They/Them, agender-leaning scalie.

ADHD software developer with far too many hobbies/trades: AI, gamedev, webdev, programming language design, audio/video/data compression, software 3D, mass spectrometry, genomics.

Learning German (B2), Chinese (HSK 3-4ish), French (A2).

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. … Western companies have ‘legalized’ piracy in Russia.

    100% this.

    Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it’s excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.

    It’s inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.





  • I think the big difference between people benefiting at small doses (~0.3mg) and large doses (2+mg) is that the 0.3mg group use it for sleep quality through the night, whereas the 3+mg people just need the sudden shock to get to sleep in the first place.

    The drawback with big doses is that your brain becomes less sensitive so your naturally-produced melatonin might not be enough to keep you asleep for the whole night after the pill wears off. It has a very short half-life in the body (under 1 hour), so there’s no way for a single dose before sleeping to last 8 hours. We naturally produce only 0.06-0.08mg per night, so it’s easy to see how supplementing melatonin could desensitize someone and cause them to wake up after just 4-6 hours of sleep.

    I have ADHD and am in the large-dose category and use 2-3mg of melatonin to help me fall asleep. Without it, I can’t sleep reliably because my brain often won’t shut up. Sleep reliably is so much more important to me than sleep quality.

    Using it only 5 nights a week, I’m not significantly dependent. I can still sleep without melatonin, just less reliably. I’ve tried 0.3mg, but it felt the same as taking nothing.

    For me, 10mg would be excessive and probably harmful in a desensitizing way. The most I’ve taken is 6mg, but it only helped in 2 out of 6 times. The other 4 times my brain just wouldn’t stop. If doubling my usual dose didn’t help, I don’t think doubling it again would be any different.

    There are however studies with higher doses, e.g. this one about kids with ADHD that says:

    two-third of the patients responded to relatively medium doses (2.5–6 mg/d), whereas doses above 6 mg added further benefit only in a small percentage of children.

    so I guess it’s different for everyone.








  • In two languages I’m learning, German and Chinese, I’ve found it to suffer from “translationese”. It’s grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.

    No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you’ll see/hear in day to day life.


  • As someone with untreated ADHD, I absolutely don’t feel I’m the highest level of control in my brain. I can make all the plans and decisions I want, but I can only gently steer what I ultimately end up doing and paying attention to. My “executive function” wields ultimate power and not only can overrule me, but also prevent me from having the thoughts I want to have.

    Another indicator that I’m not the only consciousness in here: anxiety-inducing events like deadlines and exams can give me physiological symptoms even when I’ve forgotten about them. I’ll just be sitting there wondering “why is my stomach upset at me?” and only later realize it’s from stress for an upcoming test I hadn’t paid attention to.


  • Though my lizard brain demands me to be around other people, most of the things that bring me genuine life satisfaction are just easier to do solo. When I’m at purely social events I also get this sense of dread that I could be making better use of my time.

    The voice in my head is making contradictory demands, so I’ve learned to not feel bad for circumventing it. I have my own goals in life, instincts be damned.

    I find that listening to people casually talking is usually enough to satisfy the lizard brain, so I listen to a lot of stuff in the background: YouTube video essays, Twitch Just Chatting streamers, etc. When it gets particularly demanding I’ll try engaging with the people, but usually I just let my subconscious listen while I’m focusing on more important stuff.


  • ooo, I love this. It reminds me of how nice C#'s LINQ is…

    “Pipeline style” DB queries have some interesting advantages as well:

    • It’s straightforward to write efficient queries for DBs that don’t include a query optimizer stares at Datomic
    • You can split the pipeline into server-side and client-side steps when working with less capable DBs stares at most of NoSQL
    • It would be much easier to transition from a pipeline API to a non-text-based API so that our ORMs/query builders can directly talk to DBs without the overhead of generating and parsing SQL.

  • I still use Google for ~95% of my queries because I like real sources, comprehensive documentation, and not having to read a wall of text when a one-line answer would have sufficed.

    ChatGPT is a good replacement for Quora/Stack Exchange for explaining general knowledge stuff like other languages’ grammar and simple science, as well as finding authors/books/movies from descriptions when you’ve forgotten their names.

    Bard is… kinda dumb. I gave it a few chances, but it was nothing compared to ChatGPT’s free tier.