102 karma · joined September 7, 2011
Full disclosure, I am diagnosed with ADHD and take stimulants daily, and initially felt pretty defensive when reading your comments here and starting to read that article. I have some problems with the article and generally find that author pretty insufferable, but the article concludes that the risks of medically-supervised stimulant use are low enough that the author personally finds stimulants worth prescribing to patients who benefit from them.
Even Section 1 which you specifically referenced, and which admittedly made me pretty annoyed until I read it a few times, and even though the author certainly seems to be trying to insinuate that ADHD isn't real, doesn't really seem to be actually backing up that point. His main point or objection seems to be that ADHD is diagnosed using arbitrary subjective criteria rather than objective measurements like other spectrum disorders (isn't blood pressure also a normally distributed trait, where we* "arbitrarily" draw a line and say people on the wrong side of that line have hypertension and should be prescribed beta blockers?).
I'll admit to feeling a little argumentative after reading some of the comments here but I do genuinely want to understand these points better, and I feel like I must be missing some fundamental context or point that the article is making.
*for various definitions of "we", since different countries and organizations define hypertension differently.
I'm not well-versed in the risks of stimulants given to children so I'm not commenting on that specifically, but I want to push back on the insinuation (if I understood you correctly) that ADHD or its treatments are any less legitimate because we haven't yet figured out if we can use brain imaging to diagnose and measure treatment efficacy.
It would be great if all medical disorders could be externally measured and quantified objectively, but when they're not, we often rely on evaluating and diagnosing them based on the (often somewhat more subjective) impact of their symptoms. That's not ideal, but it seems better than nothing to me.
Full disclosure: I'm also diagnosed with ADHD and take daily stimulants. Apologies if I came off as combative, I'm relatively new to my ADHD journey and genuinely curious to learn more about the medical/scientific aspects.
When I got into electronics and embedded development recently as a hobby, I started with Arduino. And for the vast majority of my projects, which are mostly simple smarthome IOT type things, or little toys for my kiddo, the Arduino framework is just fine and the ecosystem of libraries is great.
But when I recently started a project that was much lower-level (in fact, it was your example exactly -- driving pins with cycle-accurate timing), where I didn't need those libraries, I used ESP-IDF without Arduino.
I'm also just lazy, and just don't want to deal with more complexity than I have to.
Of course this isn't a hard rule, if I'm having a conversation with my skip-level and some topic happens to come up that I haven't spoken with my manager about before, I'm not necessarily going to hold back just because of that, I can follow up with my manager later. But if something's bothering me or I have some feedback or something like that, I'd generally chat with my manager about it before anyone above them.
The article explains that this is part of what reCAPTCHA does, e.g.:
> Finally they combine all of this data with their knowledge of the person using the computer. Almost everyone on the Internet uses something owned by Google – search, mail, ads, maps – and as you know Google Tracks All Of Your Things. When you click that checkbox, Google reviews your browser history to see if it looks convincingly human.
But your point is otherwise right in that it's used for ML training, which Google admits as another commenter pointed out.
Breaking out of this by realizing that "perfect" is not the goal, and setting more attainable sub-goals for myself is key, but hard.
Although given the planned scale for HQ2, I would imagine hiring practices for HQ2 to be closer to the "bring in people from everywhere" model rather than the "hire [almost] exclusively locally" model.
> The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it
> I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations
This is confusing.. Are you saying you do like Fog Creek's setup, or you don't?
Ok, it doesn't exactly support the quoted feature ("stop restarting if it exceeds X attempts in Y seconds"), but it does sleep for a second between restart attempts to mitigate the same problem: http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/supervise.html