I’m an uber driver. The pay is atrocious, but the work is super easy and I feel energized after a long shift. I may go back to tech, but in a talking job like sales or support. I’m just not built to write code all day.

I stopped taking all the stimulants at some point before being fired. Even after the panic attacks stopped, I still couldn’t get to a point where I could write code more than two hours per day. As a full-time dev I was expected to account for 9 total hours including 8 billable hours per day. It never worked out.

But I stopped taking the stimulants and discovered my productivity was just as high without them. Which with code means still pretty low. But any other kind of work I can go twelve hours without issue. I’m really productive so long as I’m not making precise and articulated decisions all day.

I’m an excellent driver, but the rules don’t change. Driving is the same set of rules every day, every road condition. There’s like maybe 150 rules to memorize and then all I have to do is implement them perfectly. As an autistic I’m really fucking good at that.

Programming is like doing construction, except:

• You never build the same thing twice
• The tools change daily
• The building code changes daily
• The properties of the materials change daily
• Physics changes daily

I’ve done a lot of different jobs and programming is easily the most mentally taxing. I always say if you’re doing the same thing twice as a programmer, you’re doing it wrong because you could have automated something.

I just can’t be that creative all day every day.

My mental health increased massively when I stopped being a programmer.

I had to do neurofeedback training to reduce the beta wave amplitude if my brain. They were three standard deviations above normal even when I was having an incredibly calm day.

The neurofeedback clinician had me skip my ritalin for a few days before doing that baseline scan. The day of the scan I felt a calm like nothing I’d felt for months. Even in that state my beta waves were three standard deviations above normal.

The neurofeedback training put a stop to my panic attacks.

Anyway, beta waves are used in logical decision-making (the thing a programmer does 10,000 times per day), and they’re also used in fight or flight response. Good thing to know about how the brain works.

Luckily as a software dev I had the money for the neurofeedback. I spent about $7k on that in total, in chunks of about $1500 at a time.

Yeah, childhood.

There would be a lot more respect between people, if everyone was in an iterated game with everyone else and they knew it.

Yeah next time they go for a coup they need to try bringing weapons. Silly Republicans, always doing coups wrong.

zero

How do you figure Trump might get some kind of fractional extra term?

That’s the one thing old people just don’t do: they won’t read what’s presented on the screen.

I think it comes from growing up before GUIs, so they think of an interface as a set of buttons on a console. There was very little reason to read an interface back when they were all physical; you either knew what each button did or you didn’t and you only had to memorize it once.

Like, the controls of a T-38 tank are always the same. The controls of a ‘57 Chevy are always the same.

Once GUIs came into play, people started interacting with orders of magnitude more control interfaces, so the concept of “there is no manual; the interface is self-documenting” came into existence.

Now you’re supposed to learn the interface and use it on the first encounter, which means reading what the interface is saying.

Jesus christ

The suggestion was for a little notebook, not a printout.

Have you tried a little notebook?

A notebook is more of a “thing” than a piece of paper is. A notebook is the sort of thing a person can keep on a bookshelf. A sheet of paper is gonna live on a flat surface until it’s thrown away.

Try the notebook.

I need to get out of my depression. I didn’t realize I was depressed until I had a dream, just now, where I ran into an old college classmate. She was telling me how depressed she was and I was just thinking “but your life is like mine”.

I just self-administered the IHQ-9 and it indicates me as having “severe depression”. So I need to get that figured out.

In the past I’ve taken medication for it, but I can’t seem to find any arrangement that allows me to take the medication continually. This really worries me. My life is a total failure including financially.

A family member has been helping me financially but it’s ruining their finances to do so.

Anti-piracy technique for the game X-Wing: the game was 15 floppies which could easily be copied, so it required a copy of the manual present to start.

I’m trying to start x-wing. Can you tell me the third letter of the fourth word of page 57?

Try cleaning your mouse ball, see if that helps.

I wasn’t talking to you

It’s a horse’s nose you sicko

I’d made the default desktop wallpaper just some text that says “try typing man man in the terminal”

I would definitely eat cultured meat as long as it’s not too expensive.

Cómo cara blanca, digo que chinga tu racismo. Es la ruina y la derrota del gente. Juntos, se puede. Divididos, caímos.

That’s terrible! What’s your livelihood?

It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.

“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.

Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.

But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).

This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.

Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.

When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.

And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.

For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.

That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.

Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.

Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.

And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.

But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.

We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.

This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.

This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.

We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.

But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.

These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.