I wrote a bit about what a late diagnosis for ADHD has meant for me, with an anecdote about learning to drive

#adhd #dysthymia #auditoryproceessingdisorder

https://lyonhe.art/learning-to-drive-your-undiagnosed-adhd/

had another reminder of, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time

there’s this absolutely ridiculous idea in tech culture that we should put up with abusive people with power, because who else is going to step in? That we should accept toxicity because how else are we going to improve things? And it’s absolutely forbidden to question this, to point it out

I want to be done with tech. I’ve made my income through building software for over 20 years and I’m ready to move on. LLM mania has contibuted to this, sure, toxic corpos have contributed to this, but moreso it comes down to people and culture, and the realization that it’s not healthy for me to stay among tech people

Since departing from my last salaried job 3 years ago, I’ve built up a huge list of things I might do instead, from pursuing synth/sound stuff to getting a commercial drone pilot’s license and doing stuff with computational photography and aerial cameras. Maybe even take a stab at indie games. If you’ve been working in those areas, or have left tech for doing art stuff, I’d love to chat

Anyway, as much as I like the language, I think I’m done with Rust as a community. I’ll probably continue working with Bevy for genart stuff because that’s more gamedev focused and in my experience game developers have a much better culture and tend to be much better people.

I laughed and then I cried

iykyk

Once again I lament the lack of reply controls here. If you are coming to this post to reply, know that I am not going to read it

"residential proxy network" is what you call a botnet when it's run by a corporation that will never be prosecuted for doing something that would land a 13 year old in jail for the rest of their life

AI is really the perfect reflection of American society, huh? Something that doesn't work, is built entirely on scams, but takes off anyway because the only people who have the ability to do anything about it are neither able nor interested in becoming able to evaluate anything on technical merits, because we live in a post-truth culture, and live under an economy that can only understand limitless growth and consumption.

This sounds like Asimov's Laws of Robotics, except it holds human creators legally accountable if they deploy engagement-maximizing features that foreseeably harm vulnerable users.

Why Congress Must Codify a Chatbot Duty of Care
https://techpolicy.press/why-congress-must-codify-a-chatbot-duty-of-care

too big to fork is the software equivalent of too big to fail

a year or two ago we were "incurious"

now we're "fearmongering"

so it's working, keep it up

I'm seeing some people I used to trust on LinkedIn start to realize the whole LLM coding thing ain't working out like they thought it would. Not many, but it's a start

It is so, so tempting to post receipts of their all-in posts, calling the rest of us “incurious" over the realizations they are now coming to, with a demand for a retrospective "how are you ensuring you won't fall for this type of bullshit again?”

The bridges are already gone, they burned those unintentionally, and I'm not sure they realize that, yet

I updated my “Living Cyberpunk" page with a new item about this incident

https://lyonhe.art/living-cyberpunk/

thankfully my router has a parental controls thing and so I can assign the dishwasher to a persona which is forbidden from using the network, and I can disable that when needed

seriously though, companies selling "smart" devices should be held liable for the damage their devices do when compromised

RE: https://post.lurk.org/@loriemerson/116698844776482762

As a teenager, I recognized that my brain's reward system was a bit different than most people's (#adhd is a sort of dopamine dysregulation, and mine would go undiagosed for a few more decades), and I was prone to depression, so I classified both self-harm and gambling – especially the video slot machines becoming popular at the time – as _existential risks_ to my person; thanks to this it's been pretty easy to avoid either behavior (I recognize not everyone can do this with self-harm; though I've also come to recognize that I have a survivor's drive for self-preservation).

In college, I knew a number of people who got sucked into one of two E’s – ecstasy or Everquest – which I recognized as a similar existential cognitohazard and classified them similarly. I have still never played an MMO.

And as mobile tech has become entrenched in our lives, the cognitohazard of app-based dopamine magnets is something I've been wrestling with for nearly two decades.

So when the LLM chatbots were first introduced a while back, tuned for sycophancy straight out of the silicon valley addiction playbook, it was pretty easy to say, nope, no good will come *to me* from any of this – and that's *before* you start getting into the tangle of ethical/environmental/political issues surrounding the tech.

However, this personal rule is something that would make it nearly impossible to, today, get a regular programming job like I've had for most of my career. I've watched many people who a year ago accused me of being "incurious" go full-on psychotic or fascist or what because of their exposure to this technology, and if I wanted to continue the career I've had for two decades with a salaried job, I would have one of the hardest times of that career in finding such employment without capitulating to something I consider an existential threat.

I've considered exploring what a disability exemption would look like (yes this is messy, but considering that I have a prescription to highly-regulated stimulants to function in our society I think it could be justified), but despite not being a religious person – though I am a fairly spiritual one – it looks like there's another path for exemptions.