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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm overly critical, but if fixing the Twitter search box is too hard, maybe buying solar (and batteries), fabbing chips, and building a giant data center to replicate the current generation of what another company already built is foolhardy.

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I armchair-diagnose geohot with bipolar disorder. Only a few weeks ago, he was writing about how he was slated to lose because of his low tolerance for bullshit.

I am not going to try to come up with an underlying reason but he's really poisoned his reputation in my book. How can you so emphatically jump into a problem space that (in hindsight) you're not an expert at and then manage to distance yourself so vigorously from your failure like a month later? What am I supposed to think when you're faced with a real world hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars project spanning tons of large, complex industries? How am I supposed to believe you'll have better success with this than a few thousand lines of JavaScript?

Have you ever met someone with actual bipolar disorder? They think that they are Gods and see symbols and signs and shit. Or sometime they go negative and thing there's a conspiracy targeting them or something.

They don't usually think they are gonna slowly over the next 5 years tape out a chip and build a solar powered datacenter with the company they raised $5M for...all part of the tiny corp master plan. I'll write it up better as it comes together better.

We have 417 preorders for tinyboxes btw. https://tinygrad.org

You're not describing bipolar disorder, you're describing symptoms of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia (and other similar disorders) affects your ability to think and behave coherently. It's a detachment from reality.

Bipolar disorder is characterized by long (weeks or months) mood swings that range from very motivated and often positive to deeply depressed. When you're "up" you feel overconfident, impulsive, and restless. When you're "down," you are the opposite. There's no notion of false pattern recognition or conspiracy theories.

Not my place to pass judgement either way but don't just make things up when talking about mental health, it's not a good look.

You've gone too far in the other direction. Mania can be extreme, far beyond what an ordinary person could imagine "very motivated" to mean. Deeply irrational grandiose thinking is common. Either mania or depression can involve psychosis, hallucination, or catatonia.

> mania or depression can involve psychosis, hallucination, or catatonia

Sure. And diarrhea is a possible symptom of the flu, yet saying "I don't have the flu, I'm not shitting my pants" is just outright wrong. Saying that people with bipolar disorder think their a god and see symbols and signs is like saying that people having a stroke are characterized by vomiting and stumbling around.

I am someone with actual bipolar disorder. What you are saying is not true. Both mania and depression can involve psychosis and hallucination, but neither necessarily does. Bipolar II does not involve full-blown mania at all, merely hypomania. Hypomania can be easy to miss. People often find it benign or helpful, just a bit of extra energy and motivation.

I would never try to diagnose someone I've never met and disapprove of doing so.

haters always gonna hate

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