beaker52

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Bohemia Interactive. Their games have always had a charming “designed by a software engineer” feel, which I appreciate.

Also, Operation Flashpoint was the reason I learnt to code and ended up having a career a software engineer, so I owe BI for that. My first real foray into programming was writing scripts, specifically to trigger unguided bomb releases from planes onto moving ground targets using some shoddy trigonometry as a 14 year old kid.

I have a lot of fond memories of that game. I still remember being awed by some of the mods created by this guy: https://kegetys.fi His name has lived rent free in my head for 2 decades now. Legend.

It's possible. If this is how it is supposed to be, I was thoroughly miss sold my ticket into this life thing. No refunds though, I guess :)

BP (manageable), tinnitus (BP related), prostate discharge (due to muscular tension), sleep getting worse as the week would go on until I'd have to stop. Sleep wasn't restful at all, which was the main problem. I'd feel like I'd closed my eyes and become unconscious, rather than actually asleep. I'd wake up in the morning like I'd been kept awake as some kind of torture all night, but with no recollection of it.

I desperately wanted ADHD meds to help, but in the end the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze so I stopped. I tried all 3 or 4 different stims and 2 non-stims.

Thank you for the pointers, I will look into them.

OK, from tomorrow, I will abstain for caffeine until 21st September at the earliest and take a read. Let's see if I will still have a job :)

I have one :) Unmedicated. Side-effects impacted me more than the meds helped.

Yes, thank you! I am a subscriber to his channel, and I was surprised to watch his video. I have mixed feelings about the treatment. It is one of these "very expensive fix everyone is looking for, but results aren't guaranteed" things that makes me suspect of the whole thing. I've read several reports of people who had no results, and very few from people with positive results.

Sometimes a treatment, perhaps especially one like that, you have to believe in. And I don't take paracetamol because every time I've taken it I don't really feel any better, than had I not taken any at all. So if the treatment needs me to believe in it, that THIS TIME, once and for all, that it's finally going to cure me, because I've ponied up 30,000 EUR, so it HAS to work, then I'm probably not the right candidate. Once I went to a spiritual healer who asked me to leave half way through because I wasn't playing along.

Thank you for taking the time to sign up and write this. I'm glad your daughter is feeling better, and I wish her a continued recovery. I will consider this treatment more seriously, but the cost is significant, especially only to hope for results.

It's low when I've got a job, or need a job. Double, when I don't. I have years of data on this.

Yes. I've tried avoiding caffeine during my year off. When I don't (even after weeks of abstinence) I sleep 12-14 hours a night and still need a nap during the day, which is incompatible with having both a day job and something approaching a well-lived life involving laundry. So I drink caffeine, to be compatible with the labour market.

Easily proven or disproven with a sleep study. You can get home tests too. Wishing you the best!

Indeed. Thanks for the pointer. My testosterone level is in a happy range, as are most of my levels.

Chronic stress, now that's an interesting one. I've never regarded myself as stressed. Or, if I am stressed, I'm always stressed and it's just normal. But I see no reason to be stressed, but maybe I am. And I wonder, how much of stress is a cause, or a result. I've taken a year off work. Am I better for it? It's hard to say. I'm yet to find anything that I can say helps. I've only really found things that make it worse. Like alcohol, and sugar. Diabetes? Yeah, I've considered it. I've got 6 months of blood sugar monitoring data, with no discernible correlation between my levels and how I feel. Funny world <3

I didn’t discover that ticks were a problem until I was in my mid 20s, and had been rolling around in deer-filled brush for years. Either I got very lucky, or have a chronic tick-borne disease.

I’ve been battling unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline throughout my 30s. I’ve had every blood test under the sun, numerous sleep studies and tried every vitamin. I’ve had no answers and no change.

Sometimes, I've believed that it impacts my performance at work. Sometimes I feel like I should be retiring, but I’m not even 40 yet. Sometimes, it's not so bad.

I saw a video on controlled hypothermia the other day, which seems like snake oil. I guess that’s next on my list to try. I feel desperate, but I’m just having to get used to the feeling of desperation, because there appears to be no answer or solution.

I resent comments like this. It’s captain obvious and nothing to do with the actual point being made by the author, and subtly justifies the author ending up in a disadvantaged position.

“if you didn’t want your computer data to disappear, you should have used paper” gee, I didn’t think of that, I’m glad I had someone to point it out, said no-one, ever.

Where’s carry water simulator?

Deal. Where do I sign?

> I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized YOU must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon ME.

Exactly. Now that we’re both aligned on having unreconcilable claims to being the one-true-consciousness, we can write competing holy books and argue about promised lands, and all that good jazz.

You see, once we begin playing the game, a whole host of worldly distractions crop up to occupy us. Wait until I show you this game called “having a career”, or “chasing wealth”. Spoiler alert - your body dies at the end, and you get to keep none of it, but it was fun, or at least it was supposed to be.

> I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself

Don't worry. You're in good company.

> How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie?

It's impossible for me to say that you are conscious. I only watch my own movie. In that movie, others appear to be watching their own movies. Their movies exist only as content in my movie. I cannot say for certain whether or not there really are conscious experiences like mine occurring. All I can say is that I am being given the impression that there are.

> Do I give rise to the world, or do you?

I do. Or at least, something impresses the world upon me. You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me, and, disappointingly (for me at least), there's no way to confirm it through this movie that I am watching. I am left having to "make up my own mind" about whether or not I choose to believe you are anything but a p-zombie extra, in what is (as far as I can see of the conscious spectrum I am able to perceive), a single screen, single reel movie. But I'm just guessing, hoping, wishing, because that's all I can do from this limited vantage point.

> Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way?

It's a cute idea. Design by committee. Books/predictions of the future seem to have this annoying property of becoming true, lending to this idea. Who knows?

> And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us?

What else am I supposed to do? If you have unimaginable wealth, infinite time and the ability to conjure anything into existence, exactly what are you to do? Perhaps you might dream up what having the opposite of your existence might be, and set about convincing yourself that you are a time-ful, perishable human-being bound by physics and inevitably limited by the finite energy available in the universe, stumped by entropy. Perhaps you even role play as the puppets on the ends of your fingers, while convincing yourself that they're just as real as you are, so you can feel what it's like not to be the majesty of your own lonely empire. What else am I supposed to do, than to go along with it? If we destroy the illusion, we're back to square one - and then what?

So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.

To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.

I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.

I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.

And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.

I have had LLMs refuse several of my requests. I still got my answers, but at least they tried.

It doesn’t really come as a surprise to me that these companies are struggling to reliably fix issues with software which relies on a central component which is nondeterministic.

But they made their own bed with that one.

  Location: London/UK
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Experienced Generalist / Go / TypeScript / AWS
  Résumé/CV: https://dri.me/C0BM3ArVTLwKv7zVOtAwY1k3tOZGkw
  Eml: luke at lukebarton co uk

Product engineer. Coming out of some time off. Open to principal/staff/well-compensated roles. I do my best work in fluid, fuzzy, real-world problem spaces, where things need to be figured out, where creativity and adaptability are valuable traits. System design. XP/DDD. Coaching & Mentoring. Available immediately.

The play was to use AI as an opportunity to quietly insert adverts into a platform full of paying users.

The moment your company starts playing a pauper and enshitificating the products I already pay for, is the moment I stop giving you any money at all. Try it. I’m not paying you money so you can try to make more money from me. Either add value and convince me to pay more, or fuck off.

I don’t mind looking stupid. It’s actually an important part of my identity - I lay my humanity bare. I am of flesh after all.

I’m starting to suspect that it’s making it more difficult for me to land a job though. I don’t know. There’s something about it. It’s almost as if businesses aren’t hiring human beings, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

This is a distinctly Zed solution - trying to move the agent experience into the editor, rather than just giving the agent an interface with which to control and read from the editor.

Not only do the most popular editors have little-to-no incentive to implement it (they’re more interested in pushing their own first-class implementations, rather than integrating those of others), it’s much more work to integrate the evolving agent experience into the IDE than it would be to provide IDE integration points for the agents themselves.

So, I think this project would have been much more successful if it had been more focussed on keeping the agent and IDE experiences separated but united by the protocol, instead of trying to deeply marry them. But that’s not in line with Zed’s vision and monetization strategy.

It won’t be long before the big players start to release their own cloud-based editors. They’ll be cloud-based because the moat is wider, and they’ll try to move coding to the cloud in the way that Google Workspaces moved docs to the cloud. Probably with huge token discounts to capture people. If you squint, you can already see this starting to happen with Claude Desktop, which runs its agent loop on the cloud (you can tell because skills appear to need to be uploaded).

Notably, Microsoft, with VSCode and GitHub have a web-based editor advantage in this space, but no models.

I imagine that it’s because the rug is becoming insufficient to cover the growing dirt pile.

I’m here for it. Corruption is a problem worth solving, so I’m happy to bother the ycombinator readership with it.

Someone in the UK government is furiously writing this down.

You’ve suggested they live in a bubble, yet your comments suggest that you expect no-one to “invade” your blissful little privacy bubble, and believe it’s okay to strike out and be physically violent to others if they do.

> Go out into the world and behave like the GP. Your apparent mental model of society will collapse quickly.

The problem you’ve got is that I will win. If you permit escalating mouth words to physical violence, I’ll have stabbed you in the face for your mouth words before you’ve gotten very far. Subduing your propensity for physical escalation is in your favour.

> it feels natural to me that the line for images should be aligned with the line for the act itself

Not before we get GTA 6 please.

Next, they'll be banning porn depicting sex between ministers and farm animals.