Human contact is more scarce than ever, it's not fungible with podcasts or audiobooks, and most people are starving.
I've backpacked/hitchiked through Ireland few years back. It was easy to catch a ride, even easier to find somebody to let me pitch a tent on their land. People were open and kind and wanted to hear and share stories.
Yes but the large language STEM salad of "marginal utility of a stranger's story" and the "P2P protocol of kindness" is surely more authoritative than your real world experience.
It depends; not all drones are kamikaze-type. Great many drones are used for delivery (food, ammo, medkits), for reconnaissance, as carriers of smaller drones, and as radio retransmitters. Bomber drones also fly a large number of sorties before getting shot down or breaking down from wear.
Ground teams usually have a bunch of batteries for quick replacement, because charging is slow. With these fast-charging batteries, they may need to lug fewer batteries, and larger generators.
- 45 flights per recon consumer quadcopter drone before it's lost
- 69 flights per heavy bomber drone before it's lost
They switch the batteries before each flight anyway, so even batteries that are rated for 10 cycles would be good enough if the price/performance is good enough.
Certainly batteries rated for 300 cycles are an overkill.
Also I'm listening to Piotr Ryczek talking about his time with drone unit in Ukraine, and he says recovering drones is complicated (because you have to land far away from your position and the enemy drones wait for people trying to recover a drone that landed, so you have to wait for hours before going there and do it at night). Which drains the batteries to 0 after every flight and reduces the drone availability by half or more.
So there's tactical reasons not to focus on quality too much, too.
Narcissism is a spectrum; everybody's a little narcissistic, and it changes over time. All kids are VERY narcissistic early on, most grow out of it as they experience unconditional love from their parents and are allowed to be their authentic selves in various social contexts.
For various reasons - some kids don't. Bullying can certainly contribute.
So they develop maladaptive strategies (which can look like the first few "stages" in this article) and have to undo the damage later in life (which can look like the later "stages" from the article) to have a chance to experience real human connection.
I think the article can be very beneficial for people who struggle with this, even if it doesn't explicitly mention what the technical name of the struggle is (and BTW it does not have to be NPD - there might be other reasons for people to have similar problems). Maybe even BECAUSE it doesn't mention narcissism (cause narcissism is currently villified on the social media as "they are actual demons that cannot be saved" - so people are very wary of identifying with it, which makes it less likely they will work on themselves).
BTW I'm very disappointed in the current fad on social media of villifying one mental health issue after another only to then come to realize "oh wait, they're actually people not monsters". I've seen it with BPD, now it's the NPD turn. It's usually done for ugly reasons, too (somebody hurt by a person with $mental_health_problem search for validation, so influencers jump in with feel-good validation that portrays the other side as demons).
I mean, it’s literally one of the dark triad. Dark. Not misunderstood.
The DSM basically took all those “traits we think of as evil” and said “we shall make some disorder categories”. People with NPD don’t go and get help, they just run around ruining other peoples lives.
If you’ve never had such a person in your life, good for you! The rest of us don’t care if they can be saved, we just don’t ever want to interact with another one. Ever.
I am a narcissist. I haven't been diagnosed (yet), but I certainly recognize the traits and patterns, and I'm in therapy for it.
> People with NPD don’t go and get help, they just run around ruining other peoples lives.
This is objectively false. There's lots of people in therapy for NPD. And there have been case studies with people who recovered.
Which brings another point
> The DSM basically took all those “traits we think of as evil” and said “we shall make some disorder categories”.
DSM criteria for narcissism are part of the problem. You can have the exact same mental struggle but stop yourself from hurting people (at least to a reasonable degree - "normal" people also hurt others sometimes after all). And you won't be diagnosed as NPD. But you'll still have all the other problems - lack of human connection, vastly higher chance of suicide, autoimmune diseases, relationship problems, etc.
Which is like saying you only have alcoholism if you beat people on the streets. If you define it that way - of course all alcoholics are violent.
But it's not a productive way to define mental health problems. It leaves out people who struggle with it but don't cause harm.
> The rest of us don’t care if they can be saved, we just don’t ever want to interact with another one. Ever.
That's unlikely given that estimated 0.5-5% of the general population have NPD and about 20% have strong narcissistic traits.
In IT it's probably much higher by the way, it's the perfect job (little human contact, high status, well paid).
You don't usually realize that's why you're the way you are until much later.
At first it might feel like "these people don't like me cause of how much better I am than them", or "these people don't like me, well fuck them, I don't need anybody".
People have all kinds of excuses they tell themselves to feel better about the needs they can't satisfy.
I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.
After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.
Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.
Just solving these problems made me giddy.
Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.
But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.
TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.
Perhaps. There is also more to life than your job, family, friends, and finding love. There's things like grocery shopping, washing dishes, and going on vacation. That doesn't mean we should settle into occupations we don't like. Like it or not, your work is going to consume a lot of your time, and we should strive to do something we enjoy and find meaningful if possible. In the parent comment it sure sounds like it is possible for them to pivot, and that they might find much more happiness and meaning if they do.
There was an article on hackernews a few years back (before LLMs took over) about jobs that could be replaced by a sign saying "$default_result" 99% of the time.
Like being a cancer diagnostician. Or an inspector at a border crossing.
Using LLMs is currently a lot like going to a diagnostian that always responds "no, you're healthy". The answer is probably right. But still we pay people a lot to get that last 1%.
> But still we pay people a lot to get that last 1%.
If people paid for docs as an independent product, or had the foresight to evaluate the quality of the docs before making a purchase and use it as part of their criteria (or are able to do that at all), I think attitudes around docs and "docs bots" and their correctness, utility etc. would be a lot different.
This syndrome is called "eternal child" (puer aeternus) in psychology.
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
I feel a bit shaken after reading this comment, to be honest. I don't think I've ever heard someone so perfectly describe such a major component of my life experience. It's like you read my mind.
I was a "gifted kid", now I'm a lonely adult living by herself constantly cycling between complacency, failure, panic, and productivity. Diagnosed ADHD, choose to stay unmedicated, sometimes the best employee in my office, usually one of the laziest and most disappointing employees in my office. Constantly daydreaming about how better circumstances would change things for the better even while knowing deep down I'd cause the exact same set of problems for myself all over again even if I got my Dream Job.
Spent my whole life being told I was exceptional, and, to be fair, I lived up to it as a kid. These days I'm so terrified of regressing to being "normal" that I sabotage myself at every turn.
Thank you for leaving this comment. I may bring up the concept with my therapist and see what she thinks of it.
There's no lesson. It's hard. Your brain will search for the silver bullet to skip the boring self-improvement work and feel good NOW. It'll likely detach your current self from your past self (I was bad, I discovered this, now I'm great, exceptional and heroic again). Then you'll again avoid the boring day-to-day work (becaue you feel exceptional again) and fail again.
Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.
What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.
It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.
When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.
Physical exercise does wonders for this. The results you achieve are a 100% determined by the time and effort you put in. It's hard to start, as its asking for more self-improvement, but if you can get this one thing, the rest fall into place.
What worked for me, because I definitely had ~all these thought patterns when I was younger, is to make peace with being mediocre. Easier said than done though.
Once you accept being mediocre it opens the path to doing things which might fail.
I kinda heard lots of whispers when I was very young (like 6-7) and now I'm 40 and haven't had any such problems.
I blamed it on the drugs I got prescripted for sleeping (I had bad allergy and was scratching myself to the point of bleeding during sleep so I got some "pacifying" drugs).
Well, not just drugs-children are more likely to experience hallucinations even without drugs.
I still have vivid memories of experiencing what (in hindsight) I realise were hypnopompic hallucinations, around the age of 6 or 7. I wasn’t taking any regular medications, that I can remember. But, I grew out of it, as kids usually do.
A fun aside here: experiments in which people who’ve taken hallucinogens are placed in brain scanners reveal activation patterns which look an awful lot like what we see when we put small children in brain scanners, and this somewhat accords with the neurogenesis vs pathway pruning see-saw model of brain development.
I’ll say personally my experiences with psychedelics brought back memories of childhood - how I engaged with the world, how my mind would go off down different paths, the intensity of focus - so, you’re probably not far off here.
I always said psychedelics reduce you to a child, with reduce having no negative connotation, just a word that describes the experience. It's like sending your perception back in time in some ways, while retaining some matured aspects.
Lower doses can induce hallucinations before it becomes full on delirium that you see in higher doses. You'll regularly hear about people seeing "spiders" after taking 25-50mg of Benedryl, the recommended dose.
I think that may be more common in the elderly. I had full-on delirium from 5 x 50 mg, however. I would not recommend. It took me months for my body to recover. The auditory hallucinations lasted the longest (2-3 days), but my body and my mind was a wreck for months. Thanks to our beautiful hospital that did not administer the antidote for anticholinergic toxicity.
I've backpacked/hitchiked through Ireland few years back. It was easy to catch a ride, even easier to find somebody to let me pitch a tent on their land. People were open and kind and wanted to hear and share stories.
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