You better believe it. It’s a non-stimulant, meaning you won’t get any instant focus changes like the TV might dramatize. Nah, this stuff takes multiple weeks to start to kick in, meanwhile you get all the standard medication side effects. However, it’s a subtle but distinct difference when you finally have the agency to say “no, I don’t want to watch youtube anymore, I’m going to sleep”. And then you go to sleep. And then you get distracted for maybe 6 minutes but THEN you go to sleep. Only six minutes! I don’t even remember how I felt before, but that’s the thing. It feels more normal than abnormal, it’s a lifestyle changer.

Psychiatrists. They know not to give me stimulants after I didn’t sleep for 3 days on Adderall. Thanks science for having alternatives.

Welcome to Atomoxetine! I remember starting them and gaining the inexplicable ability to predict what time it is before checking my phone. I’m glad some of the non-stimulant medications helps. Just remember to stick with both your psychiatrist AND your therapist. You will gain new capabilities that bring you closer to neurotypical, meaning new thinking techniques like scheduling and habits may become easier. If you think your medication is starting to stop working, therapy was the solution for me.

I JUST learned what “self care” actually is. So, I have ADHD and anxiety and probably depression, so I have had medications for all three. Notably my anxiety medication almost immediately removed my social anxiety, etc. But I still felt listless, not knowing what to do with myself, letting my apartment get unacceptably dirty. I get a new therapist and he’s got a specialization in “Men’s Issues”, right? And so he listens to my plight and he says “you care about everyone else, why not focus on doing things for yourself?” He specifies that it’s not selfish to do things for yourself, and WOW. I look at my desk, I’m unsatisfied? Cleaned, wiped away. Dirty dishes? Get em outta of the sink and onto the drying rack? Making my bed because I think it looks nicer. I’m amplifying my dissatisfaction into action. It’s awesome.

And the best part? He’s using Men’s Issues techniques and he NEVER mentions it as self care. He knows I’m a smart guy, and (stereotypical) guys don’t like these “mental health” buzzwords peppering women’s magazines. He simply says: “Do things for yourself because YOU want them.” THIS IS WHY YOU NEED THERAPY WITH MEDICATIONS! You can’t use your newly modified brain perfectly, you need help. And the right therapist can change everything.

Their Onion Explains: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is eight years old, but I still consider it paramount to understanding this complex geopolitical conflict.

Sadly we don’t even know what “knowing” is, considering human memory changes every time it is accessed. We might just need language and language only. Right now they’re testing if generating verbalized trains of thought helps (it might?). The question might change to: Does the sum total of human language have enough consistency to produce behavior we might call consciousness? Can we brute force the Chinese room with enough data?

Ah, this got a good writeup by news piece. I first learned about this from Medlife Crisis’s The Epidemic of Fake Disease. Statistics about anything as big as cancer diagnoses are beyond complex, and honestly it would take a gargantuan effort of science communication to get this out to the general public. It’s… sobering to know that mortality is not morbidity and that harsh side effects create the most important optimization problems of patients’ lives. I hope that if (or maybe when) I get confronted with a similar diagnosis, I can face the numbers and the odds with as much of a level head as possible.

I was going to oppose, but I remembered that my boyfriend tells me the 2 year olds at preschool are utterly addicted and I am terrified.

Best wishes to his family. At home, drawers and other furniture tragically crushes babies once every two weeks in the U.S. If you have small children, as part of your baby/childproofing, buy and use anti-tip or furniture straps to prevent this kind of thing happening.

As for occupational hazards, this is a stark reminder of the risk behind storing large amounts of anything, including grain silo entrapment, flammable material storage, and even the Beirut explosion. I can legitimately say that manufacturing flour is perhaps the most dangerous food to produce at mass scale. As for weight, ss soon as over 100lbs/50kg goes over your head, make sure you have sufficient structural stability in your shelf.

Manufacturing is actually the name of the game with chip design. Even if a quantum computing design becomes feasible, the exotic nature of its construction will turn any discovery into a engineering nightmare.

As for the type of technology, here’s what a competitor looking for the first blue LED said about the Nobel Prize winners: “It’s like I say to people: they had been working on the steam engine for 100 years, but they never could make one that really worked, until James Watt showed up. It’s the guy who makes it really work who deserves the Nobel Prize. They certainly deserve it.”

My favorite part about the microchip production line is that it all depends on one company (ASML) in the Netherlands and their R&D. They make double digit quantities of EUV machine and that’s it: they dictate the entirety of “easy” technological speed advances in computing.

And then they ship to a micropseudonation being threatened by the most powerful Eastern country just thousands of kilometers away. That’s where the chips are actually produced.

And this entire process is predicated on quantum physicists banging together light waves that literally turn chip design into a probabilistically modeled engineering problem.

What fun!

Shoutouts to Asianometry for having the best videos on all sorts of the chip design process. He covers a ton of other stuff but his interests just about align with mine so I’m a huge fan.

I’m partial to Defectcoin, if only for claw-based shenanigans.

My BF failed their exam that would have given them enough credit to not have to take a final semester. COVID and a lack of support for their mental health makes this their 6th year of college. Sadly, this means a few more months of long distance relationship, but at least he isn’t at risk of being kicked out for being trans.

…For now. I’m fully prepared to make the drive and extract him from a bad situation. We’re feeling better than expected, though, since now the dread of the test looming over his head is gone.

Common Beehaw W for good natured communications

NovelAI for paid usage with NSFW capabilty! It’s not to be used in a conversational mode. Instead, you write a section of the story and it will intelligently fill in. It’s quite expensive but it also includes an AI image generation feature as well for anime artstyles (and furry…).

Can’t wait for Beehaw to have 7 or so golden age years before we drop this place. But it’s gonna be a great time in between.

I guess there has to be a lowest common denominator instance. Not at all a bad thing, it leaves the dedicated communities out of their inevitable implosion range which still having access.

Is it useful to view spirituality as makeshift philosophy and psychotherapy? When I pick out the good parts of religion, I see it’s not so different to what a stoic or my therapist might say. You can either pray for or visualize positive outcomes and either way it works to ease the mind. Hell, Nietzsche’s work has basically a religious conception (the Eternal Return) without claiming absolute authority of reality.

I ask because my Mom focuses on this aspect of her religion rather than dogma. I hope it gives her what she needs.

Just got a big blue headline on old.reddit.com, trying to negotiate their way out of the modtool API debacle

I am going to miss seeing my total karma go up after a zinger of a meme I created, though.

The federated nature of instances unfortunately might nerf the SEO because they’re from different domains. Google wouldn’t value instance_1. com more because the clicks to related_instance_2. com are higher.