I'm essentially the same way, with the caveat that I do occasionally go back and find something from one of those archived bookmarks. Maybe a couple times a year at most, which is all the validation my lizard brain needs to consider this a critical practice that I will continue doing without questioning for the rest of my life.

I'm not the person you're condescending to, but it is possible IMO to simultaneously recognize the security value in deny-by-default and Principle of Least Privilege while also finding it challenging to work with AWS's IAM permissions in practice.

I'm sure I'm slightly misremembering/exaggerating, but RAV4s of recent years seem like a similar size to how I recall the Highlander from that time period, and now Highlanders are more like how I recall those older 4Runners(?).

If you don't mind my asking, is your caution about benzodiazepines out of concern for the addiction potential, the long-term effects (e.g. dementia risk), or something else (or a combination)?

I genuinely don't understand what point you think this article is making that backs up what you've said here -- would you mind elaborating?

Full disclosure, I am diagnosed with ADHD and take stimulants daily, and initially felt pretty defensive when reading your comments here and starting to read that article. I have some problems with the article and generally find that author pretty insufferable, but the article concludes that the risks of medically-supervised stimulant use are low enough that the author personally finds stimulants worth prescribing to patients who benefit from them.

Even Section 1 which you specifically referenced, and which admittedly made me pretty annoyed until I read it a few times, and even though the author certainly seems to be trying to insinuate that ADHD isn't real, doesn't really seem to be actually backing up that point. His main point or objection seems to be that ADHD is diagnosed using arbitrary subjective criteria rather than objective measurements like other spectrum disorders (isn't blood pressure also a normally distributed trait, where we* "arbitrarily" draw a line and say people on the wrong side of that line have hypertension and should be prescribed beta blockers?).

I'll admit to feeling a little argumentative after reading some of the comments here but I do genuinely want to understand these points better, and I feel like I must be missing some fundamental context or point that the article is making.

*for various definitions of "we", since different countries and organizations define hypertension differently.

Please don't be hard on yourself for a vacation not "fixing" whatever is ailing you. If you're depressed or have ADHD or similar, you should consider seeking professional help (e.g. therapy and/or medication, if appropriate), and "just take a vacation and turn off your phone" is about as helpful as telling a diabetic to "just produce more insulin".

> To my knowledge, you cannot scan the brain of someone with ADHD and point out an abnormality associated with the disorder. Yet we give 8 year old boys stimulant medication because they can't sit still in a classroom for hours a day.

I'm not well-versed in the risks of stimulants given to children so I'm not commenting on that specifically, but I want to push back on the insinuation (if I understood you correctly) that ADHD or its treatments are any less legitimate because we haven't yet figured out if we can use brain imaging to diagnose and measure treatment efficacy.

It would be great if all medical disorders could be externally measured and quantified objectively, but when they're not, we often rely on evaluating and diagnosing them based on the (often somewhat more subjective) impact of their symptoms. That's not ideal, but it seems better than nothing to me.

Full disclosure: I'm also diagnosed with ADHD and take daily stimulants. Apologies if I came off as combative, I'm relatively new to my ADHD journey and genuinely curious to learn more about the medical/scientific aspects.

This is exactly where I'm at. I'm a professional SDE and I'm pretty damn good at writing code and solving problems at all kinds of different levels of complexity and abstraction, although professionally I mostly write Java code and build web services and that kind of thing.

When I got into electronics and embedded development recently as a hobby, I started with Arduino. And for the vast majority of my projects, which are mostly simple smarthome IOT type things, or little toys for my kiddo, the Arduino framework is just fine and the ecosystem of libraries is great.

But when I recently started a project that was much lower-level (in fact, it was your example exactly -- driving pins with cycle-accurate timing), where I didn't need those libraries, I used ESP-IDF without Arduino.

I'm also just lazy, and just don't want to deal with more complexity than I have to.

I agree with this, and disagree with the parent comment's framing of this as "going outside the chain of command", but I do think that if you have a healthy relationship and open communication with your direct manager, I can't think of many reasons not to tell your direct manager something before telling your skip-level (or above), as a courtesy and an opportunity for them to address the issue first but not because of some rigid expectations around "command structure".

Of course this isn't a hard rule, if I'm having a conversation with my skip-level and some topic happens to come up that I haven't spoken with my manager about before, I'm not necessarily going to hold back just because of that, I can follow up with my manager later. But if something's bothering me or I have some feedback or something like that, I'd generally chat with my manager about it before anyone above them.

This is super org-dependent -- my entire org has completely switched to Slack, I only use Chime for meetings now (except for the occasional recruiter or someone outside my org who will ping me on Chime).

Oh totally, I can't dispute that. It's just good reading in general, but is more of a response to the grandparent comment stating "the software industry is a complete joke in terms of quality control". I think that's probably not a completely off-base assessment of quality control on average in the tech industry, but the point is it's not like no one knows how to do better; rigorous QA processes exist, but it's a huge tradeoff between cost/agility/etc and the expected cost/damage of not getting it right.

This topic reminds me of this relatively old (but still super interesting) article about the team that worked on the space shuttle's onboard computer systems and the rigorous processes they followed to ensure correctness and safety: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff.

> With the possibility of almost uniquely identifying us on the web through fingerprinting... Google, of all companies is in the perfect position to know that my web request was made by me... And therefore I'm not a robot.

The article explains that this is part of what reCAPTCHA does, e.g.:

> Finally they combine all of this data with their knowledge of the person using the computer. Almost everyone on the Internet uses something owned by Google – search, mail, ads, maps – and as you know Google Tracks All Of Your Things. When you click that checkbox, Google reviews your browser history to see if it looks convincingly human.

But your point is otherwise right in that it's used for ML training, which Google admits as another commenter pointed out.

It's been mentioned a few times already but I just wanted to +1 the suggestion of considering therapy. And I don't even mean that in a "you sound like you need therapy" sense; I think therapy can be a great tool for anyone trying to improve the way they handle stresses like this, regardless of whether you think anything is "wrong" with you (e.g. depression, anxiety, etc). I have struggled with fairly severe anxiety at points in my career/life, but therapy has just generally helped me a lot with handling stress, not taking things so personally, fighting procrastination, not coupling so much of my self-worth to my work performance, etc.

The way you put this really resonates with me. Often when I'm procrastinating it's because a task seems/feels/sounds really daunting, but the "daunting" feeling is because I'm imagining just how damn hard it's going to be to do the task perfectly. It creates this mental barrier to getting started because completing it perfectly (or, to my expectations) seems too hard.

Breaking out of this by realizing that "perfect" is not the goal, and setting more attainable sub-goals for myself is key, but hard.