istjohn

I mostly blame bad journalism for this. Always looking for sensational content to capture attention, outlets publish credulous articles on single journal articles without providing enough context for their unsophisticated audience. It would take much more time and effort to properly contextualized them, and in many cases, it would be apparent that it is too early for the general public to draw any conclusions from the research. It wouldn't be newsworthy.

How does this fit the EEE pattern? For reference, here is Wikipedia's description of EEE:

> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" ... is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

Not every instance of corporate bad behavior in open source is EEE. Shopify isn't in competition with open source or potentially threatened by open source. They are not extending open standards or technology.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd rather not muddy the water with unhelpful, sloppy metaphors.

See also the incident ca. 2021 when a third of 37signals employees left the company over heavy-handed policing of employee speech[0].

0. https://www.platformer.news/-what-really-happened-at-basecam...

I think you should re-read the parent comment, and try to read what is written instead of what you are looking to read.

Good luck.

Biden doesn't get credit for a few weeks of ceasefire after materially supporting the genocide for over a year.

"Saving people" is an Orwellian turn of phrase for not supplying the bombs that are dropped on hospitals and refugee camps. Does the commuter "save" the child playing in the street by not willfully plowing her over in his SUV?

Is it the fault of the voters who couldn't stomach the genocide or the Democratic candidates who refused to budge on the issue? It's an argument that has been recapitulated millions of times now, so I'm not sure why we should repeat the exercise here.

It does make me despair to have the two parties that together govern our country both be so committed to something so heinous. Can one really be a proud citizen of such a nation?

Heh, I'm glad someone read the thing. After reading your later replies to Patrick, I felt my comments were essentially redundant, so it's nice to hear you appreciate them. I doubt Patrick will scale my wall of text, and I don't blame him, but that's what you get when you rile up a hyperfocusing ADHDer.

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.

Not OP, but I was diagnosed as an adult. There are brief screening questionaires therapists or general medicine doctors can use as a quick first step. But when I was given one of these tests, I scored a couple points under the threshhold. Later, when a thorough, proper battery of tests was administered by a psychiatrist at a major university medical center, I was found to have significant ADHD impairment. So if you think you may have ADHD, it's worth seeking out a proper evaluation from a psychiatrist. The battery of tests will take multiple hours.

I haven't had a lot of issues getting treatment after my diagnosis, personally. I know some people do have issues, and there are inconveniences like annual drug tests I have to take, but my only regret is not getting diagnosed ten years earlier.

> Why drug your way to a different thinking style?

Would you talk this way about statins, PrEP, or ACE inhibitors?

Wow, this got long.

TL;DR: The author, by their own words, is simply coping. ADHD is a disorder, not a "different way of thinking" one chooses to "drug your way" out of. Discovering one has ADHD can be a huge relief. Generally, if you have it, you want to know.

---

I disagree with your reading. The article describes the mechanisms the author has developed to cope with their "thinking style." Whether they merely have a unique thought process, or they are suffering from a common mental disability, their optimistic, solution-oriented attitude is adaptive and healthy.

> I'm not a quick witted person. In fact, I’ve always been worried about my brain’s slow processing time.

> But recently, I've realised that slow processing time is not as much of an issue as I thought it was. And even if I was wrong about that, I still think I’d do better for myself by leaning into it, instead of spending energy trying to fight it.

The author has "always" been worried about this. But he's realized it's "not as much of an issue." It reads to me like the author is working to cope with a long-standing difficulty. And they do not say that they have overcome the difficulty, but only that they've found certain approaches to be superior to others.

If the root cause of this long-standing, much-vexing difficulty might be a well-understood condition with standard methods of treatment that have been helpful to many people, it's reasonable to think the author might appreciate that suggestion.

Also, ADHD is not a "different thinking style" anymore than anxiety, depression, or autism are "different thinking styles." It can feel like that to someone who hasn't been diagnosed yet, and even many people diagnosed with ADHD will downplay the condition as being different--not worse. Furthermore, there are even doctors who will indulge in this wishful rhetoric. This is not unlike those in the Deaf community who assert that deafness isn't a disability[1].

In fact, ADHD is a mental disorder. It does not give one special powers of creativity or insight or anything else in compensation for the lack of executive function and emotional regulation. As Dr. Russel Barkley says[2]:

> Now let's be clear, this is a very serious disorder. This is not some trivial little fly-by-night disorder.

> Also, to emphasize something which I don't think is emphasized enough: ADHD is no gift. There is no evidence in any research on any of hundreds of measures that we have taken that show that ADHD predisposes to anything positive in human life. Now let's be clear, ADHD is but a small set of hundreds of psychological abilities that people will have, and many people may be gifted and talented in various aspects of these other human abilities, but never attribute that giftedness or that success to ADHD itself.

I know you hold no malice in your heart, but your comment has drawn several indignant responses because it expresses an attitude that those with ADHD frequently see, and one that easily shades into an outright stigma towards people with ADHD.

I'm not saying that you were saying this, but many people seem to think that people with ADHD are pathologizing normal difficulties and using it to get their hands on fun drugs.

> You get bored at work. Sure, everyone gets bored.

> You have a hard time starting big projects. I can relate.

> You lose track of time sometimes. Me too!

> You know, it kind of seems like you have all the normal struggles in life we all do, but instead of bucking up and just getting stuff done, you've decided to cry to a doctor so you can get cheap addies.

There is nothing admirable about refusing to acknowledge a mental disorder. ADHD is more or less severe in different people, and it's perfectly valid to make an informed choice to forego any treatment for any condition. But it isn't doing the author or anyone else any favors to "refuse to pathologize it" by ignoring the resemblance to a common disorder.

The other part of the puzzle you are missing is that getting diagnosed with ADHD was a hugely positive, life-changing event for many of us who were not diagnosed until adulthood.

To live with undiagnosed ADHD is to live with a condition that makes others see you--and you see yourself--as chronically late and unreliable, unfocused and slow, and disorganized. You are, by all appearances, lazy, irresponsible, and careless: a bad, virtueless person. And over and over again, you fail to reach the eminently achievable goals you set for yourself.

It's an immense relief to discover your life-long shortcomings are not those of a morally defective soul, but of a medically defective brain. And this relief is entirely apart from the hope that medication or another treatment might help.

So perhaps you can now understand why those who have experienced this unburdening are eager to pay it forward. It's not like being diagnosed with cancer. We've always known the struggle. Now we know the enemy with whom we struggle.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/deaf/comments/134tw70/do_you_identi...

2. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9w6YL5__Z8

Edit: Added a TL;DR, removed an unnecessary quote, and made a couple slight wording changes.

I don't think anyone remembers war fondly, but least of all those who lost.

Kirk didn't deserve to die for having or expressing hateful ideas, but his views were not merely "different."

Charlie Kirk speaking about a trans athlete: "Someone should've just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s[0].

And [1]:

> America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.

And [1]:

> The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

0. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-cha...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...

Yes, almost all of the examples are off in one way or another. The viewpoints don't actually match the arrow directions, for example. And if you actually use the model, you will see that even these examples must be cherry-picked.

Personally, I'm underwhelmed by this model. I feel like these examples are cherry-picked. Here are some fails I've had:

- Given a face shot in direct sunlight with severe shadows, it would not remove the shadows

- Given an old black and white photo, it would not render the image in vibrant color as if taken with a modern DSLR camera. It will colorize the photo, but only with washed out, tinted colors

- When trying to reproduce the 3 x 3 grid of hair styles, it repeatedly created a 2x3 grid. Finally, it made a 3x3 grid, but one of the nine models was black instead of caucasian.

- It is unable to integrate real images into fabricated imagery. For example, when given an image of a tutu and asked to create an image of a dolphin flying over clouds wearing the tutu, the result looks like a crude photoshop snip and copy/paste job.

Contrast this with the global market, where EVs are cheaper than ICE vehicles.

Tesla's success shows that people want high-quality EVs. And if competition in the local EV market drives quality up and prices down, they will become more and more compelling to consumers. But tariffs isolate domestic manufacturers from foreign competition where the latest advancements are currently being made. American manufacturers are already not competitive in the global market.

But perhaps most importantly, we must transition from fossil fuels to avoid the most dire possible outcomes of climate change. It doesn't matter if you enjoy a pipe after dinner, you can't smoke in a family restaraunt because it would harm the well-being of the other diners.

There are already cheaper, better vehicles being produced in China that American consumers cannot buy due to exhorbitant tariffs. These vehicles will only improve as battery tech continues to rapidly advance and Chinese manufacturers climb the learning curve.

Meanwhile, American manufacturers will lazily enjoy comfortable margins guaranteed by the protectionist tariffs without needing to make meaningful investments in new technology. They will fall even further behind and become even less competitive. But the American people will be told--truthfully--that if they do not continue buying overpriced, technically inferior vehicles, the entire domestic auto industry will fall, with dire consequences for thousands of American workers.

We bailed out the auto industry in 2008. The bipartisan tariffs on Chinese EVs is effectively another giant domestic auto industry bailout at great cost to American consumers, though they by and large are oblivious to this. But an argument could have been made that these tariffs were a necessary and temporary measure to give the US auto industry time and space to catch up to their foreign competition. With this change, these tariffs will need to be a permanent ball and chain on the American consumer. The US auto industry will never be able to exist without them.

You're moving the goal posts. OP wrote:

> The distinction I want to emphasize is that they don't just predict words statistically. They model the world, understand different concepts and their relationships, can think on them, can plan and act on the plan, can reason up to a point, in order to generate the next token.

You replied:

> How can an LLM model the world, in any meaningful way, when it has no experience of the world?

> An LLM is a language model, not a world model.

No one in this discussion has claimed that LLM's are effective general purpose agents, able to throw a curve ball, or drive a vehicle. The claim is that they do model the world in a meaningfull sense.

You may be able to make a case for that being false, but the assumption that direct experience is required to form a model of a certain domain is not an assumption we make of humans. Some domains, such as mathematics, can only be accessed through abstract reasoning, but it's clear that mathematicians form models of mathematical objects and domains that cannot be directly experienced.

I feel like you are arguing against a claim much stronger than what is being made. No one is arguing that LLM's understand the world in the same way human's do. But they do form models of the world.

Americans won't have any other option than to buy expensive, high-maintenance ICE vehicles to keep these parasitic manufacturers afloat.

We build mental models of things we have not personally experienced all the time. Such mental models lack the detail and vividness of that of someone with first-hand experience, but they are nonetheless useful. Indeed, a student of physics who has never touched a baseball may have a far more accurate and precise mental model of a curve ball than a major league pitcher.

It's hard to beat slapping something together. It might not come apart, or maybe a shape memory alloy could be used for the hooks?

Your metaphor is not at all apt. No bullet is going through ten inches of steel. Some UV radiation will penetrate the strongest sunscreen.

Perhaps the flexible sheet is just used so it can be peeled back to reveal the mechanics of the connecting bits--perhaps the flexibility is purely pedagogical.

Slightly off-topic, but recently I had the thought that it would be fun to implement a hook-and-loop system with the hooks and loops made from heavy guage wire embedded in concrete or welded to steel. Could such a system be strong enough to lift hundreds of tons? Perhaps it could be used to rapidly assemble military infrastructure like bridges or defensive structures--literally velcro the pieces together.

Yes, moral injury. Thanks for giving me a new way to frame that experience.

The natural impulse to be sociable and get along with people combined with minor insecurity or social anxiety has led to social experiences that when I reflect on them, I can only cringe in shame at my timid response to some awful statements.

Yes, because it's not actually area that balances out but mean time between bounce against the black/white boundary.

So why not replace it with a gif?