Newtra

Nooooo! Not Naomi!

I don’t really follow her content, but I love her existence and all her efforts towards education and awareness on many topics.

I hope she’s able to find freedom again somehow.

The funny thing is that YouTube’s code is already so laggy that we all believed this without a second thought.

Since it’s a natural hormone the body already has ways to get rid of it. It has a half-life of less than an hour. The lethal dose is so high we haven’t been able to intentionally kill animals with it: “Melatonin is not fatal even at a dose of 800 mg/kg in animal studies”.

The big risk of ongoing high doses is becoming so dependent on it that you wake up as soon as it wears off (e.g. after only 4 hours of sleep). At this level you basically can’t sleep without it and have to slowly wean yourself off to get back to normality.

I think the big difference between people benefiting at small doses (~0.3mg) and large doses (2+mg) is that the 0.3mg group use it for sleep quality through the night, whereas the 3+mg people just need the sudden shock to get to sleep in the first place.

The drawback with big doses is that your brain becomes less sensitive so your naturally-produced melatonin might not be enough to keep you asleep for the whole night after the pill wears off. It has a very short half-life in the body (under 1 hour), so there’s no way for a single dose before sleeping to last 8 hours. We naturally produce only 0.06-0.08mg per night, so it’s easy to see how supplementing melatonin could desensitize someone and cause them to wake up after just 4-6 hours of sleep.

I have ADHD and am in the large-dose category and use 2-3mg of melatonin to help me fall asleep. Without it, I can’t sleep reliably because my brain often won’t shut up. Sleep reliably is so much more important to me than sleep quality.

Using it only 5 nights a week, I’m not significantly dependent. I can still sleep without melatonin, just less reliably. I’ve tried 0.3mg, but it felt the same as taking nothing.

For me, 10mg would be excessive and probably harmful in a desensitizing way. The most I’ve taken is 6mg, but it only helped in 2 out of 6 times. The other 4 times my brain just wouldn’t stop. If doubling my usual dose didn’t help, I don’t think doubling it again would be any different.

There are however studies with higher doses, e.g. this one about kids with ADHD that says:

two-third of the patients responded to relatively medium doses (2.5–6 mg/d), whereas doses above 6 mg added further benefit only in a small percentage of children.

so I guess it’s different for everyone.

Yes! Scientific trials have shown that for most people, 0.3mg of melatonin gives better quality of sleep than 3mg.

I’ve seen pills as high as 10mg on the shelf and have to wonder wtf they’re for. If you take too much your body becomes less sensitive to it and you become dependent on supplementation. 10mg is definitely too much.

That was directly in response to:

those are helpful altho the name of the game is also brightness

Every night I lie in bed, lights off, using my phone for about 20 minutes while waiting for the melatonin to kick in and my brain to calm down. In a dark room I have to keep my phone on quite high brightness (about 1/3rd of maximum).

Lamps aren’t an option at that stage as usually my husband is in the room also trying to sleep. I also find that “warm” light still has too much blue

Yes. They’re very effective at making me sleepy, but have 2 big drawbacks: they’re uncomfortable to wear in bed with your head on a pillow, and complete monochromaticity seems to ruin any enjoyment you get from using your phone. If I get bored it’s much harder to get to sleep because my brain starts fixating on stuff and making me anxious. Yay ADHD.

Unfortunately I have to keep my brightness quite high. My eyes can’t focus well in the dark.

I do. I also messed with the iOS accessibility settings to color shift even more. It helps so much.

I even went to monochrome red at one point and it felt like me cellphone was actively putting me too sleep. Unfortunately monochrome also kills a lot of the enjoyment of using a phone. I was getting sleepier, but felt so bored I just wanted to find something too do to fill the dopamine void.

Melatonin

I can’t do sleep hygiene. My cell phone is the first and last thing I see every day. I stare at screens all day for work and for leisure. With moderate melatonin use I can somehow maintain regular and restful sleep.

No side effects if you use it responsibly (e.g. 5 days on, 2 days off, stick with low doses). Very safe. Can improve sleep even if you’re already sleeping well. I don’t know why more people aren’t on it.

In two languages I’m learning, German and Chinese, I’ve found it to suffer from “translationese”. It’s grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.

No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you’ll see/hear in day to day life.

As someone with untreated ADHD, I absolutely don’t feel I’m the highest level of control in my brain. I can make all the plans and decisions I want, but I can only gently steer what I ultimately end up doing and paying attention to. My “executive function” wields ultimate power and not only can overrule me, but also prevent me from having the thoughts I want to have.

Another indicator that I’m not the only consciousness in here: anxiety-inducing events like deadlines and exams can give me physiological symptoms even when I’ve forgotten about them. I’ll just be sitting there wondering “why is my stomach upset at me?” and only later realize it’s from stress for an upcoming test I hadn’t paid attention to.

Though my lizard brain demands me to be around other people, most of the things that bring me genuine life satisfaction are just easier to do solo. When I’m at purely social events I also get this sense of dread that I could be making better use of my time.

The voice in my head is making contradictory demands, so I’ve learned to not feel bad for circumventing it. I have my own goals in life, instincts be damned.

I find that listening to people casually talking is usually enough to satisfy the lizard brain, so I listen to a lot of stuff in the background: YouTube video essays, Twitch Just Chatting streamers, etc. When it gets particularly demanding I’ll try engaging with the people, but usually I just let my subconscious listen while I’m focusing on more important stuff.

ooo, I love this. It reminds me of how nice C#'s LINQ is…

“Pipeline style” DB queries have some interesting advantages as well:

• It’s straightforward to write efficient queries for DBs that don’t include a query optimizer stares at Datomic
• You can split the pipeline into server-side and client-side steps when working with less capable DBs stares at most of NoSQL
• It would be much easier to transition from a pipeline API to a non-text-based API so that our ORMs/query builders can directly talk to DBs without the overhead of generating and parsing SQL.

I still use Google for ~95% of my queries because I like real sources, comprehensive documentation, and not having to read a wall of text when a one-line answer would have sufficed.

ChatGPT is a good replacement for Quora/Stack Exchange for explaining general knowledge stuff like other languages’ grammar and simple science, as well as finding authors/books/movies from descriptions when you’ve forgotten their names.

Bard is… kinda dumb. I gave it a few chances, but it was nothing compared to ChatGPT’s free tier.