N=1, but last yearly physical my primary care doctor asked me if I ever had anxiety. I said yes, but that I wasn't really interested in treating it outside of lifestyle change. They asked if I wanted a prescription for prozac, without explaining anything about how to does it or titrate up or down or a time frame. I said I wasn't interested again, and that I particularly didn't want to take any medications that you can't just stop taking one day on a whim (a statement she didn't respond to).
She then proceeded to say "well I'll just write you the prescription anyway and you can do your research later and decide to fill it or not".
I was actually shocked by this interaction, and think about it often. She's a regular family doctor with the local hospital system, and this was just a regular checkup. I answered one question with a "yes, but it's manageable and I think I can handle it with lifestyle change" and then said no twice to medication and ended up with a prescription, which I ignored but don't appreciate having on my record, since it's a false indicator for future prescribing physicians.
Crazy. I hear such wild horror stories with doctors. I'd never return to a doctor like that, sorry you had that experience. Still, this feels like a case where the lesson is "get a new doctor" not "lie to one" but I understand that circumstances can make that a pain.
> I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.
I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
As a technologist, I like lane-keep assist because it feels fundamentally more right that my car by default follows the road than keeps going with the turn radius I had previously input.
Cruise control with minimum distance helps me keep a sound distance even as other cars keep packing up and reducing distances on a busy highway. My previous car (Mercedes) was great at detecting if a new car coming in front of me was accelerating, if so it didn't adjust the distance as aggressively. Much better behavior than my current Kia.
Auto-break features are sweet as they react really fast. If that can avoid deploying an airbag in my face, I'm all for it.
I agree it's a lot like managing, with six buttons just to do the above, but from a bottom-up approach, each feature has value in its own right.
> For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Where do you draw the line? Would you prefer not having a steering and brake servo? Would you prefer sticking out your arms instead of having flashing lights? Would you prefer feeling every bump in the road to having suspension?
To me these systems just feel like natural evolution of the car concept, something that's been going on for 120 years. What Tesla failed at was putting their heads in the clouds and hoping something awesome would eventually pop out the other end. While the established car makers did incremental improvements.
GP said s/he didn't understand why anyone would want these in-betweens. I gave an explanation as to why.
Based on what you're saying, it seems the divide arises from some drivers classifying these features as physical comfort, and some as mentally disengaging.
The cognitive load is greatly reduced when using these features. Honestly, adaptive cruise control in the city is a godsend. Not having to deal with watching speed . start and stop traffic is also automated for me. Driving on a highway is also great .. You can drive much further without needing a break.
Same. Even cruise control is kind of useless because people in front of you don't necessarily use it and are very inconsistent in their speed.
So you end up constantly having to engage/disengage, rendering the whole thing moot.
I think something like autopilot could be implemented at the infrastructure level (sensors and emitters along the road), but people wouldn't like that because it would mean being unable to set your speed or overtake.
The car exists for "freedom," but it is really an inefficient mode of transportation from both a time-use and energy-use perspective.
What we really need is a mix between rail/train and car/road.
ACC generally has a 3-4 second time interval that it permits between you and the car in front of you. I live in SoCal, so a lot of my driving is on very aggressive routes. The 4-second gap is mechanically safe but it's practically unusable because it creates a void large enough to invite other cars to lane change in front of me. So when that car merges in, the ACC detects a violation of the safe braking distance and decelerates to reestablish the gap. I call it the "cut me off" loop when we're on trips.
And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.
The beauty of ACC is it lets your disengage mentally. You can be aggro if you want to with it on, but I found it's just not emotionally worth it to get mad at being cut off anymore in a car with ACC. ACC just handles going forwards and I'm not having to touch gas nor brake. If I'm not touching either, I don't have to panic react to getting cut-off, just make sure the ACC is handling it, and if that's all I need to check, vs slam on the brakes, then eh.
Ah yes, I never used that. My car isn't very recent (about 10 years old now), and I drive very little (about 2-3k per year; I take the train to go anywhere far) because I hate it.
But the adaptive part would make it much more useful indeed.
However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly.
I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...
I prefer to steer, but radar cruise control takes a lot of the frustration out of minor speed fluctuations in front of me on the highway. I don’t feel as much need to pass all the time.
I already have a similar setup for developing on remote servers I've been using with tmux + goose-cli + claude via openrouter. I've found that anything claude 4.x and above becomes very expensive very quickly, with 3.7 being almost negligibly inexpensive. I'd find myself using $30 dollars of credits in a few hours of development on a small scope project. I might give the claude CLI a look specifically, but I don't expect great savings and I will miss my AI-provider-agnostic setup. Is everyone using this technology just programming as they go about their day and burning like fifty to a hundred bucks while doing so?
I've spent a lot of the last four years accumulating tools and building out infra in my home for my hobbies, to an extent that it's blocked me from actually doing things due to being bogged down from meta-work, learning, and research. This year I'm going to put a hard stop on spending and building up new things so that I can:
- Continue to take old-time music classes at the folk school, play more music with people that way
- Finally run some water through my hydroponic setup
- Finish electrifying part of the basement
- Play some noise shows with my friend and the synths I've built over the years (and make some recordings)
- Make a dating profile, setup instagram (which seems necessary for a successful dating profile these days)
- Actually catalogue, export, and post the extensive photography I've done of the last years and continue my black and white development processes
- Get back in the swing of eating from-scratch bread, fermented sauces, mayo, saurkraut, ginger ale, and home-cooked food in general
- Actually make blog posts, improve my web presence
- Finish my woodworking bench, tackle some of the woodworking projects I've had backed up
That's a lot of things, but I already have every piece of the puzzle to tackle all of them stored neatly in my house and the experience to do it all, which cuts down on a lot of it. I also really need to save money, so all that should dovetail nicely. I'm at a point where tech projects crop up and sort themselves out on their own regularly in my life so I'm not mentioning that here. Really, the 'skill' I need to learn is having the mental energy and drive to get things done as I go about my work week, or maybe to realize that I don't need perfect energy / motivation / clarity / whatever to work on something in the afternoon.
- Working on a time tracker frontend to watson-cli that meets my specific needs
- Setting up importers in beancount for a retrospective on my last 3 years of spending and investment
- Getting ready to start a slow migration of some services from unraid to an argo/k8s cluster (starting with some services I don't use yet which are hard to keepup in clickops, immich,peertube, etc)
I'd like at some point to try to make an android app for personal use, but my strong preference for lean toolchains and non-ide-based development are hindering me there. It doesn't help that I'm using nixos, and the toolchain for developing even with gradle and kotlin is a nightmare. I'm not sure when I'll have the patience to approach that issue again
That sounds neat! I have an old kobo clara HD. I run koreader through nickelmenu, and I have to let it load its native software before selecting and switching into koreader. I'm also under the impression that if I connect it to the internet I'm at risk of losing my setup via wireless update. I think I had to delete a config file by mounting the device to linux to be able to even use it without a walmart / ratuken / whatever idp account in the first place.
Everyone here is lauding kobo for being so 'open' and 'hackable', but when I set mine up in 2022 it kind of just felt like they just weren't as good at fucking me over and subverting my intentions as Amazon. Kind of like being an intruder in your own home. Have things changed? Should I update my setup?
Hmm, have you checked out Ox-Hugo? It's a pretty great system for exporting to a hugo blog from a single org file. But then I guess your blog would have to be hugo-based
> If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years
Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.
I make a point of hitting "publish" when I'm still not entirely happy with what I've written, because I know that the alternative is a folder full of drafts and nothing published at all.
Nobody who reads your stuff will ever know how good it could have been if you kept on polishing it.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at several different points and saw different professionals about it at different times, most notably in kindergarden, first grade, fifth grade, the beginning and end of high school, and college. (not all were re-diagnoses but for some reason took place at different locations) I don't really know why treatment was so off and on or varied, but I suspect it is because I don't respond well to stimulants. They make me feel extremely 'up' and anxious in very, very small doses. Everything from the amphetamines they prescribe to coffee.
When I was in college, I was prescribed them again just by my primary care physician. I didn't say I was having trouble focusing, I said I was having trouble with wakefulness. I still do sometimes. It was hard to stay awake in a lecture setting for some reason, borderline impossible on days when I had several in a row. Medication definitely helped me get through college but it was a rough time.
As an adult I don't take them, but it is hard to really work the full work day. I have always performed well enough that nobody questions it (and in some cases have brought so much value to a company that nobody cares), but it is a constant source of stress. I resonate with the top commenter in that I also have hundreds of unfinished personal projects across all domains. At this time in my life (33 y/o) I am more concerned about mitigating the constant stress I feel than I am about the actual ADHD symptoms. I am ok with my many personal projects clashing with each other.
At one point a few years ago I was stressed enough about my job to seek medication. For some reason I was not able to get the information about my diagnosis from my old primary care (from 8 years ago) and the one before that was pediatric and didn't seem to count. I talked to a therapist for a bit (which was not useful), got a diagnosis, and then talked to a psych briefly via zoom, and went on medication for a month before deciding (again) that it wasn't worth it. The whole thing was kind of disheartening.
Things are very weird when it comes to ADHD treatment and diagnosis. There seems to be a tendency towards the same 'easy button' when it comes to ADHD. I also don't think it's exaggerating to say that just about every single person I know well enough to have spoken to about these things says that they have been diagnosed with ADHD, often medicated. I don't think very many of them actually do have it. Sometimes I'm not even sure if I do, or there is something else going on.
I'm not sure what to conclude after all this except that maybe there are no answers for me in this space. It's frustrating, but I've never opened up to exploring this problem without the same exact solution being thrown at me, a solution I know is not sustainable for me. I've never spoken to a doctor who's ever suggested it could be anything else. Should I just find my own way, since I seem to be able to function well enough?
This might not be relevant for you, but generally, such constellations of symptoms should at least trigger a differential diagnosis between anxiety and ADHD. Anxiety can be simplified as "energy mobilized to handle important challenges." Some people with high baseline activation are really focused on managing challenges, whether external or internal. This could resemble ADHD if the person is not avoiding their feelings but instead enduring them. This would explain both tiredness and low benefit from stimulants, scatterbrain, and high energy/activity levels. People usually think that anxiety just causes someone to sit in a corner and be anxious, but many people channel the energy into action and don’t even realize they are doing it due to an extremely high baseline activation of the nervous system. For these people, it’s almost more physiological than psychological. If the activation is always directed at managing and handling something, as opposed to reflexively focusing on the most interesting thing, I would suspect it’s more in the realm of anxiety, or perhaps better described as a really reactive, hair-trigger nervous system. Not saying that it is anxiety, but it might just be that you are the opposite of apathetic.
Interesting, I have never been diagnosed with anxiety beyond 'well ADHD and anxiety go together, ADHD medication should help' and then a kind of shrug when it made things worse. All these things are possible and are food for thought (I am not saying it definitely is that either). This is kind of US-medicine specific, but everyone I know who is being treated for anxiety is being treated via methods I'm not interested in unfortunately.
> For these people, it’s almost more physiological than psychological.
This stands out to me. I have lifted weights in the past, have not been well physically conditioned in cardio activity since I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 22. Cardio tends to cause my blood sugar to become unpredictable (or at least you have to actually be really rigid in maintaining your exercise patterns to keep things predictable). Maybe a bit of biking or running would do me some good. What would you do?
> Given the choice of increasing the number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?
Idk, the trend in manufacturing seems to be towards more and more high skilled work and less dangerous or low-skill work as time marches on. Your post also positions it as a binary choice, where we must either increase IT service jobs / web services or manufacturing, which doesn't seem to be true given the landscape of the job market these days.
Personally I would like it if there were a more diverse array of job opportunities in general for people looking to gain and employ skills in machining, fabrication, factory automation, production, etc. "Just learn to code, bro" has been a meme since I was in college, but at this point at 33 every single person I know who is doing even 'kinda ok' has either gotten a tech job or gone into nursing. Exactly 0 of these people actually care about technology or are interested in computers at all, but it feels like the only avenue available anymore for Americans. That doesn't seem good or sustainable.
No matter how much of a cash cow the tech industry has been, is it really a virtue to be totally anemic in such a basic function as ability to produce actual, physical goods?
She then proceeded to say "well I'll just write you the prescription anyway and you can do your research later and decide to fill it or not".
I was actually shocked by this interaction, and think about it often. She's a regular family doctor with the local hospital system, and this was just a regular checkup. I answered one question with a "yes, but it's manageable and I think I can handle it with lifestyle change" and then said no twice to medication and ended up with a prescription, which I ignored but don't appreciate having on my record, since it's a false indicator for future prescribing physicians.
reply