I'm nearing my 40s. In my mid-twenties I was diagnosed and over the next couple of years tried all of the usual ADHD meds and none of them were short of terrible in regard to side effects. I guess I've just learned to live with it in a way that outweighs the side effects I get from the drugs.
I was diagnosed with Shiftwork Disorder at one point in time and was prescribed Modafinil and it was incredible for the most part and had zero side-effects, but my doctor wont prescribe it for ADHD. One down-side to Modafinil is that I could get stuck on an unproductive task and would realize in hindsight that I had just been hyper-attentative to this unimportant task for hours.
Studies show Modafinil isn't effective in ADHD adults. It may have benefit in children with ADHD.
I think many prescribers give ADHD adults a high dose too soon causing side-effects. In my experience, it's best to start with a low dose and slowly increase as necessary. The myth is ADHD responds quickly, but observing hundreds of patients it takes months, not days, for benefit of treatment to develop. There's wisdom in the phrase, "start low and go slow".
Yep. What you find often is that the drug is effective right away, at a 20-30-40% effectiveness level. But over time you learn to take advantage of the benefits more effectively, and get more used to the side effects, so it tends to increase significantly in effectiveness at the same dose over 6-8 weeks much like SSRIs, not because the effects last that long, but because you use the tools to improve the tools.
I had terrible brain zaps on Strattera and didn't notice anything at all in regard to benefits. Probably because I just could not get through taking it long enough.
I think it was similar to all the early MMO's. They were a platform to create a community in a time where that was hard to do in the real world. Back when I started playing Asheron's Call there were basically two "nerds" on my school of like 1000 students and the town computer club had 5 members. It wasn't like today where you can easily find someone to play DnD or board games with and you couldn't really play video games online. Hell, how many people under 35 knows what the internet chatrooms were?
MMO's let you go online and be social and build communities. WoW did that really well back then. Eventually as things went on, MMO's got more and more tools that let you avoid building those communities. Like the dungeon finder in WoW. I think a lot of MMO's and games in general turned to letting peope get their dopamine fix from increasing numbers through RNG rather than being social.
I know people who stuck around with WoW because of the social communities they build. One of the guilds I was in 20 years ago still meets up in the real world, I know because one of my old friends still plays. I also know people who stuck around because of what is essentially the idle gambling. I became a jock of sorts back around the burning crusade release because I had to put a lot of focus into water polo training. Which meant I didn't do a whole lot "nerdy" stuff for a decade. Once I started doing "nerdy" things again it was easy to find people near me because everyone is a "nerd" these days.
There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?
Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.
Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.
Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.
As someone who used to have a WoW problem and now and then relapses, it tickles me the same way Cookie Clicker does. It’s nice to see number go up.
Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.
For many, it's an online third space. Cooperating to overcome shared challenges reinforces social ties. The game provides a weekly schedule of activities and new challenges quarterly.
My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.
Planning 40 man raids was a part time job. Everyone worked together to grind out materials for potions and stuff and you really had to work together on dungeons to get through them, whether that was acquiring better gear or practicing strategies. The payoff of working on a dungeon for a month and finally clearing a boss was so satisfying. It created real comraderie.
Grind addiction aside, the gameplay was legitimately good. PvP was compelling, raiding was compelling, even the grind was pretty fun (especially compared to your usual free-to-play MMO).
It's not WoW, but the thing that kept me playing City of Heroes for longer than I should have was a weekly game night where a group of us would get together and run characters that we only ran on those nights.
When news about the server code leak broke containment and the open servers started I was initially intrigued, but I discovered that playing with randos just wasn't as much fun.
It was a very forgiving and accessible MMO, one that really felt like playing diablo 2 on a persistent multiplayer world. That, and warcraft 3 was released not too long, and the Frozen Throne expansion the year before. So the setting and lore was fresh in people's minds.
There was no MMO like WoW before, that was a big appeal why I started after not doing homework for weeks while playing closed US beta and then later closed EU beta.
Only played casually and like a noob for a few years because I was like 12? and playing on the PC of my big brother.
They were a social network before social networks and always available IM and the gameplay provided a reason to be in the game (and therefore available to socialise with) even if you were the first/only one there.
I mean, they also had their own gameplay appeal, but I think the current player pool of WoW+FFXIV+ESO+GW is probably a more accurate reflection of how widespread the appeal of them as pure games is, while the crazy numbers of 00s WoW were about the social network aspect.
I absolutely drop quite a bit of guard if PP G&S is an option. A lot of that being because I have been on the other side (seller, selling digital goods such as dev and design) and have seen how quick PP is to yank those funds back.
Is that a good thing, or is it crazy that such a simple concept (if consumer claims they don't get a product, you provide proof of delivery or we take the money back) has been almost unique to PP for so long?
I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.
Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
> how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
I think different people benefit from it differently. Most people regardless of remote or in-office, put on their headphones and barely talk to anyone else all day, and being in the office has zero if not negative networking benefit for them.
Then there are a few "social butterflies" who know everyone in every department, and they benefit in various ways internally and externally. Internally maybe they can move a difficult cross-department project because they have friends there, which then comes back as praise and rewards. Externally maybe one of their friends get a better position somewhere else and poach them, etc. etc.
I can't speak beyond my own experiences, but yeah the "social butterfly" phenomena is also a bit of a lie.
It's rare to see someone just walk into a business as a total outsider and charm their way in. See how well they handle unfamiliar people. Most of them will stay in their bubble. When you and your unfamiliar people are all nerds, you're actually in the best position to figure them out. They try to take the easy way out with flattery. Something like: "Oh, you all are so smart I couldn't possibly comment." before running back to their people. Does that really seem like a "social butterfly" to you?
Networking is one thing, but nepotism is another. I don't like working with people who can drag everyone else down. Small businesses are more vulnerable than anywhere else, yet that's where you see it most often.
The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.
Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to say that Visual Studio had a resource editor UI, basically a frontend to a resource file - that's it.
In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...).
But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.
Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.
Not only has MFC never been at the same level as OWL, unfortunately to this day other than the short lived C++/CX, they never shipped anything comparable to C++ Builder, which shares the RAD tooling with Delphi.
Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.
When I got interested in flying I took to flight simulators and the VATSIM network[0], as I had seen mentioned multiple times that the radio work can be a difficult aspect of flying to pick up on when flying out of a towered/busy field. By the time I started, I was comfortable on the radio and pre-flight checks, and this seemed to gained quite a bit of favor from my CFI.
I'm not saying it made me a well-versed pilot, but simulating these situations can do a lot to get one going.
I got my PPL a few years ago. VATSIM and flight sim were huge tools.
I would, literally, fly my training flights a few times using full VATSIM and then show up IRL to do the same thing. It made a massive difference.
My instructor even said it makes his job so much easier. He had to do nothing with me.
I was able to cut my rental time over half. It paid for itself a dozen times over. Like literally it saved me $5k or so.
I recently gifted my yoke and controls to my GF who is getting her commerical cert. She is so excited. She is already flying her training flights using it. It's so helpful.
> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state). To be clear, the 10 was in the middle of the victims plate number, which was "34 10 DTM", not the end of it.
As stated in voxic11's comment, that is not what it did. It did more like a 34DTM.
Is that what it was asked to do? If it was, sure - the onus of accountability should be shifted to the law enforcement agency that decided to act in the way it did on potentially* matching information, as by asking in that way they would explicitly know it was only a potential match.
I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.
The way I see it their fundamental business model is not something we should tolerate. This is basically just stalking with a lot of money put behind it and barely any legal accountability. This is just not a thing we should tolerate in a free society.
In Pampano beach FL my 76 yo mother got pulled over for driving a stolen vehicle. Luckily the police had some common sense to decipher what happened. Plate swap, same make model and color.
> We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes
This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less accountable federal paramilitary/carabinieri force, ICE, resulting in the Minnesota conflict and several people getting killed.
And what lies underneath all that? Dirty Harry and a whole stack of subsequent propaganda. There's a very powerful story that the world is full of criminals and any form of police accountability (such as double checking information before acting, or taking a safety focused approach to stops which may include not doing them) is getting in the way of "fighting crime".
HN is firmly against Flock, but there are lots of people, Republicans and Democrats, who are going around demanding more surveillance to fight crime.
(The UK "ring of steel" and high presence of surveillance cameras and ANPR do not seem to have nearly this much level of problems. Here the controversy over stops is mostly good old manual racial discrimination for "driving while black")
The being tough on crime narrative ignores that police can act like criminals, have biases, enforce societal stereotypes and class systems, be incompetent or just make mistakes like any other human. Having a gun and a badge doesn't prevent any of that, thus the need for accountability. But voters also have to hold their representatives accountable for making sure police departments and justice systems do this.
I wish Garrett had been asked about his attitude towards false positives and negatives. He's previously said that he feels false positives are a better option than negatives.
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple
To be fair to Flock, from what was said in this conversation they were told to be on the lookout of a partial plate of 34DTM. Meaning, there could be some additional characters that were not originally caught. So 34DTM10 and 1034DTM could potentially both be matches. It doesn't seem to me like Flock mistranslated the plate.
> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state).
This isn't in the featured article, thanks for sharing. I see its in one of the linked articles giving more backstory.
This is still an instance of a partial match. If it was looking for an exact match of 34 DTM, it wouldn't have found the target 34 03 DTM. So more like it was searching for /*34*DTM*/ instead of /*34DTM*/
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
I am anti-Flock to the point that my friends and family roll their eyes when the topic comes up, but saying that because the image recognition software did not achieve 100% accuracy it can't be used under any circumstances is just silly.
I agree Flock shouldn't be used (I'd love to see the company bankrupt, the investors lose their money, and the founders imprisoned), but the accuracy of their software has nothing to do with why.
Weird to us, but it's not as if it's not well known to (in this case) the state of NJ, nor is there an infinite set of license plate designs, particularly for the actual letter/number size, shape, and coloring.
I never personally liked the blanket advice to "Max your 401k." For most, if achievable at all, that would be the most they can invest at all. Even though it is often recommended alongside a proper "emergency fund," that advice leaves little liquidity without major penalties.
When young and lower income (lower tax rate) the best deal is to max out Roth 401k and Roth IRA if you can. Then you'll have a lifetime of tax-free appreciation.
I understand contributing at least the amount an employer will match, and almost always much more than that. But to "max" it would be $24,500/yr which for many if feasible at all would leave little go into different investment vehicles meaning all of your money is tied behind the rules of a 401k until you can access it, or take that 10% penalty.
Maybe I'm missing something here but diversification is a pretty fundamental investment rule and I'm not sure why the advice doesn't usually follow it here. Putting everything into a "you can't touch this until you're ~55+" bucket seems like quite a risk.
But you can do a backdoor Roth IRA by maxing out your 401k and then rolling it over into a Roth IRA with recharachterization. You lose the tax benefits of the 401k but gain the tax benefits of the Roth IRA which can be a good trade depending on your tax situation.
Backdoor Roth IRAs involve making a traditional IRA contribution and not taking the deduction at tax filing time (because you can't), but then rolling over (not recharacterizing, that's something else) the traditional IRA contribution into a Roth IRA. It's completely tax free, assuming you have a $0 traditional IRA balance once the rollover is complete. The usual way to accomplish this is to roll all traditional deductible IRA balances into a traditional 401k first.
What you're kind of thinking of, but also not quite right, is called a 'mega backdoor Roth', which involves contributing to a 401k via a non-deductible contribution (which is not part of 24.5k/yr limit), then immediately rolling it over into a Roth 401k. It has to be allowed by the plan, but some plans even offer to do the rollovers for you automatically.
The Mega Backdoor basically lets you get an extra ~40k/yr of Roth contributions, if you can afford it.
You can convert your 401k to an IRA when you leave an employer. Some employers also offer in service rollovers (I think these mostly have minimum age restrictions on them though)
Right but once your traditional IRA is fully rolled over to a 401k, you can take full advantage of backdoor Roth IRA contributions regardless of income.
I have considerable Roth assets because my employer's 401k allows for the Mega-backdoor, which means I can put $30k+ per year of after-tax income into 401k (beyond the normal pre-tax contributions) perform a Roth-in-plan-conversion on the after-tax assets, and then roll it out into a Roth IRA.
You can’t personally contribute to a 401k beyond the limit, even after tax. Your employer can add extra via match or profit sharing contributions. What are you talking about?
For 2026, the 401k limits are $72,000 overall, and $24,500 for pre-tax employee contributions.
Assume an employer who matches 50% up to pre-tax employee contribution max, the result is this:
$24,500 pre-tax employee contribution
$12,250 employer match
This leaves $35,250 to the $72k limit.
Roth MegaBackdoor enabled plans allow the employee to put $35,250 of _after tax_ contributions in to fill that window, and to convert them to Roth assets. They can even be rolled out into a Roth IRA while the 401k is still active.
I have no clue why you think this relatively common plan option is, somehow, impossible.
There is no five year clock for withdrawing your own Roth contributions. Contributions (not earnings or conversions) can be withdrawn at any time with no tax or penalty.
I actually had a great session with Gemini pushing back on the "Max 401k" advice. Summarized in my own words:
- Why would I contribute tons more to my already decent 401k? If anything, I want to pull from it. I refuse to diminish the peak years of me and my family's life together just to be wealthy when I'm old and alone.
- that's a good point, but know you'll pay tax on top of 10%
- well I would have paid tax anyway if I just saved it, and 401k turned out to be more lucrative anyway. So the penalty is only 10% when tax is unavoidable timewise, paltry
- true, but you yourself just mentioned how lucrative the 401k is over time. That money will not manifest over time if you pull it now
- why would I even want to be rich when I'm old and boring anyway, life is happening for me right now
- well that depends on what you consider old, you could retire early, use SEPP to access penalty free, say at 50
- I actually wasn't aware of that as an option... The difference between my age an 50 isn't that large, at least not compared to 55/60. Very good then, perhaps I'll keep things as they are.
As is typical with AI, I can't attest to whether this is accurate, whether it's good advice, or whether I myself am financially illiterate (probably), but it did raise my confidence a bit, and legitimately talked me out of a hypothetical of using some 401k money to buy a better house.
The problem of money mattering more when you are younger is something that often appears in personal finance discussions.
One thing is consumption but another are opportunities to invest in yourself.
There is case for not saving at all when you are young (because there are always good way the money can be spent).
Here is some good discussion that touches on it (and other FIRE related topics):
>> well I would have paid tax anyway if I just saved it
The point is that as long as your money is in the IRA you can earn interest or buy stocks, sell for a profit, over and over and not pay any taxes on your gains in between.
Imagine you have $100k in a normal trading account and $100k in an IRA. You make the same trades in both and both are up $20k at the end of the year. Let's say then you want to trade out and take profit. The normal account triggers taxes on $20k worth of capital gains, so maybe it now has $115k in it. The IRA doesn't, so it still has $120k in it. Go ten years like that. At the end when you withdraw from the IRA, yes you have to pay taxes on the total gains (if it's not a Roth) BUT you had the use of that extra $5k every year you didn't pay taxes on! The whole time, all that tax money you didn't pay compounds to let you make more money with it. That's the concept. You're allowed to keep using the money that you would've otherwise had to give to the government, to make more money along the way. The final 20% you pay when you cash out is less than how much you made by compounding the tax savings and plowing them back into investments.
I think you're missing the point of IRAs too. The primary point of IRAs is that you can defer taxes from a time when you have high taxes (your working years), to a period of when you can have low taxes (retirement). That's it. Being able to trade stocks within an IRA is a side benefit. Another side benefit is no taxes on things like dividends inside your IRA. Those are not the primary benefit.
Right, so you max your 401k instead of diversifying a portion into something more liquid, and when something happens before 55 you have to take a major bite out of it just to access that money?
That would be what an emergency fund is for, in traditional financial literature. If you mean something more tragic, that's what insurance and other products are for. Even then, 401ks have exceptions for something like total disability that allows early withdrawals without penalty.
If you just mean "I want my money early", well... there's lots of ways to access retirement account money early without penalty with some planning.
I was diagnosed with Shiftwork Disorder at one point in time and was prescribed Modafinil and it was incredible for the most part and had zero side-effects, but my doctor wont prescribe it for ADHD. One down-side to Modafinil is that I could get stuck on an unproductive task and would realize in hindsight that I had just been hyper-attentative to this unimportant task for hours.
reply