Oh yes, I know that experience well. I’ve had to excuse myself to discretely take another pill many times.

Yep! And I can’t direct it either, which is also super frustrating. If I’m productive, it’s always in a direction my brain wants to go, not where I actually need to be productive.

It isn’t just “struggling to focus.” The same way that depression isn’t just “being sad” and anxiety disorder isn’t just “getting nervous.”

When my ADHD is at its worst, I literally become almost illiterate. As in, I read a single sentence, and by the time I finish the last few words, I have completely forgotten the rest of the sentence.

I have to read that sentence 4-6 times over and over before I actually comprehend what the meaning is. The words are being sounded out in my head, but my brain doesn’t store them in short term memory, and certainly not into long term memory.

My brain is too busy processing random other things to dedicate enough attention to the thing I am trying to read. And I’m not taking about Shakespeare or Tolstoy, I’m talking about trying to read a basic email from my manager.

Imagine the feeling you had when you were in school struggling with your toughest subject. Maybe it was math, maybe chemistry, whatever. Remember what it was like when you were focusing as hard as you could to solve a problem on an exam or a homework assignment. Remember that feeling of mental exhaustion? Where it felt like your head actually hurt, you were physically tired from how hard you were focusing? Maybe for the next hour, perhaps even the rest of the day, you couldn’t think hard about anything else?

Well that’s how I feel doing the majority of trivial tasks I have to do all the time. Getting dressed, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting my work bag together, remembering to cash a check or pick up a few groceries. Working out, texting back a friend, responding to emails, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, etc.

I start the day mentally exhausted and foggy, and I end the day even more so. And most of the things that nuro-typical folks do without hardly a thought, I have to expend final calculus 3 exam effort to do.

The most frustrating part? Sometimes, seemingly at random, my brain will just kick into gear and I will be able to focus on something for hours without any effort at all. I can’t seem to cause it to happen, I don’t know where it comes from. But on those rare days, I am a god. It actually makes me depressed, because I always think, “if I could be like this just 25% of the time, I would be unstoppable.”

Good riddance.

It would be hilarious if the accelerated aging from the supplement undid all the progress he made from all the other stuff lol.

Immutable distros are great for applications where you want uniformity for users and protections against users who are a little too curious for their own good.

SteamOS is a perfect use case. You don’t want users easily running scripts on their Steam Decks to install god knows what and potentially wreck their systems, then come to Valve looking for a fix.

Immutable distros solve that issue. Patches and updates for the OS roll out onto effectively identical systems, and if something does break, the update will fail instead of the system. So users will still have a fully functional Steam Deck.

If you’re not very technical, or you aren’t a power user and packaged apps like Flatpaks are available for all your software, then go for it. I prefer to tinker under the hood with my computers, but I also understand and except the risk that creates.

Immutable distros are a valuable part of a larger, vibrant Linux ecosystem IMO.

Learn Linux TV. Great educational channel for all things Linux.

Glad I’ve never used it.

…You are considering abandoning Libre Office because it doesn’t auto-capitalize after line breaks?

I’d give Nobara a try. I’ve been using it for about 2 years and it’s been pretty seamless. Already comes with a bunch of Linux gaming related software, like Steam, Lutris, Proton-up, etc.

It also has a bunch of gaming performance patches automatically installed.

If you’re not technically inclined at all and want a console style experience, Bazzite is probably your best bet.

All that said, most mainstream distros will give you a fine gaming experience, you just might have to do some manual fiddling and installing yourself depending on the distro and the games you’re playing.

I plan on moving to a nice Neovim setup eventually, but VSCodium is so convenient out of the box for a baby developer like me.

You must be a bot, you don’t understand the semantics. Ironic, and blocked.

The point is that it actually can be vetted.

Absolutely.

And yet, this AI expert stated that we don’t know why the AI designed the chip in specific ways. There’s a difference between understanding the rough mechanism for something, and understanding why something happened.

Imagine hiring an engineer to design something, they hand you a finished design; they cannot explain what it is, how they actually designed it, how it works, or why they made the specific choices they did.

I never made the false equivalency you claimed I did, and you also never addressed my second criticism, which is telling.

Nope, we actually have entire fields of study that focus on the brain and cognition with thousands of experts and decades of research and experimentation to effectively understand a ton about how our brains work and why we behave the way we do.

Plus, your brain is not created and owned entirely by trillion dollar megacorps with the primary incentive to use it to increase profitability.

Almost zero, but not because I believe in American democracy. I think the techno-fascist machine will grind forward regardless of Trump being in office.

“We are coming up with structures that are complex and look randomly shaped, and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better.”

Great, so we will eventually have black box chips running black box algorithms for corporations where every aspect of the tech is proprietary and hidden from view with zero significant oversight by actual people…

The true cyber-dystopia.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theoretic concept, not a psychology experiment, and cops use it all the time to successfully get suspects to rat each other out or provide confessions in exchange for certain plea deals.

🖕