to me, but this one was not a psychiatrist but a cardiologist, farther cementing my suspicions.

When I later asked my psychiatrist about this he said that since SSRIs and amphetamines are though to complement each other (even if the science on the matter isn't really decided) the recommendation they get is to adjust the dose of SSRIs down. I'm sure the actual reason is more complex than that, maybe involving fears of serotonin syndrome, but my takeaway from it was that the effect is well known.

No idea about coffee in particular since I wasn't allowed to have any caffeine during that time.

I was under the impression that this is a pretty known effect. I used to take anti-depressants along with CNS stimulants and this definitely was something that my psychiatrist and my other doctors mentioned to me and considered when choosing an appropriate dosage.

The thing that you're missing is that most health professional will still include things like "exercise and yoga" in their treatment plans because that's what is required. Usually it's the patients that expect pills and therapy to show magical, immediate results. Nobody (well, I'm sure there are doctors that would, but at the risk of invoking a No True Scotsman, some doctors are pretty bad at their job) is going to tell a depressed person or a person with severe ADHD to just pop pills and not exercise, meditate or otherwise not do any self-care. The pills are there to help the ill person get to a place where they can start working towards those things, pills are step one of a long process, they're not the only step. The thing psych meds are not taken with much skepticism is that they can show results incredibly quickly, even if getting the right results cant take months of fine-tuning and trial and error due to the fact that the mechanisms aren't well understood.

A very good analogy for mental illness and psych meds is diabetes and insulin. Most people who are prediabetic or have diabetes will have type 2, adult-onset diabetes, which can be stopped or reversed with lifestyle changes, but those are hard. If an obese person is feeling terrible and goes to a doctor and gets diagnosed with diabetes, the doctor will give them insulin because they need it to live and function, but it's not actually going to solve the problem. Insulin is just step one for such a person, step 2 involves exercise and diet, maybe surgery in severe cases, but many people can't commit to such lifestyle changes and just keep taking insulin as a stop-gap measure to keep living in relative comfort, while other people will manage to use their new feeling to take up the needed lifestyle changes and get cured (or go into remission, as they say), possibly to a point where they no longer need insulin or other medication.

In the same vein, just as there is type 2 diabetes, there is type 1 diabetes, whether it manifested because of environmental factors or was purely inherited, these people need insulin to live. The state of medical science today means they will need insulin and other medication for the rest of their lives, but they still need the diet changes and exercise, nobody is expecting them to just sit on medication and nothing else.

With mental illness it's the same way, some people can get better with just exercise and lifestyle changes, but some people need professional help (meds and therapy) to be able to implement those lifestyle changes and maybe get to a point where the no longer need the help. Other people, however, will need meds for the rest of their lives to have a chance at normal life, at least with the current state of medicine. One can hope for a breakthrough in the future but people need to live their lives right now, and if that involves taking a pill or two every day, so be it.

In my particular case, I think that I was pretty lucky that me and my psychiatrist only took 4 or so months to find the proper combination of meds for me, but at no point did he tell me that was all I needed. He always insisted that diet, exercise and mindfulness were part of the treatment and the meds were there to help me get started. Now it's been roughly a year since I started and I lost a ton of weight, exercise regularly (including yoga) and eat healthy. I'm down to only taking my ADHD meds because the others did their job and I don't need them anymore, but even if I have to take this pill daily for the rest of my life I'm okay with it because my quality of life skyrocketed. This was not possible for me a couple of years ago when I thought that I could power through my issues with yoga and exercise alone and didn't trust psychiatrists.

I think it's incredibly irresponsible to tell people that things like yoga, meditation, exercise and diet changes are a replacement for professional mental health help. This may be true for some people, but I suspect the percentage is close to the amount of people who are able to stop being alcoholics without help. The two things are orthogonal, professional medical help is one thing and a healthy lifestyle is another. Having a healthy lifestyle may mean that you don't need professional help, but professional help may be required for a person to be able to get a healthy lifestyle. Finally, professional help usually involves all those nice things like plenty of exercise and a good diet, sometimes yoga or mindfulness/meditation (even if they call it something else the principles are usually the same, CBT for example is basically mindfulness by another name). You go to the a professional so he can help you get going with all of that, because sometimes you just can't by yourself.