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mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Autism should not be treated as a single condition   economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
mrguyorama · 14 days ago
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mtlmtlmtlmtl · 14 days ago
I just want to say, I wish I could give 100 upvotes, but I'll have to settle for one.

It's definitely the case that there is undue paranoia about stimulants.

One case you only briefly touch on, addiction. Let me elaborate. I have struggled with severe ADHD(largely untreated during childhood, mainting severity into adulthood as a result) for all my life. I've struggled with drug addiction for most of my adult life(mainly cannabis). The amount of hoops addicts are made to jump through to get access to amphetamines is insane. Generally the requirements in my country(Norway) are to deliver weekly clean drug tests for 3 months. In the case of heavy cannabis use, it takes up to 3 months from going cold turkey until tests are negative. So, a 6 month commitment before treatment can even begin. Now, the relationship between ADHD and cannabis is interesting. I know some ADHDers who swear by it as a treatment. These tend to be of the predominantly hyperactive/impulsive type.

For me, it can't really be called a treatment. It actively worsens my condition in terms of executive dysfunction. Although it does improve some of the aspects like hyperactivity and emotional lability and helps make things bearable.

By the time I'm a year into a binge, my life is such a mess that getting myself out of it without meds is completely hopeless. Here I'm talking my apartment being such a mess I'm generally expecting to be woken up by people in biohazard suits any day now, and wondering how the hell I haven't contracted some kinda crazy bacterial disease by now. Cleaning it up is weeks if not months of work even with meds. Without it's inherently impossible. And the cannabis at least numbs me to the horror of it all.

So for 6 months I have to abandon that small comfort and just exist in this hellish life until I can even begin to improve things. Try to imagine how hard that makes going cold turkey in the first place. Not to mention the fact that meds significantly help me manage the addiction in the first place. I've successfully made it through this 6 month purgatory 3 separate times in the last 13 years. I've made more failed attempts than I can count. Wasted most of my 20s hiding from the purgatory inside a bong. I often wonder ehat my life would've been like if the rules weren't so strict. There's no evidence supported medical justification for waiting any longer than about 4 weeks. Out of the bajillion or so failed attempts, I reckon maybe 3/4 made it that far. Go figure.

I'm currently, close to 2 years semi-sober(doing a new moderation based approach to my addiction, very successfully, smoking exactly once every 4 weeks. Bit unrelated to the stimulant thing, it's more about relapse avoidance. But it's worked wonders so far.) and doing better than ever, but I still have a long way to go. And I will fight anyone who sows FUD about amphetamine or methylphenidate. These are wonder drugs. If you want to freak out about psych meds, go read up on neuroleptics. Now there's something truly horrifying. But of course, that only happens to crazy people hidden away in mental wards, so no one cares about them. I've been to those mental wards and I have seen some shit I will never forget. People whose lives were destroyed, reduced to an unbearable living hell for the remainder, by a supposed "treatment". These people are treated like animals. Go talk about that. Shut the fuck up about stimulants and SSRIs already, jesus. And go touch some grass.

mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on A Love Letter to FreeBSD   tara.sh/posts/2025/2025-1... · Posted by u/rbanffy
shevy-java · 18 days ago
That's fine. The thing is: I am different with Linux too. So I don't quite understand that FreeBSD focus.

From the BSDs, I think only OpenBSD has a really unique selling point with its focus on security. People ask "why pick FreeBSD rather than Linux" and most will not find compelling arguments in favour of FreeBSD there.

mtlmtlmtlmtl · 18 days ago
First of all, FreeBSD has plenty of selling points compared to your typical Linux distro:

Small, well integrated base system, with excellent documentation. Jails, ZFS, pf, bhyve, Dtrace are very well integrated with eachother, which differs from linux where sure there's docker, btrfs, iptables, bpftrace and several different hypervisors to choose from, but they all come from different sources and so they don't play together as neatly.

The ports tree is very nice for when you need to build things with custom options.

The system is simple and easy to understand if you're a seasoned unix-like user. Linux distros keep changing, and I don't have the time to keep up. I have more than 2 decades of experience daily driving linux at this point, and about 3 years total daily driving FreeBSD. And yet, the last time I had a distro install shit itself(pop os), I had no idea how to fix it, due to the rube-goldberg machine of systemd, dbus, polkit, wayland AND X, etc etc that sits underneath the easy to use GUI(which was not working). On boot I was dropped into a root shell with some confusing systemd error message. The boot log was full of crazy messages from daemons I hadn't even heard of before. I was completely lost. On modern Linux distros, my significant experience is effectively useless. On FreeBSD, it remains useful.

Second, when it comes to OpenBSD, I don't actually agree that security is its main selling point. For me, the main selling point of OpenBSD is as a batteries included server/router OS, again extremely well documented in manpages, and it has all the basic network daemons installed, you just enable them. They have very simple configuration files where often all you need is a single digit number of lines, and the config files have their own manpages explaining everything. For use cases like "I just want an HTTP server to serve some static content", "I just want a router with dhcpd and a firewall", etc, OpenBSD is golden.

mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Iceland declares ocean-current instability a national security risk   edition.cnn.com/2025/11/1... · Posted by u/donohoe
ademup · 19 days ago
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
mtlmtlmtlmtl · 19 days ago
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?

Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.

mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on John Carmack on mutable variables   twitter.com/id_aa_carmack... · Posted by u/azhenley
mtlmtlmtlmtl · 2 months ago
It's fascinating how even when Carmack says something rather obvious and unoriginal, that many people have said before, sometimes decades ago, it still spawns a 400+ comment thread on HN. I really don't get it, it's almost like a cult of personality at this point.
mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado   nobelprize.org/prizes/pea... · Posted by u/pykello
jansan · 2 months ago
That is nonsense. Even if the Gaza deal was worthy a Nobel Peace Prize, nobody, including Trump, would expect to be honored two days after the deal.
mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado   nobelprize.org/prizes/pea... · Posted by u/pykello
Al-Khwarizmi · 2 months ago
Not to diminish her valor and heroism. Mad respect. But how is that actually about peace?

A dictatorship can be peaceful, and a democracy can be warlike. Venezuela hasn't been involved in any war recently as far as I know. Of course people who fight for democracy deserve being praised and supported, but to me it looks odd to do so with a peace prize.

The prize is supposed to be awarded to people who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". Is this the case here?

mtlmtlmtlmtl · 2 months ago
>Venezuela hasn't been involved in any war recently, as far as I know.

While the point you're trying to make may or may not be valid, Venezuela is not a good example. Go read up on the Venezuela-Guyana crisis. The Maduro regime has been pushing the region closer to war in recent years. Renewing its claims to Guyanan territory, and preparing its military for war. For now, all out invasion has been prevented partially by significant support for Guyana and pressure against Venezuela from neighbouring countries and the west, and distraction from its own internal problems.

mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Privacy Harm Is Harm   eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10... · Posted by u/hn_acker
charcircuit · 2 months ago
If you understood my comment you would understand that I don't agree with them. If you are trying to passively aggressively call me out for not reading reading article (of which I did), do so directly.
mtlmtlmtlmtl · 2 months ago
What is there to understand about it? You don't make an argument, just a shallow dismissal. There's nothing about your comment that indicates you read TFA.
mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did   blog.pragmaticengineer.co... · Posted by u/bschne
immibis · 2 months ago
I think it's still controversial whether manufacturers of substances are morally culpable for the result of people wrongly using them. And while you could hold the marketing or executive team accountable for trying to get people addicted to heroin, I'm not sure the same applies to programmers of an inventory tracking system?
mtlmtlmtlmtl · 2 months ago
Controversial in general, maybe. In the case of opioids and the pharm industry, absolutely not. It's been well documented at this point that pharm companies were well aware of the abuse, and not only did nothing to stop it, but went out of their way to encourage it because sales were going through the roof.

In the case of Purdue and oxycontin, the culpability has in fact been established in court as well.

As for the coders, I find it hard to believe that they were so ignorant, naïve, or unintelligent that they had absolutely no idea what was going on. I just don't buy it.

mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did   blog.pragmaticengineer.co... · Posted by u/bschne
comprev · 2 months ago
How is it any different from working at a gambling company writing addictive software?

There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.

mtlmtlmtlmtl · 2 months ago
The question was how GP felt about their particular unethical act, and it's consequences which likely includes multiple deaths. Since you are not GP, it seems unlikely that you can answer this question.

I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different, and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP said that they used to spend their time optimising software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask the same question.

mtlmtlmtlmtl commented on Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did   blog.pragmaticengineer.co... · Posted by u/bschne
nerdsniper · 3 months ago
Not taking away from your point, but just a PSA: For some reason "First, do no harm" is synonymous with "Hippocratic Oath" in pop-culture. Just a reminder that this is apocryphal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

Surgeons, in fact, often begin with harm. To replace a hip joint, they necessarily must begin by causing great trauma to the body by cutting it open and removing bone.

mtlmtlmtlmtl · 2 months ago
That's far too literal an interpretation of harm. The point isn't to never do any kind of "physical harm". It's about doing the least amount of harm possible/necessary in any situation, where doing nothing can also be seen as causing harm.

I had a burst appendix as a teenager, leading to peritonitis. To treat this, surgeons were going to operate laparoscopically to remove the appendix and fix remove any contamination in the peritoneum. Obviously this required damaging my skin, removing an organ etc. which in the strictest sense is harm. But doing nothing at all would obviously lead to sepsis and death, so this was still the least harmful intervention. During the surgery, it turned out that the laparoscopic method was hard to carry out due to obesity and other factors. The attending made the decision to convert to a laporotomy, doing even more harm to my skin and leaving me with a 30 cm scar on my stomach. But it was the right call because it maximised the chances of accomplishing the goal of the procedure(preventing imminent death), minimising the risk of serious complications.

And here I am almost 20 years later. I have a scar, I have some adhesions that occasionally cause moderate abdominal pain if I don't eat enough fibre, and perhaps my lymphatic system and gut flora are very minorly compromised in some nebulous way due to the lack of an appendix. On the other hand, I'm alive. So yes, they "did harm", but they also minimised harm. And they didn't do any unnecessary harm, to the best of their ability. And that's the point of the ethical principle.

u/mtlmtlmtlmtl

KarmaCake day5461June 23, 2021View Original