I used to wonder, in the early days of the transformation, how much was Drew changing moderation and selection criteria, and how much was becoming popular enough to attract a critical mass of political junkies. It's been a long long time, but my memory says it was a fast transformation, days or weeks rather than months, but not overnight, and could have cut either way. I sent a few emails, never got any response, and quit logging in as often, and soon not at all.

Same here. Fark's only redeeming quality was poking fun at everything and everyone. Then the political junkies swamped it, and I stopped visiting. I'd forgotten all about it til now. Tried my old login. Says the password has expired.

*shrug*

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.

So can I. The next supermarket is right across the street. The next one right beside the first one, and a third across the next street. Still, I like the cargo trike, because I don't need to carry stuff.

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.

Me.

I solved this problem by a) riding an incumbent cargo trike for grocery shopping and b) not liking ice cream.

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.

Did AWS use Grok to generate the billing sheets or the code for handling billing?

I'm serious. The errors reported look suspiciously like AI hallucinations or a signed integer being treated as unsigned.

Your math is wrong. Not the actual numbers, but the way you apply them. Your idea is to build big power plants rivaling what you know from steam turbine powered based power plants (how the steam is heated, coal or nuclear or fusion or whatever the heat source du jour might be, is completely irrelevant). But that's not how Wind and Solar work. If you just cover the public parking spaces of Houston, TX with solar panels, you would not take a single farmer's land, and still, you would be able to power the whole city of Houston. It begs the question though why Houston needs that much parking, and if that's not the real waste of space. By the way, that's what Portugal does with parking spaces in the country - cover them with solar panels. It cools the tarmac below, improves the ambient temperature in the towns, and generates energy. And you can build glass houses with solar panels instead of pure glass sheets. There are solar panels which have 50% transparency. They provide enough light for the plants in the glass house, and still generate surplus electric energy.

Denmark started with wind turbines 40 years ago, and now, Wind accounts for more than 50% of Denmark's electricity generation. In Germany, Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricity (the high prices for electricity in Germany have very bureaucratic, and quintessentially German reasons with braindead legislation, but that's another chapter). Ah yes, biogas currently generates the same amount of electricity in Germany as Nuclear did the last year before it was switched off. And then there is balcony power - a concept completely alien to the U.S., but widespread in Europe. For about 300 EUR, you can get a small do-it-yourself solar power plant, and legally assemble it yourself and plug it into your wall socket (any wall socket will do). No licensed electrician required. It's limited to 800 Wp - but hey, free energy for everyone. In a town with 10,000 apartments, this would be akin to a 8 MWp power plant for the price of 3 million bucks - without any tax payer money. If you want to pay an electrician, buy 10 of them. Or 30. And he will do the connection to the grid. For 10,000 EUR, you get 25 kWp solar power, which should cover most of your electric energy needs. If the 20,000 households in a medium sized town would do it, we are talking 500 MWp. That's the usual size of a nuclear reactor.