Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

Down here there was a murder case recently. The suspect always replied prompt on his messages, except for the 2 hours during that murder. His phone was supposedly at home with him being out.

There were many more juicy bits in that case, but this part is somewhat in the context of the discussion. The message seemed to be, plan better next time :)

I'm pretty sure that caffeine doesn't increase most people's productivity.

Any mental performance ascribed to caffeine in studies is always due to removing withdrawal symptoms. It doesn't increase them past their baseline.

In addition, caffeine works by stressing the body, thus reducing creative problem solving capabilities.

So, really if you quit caffeine, your performance might suffer for a few days, then it'd be back up to 100% or even higher.

I don't use caffeine (though I love coffee, it does not love me) I do use smallish dose Adderall XR for my ADHD, but even then I reduce/stop it when I need to be creative (architecture/design of complicated systems). For me, Adderall is great for slamming out repetitive tasks, it reduces my capacity for lateral thinking.

The original with ALL of the excuses is at the British Museum here:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634

Are there many sizable communities out there left that rival HN’s s/n ratio, civility and substance?

I can think of some with one or two of those attributes but not many that match it all the way around.