Starting with the Intel 386 it became possible to run a proper operating system on consumer hardware. I can still recall the excitement with that first Redhat 3.03 book and CD I received, sitting in front of a 16MHz i386sx, craving change. I had owned a Vax 11/730, an LMI Lambda, an SGI 210GTXB, but they were just stupid expensive to run and it took a couple friends to move them.

Anthropic and OpenAI are in the same position the workstation vendors were thirty years ago. What they do is amazing, extremely desirable to those of us who create and use software, but SOOO painful price wise. While I'm writing this on my 16GB M1 Mac the Bonsai 1 bit models are downloading. I mostly use Claude Max and an Ollama cloud subscription, but if I can shift some of the work to the machine on my desk ...

I let an RTX 5060Ti go cheap a few months ago, 16GB was just not enough. I don't regret this, but I wish my income position would change. The world would be a different place if the HP Z4 in my kitchen had an RTX 6000 Pro in place of its current GTX 1060. The advent of TurboQuant makes me want to try some things on one of the Intel GPUs - maybe that entry level sedan price on the RTX 6000 Pro is no longer the real barrier to entry.

These are strange days we are living, strange days indeed ... and no reactionary pack of ninnies is going to be able to do anything. It's a fine thing, having China defending our freedom to create, eh?

I changed careers thirty years ago to get Microsoft out of my life and I've never regretted that decision.

Using Microsoft operating systems is like dating a morbidly obese person who is continually in and out of the psych ward, and they've got a cluster B character disorder, one of the really manipulative ones.

I do not understand how that company's products are not limited to historic niches that are too difficult/unprofitable to clear.

Perhaps the advent of AI is going to lower the barrier to entry for decent operating systems. The Unix based ones have always seemed easier to me, but I'm an aspie weirdo so my opinion only counts just a little.

Although the Chinese models are all considerably smaller, it's not obvious to me that they're as good or better. They could be, but I'm not convinced the benchmarks that currently exist are stressing the models enough to establish where models actually are any good.

You use the can of grue repellant in the lake to get past those.

That humans have sufficiently directional hearing is perhaps the most impressive part. Once you have that, then the rest really just follows,

However, this continues the unexpected senses in humans, one of the first discovered was that humans have a weak magnetic sense.

The potential, both in fact (if you can "see" walls and gaps by clicking then you can presumably navigate a cave even if your light source goes out) and in fiction (this one should really be obvious), is considerable.

Not sure you quite get how dopamine works.

Here's a little more detail.

Researchers a few years back ran tests. ADHDers and neurotypicals were asked to harvest berries and edible plants.

Neurotypicals tended to over-harvest and damage bushes to the point where recovery would be slow if possible at all, and tended to pick areas clean, wiping out local populations of edible plants.

ADHDers tended to move relatively quickly from area to area, harvesting a decent amount from each area but not excessively. The quantities tended to be at the sort of level that have long been established as a good balance, such that plants and populations would tend to actually do better the following year. Not only that, but they tended to gather more.

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Crofts and small farms rapidly went to three-stage and four-stage crop rotation, but different fields would be with different crops. This meant that the failure of a single crop would be much less of a survival thing.

You'd see fields with a mutitude of diverse crops, because diversity was critical. Failure was highly likely, so you localised it. Failure in one area had no meaningful impact overall. Things like the Irish potato famine and the parsnip failures across France in the 1700s were relatively rare in history. Likewise, when industrialisation wiped out cottage industries, farms that had been very successful suddenly went bankrupt and mass starvation was common. The ability to task-switch and have a large number of small projects going was essential to life at the edges.

You're absolutely right, more ADHD would have indeed curbed the excesses. The industrial revolution caused huge problems by trying to do too much with too little diversity. Which eventually destroyed the economies built around the early mills, because the markets were too easy to undermine. There was no capacity to switch. But during the IR, the obsession with coal meant nobody really looked at alternative fuels or alternative activities. Economies became tightly constricted, which was devastating when it came to global warming, but equally devastating when it came to distributing metal-devouring bacteria (which did enormous damage to infrastructure) and radioactive particles (old mill areas are still unusually radioactive).

More ADHD wouldn't have eliminated the problem, but it would have diversified the solutions and would have diversified the markets, resulting in a much more robust, much healthier marketplace and a much more robust, much healthier population.

Uh, no. As in, 100% of gatherers would be ADHD. IF they weren't, you'd be extinct within the year. 20% of the hunters would also be ADHD, because over-harvesting was also going to wipe out your food source. 100% of your explorers would be ADHD, 100% of your experimenters would be AuDHD.

ADHD was essential to survival. If you didn't want to die out, you stuck the neurotypical outside so that the wolves and other nasties actually hunting (tigers wouldn't be present) would get them. Neurotypicals were the main threat to survival.

Free speech includes lying.

No, it's more likely that girls and women learned to mask symptoms early for survival reasons.

If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, ADHD is paramount to survival because it avoids over-harvesting. Too little ADHD produces cultures prone to driving plants and/or animals extinct. ADHD is a critical stop-gap that prevents this. Studies show ADHD gatherers will not only collect more, they will do so in ways that cause far less damage, resulting in a far better second harvest and far better sustainability.

Into more modern times, ADHD was a valuable survival trait. Too little and you became vulnerable to diseases, pests, crop blight, etc. If you wanted a stable population, right the way through to the industrial era, you needed a high level of ADHD in the population.

It is only when neurotypical bosses decided that they had to micromanage everything and decided who lived and who died on the streets that you see ADHD symptoms suddenly and massively suppressed. But masking changes nothing. The levels will still be the same, they're just hidden.

It isn't. The under-diagnosis of girls is astronomical.

You are assuming ADHD is a new thing. No, it isn't. It is a survival thing. ADHD was critical in a very large percentage of the population for the bulk of the last 350,000 years. Without it, humanity would have gone extinct. It's merely not appropriate in a world in which neurotypicals make neurodiverse solutions a "bad thing".

They might drop by a little, but honestly not by much. Boys are mildly overdiagnosed for the reasons you give (but few places still medicate), girls are however massively underdiagnosed.

I never got myself into the whole "masculinity" obsession, even back in the 70s and 80s. The result of this was a discovery that computers launched me head-first through far fewer windows and pelted me with far fewer rocks. So, yeah, I was definitely seen as disposable though my childhood and teen years by pretty much everyone. (It's one reason anyone looking back at those as "golden years" is unlikely to win me over.)

Escapism is pretty much all I had at the time, and these days remains pretty much all I have - reality has grown far worse over the years and knowledge by the neurotypicals has not come with empathy but ammunition. There is guilt and shame in playing with creative writing or inventing, and the demons have got really bad on occasion, but you're right, it's not doing anyone any harm.

Both. It's best thought of as a positive feedback loop.

The algorithm seems to have been failing to scale correctly, yes. On closer inspection, it looks like the billing software treated the bytes used as K used.