something_else

I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD. When I look back on my life, especially childhood and early adulthood, it really should have been much more obvious. However it never really occurred to me that a lot of my troubles could be caused by ADHD until the last year or two. I thought a lot of the stuff I struggled with was just 'normal' and that everybody was like that. Anyway, I've been prescribed Elvanse (Vyvanse for people in the US) and it will be arriving shortly. I have tried Ritalin and Vyvanse a couple of times before (just as a one off) and based on that I feel like consistently taking these meds has the potential to be life changing. It was truly insane to experience what it is like to have a mind that just does what you want it to do instead of fucking around all of the time and self-sabotaging you at every turn. I also notice that they significantly improved my social anxiety and made me realise that most of my social anxiety came not from shame, but from a lack of ability to trust my mind to pay attention and behave during conversations. I'm curious if anybody here both has ADHD, and has experience with ADHD meds and the effects they had? Thanks

You're not entirely wrong, but it's flexible enough that you can give it specific design requirements which are unique to you and it'll implement them. You can also give it several other websites as inspiration and it'll create something unique that draws inspiration from all of of them.

Thanks for sharing your experience! I relate a lot to the bullying part. What meds did you try out of curiosity? And re people pleasing, I had people pleasing symptoms when I was a late teen, but I'm a lot better with that now than I used to be. Interestingly I find the meds make me people please less. I realised a lot of my people pleasing was because I found it easy to be a people pleaser as a backup when my brain couldn't focus on or keep track of a conversation well enough to push back on stuff I disagreed with. The thing that really convinced me to go and get an ADHD test though was thinking about how chaotic, disorganised, impulsive and loud I was as a young kid before I even started getting bullied or anything. If anything the bullying is probably what suppressed my external ADHD symptoms because I became very quiet after that, but still extremely disorganised. By disorganised I'm talking like carrying a schoolbag full of everything I needed for the entire year instead of only taking what I need every day, no folders per subject, my school bag was just one big pit of random papers. Forgetting to do homework every week, or leaving it to the last minute. Locking parent's keys inside the house or car. Once I flooded the house because I started running a bath and forgot about it. I would talk about random shit that interested me for hours but couldn't hold a basic conversation. I find it hard to explain that with anything other than executive dysfunction, it can't really be learned behaviour because I was young and both my parents are pretty normal, loving, and not controlling at all. At least in the UK, having symptoms when you are young (between 5 and 10) is almost a requirement for getting diagnosed because they want to ensure it is genetic and not learned.

You can make it do other stuff, but if you give it no design guidance it defaults to this colour scheme

Me: "The outcome is comparable because X and Y" You: "No it isn't" Me: "Why" You: "Because it isn't, just saying it is doesn't mean it is" ===== That you say I am wrong, doesn't mean I am wrong. You need to actually address my argument: X: Billions of years of evolution encodes massive amounts of data into a human brain. This is comparable to LLM training on billions of rows of data. Y: LLMs learn a new programming language through examples, practice and documentation. This is comparable to humans learning a new programming language through examples, practice and documentation. I can think of plenty of ways to poke holes in my own argument here, it has flaws. But it's not worth my time if you're just going to state I'm wrong without engaging with what I'm saying at all.

Why?

A human can't suddenly just program in C++ without somebody teaching them how to do it, or at least having access to documentation. So yes, we need examples too. Billions of rows of training data is to an LLM what billions of years of evolution is to a human brain. The end result is the same, both end up in a state where they are capable of learning a previously unseen programming language from documentation and trial and error.

You've changed the claim. You started with "LLMs cannot code in a language not in its training data", now it's "they cannot code obscure languages with insufficient examples", those are different claims. Of course if the model can't code in a language for which it has no examples of. The same is true of humans, so that point doesn't really do the work you need it to do in an AGI argument. The point is that you can load examples into the model's context and it will use those to write in a language it hasn't seen during training. That's what they did in this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.14501) and you can see an excellent summary in the snippet image below. ----- On top of this, 53.8% is the result a 'chatbot' LLM gets. When they gave the task to a coding agent LLM and provided it with documentation it could search as needed (like a human would) it jumped to 77.6% accuracy. The coding agent can also employ trial and error approach where it will compile some code, check the output of the compiler, edit its attempt to fix any error messages, remember it's mistake in context, and then try again, so it will build up an even better picture of how the new language works as it goes.

Ehm, I'd be very surprised if that were literally the case. I suspect it will store the syntax rules in its context and use that to write code.

They literally can. Especially in agentic form. You keep making the same assertions that are just categorically wrong. Taking the big picture view still requires you to have an accurate understanding of the technology

This is just wrong. LLMs capture semantics extremely well or they would not be able to write a coherent sentence

A significant chunk of many white collar jobs can be done within the domain of language + software tool usage, which is what LLM models are good at. Software is where it’s most impressive just now, and also where it’s been applied most readily because tech bros can adapt to this stuff quickly, but it’s certainly far from the only field it’s capable in Up to 150 seats you can get the team plan which is $20/m for standard seats and $110/m for premium seats per dev. Beyond 150 people you need enterprise where it’s metered, but 150 people covers the vast majority of companies. Even when it’s metered, I suspect most devs would rarely go above $500/m in usage tokens, which is more than enough to allow them to be 4-5x as productive. It’s still very worth it for companies

I’m taking Elvanse 50mg right now It’s a very smooth and slow release stimulant which lasts 14hrs Other stimulants like Adderall hit hard and fast for like 4hrs, that’s not available in the UK Ritalin/Methylphenidate is somewhere in between depending on the formulation, usually 8-12 hour release but it tends to be less “smooth” than Elvanse

It's more like "hire 2 senior devs who each have a team of 3 junior/mid-level devs working with them" versus "hire 2 senior devs who each get a 100-200$/m AI subscription that you can set up for them in 15 minutes" Both of these probably have equivalent output just now, but 100-200$/m is much cheaper than 3 junior/mid-level devs. Your final point is somewhat valid, you are kind of held hostage by the AI company. But that happens all of the time in business. Old developers were held hostage by Google or a JetBrains license. It's just a cost the company has to pay for a tool so that you can do your job at a competitive level.

Can you explain in what ways you think an LLM agent does not have human level intelligence? I don't really disagree, in some ways they are not as capable as humans. But in some ways they are more intelligent I think. Again, intelligence is not some single metric. You can be intelligent in some aspects and dumb in others. Yes, they can! The easiest proof of this is that most tech companies are using LLM coding agents on their PRIVATE codebases which the LLM has never seen during training. It loads what it thinks are the important parts of the codebase into its context and builds an internal model which it can then use to complete novel tasks within a codebase it has never seen before.

You've essentially answered "how do you define intelligence?" with "I define intelligence as intelligence." AGI is an equally vague term, so if you want to use it as your criterion for intelligence, you need to define what you mean by AGI too. To demonstrate why that's necessary: LLM agents check most of the boxes in the standard definition of AGI below. They possess all of the traits to some degree (some in greater measure than humans, others less) so the only thing that could disqualify them is the degree to which they're better or worse than humans at each one.

Yea, it’s just a very rigid rule-based intelligence. An AI model is more generally intelligent and can solve novel problems it hasn’t been explicitly instructed on how to solve before

It really does matter… It can do things that no child could ever do It’s not like intelligence is this unified thing, there are different ways to quantify and classify it To be honest I’m not even really sure what you actually mean when you say intelligence. It feels like we’re using different definitions and that is where this disagreement stems from. What does it mean to you for something to be intelligent?

Yea a database isn't intelligent, but AI models aren't just databases. They are trained on data but under the hood they are abstracting and modelling that data in a way which can absolutely be considered intelligent. The agent harness built around AI models is not just "data" either, it is a system that allows the model to think and plan.

Liquid calories are your friend. Look up some recipes for high calorie shakes. Routine helps a lot as well. It's a lot easier to fit calories into the day if you get up earlier and have a big breakfast.

There is a reason why you are making no progress and experiencing this “no room to breathe” feeling. There is a certain level of social skills which are a prerequisite to making progress in pickup. Without them, no matter how hard you try, you’ll never make any progress. Making progress in pickup without baseline social skills is like learning to drive in a car without tyres on the wheel. No matter how hard you try you’re just going to keep spinning your wheels, because you need the basic equipment that makes progress possible. You don’t have the baseline social skills required to make progress, and that’s why you feel like you’re drowning. Your mind is trying so hard to manage basic social functions that it has no room left to breathe, no room left to be playful, relaxed and charming. The solution here is not more approaching. It isn’t doing crazy approaches with shock value to push your limits. You need to figure out basic social rules first. You need friendships and an active social circle, you need to be around people with whom you can form deeper bonds with over time. You need lots of positive social experiences that help your brain realise that you are a person people want to be around. At that point a lot of social functions will begin to run on auto-pilot and you will free up more of your mind for charm and playfulness, which allows you to flirt with women much more naturally. You will not get this from doing endless pickup-style approaches, in fact you’re probably just shooting yourself in the foot. You need deep connections and friendships first, figure out basic social dynamics, then return to pickup

'Not giving a fuck' doesn't mean totally abandoning all social norms. Most of the dudes who pull off this vibe are actually quite socially aware, they use that awareness to push the limits of what is socially acceptable. That can be very attractive. What they don't do is smash through the limit of what is socially acceptable like a freight train, which is often what happens when people try to fake the "I don't give a fuck" energy. That will get you thrown out of places.

I agree. Direct experience, however, will give you an accurate perspective on AI. Anybody who has used this tech beyond consumer level has direct experience of what it is capable of.

It is only an open question for you because you haven't actually used the tech or really seen what it can do

This is completely outdated knowledge If you are dumping code snippets into a ChatGPT window that's probably the case. I suspect that's what this study looked at. If you are using a coding agent like Claude Code it is more like a 300%+ increase in efficiency when used correctly. Much more in some cases. ----- I'm sorry but I think your knowledge on this topic is both outdated and quite incomplete, and while I appreciate that you want to avoid falling into group-think I get the sense that your anti-mainstream bias is clouding your judgement a bit here. I remember that when everybody thought AI was a bit gimmicky you were a massive promoter of AI tools (I vaguely even remember you calling them smarter than most people) and now that they're mainstream you have gone 180 and started calling them overhyped and unintelligent despite the fact they are orders of magnitude more intelligent than they were at that point in the past. They are overhyped, but not nearly as much as you think. Certain industries like software engineering, most IT jobs, support agent work, any kind of data analysis, marketing, search engines, SEO and tons more... all unlikely to ever be the same again. Even as a result of less than perfect AI imagery, industries are changing. I went to an AWS conference recently and Skoda did a presentation where they said that almost all of their newest still images of cars were AI generated. They were talking about their methods for getting the AI to produce consistent images which did not have oddities or inaccurate depictions of the target car in them, and most people in the audience could not tell the difference between the real car and the AI generated one in the end results. Skoda are not going hire a team of people to go into the dessert and take photos of a new car anymore, they'll just get a few people to use their AI tools to do it.