You’re self-questioning and self-reflective. Totally not worried for you or by you. Keep it up.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”

Certainly one of the benefits of my "Fuck Off Fund" is that for a good many years now it has enabled me to be unburdened by concerns about whether I might get fired for saying what I think to management.

I'm at much lower risk than the imagined target of the "Fuck Off Fund" concept for things like inappropriate sexual contact or coercive control, but I find it really does lift a weight off you to know that actually I don't have to figure out whether I can say Fuck Off. The answer to that is always "Yes" which leaves only the question of whether I should say that. Sometimes I do.

And you know, on zero occasions so far have I been fired as a consequence of telling management to fuck off. But also, I had to think hard about that because, thanks to the fund, I had never worried about it. I've been fired (well, given garden leave, same thing) but I have no reason to think it's connected to telling anybody to fuck off.

Waymo solved San Francisco. Non-trivial, imo. Is London more complex?

This is an evolved view. Let’s put achievements on currency, not humans. Of course, this is no panacea - “achievement” is ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation, and therefore political capture. But it’s a step forward.

Apple Vision Pro.

You use it often / what’s your experience been?

Emails are optimized for COA record-keeping, not efficient communication.

PR budgets exist to _prevent_ exactly this sort of response.

This is an astute point. I’m a mid-40s mech engineer in the Bay Area. HN is my tribe, by and large. I’ve been bombarded with perspectives that ADHD medication is the answer. (Not officially diagnosed, but I’m confident I meet the criteria and very likely “afflicted.”)

The brain is complex—adapted, or maladapted, for different tasks. My working hypothesis: mine is maladapted to the behaviors currently rewarded in corporate America. And I know I’m not Feynman.

So here I am, stuck in a bi-modal world (or maybe just worldview). This piece hits hard.

I mean, medication is the frontline treatment for ADHD. Research has shown it to be the most effective treatment and to be safe with typically mild side-effects. This is the professional opinion of the medical experts who study this disorder. If anything, it's the oft-expressed skepticism towards ADHD medication that is noteworthy and odd.

The comma makes it more human-readable. What separator would you suggest?

So ASCII actually had dedicated characters for this, 0x1C-0x1F. The problem is that they are non-printing.

Unicode has rendered analogs, U+241C-U+241F, but they take more bytes to encode, which can significantly increase file size in large USV files.

So my ideal would be to use ASV files rendered as USV in editors.

https://github.com/SixArm/usv

The benefits are that ASV / USV files are trivial to parse with simple string splitting since you don't have to worry about nesting and quoting.

Here's an example of what a USV looks like:

Folio1␟␞ Sheet1␟␞ a␟b␟␞ c␟d␟␞ ␝ Sheet2␟␞ e␟f␟␞ g␟h␟␞ ␝␜ Folio2␟␞ Sheet3␟␞ a␟b␟␞ c␟d␟␞ ␝ Sheet4␟␞ e␟f␟␞ g␟h␟␞ ␝␜

The comma is too prevalent in the data to be a suitable separator. A semicolon would be a better choice.

"|" looks pretty good (and is relatively rarely-used).

This is a largely correct, but incomplete take imo. Cultures are neither “good” nor “bad”. Some are better than others at optimizing different outcomes. Of course, culture A might be objectively better or worse for you vs culture B - depending on what you value or prefer optimizing.

That's like saying air is neither "good" nor "bad". There is bad air quality for humans. There is bad culture quality for humans.