I‘ve been on a 10mg of Adderall XR for years. Over a decade now, since I got diagnosed right after my son while he was early in school. I very much notice it when I run out of my meds (seriously, why do they make it harder for the drug prescribed for executive function?). It seems as effective as when I was prescribed the medication, without the side effects that I started with.
”n of 1”, and all that, but I’m glad I have it.
OpenClaw itself didn’t, but the agentic systems have. Last year, I thought I’d have a robot assistant by now, and I’d be a software engineering company on my own by next year. Now, I regularly have a team of robots write my code.
I’m not a lot more productive because my coworkers haven’t really kept up, but I spend a hours less time sitting at my desk in my home office. I generally will spend about 10-20 minutes setting up the task, and then have them work on it, and I have them send me an audible alert when they are done writing and reviewing the work, at which point I’ll come back and review. Sometimes I leave comments, and the robots fix the issues, and tell me once all of the tests pass.
I can only run about 3 concurrent jobs at once due to memory limits on my computer (we have like 20 services in our system, and those docker containers use up a good bit of memory. Cursor too). I feel like i could manage about 6 at a time before the context switching would become a bottleneck
Somewhere around February was the inflection point. Agentic systems went from situationally useful to just how I work. The world has changed, and most people don’t know it.
Now I’m using my time to learn the mathematics of AI with the help of ChatGPT and Codex.
The future is wild.
This is one advantage of polyamory. It’s not discussed much, but it’s the kind of thing you see when someone gets hurt. When my girlfriend broke her leg, me and her other partner were able to coordinate and help her more than either of us could alone.
I was coming on here to say that this doesn’t take into account all of the kids that aren’t very motivated by money. I‘ve tried paying my son for things like this, but he’s not interested. he does way better with intrinsic motivation.
Then I realized that the intrinsic motivation would still exist, and therefore this would be for students who are easily extrinsically motivated. My nephew is. He’s not even a teenager, and bought a portable pressure washer to make money in the neighborhood. I think he’d be motivated to go to school and participate.
The biggest issue I see is cost. Education has been severely underfunded, and this would increase the cost. According to Google, there were about 49.6 million gradeschool students in the US in 2022. Assuming that the grades are distributed evenly, on average we’re talking around 150 million per day, nation-wide. With about 180 school days in a year, we’re looking at 27 billion dollars.
That’s well within the range of federal government budgeting, but given the track record, that seems very unlikely.
I think it would be worth studying. I’d want to know how much that money affects outcomes, and what payment thresholds produce what kind of results. I’m skeptical that it would be a better than the money going to teacher pay, but it’s worth finding out.
i think that we need to start rethinking some of our best-practices. For instance, does DRY matter? If i have a server that serves a bunch of endpoints, and if each one reimplements some fetching function, is that bad? As you said, if all of the code is local, and we need to fix one of the endpoints, we can just fix that endpoint, and not break anything else in the process. If we need to make changes across the endpoints, we can tell it to do so.
I’m not sure about this though. Right now, I don’t think that’s the right call—mostly because humans still have to read and understand the code—but I expect that in the very near future we won’t be reading much of the code anyway.
it’s a weird time we’re living in right now as software engineers.
One of the things that just really gets to me is that because my medication is a controlled-substance, I can’t use my pharmacy’s app for refills: I have to call or go in. That little bit of friction has meant the difference between having the medication and not. Without the medication, tasks like this are difficult for me to remember and do. It’s a perverse feedback loop.
Please just let me refill my prescription like everyone else.
FOOM! Is this really a jump, or just the exponential trend?
The deontoligical answer is this: without consent, the only acceptable sacrifice is oneself. The answer is to jump on to the tracks.
I have started it, and I’m far enough into it that I’m hooked on finishing it. I LOVE archeology games Where I piece together the story through clues left. Viewfinder was another good example.
I look forward to your future posts.
D&D taught me about the importance of journaling. Watching how effective Marisa Rey was by using her game journal on Critical Role, Campaign 2, it inspired me to try it out. After about a year into to it, I went back through it, and it brought back so many memories, and I realized I remembered things from the game better than my real life. that’s when I started daily journaling.
3 years later, I’m still at it, and I wish that I had started so much sooner, like as a kid. It helps me collect my thoughts when I’m dealing with complicated feelings. It helps me remember specific details that would otherwise be lost to time. I hand-write, but I use Notability, which can index my handwriting, so I can search for things.
Going back to games for a bit, Blue Prince was one of my favorite games of all time, and my journal from my journey through that game is a treasured possession. For those weeks I played obsessively, most of my time was looking through or reading my journal, trying to pull threads together. by the end, I had about 120 pages of notes, including pictures, drawings, details, tables, etc. I can’t go back and play that game the same way again, but I can rediscover what it was like.
My journal s a gift to future-me. Inattentive-presenting ADHD makes remembering hard, and my journal is my mental prosthesis. I expect that years later, when these were the good ol’ days, I’ll be able to go back and read about them, and relive the memories. I’ll have a better connection to now-me, and I’ll be thankful that I took that time, even when it was hard.
Also, if you haven’t played Blue Prince, go do that—like right now—but be careful: It’s extremely addictive.
Intellectual property is going to go the way of privacy.
I think currency is best when it is backed by a central authority.
They do make a good way to exchange between different currencies in countries where that would otherwise be very difficult/illegal.
In general though, blockchain is a brilliant solution to a particular problem (decentralization). For most things having a trusted central system of record is a better solution.
I feel that way about currency too. 🤷🏻♂️ Then again, outside of my 401k, I don’t have any financial investments, so I’m a terrible source of financial advice.
Bubble or no, with the latest models I can ship quality code 20x faster. I can make prototypes in minutes to hours, and finished tested code in a few days that would have taken months previously. My tool’s and workflows are forever changed. This isn’t hype; this is what I am doing today.
This is the worse it will ever be. even if we stopped here, society is soon going to be running on jet fuel.
The models don’t have to get stronger, and we would still be seeing improvements, and they aren’t stopping.
Yeah. I think that is where I’m landing. I’ve been going hard for the last two weeks, with not enough sleep. It just hit me once I had time to slow down.
I’d add Blue Prince to the list. I haven’t seen a game with so many layers before. It’s a masterpiece. I have 125 pages of notes, that I used to complete the game. Room 46 is just the beginning.
Timberborn would be an honorable mention. It’s a city builder game with beavers and water physics.
I might even add, “avoid absolutist statements”: always, never, all, none, etc. Not ban them, as there are appropriate uses, but rarely are they true about people.
There was a phase where “this feels great,” but not like euphoria. More like I could be comfortable sitting still, and follow conversations in crowded places better. It was mostly by contrast, similar to how I felt when I first put on glasses, and I could see the world in a whole new level of detail.
I’ve taken MDMA recreationally before, and the jaw clenching side effect of that was similar to when I started taking Adderall. It went away within a week or so. MDMA does have that drop-off effect, but don’t get more by taking more. I do wish I could take a low dose of that safely; I love how it mutes my social anxiety for a few days.
I’m not even tempted to take more of my meds than prescribed. I wouldn’t want to build up a tolerance. I also have no effects (other than my symptoms becoming more profound) when I don’t take it for a few days.
Most days just feel… normal. 🤷🏻♂️ That‘s all I want. If I want a pick-me-up, I’ll have a cup of coffee
I lean heavy to the attention disregulation side with less of the hyperactive dimension. I’ve developed tools and techniques to mitigate my memory issues. I suspect that the symptoms don’t really go away with age, but people develop ways to cope with their symptoms.
It sounds like you have it worse off in Germany. My biggest complaint is that I can’t order refills over the internet, and have to call or physically go into the pharmacy. I see my doctor every three months, and we check in, and I get my next three months. It’s almost a little silly at this point, but worth it.