I love 60s and 70s music, heard a lot growing up from my boomer parents. So many classic, timeless hits. Then my mum found some “Fab No. 2s of the 60s” CD, a compilation of songs that didn’t quite make it to number 1…

It was truly awful, all clichéd cheesiness and triteness, so many lame songs that sounded like other, better songs. Just sucko-barfo all round. I think there are arguments for why music from the early stages of a genre (like 60s pop and soul) are particaurly good… But there’s also a hell of a lot of selection bias going on.

Egg and dairy allergies are among the most common food allergies, so I’d guess that something like that might be the issue?

Yeah, I think challenge can be a bit motivator for adhd folks. Once I’ve completed the main part of something, I find it really hard to care about the details, to the extent that the unfinished parts sometimes spoil the bit I had completed.

I feel like it’s the dopamine of the chase is actually what’s motivating, and challenge is a version of that. I’ll get sucked into finding some obscure game and getting an emulator working to be able to play it and all the way I’m super engaged. Then I start playing this game I was so excited about and meh, don’t care.

Maybe you could think about ways to refocus that drive? A therapist told me once that adhd people don’t get satisfaction from completing things, but are excited about new things. So, instead of feeling proud of getting into college try and immediately find the new challenge (now I want to get a prostigious internship!) if you succeed at your fitness goals, maybe you can raise the stakes see if you can beat a friend or a record or something?

I really got a lot out of the Myres Briggs when I was younger. I know its not scientifically valid, and it’s stupid of folks take it too seriously, but it really helped young me understand that other people weren’t wrong/dumb/weird for approaching things differently. And it helped me understand some of the axis on which difference can lie in a helpful way.

I think in the post internet age people are very aware of different categories and identities, but growing up in the previous millenium it wasn’t something that we talked about much. The introvert / extrovert division is overblown and overly simplistic nowadays, but before people use to just criticise each other for being “too shy” or “too loud” like there was a “normal” way to be that everyone should get.

The big five is certainly more reliable and scientifically supported, but I never found that it helped me understand a coworker or friend better. Partly I think conscientiousness and neuroticism sound a little too value laden. People can happily self describe as “detail orientated” (Sensing) or “big picture types” (Intuitive) but nobody really wants to say “I’m closed-off and unconscientious”. And I think that’s why MB has been popular in business / organisation worlds, because it’s a useful way to get people discussing themselves and how they approach problems. It doesn’t matter that in reality my level of extraversion varies depending on the context, or I’m Judging in certain tasks but Perceiving in others.

That’s really helpful! Exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I wasn’t aware of the role of temperature and embedding, thet explain a lot.

That’s my take as well, I would just like to know more about the weighting/bias.

Just to make clear because it seems to come up a lot in some responses - I absolutely don’t think (and never have) that chatgpt is intelligent, ‘understands’ what I’m saying to it or what it’s saying to me (let alone is accurate!). Older chat bots were very prone to getting in weird loops, or sudden context/topic switches. Chatgpt doesn’t do this very often, and I was wondering what the mechanism for keeping it’s answers plausibly connected to the topic under discussion and avoiding grammatical cul-de-sacs.

I know it’s just a model, I want to understand the difference between it’s predictions and the predictions on my Android keyboard. Is it simply considering the entire previous text as it makes its predictions vs just the last few words? Why doesn’t it occasionally respond with a hundred thousand word response? Many of the texts it’s trained on are longer than it’s usual responses. There seems to be some limits and guidance given either through its training data or its response training that guide it beyond “based on the texts I have seen, what is the most likely word.” and I was curious if there was a summary what the blend of corpus based prediction and respinse feedback, etc. has been used.

Drunkly got down to it on a very empty train… But someone saw us cause the police were waiting for us at the station. Fortunately there was no cameras where we were, and no corroborating evidence, so we got away with it. But both of us had to go to the station and get questioned… Definte drunken stupidity, and now we’re a bit more circumspect.

Yeah, I’d say SO generally are like great friends (with benefits), but often, over time you end up doing so much stuff with them that they eclipse any other individual friend. And eventually (especially if you end up living together) they become such a part of your day to day life they can begin to feel like an extension of yourself (or rather, that you’re both part of one being) and it’s hard to live with out them. I remember laughing at my dad for wanting to phone my mum everyday when he was away on business. I’d be like “what do you even have to talk about? You see each other all the time” But now, if I had a day where I didn’t at least message with my partner I’d feel so isolated.

Ereaders like kobo / kindle have gentle backlight, just make sure you get one with adjustable warm /cool white backlight, so you can make it warm and not blue. I also use a little clip on booklight with adjustable brightness and color. If it’s dim and red/orange you’re not disturbing anyone but it illuminates the page perfectly.

Yeah, I was confused about this… A little sugar won’t ruin your French toast, and you can always salt it afterwards… I genuinely forget that people eat it sweet, I’m a cheddar and bacon boy myself.

As others have observed, a glottal stop on its own is completely silent. But the idea of responding to distinct weird sounds is awesome! I’d like to be able to whistle commands like Alexa is well trained sheepdog!

That’s a really good description. I feel like people focus on the highs and the lows of addiction. But one of the main reason it is hard to give up an addiction is it’s such a comfort. The ecstatic highs are fun, but the real appeal is having something so simple that makes you feel good.

Maybe my comment wasn’t clear enough, I have a job that I find satisfying, teaching at a university. The five year job I had that forced repeatedly forced me off sick was as a health professional in a hospital, and it was very interesting, challenging and satisfying. But the repetition (not of the work with patients, which was endlessly varied) but just turning up at the same building every day, seeing the same collegues, keeping on top of paperwork, etc. was mentally exhausting.

The advantage to being a lecturer is that the commute, paperwork and stress is seasonal, so it doesn’t just feel like an endless Sisyphian task. In a sense, it’s less challenging and less satisfying work than my time in health (teaching a student something interesting isn’t the same as saving someone’s life!) but the work pattern works much better for me. I think that what the OP was describing about cyclical burnout might be something similar. There are lots of careers (many self employed) out there that are intensely busy for a block and then time off or starting a completely different project. When I start finding teaching too much (and I’m sure it’ll happen eventually, but at least it’s longer than a year!) I’ll probably move into freelance coding or seasonal event management type stuff. Stuff where I can use my strengths of picking up stuff quickly and dealing with problems, but don’t need to worry about the long haul.

I don’t know, I feel like it sounds a lot like burn out (or at least how I understand the term, which might be wrong!) I would manage alright at a job for a year or so, and then the combination of repetitiveness and lack of interest (for more low level jobs) or the accumulated stress and exhaustion from trying & failing to keep on top of everything (for more professional jobs) would bring me to a point of anxiety, depression and ‘mental shutdown’.

Mostly I’d walk out on jobs when it started happening, but I’m my longest job (5 years) I just kept getting signed off work for increasingly long periods, and then I’d come back and be okay for another 12 months and fall apart again.

But I don’t think it’s cyclical depression or something. I had a two year period where I was fortunate enough to not have to work and I was in good form for the whole two years. Now I’ve moved in to academia, and the university schedule with four months off in summer seems to be enough that I don’t hit that point. The end of each semester has me worn out and approaching burnout, but then I get plenty of time off to recharge.

Any particular thing will change, and if you look more specifically at the factors and data around it, you can make a more accurate guess about that change. But that’s pretty difficult for big, unpredictable things that we don’t have a lot of examples of (like “big world religions”).

Current data is that Christianity has been on massive growth spurt since the 1800s. There were 2.4 billion in 2020 and that is estimated to go up to 3.3 billion by 2050. So if you’re looking at growth rates, forecasts etc, Christianity is only going to get bigger.

Obviously, a lot of that growth is due to general population growth (although growth rate of Christianity was higher than the global growth rate) And if you make some pretty big assumptions about world development, ‘progress’ and waning religious belief you could believe that Christianity will boom and then shrink. But there’s not a lot of evidence for that currently. And that’s why I brought up that general guideline - we don’t have any reason to believe that Christianity is going to disappear anytime soon, and we don’t have any evidence that it’ll be here in 10,000 years. So, if I was an immortal onlooker, and I had to make a bet, I’d guess it’d be around for another few thousand years.

Maybe it would help if you explained more about why you think it’s surprising these religions are still around after thousands of years? Religions and cultural items like that don’t generally get ‘superceded’ by new inventions (as happens with technology), instead they general adapt and change to the needs of the culture that uses them. Christianity is the 2000s is massively different from even 500 years ago, let alone 1500 years ago. And in the 3000s it’s more likely that Christianity will be around, but significantly changed, than that it has faded away.

I can’t remember the theories name, but I came across a suggestion from a historian (or sociologist? Or something…) that if you have to estimate how long a cultural feature will last, your best guess is “roughly as long as its existed for”.

So the pyramids at Giza are over 4000 years old. If we lack any specific knowledge of reasons ( predicting the stone erosion, or knowing that bombing is likely in the area soon) then all we can know is that they have lasted a long time, so probably could last a good bit longer. And if we guess random ages, they will average out to a middling number (just like if you roll a lot of d6s you’ll average out 3.5). The could be destroyed next year, but that’s an extreme outlier, and they could last 40,000 years but that’s also an extreme. So something around the 2000 - 6000 mark would probably be a good bet.

Similarly, Facebook has been around for 20 years. If the company collapsed next year, that’d be possible but unlikely. They could last into the next century, but again, most companies don’t. So guessing in the 10-30 years would be safe.

Obviously, it’s just a huge “rule of thumb” but I found it interesting. So instead of being surprised that Christianity is still here, twenty years past its second millenium, it’s more realistic to assume that you’re seeing it somewhere near its midpoint, rather than at an extreme. So we’re likely to have Christians for another few thousand years!

Tl:Dr if something has lasted a thousand years, it’s likely to last a good time longer.

My parents grew up in working class 1950s Britain. My dad’s parents slept in the kitchen (with a curtain round the bed for privacy), which was also the room that most “living” was done. The three kids shared a single small room, with both teenage boys sharing a double bed, their older sister got her own single bed, and she stayed there until she married and moved out in her early twenties. I remember seeing that room and even as a child it seemed cramped, no space really for anything else once the two beds were in it.

While the whole the family was living, eating and sleeping in two small room, an immaculate “front room” / parlour was kept solely for the two or three days a year where they had “company” (a family event like a wedding or funeral, or the priest visiting or something). The front room was bigger than both the others. It’s hard to comprehend the priorities that led to this sort of thing, but it was apparently extremely common in that time and place.

Only way I manage it is to use my phone or something that I have with my all the time anyway. And the planner / to-do / calendar or whatever has to be right on the front of my screen so it’s not an app I have to go check, it’s just visible all the time.

Adding stuff is hard, until you get into the habit where it becomes pretty automatic (as long as your planner/phone is always right at hand - if I walk away thinking “I’ll add that in later”, I won’t.)

My one tip is to put everything in it to begin with, it’s more effort but it gets you in the habit quicker. So if you a morning routine, you can have “make coffee / brush teeth / read lemmy” as three separate tasks, and complete them all quickly. Or if random thoughts pop into your head during the day stick them on (“put a spare USB cable in my bag / Google terrapins”). Not only does it help me remember to do stuff, but it stops rando tasks distracting me. If I feel it’s really important to check how much laundry detergent I have left, I can add a task, not stop in the middle of cooking somehting and rush off, only to come back and find dinner burnt.

For me, to-do lists work much better if I have to add and complete dozens of tasks a day. Because then it’s something that feels like it’s working and helpful, while if it’s just “remember to do that big scary important thing” it just stresses me out and I ignore it. Obviously, ymmv, and some people find having lots of tasks distracting or hard to sort (or go down the rabbit hole of categories and color codes). But if it’s something that I get regular dopamine hits from (by completing many small goals) I pay attention to it, while if it’s something that just makes me anxious or feel guilty I won’t.

Tbh, a stoned discovery that I still enjoy is chocolate chip cookies dipped in hummus.