• 0 Posts
  • 85 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • My wife of 14 years has bipolar disorder.

    My experience with it as someone caring for someone with it is that, when properly managed with appropriate medications, it’s nothing we can’t handle.

    Once we found meds that worked effectively, as long as she’s taking them things are fine. She understands the importance of being properly medicated, I make sure she always has the medication she needs and she takes it.

    In our normal day to day I don’t think either of us think too much about it. I do know though that there are things that can trigger a manic or depressive episode. Sleep changes are a massive trigger for her, so we stick to a pretty solid routine. She can tell when it feels like she might be on the edge of a manic episode. We check in frequently when that happens, I provide support, and we get her doctors on the phone if we need to.

    But in all our time together we’ve not had to go back to in patient treatment once we got our arms around it.

    Good luck to you and your son. Just keep in mind that manic episodes are big and loud and people can feel a lot of shame about things they did while manic after the fact. Care, love, support and understanding are the best context to help your loved one find a path that will work for them.

    A happy, full, and healthy life for your son is still more than possible.



  • It wouldn’t matter one bit.

    You would have every right wing media outlet either calling it fake or saying that it has always been everyone’s peak sexual fantasy to do piss play and the wokies are just jealous that Donnie two scopes is getting some.

    We are well past the point where there’s some big scandal that’s going to drop and save us. These fucking people sit in the Oval Office and say “we just aren’t following the Supreme Court anymore, fuck it, we have concentration camps now and we can send anyone we want to them”

    The scandals are out in the open, they are shouted proudly by the worst people you can imagine and the cult eats it up.


  • Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.

    I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.

    Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.

    I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.

    I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.

    I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.


  • Sad news for his family.

    I do wonder though about these people that hang on to power all the way up until death. Is that fulfilling?

    What was the point of all that amassing of influence and power, just to spend the last few months of your precious finite time on earth sitting in a little office arguing with people.

    I wonder if there is an afterlife how many of those that held onto power with an iron grip up until death look back and go “I wish I had spent more time with my family. I wish I had used some of that wealth and power to enjoy the fruits of life. I can’t believe the last heathy months of my life were wasted doing these things that in retrospect seem so unimportant.”

    There is this group of old billionaires and politicians that are bound and determined to run up the high score as high as possible and for what? Billions of dollars and still heading into the office day in and day out stressing about the next product launch? Why live your life like that?

    Isn’t the point that you can get out of the rat race at some point, not just become the fastest rat?


  • I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.

    1. Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
    2. See if this is an XY problem.

    I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.

    The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.





  • I never really understood the idea of the popular kids in high school. I wasn’t popular but wasn’t unpopular, just sorta a regular dude.

    I remember thinking how odd it was that people liked people simply because a lot of people liked that person. Or that those people felt like they were better than others because a lot of people liked them.

    Then I graduated and got into the real world and there were celebrities but beyond that there were no popular kids anymore. And celebrities were generally well known for some actual thing they could do exceptionally well, acting, singing, sports, etc.

    Then social media gave us influencers which are just popular kids for adults. People follow them because lots of people follow them and some of them are genuinely talented but a lot of them are just flexing with wealth (or pretending to) or just attractive.

    I remember being relieved that the “popular kids” was a thing people grew out of, and kinda appalled that we somehow engineered it back into adulthood.



  • It’s extremely interesting to watch them give trump leeway here. I saw polling recently that many of the trump faithful believe that the tariffs will bring short term pain but it will be worth it for the long term benefits.

    What’s going to turbo suck is that they will take the exact wrong lesson from this. It will enforce their short term thinking because they will remember this time that they experienced short term pain for long term gain and the gain never materialized.

    I just wish we had the ability as a society to have a more nuanced conversation than sound bites. Ok we disagree about tariffs, one side thinks they are real fucking dumb and the other thinks they are great and will have long term benefits. It would be amazing if we could have an adult conversation about this, how it’s expected to work, how likely that is, what issues might be in the way, etc.

    Perhaps it’s decades of being an engineer, but I propose designs that are meant to achieve goals and other engineers check my work, ask questions about things I might not have considered, help play out scenarios that aren’t accounted for and at the end of that we have a better design. As a nation we now seem so incapable of having an honest dialogue between the two major parties that not only are we advancing ideas that obviously won’t work but it’s clear we have no feedback mechanisms to correct course. So now we will just blow up the economy because a group of people think it might, somehow, using mechanisms no one can identify, lead to a future that is “better” where no one can meaningfully define “better.”

    And that’s the state of discourse.


  • immutable@lemm.eetomemes@lemmy.worldTrue
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    The absolute best life hack I have is the 5 minute rule.

    If I see something that needs doing I ask one question, “can I do this in less than 5 minutes?” If the answer is yes, I do it.

    Over time I’ve realized how many things I used to put off and let pile up because I didn’t have the time and how many of those things take less than 5 minutes, less than 2 minutes.

    It’s amazing how many things you can do in basically no time. I used to put off so much, I won’t empty the dishwasher because it “takes too long” takes about 2 minutes. I won’t load the dishwasher because it “takes too long” takes about 2 minutes. The counter is messy but it would take forever to clean it, nope, 3 minutes.

    I think it’s a good hack though because it works in 3 different dimensions

    • First, and most obvious, you do whatever thing you’ve identified will take less than 5 minutes.
    • Second, and less obvious, once you start doing this you find the number of times you need to stop and clean all afternoon going down greatly. It just changes the relationship you have with cleaning (or at least I had with cleaning). Cleaning time used to be this block I would set aside and dread, but now even when I need to stop and do the things that take more than 5 minutes there aren’t 100 5 minus tasks also piled up in the way.
    • Third, and maybe least obvious, it helps you really gauge how much work stuff is. I don’t know why I thought unloading the dishwasher was some big ordeal, it takes 2 minutes tops. The longer I use the 5 minute rule the more things I’ve thought to try to see if I can do in 5 minutes. And it’s not like I’m speed running these chores. A lot of the things I put off and let pile up just aren’t that much work if you do them when they need doing.

    So that’s my cleaning life hack. It has completely changed the way I think about cleaning. It’s not something I stop and do and dread Saturday because I’ve got to do a big clean of the kitchen. My kitchen is always pretty clean now and on Sunday I spend 30-60 minutes mopping and spraying everything down for a nice squeaky clean.

    Living in a nice clean place also rules.



  • He likely has narcissistic personality disorder and so this is less an act and more a mask, a shield. The person he’s protecting the most is himself, he needs to be this facade.

    I found this video really quite fascinating about what it’s like caring for a dying narcissist. Whatever family that remains hold out hope that as death itself nears the narcissist might finally let down their guard and show their true self. Apparently the opposite happens.

    https://youtu.be/FavgHrxc6oY





  • Yea I tend to think than when someone identifies as a Libertarian they almost certainly don’t mean a civil libertarian, which is how the aclu actually identifies themselves.

    We have grown from a roomful of civil libertarians to more than 4 million members, activists, and supporters across the country. The ACLU is now a nationwide organization with a 50-state network of staffed affiliate offices filing cases in both state and federal courts. We appear before the Supreme Court more than any other organization except the Department of Justice.

    This is literally the only time the word libertarian appears in their own history https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history