Are you familiar with any of those? I did some research after receiving my report and apparently the combination of tests listed above are well-respected, about as good as it gets. I’m curious what your take is.
The subjective part of the assessment was actually the clinician making sense of the data. My cognitive assessment (IQ and its subtypes) scored fairly high, I averaged something like 115 (84th percentile). But my memory assessment scores (audio/visual memory/working memory, immediate/delayed memory) tanked tremendously, I averaged around 90 (30th percentile).
My positive diagnosis was based on the variability of scores and the clear cognition-memory gap. The results made sense, aligned with my experience in life (I fell asleep in almost every lecture in college, sustaining attention while taking notes was a heavy audio-visual working memory exercise for me).
I personally haven’t adopted any of this as my identity but it opened a door to do some metacognition and reflect on how I interface with the world. Also the stimulant medication didn’t magically fix everything, sometimes the hyper focus is worse, but there was one HUGE benefit that I didn’t realize I was missing - emotional regulation. I’m a heavy ruminator and pretty much suffered in silence most of my life, my inner dialog is much more organized and calm, and I can comb through my thoughts easier now.
P.S. I cannot recommend enough - check out “HealthyGamerGG” on YouTube. He does some deep dives on ADHD and other diagnoses. Classically trained psychiatrist with something like 5 years of training as a Buddhist monk. Very insightful guy who’s both data-driven and spiritual, helping a lot of people.
I’m going to say that as you perform more clinical tests typically your chances of a wrong diagnosis will decrease proportionally. However particularly in the case of ADHD tests, if you know the test questions and the symptom description I think you could cheat your way to a diagnosis. If you went to all of these tests in earnest, without looking them up, just providing spontaneous responses, and all of them come back positive, I’d say chances are you have ADHD.
I'm not OP but that seems like a very respectable diagnostic track. No test is 100% reliable, so you'd want multiple tests. Even then the results can realistically only be interpreted by a psychologist that is familiar with your situation (hence the clinical interview). So this seems perfectly proper.
> Also the stimulant medication didn’t magically fix everything
Sadly there is no medication that fixes adhd. The only thing these medication does is make it easier to deal with by alleviating (some of) the symptoms. Personally I've noticed from my medication (methylphenidate) that it make it easier to stay focused on whatever task I'm doing, but if that happens to be scrolling reddit, I can still waste hours, perhaps even more since I would have otherwise distracted myself from reddit long before. So it's not perfect, but it does enable me to concentrate 8h+ at work, and that's ultimately the main benefit it brings me.
Be careful and approach `HealthyGamerGG` with a bit of healthy skepticism. I have benefited from a number of his videos, but recently small things have lead to me growing concerned that as his reach/influence grows, the same motivations that existed early on mutate as with many influencers. Not suggesting anything negative per se, just recommending a variety of sources and validating his claims. For another source, Dr. Barkley's videos are very good.
IPv6, in a way, takes the concept of a MAC address and puts it on steroids. This became evident to me when I learned about EUI-64 addresses. And then my brain melted when I learned that any interface can be assigned an arbitrary number of unique addresses with varying purposes or contexts because the address space is truly *that big*.
When I consider that quality of IPv6’s design, it communicates to me an old and ideal vision of what we thought the internet would and should be - a hyper-connected, shared infrastructure where [Layer 3] identity is universally unique such that connectivity between any two arbitrary nodes is possible (which obviously isn’t true for NAT w/ overload).
I’m just a lowly SysAdmin who finally decided to get his CCNA - so I’m a nobody - but as I worked through the material I felt like I was paging through a history book or biography of how the Internet’s life came to be and all the mistakes made along the way. Most features felt like patches for design considerations that were overlooked. Examples: DHCP Snooping, STP’s various * Guards, and the mere fact that Layer 2 and Layer 3 addresses are distinct concepts.
I don’t think there’s any disagreement that NAT was co-opted as a security feature. I never hear that said in a positive way, either. I think if we were to start over, with IPv6 as the default assumption, the tools we’d develop for network security would look very different, but not at all impossible or any more difficult.
But again - I’m a nobody. Just thinking out loud here.
Having actual unique stable IPv6 addresses for every device is the dream of every Ad vendor - no need to bother with the huge array of tracking techniques and the chicken and mouse game of fighting various tracking protection solutions, just log the stable IPv6 of the user's device across any service they use.
So, of course, we then got Privacy Addresses, or whatever the name is. Which now means that you don't actually have a stable unique public IP, it actually changes all the time, and legitimate tracking and logging of your own network activity actually becomes much more complicated on IPv6.
The 'why' behind all of these protocols and decisions is left out in favor of the cert exams. Being able to implement is usually what gets you paid.
>mere fact that Layer 2 and Layer 3 addresses are distinct concepts.
The logical separation between the ideas allows for a lot of flexibility, and there were some wrong answers on how scalable vs flexible things should be.
They emerged with a decent answer: L2 crosses intranetwork, L3 crosses internetwork. Their separation allows L3 addressing to be completely unaware of multiple changing L2 (lower level) intranetwork switches, which is immensely useful.
Trying to solve everything with One Master Protocol to solve it all turned out like this:
https://xkcd.com/927/
this works nicely in IPV6, where true seperation of layer 2 and layer 3 exist.
This does not exist in practice in ethernet, because ARP is required as a mechanism to learn MAC IP bindings and is dependant on IP AND Ethernet.
IPv6 solves this by doing neighbour discovery on link local addresses and multicast addresses.
I am doing a little facepalm over the L2-L3 distinction, thanks for being gentle and thoughtful. Sometimes I interrogate how things are, imagine what another paradigm would look like, but always end up where I started... I see that and think, hm, maybe the design of networks as we know them are expressing some sort of structure in the Platonic space.
I took a course called “Introduction to Internet Architecture” back in 2017 with a wonderful professor. The course opened with a prompt, “What is communication?” We started with smoke signals and worked our way up the OSI layers (including voltage-level encodings on the wire). I remember drawing those layers and asking, “What problem is each layer trying to solve?”
Also that XKCD comic is a classic. Love it. I don’t see any value in overhauling the protocols of today. It seems like the future (or present) of networking is overlays. When this recent cert covered SDN, it really abstracted away everything I had just learned and I felt a little sad about it honestly - as if switch/router configuration would some day be ubiquitously software-defined, getting totally buried by the application layer and becoming almost apocryphal like assembly or machine code… something we know exists but rarely touch.
I’m not doing any coding with AI, so I’m the odd one out. Mostly use it for research: information retrieval and grokking technical concepts for exam prep. Does that fall within “knowledge work”?
Anywho - I switched to Opus last week and felt torn. It’s displayed somewhat higher competency in some responses, and the artifacts (diagrams) are splendid, but I despise its writing style. Grok is indeed fact/truth oriented, direct, and less personable (which I vastly prefer). Maybe I’ll switch back to Grok.
One does not need to be human to understand. Animals understand. Saying “he” or “she” would be closer to anthropomorphism than the parent comment, but still does not sufficiently satisfy the definition of anthropomorphism (giving human form).
I see you pushing back on related topics in a few comment threads. I’m not sure if I can define “understanding” but I think “intelligence” is a fair synonym for this conversation. I see your passion for clarifying that LLMs are not intelligent, and I’m sensing you’re conflating that with “consciousness” and trying to hedge against other people inadvertently making that same error.
Intelligence is not uniquely human. And not constrained to consciousness. Even consciousness itself, under fringe definitions like exhibiting non-deterministic behavior, is not constrained to living beings. Systems, for example, exhibit intelligence all the time - groups of people, colonies of ants, weather systems, self-organized criticality like blooming forest fires or abelian sand piles, evolutionary processes, and so on.
Your counter argument - that LLM responses are “just” statically probable (i.e. predictions) - actually supports this notion. Many intelligent statements we make are probably right or probably wrong, in part or in whole. We as humans are far more than statistical computers, but our intelligence in isolation doesn’t seem far off from that of LLMs (not mechanistically, but rather qualitatively).
3Blue1Brown recently posted a video called something like “Compression is Intelligence”. Worth a watch.
You're arguing semantics, but I think that expanding your definition of intelligence to include ant colonies and weather systems is going to make it completely useless to say anything at all about an LLM.
The problem with all of this is that because an LLM gives a facsimile of language and conversation people believe it can "comprehend" or "understand" or whatever word you want to use. This problem isn't new, AI research has had this issue for decades. The risk is that this makes people misunderstand and offload their decision making to it, treating it like a person to be instructed or reasoned with. It isn't, and can never be.
The parent comment wasn’t making that comparison. In fact, quite the opposite. The communism comment emphasized personal experience with a boot in one’s face, not that the boot was communist.
Americans’ apathy to your concerns and their support of this administration is a direct consequence of the emotional blackmail tactic you employ. I share some of your concerns, but also have an awareness that enforcing the law to correct for past immigration policy failures will be ugly. The emotional blackmail is a learned behavior fueled by social media campaigns that effectively traumatize the hell out of us by amplifying violence and often removing their context.
I don’t think there’s any context that would make executing a father in front of his daughter and actively suppressing accountability any better. You might call it emotional blackmail, but many of us would consider it “pointing out basic human rights”.
Enforcing the law is not inherently good. It is only as good as the morality behind the law and the manner it which it is enforced. This administration and the forces backing it possess neither morality nor the ability to impartially enforce any of these laws.
Even if your insistence that asking for basic empathy encourages apathy is true, it only says something disturbing about the Americans supporting this administration. On that topic, polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans do not approve of how the current immigration crackdown is being handled.
It is not a basic human right to enter a country illegally, or to overstay a visa. You also show absolutely no concern for human rights when an ICE activist mowed down two ICE detainees accidentally, tellingly so. You allegedly care about ICE detainees, but will happily ignore their deaths if they were slaughtered by an anti-ICE activist. It's not a good look, is it?
The activists also continually highlight the plight of people with sordid backgrounds, like Seamus Culleton. He was plastered throughout the media as a sympathetic deportee, until you also learn he was a wanted fugitive drug dealer in Ireland. Whoops, memory holed!
On the topic of polls, the vast majority of Americans support deportations. 56% of registered voters support deporting ALL illegal aliens. Not just criminals - ALL.
