Think of how many people who have remote jobs with American companies couldn't connect to their meetings while they "work from home" while secretly being in China!

Normally they have to fight VPN issues anyway, but having a sovereign state inject your packets is certainly a fun new one.

Terrible, this is Internet curfew. It's not uncommon to imagine they'd shutdown Internet across border during any war (like against Taiwan).

The youtube channel of ADHD science researcher Russell Barkley gave me the push to get diagnosis in my last year of undergrad and It was like lightning to see all my symptoms laid out since childhood in context of the underlying brain science. He does a lot of debunking of bad research too. Great channel.

Reading all of these anecdotes about how difficult it is for some people to not only get an ADHD diagnosis but also a prescription for medication makes me feel somewhat guilty. This has not been my experience living in the US. I was diagnosed over 20 years ago and since then have explored the full range of medications with various different doctors in different states. I don’t recall any of them scrutinizing me or being reluctant to prescribe. I just asked and received. And the pharmacy always filled without question. Only in the past 5 years in my state have I had to do a urine test before getting a prescription refill to prove I’m not abusing other drugs, but that’s it. I guess I’ve been lucky. To anyone curious, I recently started taking Zenzedi (which I only take once or twice per week) after reading good things about it on Reddit, and all that took was a simple note to the nurse practitioner (though she needs to have a MD write the script). They didn’t grill me on why I wanted to change from Concerta, and I even suggested my own starting dose of 10mg which she agreed to without hesitation. It’s sad to me that others are having to go through the gauntlet for the exact same thing….finding a med that works.

My $0.02 as a response to several comments I read in this thread: I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 40s and got Concerta. My belief is that ADHD is not a disease, nor a disability (even though it acts like one very frequently) and in fact there is evidence that ADHD is an important part of our evolution as a species.

The problem(s) mostly relies with the modern way of life and what is expected from the society at large. In that context I try to feel ok when I daydream while I have countless of boring things to take care of as I totally feel ok when I hyperfocus in a creative endeavor.

The meds are just a tool that I use no more than two times per week in order to take better care of myself and others. It is not a therapy and it's not me. I believe that Sensitive Rejection Dysphoria is very real for people like us, but the worst version of it is when you reject yourself because you are different and you try hard to be someone else.

The irony about getting treatment for ADHD is that medical providers make it very hard to get the proper medication and treatment. People with ADHD are horrible at following through and handle rejection poorly. So the worse the ADHD is, the less likely somebody will be able to actually get treatment for it. A lot of people suffer because doctors fear losing their license like so many did during the pain pill debacle. It's a risk for them to prescribe a stimulant, but zero risk to tell you to eff off.

As many have said in this thread, most doctors will tell you to go away or give you Welbutrin (which works poorly, if at all). I feel for your struggle.

It's not that troubling because we should not think that human psychology is inherently optimized (on the individual-level, on a population-/ecological-level is another story). LLM behavior is optimized, so it's not unreasonable that it lies on a Pareto front, which means improving in one area necessarily means underperforming in another.

Optimizing for one objective results in a tradeoff for another objective, if the system is already quite trained (i.e., poised near a local minimum). This is not really surprising, the opposite would be much more so (i.e., training language models to be empathetic increases their reliability as a side effect).