The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.
Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.
EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.
There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.
> The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate.
They are still sheep. Fighting for better spot on the butcher's table.
So let me get this straight. Rather than fighting airlines for better flying conditions, they fight each other for earlier boarding time.
Not sure who said it, but consumerism truly is slavery perfected.
Maybe it's different in the US, but I fly constantly and have ever since I was a kid, and overhead storage space has never been an issue in my experience. At worst you'll have to put your bag a few seats away from your seat, but even then I usually travel with a pretty big duffle bag and have never had issues
It's different in the US. The gate agents, depending on the flight, for the last 10-30% of boarding passengers will say "we're out of room, we're checking your bags". So now you have to deal with that hassle. The lived experience is you have gate agents explicitly priming the anxiety.
OP missed the point though, also in the US, you can bring what's called a "personal carry on" and put it under the seat in front of you. Now overhead space is a non-issue. Just pack light.
>You remember when Google used to do the same thing for you way before "AI"?
[...] stack trace [...], but a plain search used to be capable of giving the same answer as a LLM.
The "plain" Google Search before LLM never had the capability to copy&paste an entire lengthy stack trace (e.g. ~60 frames of verbose text) because long strings like that exceeds Google's UI. Various answers say limit of 32 words and 5784 characters: https://www.google.com/search?q=limit+of+google+search+strin...
Before LLM, the human had to manually visually hunt through the entire stack trace to guess at a relevant smaller substring and paste that into Google the search box. Of course, that's do-able but that's a different workflow than an LLM doing it for you.
To clarify, I'm not arguing that the LLM method is "better". I'm just saying it's different.
That's a good point, because now that I think of it, I never pasted a full stack trace in a search engine. I selected what looked to be the relevant part and pasted that.
But I did it subconsciously. I never thought of it until today.
>and make my videos interesting and where can I find royalty free music and clips.
reply to commenter akulbe: >Do you think using AI for text-to-speech lessens the value of the content?
You really don't need any music soundtracks or B-roll stock-footage clips to make compelling tech content. Another problem with music is that most content creators mix it too loud which is distracting and often drowns out the voiceover and makes words unintelligible.
E.g. this (relatively new) channel about computer hardware and programming uses no music and no B-roll cuts with a AI generated voice ("Dylan" voice from ElevenLabs) and yet the quality of content allowed it to amass ~275k subscribers in less than 18 months : https://www.youtube.com/@CoreDumpped/videos
An AI gen voice is not usually ideal but it will be accepted by audiences if the native accent makes the English pronunciation too difficult for viewers to understand -- and the insights from the content itself are high quality. The content creator in the above example is from Ecuador and he said his native English voice is not good.
>What’s an example of the kind of advice that doesn’t work?
For some people struggling with chronic lifelong procrastination, the oft-repeated advice from the author such as "Action leads to motivation, not the other way around." ... and similar variants such as, "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline!" ... and other related big picture ideas such as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams' "Systems instead of Goals"
-- all do not work.
And adding extra rhetorical embellishments to the advice such as using the phrase "it's simple [...]", and using the word "[...] just [...]" as in:
- "Stopping procrastination isn't that hard to solve. It's simple. Just chop up the task into much smaller subtasks and just start on that tiny subtask. That will give you momentum to finish it."
... also doesn't work. Some procrastinators just procrastinate the initiation of starting that tiny subtask! For the few that actually do try to start with that first step, they'll quickly lose steam because of boredom/distraction/whatever and the overall task remains unfinished.
A lot of books and blogs about time management repeat the same advice that many procrastinators have all heard before and it doesn't work. The procrastinators understand the logic of the advice but it doesn't matter because there are psychological roadblocks that prevent them from following it.
EDIT reply to: >That doesn't mean the advice is bad,
I'm not saying the advice is wrong. Instead, I'm saying that some well-meaning people who give that repeated advice seem surprised that it doesn't work on some people. Because the advice givers believed "Action Precedes Motivation" worked on themselves, they automatically assume that imparting those same words to other procrastinators will also work. It often doesn't. The meta-analysis of that advice and why it sometimes doesn't work is not done because the people giving that advice are the ones who used that technique successfully. This creates a self-confirmation bias.
If somebody had “lifelong procrastination” and was routinely overwhelmed by simple tasks, my first thought would be to see if they are actually dealing with depression because it sounds like something bigger.
How is depression "bigger" that ADHD? That sounds super invalidating.
Being overwhelmed with simple task is typical ADHD behavior.
Lots of people with untreated ADHD develop depression as well. It is not either/or. Not to mention that there is a overlap in symptoms as well.
A diagnosis for ADHD will make sure that there no other physical or mental things present that could explain the symptoms instead. The will try to exclude anything else that could explain your struggles. They check for stuff like depression.
On the other hand, a depression diagnosis is just given out like candy. I never understood that.
Why wouldn't you ask WHY someone is depressed in the first place? I don't mean to invalidate people that are depressed. Sometimes that is just what is going on but it still vexes me because so many neurodivergent people will get diagnosis like "depression" because health care providers refuse to look further into it.
It is such an uphill battle get diagnosed with ADHD.
Your points are well taken, though I want to nuance them a bit. My experience(with severe ADHD-C) is that this type of advice can work. It's just that it's not something you can just decide to start doing and immediately find success at. It's just a lot more complicated to get this off the ground, but it's possible. For some complex organisational system, you need to compile that system into "ADHD byte code" and for that, you need to bootstrap a compiler. Create an incredibly simple, extensible system which can do things your ADHD brain can't on its own. Then you need to find ways to force yourself to follow that system using various hacks like alarms tied to QR codes, body doubling, regular therapy or home visits, etc. then you can start implementing more complex structure in that system. And even the simple system is not gonna be easy. It's gonna take months of trying, failing, starting over. The ADHD brain is absolutely capable of developing habits(just look at the comorbidity rates between ADHD and various types of addiction), it's just a lot of work.
I'm in the process of doing this myself, and after 8 months, with many setbacks, I kinda have a base system I'm following that's significantly improving my quality of life and ability to keep up with everyday tasks. And it's still a struggle, but it's getting easier.
I'm writing a blog post about it currently, which will be more structured. It's about how I used my software dev skills to think about and tackle my ADHD(and other issues). Not about writing actual software(although software is involved), but imagining the brain exhibiting ADHD is a software system , identifying the "bugs", and combining concepts from software dev and behavioral/cognitive psychology to fix, or at least mitigate them.
This blog post could be finished two days from now, two years from now, or never. ADHD is still hard to live with, and I'm still quite dysfunctional. I guess if I do finish it, it'll be worth reading since I'll be on to something...
better yet, share the link to your blog if you don't mind making it public so we can follow it and find the post when it's ready. (in my case you can also email me (see my profile) and i'll keep it to myself)
So since none of these things work and you're framing ADHD as being such that even getting basic tasks done can lead to failure, what do you suggest that might work?
I'm honestly curious, because I can't believe that a person having the problem this bad should just resign themselves to a life of misery and failure.
isn't the problem here that the answer is very individual. for me for example some of the above things do work, and some don't. some of the time. it's like it depends and there is no clear answer even just for myself. knowing whether i had ADHD would not make any difference. i'd still not know what works.
for example i have seen tasks lists recommended as one way to deal with ADHD. because the lists help focus. isn't breaking things down into small steps the same thing? others here with ADHD also claim that specific suggestions work for them. so this isn't clear cut, and it doesn't make sense to just dismiss the suggestions.
you are right, there is more than just getting started. boredom and distractions are a problem too. but they are also a problem for "normal" people.
seems to me that the only thing we can do is to list a number of possible approaches, and let everyone pick what works best for them.
so back to the original question: what does work for people with ADHD?
Not for everyone with ADHD. Only for 70% but that is still pretty good.
Besides that, again understanding how their brains work.
Neurotypical people don't have executive dysfunction. If they have a task that they know how to do, have the means to do, know they need to do, have the time to do and want to do, they can... just do it.
In fact neurotypical people can't even imagine it being any other way. For me with ADHD this sounds like a super power that I can't even comprehend having.
To simplify it very much, the ADHD brain is chronically understimultated. It lacks dopamine.
So easy boring tasks can be insanely painful. That is why stimulants work so well. It is not to get us "high", it so so we get the same level of stimulation as a neurotypical person watching paint dry.
But, we can still get over-stimulated as well so it is a balance act.
Neurotypical people mostly manage time and exhaustion, I guess but managing ADHD is managing your level of stimulation and focus and time tertiary.
You need to build activities into your routine that stimulate you, both mentally and physically. Washing your clothing can be much more taxing for you that fixing that complex bug no one else can figure out. ADHD can make the hard things easy and the easy things hard.
So yeah, ultimately every human is different and what works for one might not work for another. Yes some advice or trick for neurotypical people might also work for someone with ADHD but if you don't understand yourself you will not know what to user and what to dismiss and only hurt yourself.
This looks like an answer from a procrastinator that actually developed a system to ensure they continue procrastinating long-term. Sure, suggestions of systems that could help with that won't help without a sometimes descomunal effort. That doesn't mean the advice is bad, just that it's hard and most people won't be able to overcome lifelong procrastination.
Your brain does not work the same way as my brain works. I am sorry, I know this is hard to believe but you will develop some actual emphathy once you accept the fact.
General advice for running a marathon will not for for someone who has no legs. I can't will my brain to work differently than it does. I can just learn to cope with my ADHD brain. And you being judgemental about it will not change that.
> Your brain does not work the same way as my brain works. I am sorry, I know this is hard to believe but you will develop some actual emphathy once you accept the fact.
I am also sorry but I do have ADHD and I'm no different than any other human being, and so aren't you. Many people just deal with it much better than you, but at least it means it is possible. Nobody said it is easy but people with ADHD have a tendency to think that people doing what they need to do have it easy, "they just do it". Well, no. That is not how it works. It is hard for everybody.
Now that attitude is just mean to people with ADHD. Attitude like that is one of the reasons why people with ADHD like me, have to needlessly suffer in a society dismissing my mental disorder or pretending it doesn't exist.
I am sorry but the reality is that most people in this world do not have any executive dysfunction. They can just do things.
They often do not want to do things. They will often choose to do the easy or more pleasant task but they do not have the same struggle someone with ADHD has.
The world is not fair. Yes, you can still achieve your goals with ADHD but you will have to go about it differently. The first step is in accepting yourself and leaning into your strengths and weaknesses.
>And where the training data for your AI advice comes from?
It seems like the unstated assumption in that question assumes that the world totally depends on the information from small independent blogs like this thread's article. I.e. all other information sources would be derivatives of the independent blogs.
There are many other sources of organic info to feed AI training. Examples:
- transcripts of Youtube videos. E.g. somebody (maybe a travel agent or a well-traveled vacationer) records a video giving advice and uploads it to Youtube. Google auto-transcribes the audio and feeds the text to the training algorithm.
- AI assistants used by normal people to "analyze/summarize information" can feed that same data to the AI cloud. E.g. a travel agent types out an email giving advice to a customer. That customer then submits that same email content (or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox) to enable the customer to ask the AI assistant, "Is this travel advice good? Is there anything this travel agent overlooked?"
Of course, the travel advisor would want to limit his "proprietary and valuable travel knowledge" to only his direct clients in that private email but they stop the customer from exposing it to AI assistants.
The common theme is that AI engines can insert themselves in between many types of communication between people. Those are the scenarios where you can think creatively about where all the new training data will come from. If AI assistants are used as mediators in private communication, information (including "travel advice") can "leak out" into the public. Independent blogs are a good source -- but they're not the only source.
Both examples has nothing to do with an open and free internet. Meaning I cannot trust AI at all. All those examples of data source here, also in the other replies, using mainly highly biased sources. Wikipedia (biased by a small group of mods), YouTube filtered by Google itself, pasting customer travel advice email heavily violates GDPR, social forums also funneled.
If we loose organic sites, we loose freedom.
Fair enough, organic sites does mean the information there is correct, but still it is open and free, so organic sites can be treated as Gaussian distributed.
Not seeing how pasting text with no personal identity information would violate GDPR.
E.g. someone sends an email saying "For your career prospects, I think you should learn Rust instead of COBOL."
Copy&pasting that into AI or an AI scanning that sentence with no identity information isn't going to violate GDPR. There's no personal data to violate. (If the AI companies deliberately want to ignore privacy laws and want to secretly attach personal data to that "Rust/COBOL" sentence, then yes, that violates GDPR.)
EDIT reply to : >or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox
That auto-scan scenario still doesn't require the AI to save the personal identifiers attached to text fragments. Many ways to do that without violating GDPR. Consider how today's global spam filters "auto scan" customers' incoming emails to automatically categorize some of them for the customers' "Junk folder" without any intervention or violation of GDPR.
Because the other languages & with bigger runtimes and more comprehensive standard libraries such as Java applets, Microsoft Silverlight, Macromedia Flash that were promoted for browsers to create "rich fat clients" were ultimately rejected for various reasons. The plugins had performance problems, security problems, browser crashes, etc.
Java applets was positioned by Sun & Netscape to be the "serious professional" language. Javascript was intended to be the "toy" language.
In 1999, Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest() to IE's Javascript engine to enable Outlook-for-web email that acted dynamically like Outlook-on-desktop without page refreshes. Other browsers copied that. (We described the early "web apps" with jargon such as "DHTML" DynamicHTML and "AJAX".) In 2004, Google further proved out Javascript capabilities for "rich interactive clients" with Gmail and Google Maps. Smoothly drag map tiles around and zooming in and out without Macromedia Flash. Even without any deliberate coordinated agenda, the industry collectively begins to turn Javascript from a toy language into the dominant language for all serious web apps. Javascript now had huge momentum. A language runtime being built into the browser without a standard library like Javascript was prioritized by the industry more than the other options like plugins that had a bigger "batteries included" library. This overwhelming industry preference for Javascript happened before Node.js for server-side apps in 2009 and before Steve Jobs supposedly killed Flash in 2010.
The situation today of Node.js devs using npm to download "leftpad()" and a hundred other dependencies to "fill in the gaps" of basic functionality comes from the history of Javascript's adoption.
Even in a good standard library, oddities arise. Many praise Go for its standard library but then there is its time format that raises an eyebrow: 01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700
>"Self-dealing [...] convert some government supported PhD thesis work [...] the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work [...]
Your 2001 essay isn't a good parallel to OpenAI's situation.
OpenAI wasn't "publicly funded" i.e. with public donations or government grants.
The non-profit was started and privately funded by a small group of billionaires and other wealthy people (Elon Musk donates $44 million, Reid Hoffman, etc collectively pledging $1 billion of their own money).
They miscalculated in thinking their charity donations would be enough to recruit the PhD machine learning researchers and pay the high GPU costs to create the AI alternative to Google DeepMind, etc. Their 2015 assumptions about future AI development costs were massively underestimated and now they look like bad for trying to convert it to a for-profit enterprise. Instead of a big conversion to for-profit, they now will settle with keeping a subsidiary that's for-profit. Somewhat like other entities structured as a non-profit that owns for-profit subsidiaries such as Mozilla, Girl Scouts, Novo Nordisk, etc.
Obviously with hindsight... if they had to do it all over, they would just create the reverse structure of creating the OpenAI for-profit company as the "parent entity" that pledges to donate money to charities. E.g. Amazon Inc is the for-profit that donates to Housing Equity Fund for affordable housing.
>uncollected tax revenues for economically valuable activity.
Taxes are on profits not revenue. The for-profit OpenAI LLC subsidiary created in 2019 would have been the entity that owes taxes but it has been losing money and never made any profits to tax.
Yesterday's news about switching from for-profit LLC to for-profit PBC still leaves a business entity that's liable for future taxes on profits.
>The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
Is there a notable company with enterprise sales that's successful without sales commissions?
Companies in the past have tried a "flat salary no commissions" comp structure for salespeople before and it doesn't work even though intuition seems to tells us that it should. The thinking goes something like... "If salespeople are paid a good salary and therefore aren't under any pressure to meet any quotas to earn a high income, that mental freedom should allow them to sell."
What actually happens is that fixed salaries for sales positions attracts underperformers who can't sell and simultaneously, makes the job not attractive to "rainmakers" who know they're worth more than the fixed salary.
... But 2 years after that story, they changed their policy and had to pay sales commissions again. They eventually learned what previous companies already figured out: variable pay for salespeople works the best.
Yeah no doubt you have to have performance based compensation but that's exactly what equity and bonuses are for everyone else. Sales people are special in getting large amounts of cash comp in addition to equity.
>Sales people are special in getting large amounts of cash comp
Not sure what you mean by "getting large amounts of cash comp" as if it was a given. Co-founder clarified their base pay is lower. If they don't sell, they won't get large amounts of cash comp.
What's the alternative idea you have in mind for compensation? How does one re-divide the pie to be more "egalitarian" to the fixed-salary $200k non-sales employees that doesn't lower the compensation to salespeople and make the job less attractive to rainmakers?
Sales people that don't sell just get fired, that's the thing about being such a quantifiable role. So in practice at a startup with a hot product you end up with a team of sales people receiving huge amounts of cash comp.
Everyone in in a well run startup org gets performance based compensation in the form of increases in salary, bonus, and equity.
There's no reason sales people couldn't be compensated in the same way. The reason they're not is just that it's considered an 'industry standard' to reward instantly with cash.
Sales people have themselves a sweet deal they're loath to give it up whether or not it's in the best long-term interests of the company or even themselves. It's not a terrible thing but it does seem an anachronism that will go away.
>Everyone [...] gets performance based compensation in the form of increases in salary, bonus, and equity. There's no reason sales people couldn't be compensated in the same way.
There is a reason and it's based on the external market dynamics that the company itself can't control. The potential candidate salespeople can see/compare how other companies pay for sales.
Whatever principled stance the company wants to take on compensating salespeople in a different way than "industry standard" e.g. "same salary + same bonus as the devs" or "flat salary no commission" etc ... those idealistic plans still have to compete in the marketplace with other companies paying high sales commissions. Therefore, if the more egalitarian sales comp structure means the "rainmakers" are choosing other companies instead of yours, it's a moot point.
Sales commissions aren't an "industry standard" just because they're an "industry standard" type of circular reasoning. It's an industry standard because other compensation methods for salespeople that pay them like all the other non-salespeople don't work so most successful companies converge on paying high commissions for high performers. A lot of non-salespeople don't understand this so it seems like paying commissions for sales positions is arbitrary and unnecessary and therefore, "unfair". As a dev, I used to think sales commissions that exceeded my salary were ridiculous but having attempted sales myself, it now makes perfect sense.
"It's an industry standard because other compensation methods for salespeople that pay them like all the other non-salespeople don't work ..."
[citation needed]
I think it's more accurate to say that it's an industry standard because it works, not because nothing else can work. There's a lot of herd mentality and (much more reasonably) risk aversion when it comes to messing with revenue generation.
>, not because nothing else can work. There's a lot of herd mentality [...]
There is herd mentality yes, but you have to consider that there have been a lot of startups founded by devs who rejected herd mentality and did try to compensate salespeople in a non-standard way. See Pluralsight CEO (a former C# .NET developer) as one example.
The timeline goes like this... When dev worked as an employee at previous company, they hated that salespeople were on commission because it's "unfair". Dev later starts his own company and thus has a chance to implement his own ideas (based on intuition instead of historical evidence) on how to fairly pay salespeople. (I.e. "there's no reason I can't just pay salespeople same as my devs"). He then sees that he can't recruit superstar salespeople or the salespeople he can hire actually can't sell. The market finally "educates" the dev-now-CEO that his intuition and mental framework about salespeople's incentives and motivations were wrong. He relents and switches to the typical commission structure that he really really didn't want to do.
There have been hundreds of years of commerce history showing how salespeople are incentivized by commissions but computer programmers that start companies are an idealistic and stubborn bunch and therefore they want to pay salespeople a different way. There's no risk aversion because they're rebellious against the status quo and are convinced they're right and "everybody else is doing it wrong". Seems like a rite-of-passage that they try their alternative idea and then eventually learn it doesn't work. Ben Horowitz's a16z blog article was aimed at those startup founders (mostly ex-developers) who thought paying commissions was completely illogical and unnecessary.
Your alternative compensation plan idea to pay a delayed annual bonus exactly like the devs is more "fair"; the problem is superstar salespeople aren't interested in it. They don't have to be because they can just work for another company that pays fat commissions.
>I wonder why not just make it an employee-owned cooperative at that point?
I understand there are funding considerations,
The ~75 employees probably don't have enough personal money to buy out the previous investors to convert it into a true workers co-op. Reportedly ~$78 million total raised (over 3 rounds) and last round was $44 million:
The alternative of turning it into a hybrid/partially employee-owned company where the VC investors still own their % shares is still too expensive for employees to "buy" because you're supposed to value the shares at the same present price as the investors' shares. (We're not talking backdating stock options at an artificially lower price here.)
I guess one could create loans where company let's employees pay for their ownership over time. The current investors probably won't agree to that.
The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.
Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.
EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.
There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.
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