llamaLord

Considering the very early effects of dementia start to impact people sometimes decades before it becomes bad enough that they are diagnosed, it's certainly possible that extreme coffee consumption is some kind of self-medication mechanism.

Anecdotally, I've seen this a lot with adults with undiagnosed ADHD (including myself until 26). Caffeine can be a (very shitty) alternative to proper stimulant medication that people don't realise they actually need because of a medical issue. So the end up drinking 4-5 coffees a day instead.

To be clear, I 100% agree. That's why I refer to it as "structural". No individual or even group of individuals is actively doing anything corrupt, but the overall structure creates an environment where self-interested individuals create an outcome that is VERY difficult to distinguish vs the outcome you would get from more obtuse corruption.

It's more akin to the Chinese concept of Guangxi (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi).

The problem is that where Guangxi ends and corruption begins is a VERY murky question with no clear way of finding an answer.

Are they technical decisions? Yeah, sure, that's on them.

But a LOT of decisions in reality are ones where there is no clear "organic" owner. In that scenario, assuming nobody else is putting their hand up to own it, that's the PM's responsibility.

Nobody will ever tell you this in interviews, it's never part of the job description, but it is one of the most important parts of being an effective PM.

There's also the element of what I call "structural corruption". This isn't "money in brown paper bags" style corruption, as much as it is key stakeholders at customers having existing relationships with certain vendors, and having built their position at the company they work at based on being subject matter experts in that vendors tools.

Try breaking in to an established market as a new product, even if you have a distinctly better value proposition.

You will face a near impenetrable brick wall of critical customer stakeholders who are using the incumbent product and have very strong vested interests in NOT changing solution, no matter how much better your solution may be.

To be fair, they should have seen Ryzen coming, any long-term AMD user knew years before Ryzen landed that it was going to be a good core because AMD were very vocal about how badly wrong they bet with Bulldozer (previous core family).

AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked.

It was never a secret WHY that generation of core sucked, and it was relatively clear what AMD needed to do to fix the problem, and they were VERY vocal about "doing the thing" once it became clear their bet wasn't paying off.

Looking at the historical data, that tends to be a pattern of urban warfare, not the IDF.

Civilian/combatant fatality ratios of 3/1 are not uncommon in urban warfare.

If a PM has time to micromanage the engineers, something has gone seriously wrong in that organisation haha

100% agree. This is the biggest debate I have with other PM's who say "you don't need to be technical"... Total bullshit.

You're expecting to be able to engage with your engineering team around the relative effort and complexities of different technical solutions... You're gonna need to have an understanding of the underlying technical details.

The way I see it, I don't necessarily need to know how to build the thing (as in, all the implementation details). But I absolutely need to know how the thing we're building works, what all the key moving parts are, and how they relate to each other.

Without that, there's no way I can develop any kind of intuition as to what is and isn't possible, which is CRITICAL when managing expections with customers or internal stakeholders.

That's awesome to hear the improvement, gives us hope.

My partner has confounding factors (autism) which is known to make this stuff worse than usual, but it is improving ever so slowly.

Your point around the politicisation of vaccines (and especially ANY kind of critique or question about side effects) is so spot on. We genuinely felt scared to even ask medical professionals out of fear of being labelled as anti-vax and having our overall quality of care drop as a result.

My wife had the same reaction to the Pfizer vaccine. This was... Over two years ago, she still hasn't recovered.

Has had to restrict her diet down to ~5-10 very specific ingredients otherwise she gets extremely bad mast-cell flare-ups.

As a PM, I believe what you're describing is the torrent of people who used to work as "project managers" and "business analysts" who've transitioned into Product for the higher pay, without appreciating any of the differences between the roles.

IMO, the fundamental role of a PM is to make the decisions nobody else wants to (and own the consequences of them). If my team is making progress and decisions are being made, I get the fuck out of the way.

I jokingly refer to myself as the "designated scapegoat", basically meaning it's my job to tank the risk for situations where everyone is nominally in agreement about something, but nobody wants to be the person to put their hand up and own the decision because of the risk if it backfires.

Has there actually been any hard evidence to support this idea? I know there's a fair bit to support Hitler being basically a junkie by the end of the war, but pre-war I'm pretty sure he was just a meglomaniacal psychopath.

The headline of this article feels deliberately misleading in some very intangible way.

Being admitted because you're a suicide risk due to abusing alcohol is very different than say, being admitted due to some kind of psychiatric break or psychosis, especially in the context of a person's general credibility as a commentator on things like UFO's.

It feels like the headline is designed to try and imply that the guy is crazy, when reading the article clearly demonstrates that is not actually the case.

I tend to have a view somewhat similar to this IMO.

My way of managing this stuff has been to straight up block the worst offending services on all my devices (Facebook, Twitter), and use tools to restrict the amount of time I can access the others that I know steal my attention, but i've consciously decided I get enough value from to make a small amount of theft worth it (reddit, hacker news, etc).

I get 15 minutes a day on Reddit and HN (each), but all "traditional" social networks are flat out blocked.

It's exactly the same style I would use if I had a traditional addiction I was trying to manage. Use tools to make it impossible to access the things that feed the addiction the worst, and other tools to force moderation with the things that make my life a bit better/more interesting, but could lead to slippery slopes.

To be clear, I don't think genuine pathological narcissism is actually a particularly common trait, maybe 5% type levels.

The problem is that a single genuine narcissist can make an environment absolutely horrible for a large number of people, meaning that even at 1/20, if you work in an area with 50-60 people, you're likely to have at least 2-3 narcissists in that group.

One other thing, I wouldn't call narcissism a "mental illness". There's a difference between a "mental illness" and a personality disorder. Narcissist Personality Disorder is effectively the clinical name for what is commonly known as "being an ass-hole", in the same way that anti-social personality disorder is just the clinical name for what is commonly known as "being a psycho".

Yeah I think it's important to note that these techniques are for situations where trust has broken down due to something external, not due to a fundamental issue with one of the people involved.

This stuff will never help with narcissistic ass holes.

You forgot all the Kiwis working remote for Atlassian and Canva in the $200+k region.

My team of ~12 is nearly ~30% kiwi at this point.

On one hand I get your point, but there's a pragmatic element to this that doesn't actually make sense. If I wanted to just find new and creative ways of being a racist, there's a million and one ways I could do that on the internet.

Actually looking for a somewhat exhaustive list of racist phrases has very minimal utility when it comes to "being racist" and a fairly large amount of utility in regards to preventing people from being racist.

I'm setting up a discord server and wanted to get a list of words to flag in messages for blocking.

I figured this would be an great use-case for GPT-4, especially since I have a paid-up business account, so you'd think I'm not just some troll looking for naughty words to use.

The level of manoeuvring in the responses reminded my of a highly skilled politician.

So I saw a newspaper headline about Mitch Mcconnell's... glitch... today and was curious so I went to Youtube to watch what happened for myself.

It seems Youtube is just HARD censoring searches of Mitch Mcconnell right now, it just returns nothing!

Checked on two different browsers and my phone, same result.

Gif in the link above showing what happens when you search (or you can just try for yourself, but it might be uncensored by the time you read this).

I mean... Yes, but IMO I think I'd be much more likely to carry a small amount of cash if I didn't have to worry about it converting into 10 different coins once I break the big note.

Was that before or after polymer notes?

I have to assume that a polymer $1/2 wouldn't have this issue?

Honestly this is the thing that scares me the most, for non-trivia portion of the population the apocalypse isn't necessarily something to avoid, its almost equivalent to their "endgame".

Is the frog boiling yet? Can we start doing something about all this now please?

As an Australian, the one thing about America I wish we DID copy was the idea of $2/1 notes.

Coins are such a pain in the ass, but $1/2 is enough that I don't just want to refuse the change to avoid the inconveniences of carrying coins.

That's why there's so many other companies effectively competing with them... Oh... Wait...

Show me a single example of a democratic communist nation that has not descended into some form of totalitarianism or anarchy...

All you posted was a long list of things that failed because of interference from the west. That's not what the question was though, show me ONE that didn't fail... ONE

Venezuela would like a word with you sir...

How could you ever implement it democratically? What happens when people vote for the capitalists?

The reality is that communism requires centralised power, centralised power attracts bad actors, and bad actors are significantly more comfortable wrestling control of that power by force than good ones are.

Communism isn't inherently totalitarian, but according to all the experiments we've run so far as a species (at the cost of several hundred million lives), it does seem to inevitably lead to totalitarians.

Capitalism works as a socio-political system because its decentralised.

But don't worry guys... When it's ME given absolute power it will be different... Just trust me.

Not even a single Gulag...