Everyone ate it too. The mockery was because

• they were messy to eat
• they were staples commonly eaten
• they were made and sold by black people early in their steps of economic independence following slavery.
• racism doesn’t have to make sense.

If you hate someone, anything they do can be something you use to express your hate, even if you do it to.

So, I definitely think that society has a tendency to want to “fix” behavior traits that are difficult or annoying, but I think there are also a lot that are actually problematic.
For example, with my ADHD, I get stuck doing stuff I don’t like doing at the expense of stuff I do enjoy. Just last night after my meds wore off, I got stuck watching YouTube videos of mediocre standup comedy instead of leaning over a bit and grabbing my book that I’m extremely into and very much want to find out what happens.

The definition I like most, which isn’t out of whack with what the standards tend towards, is something that’s:

• a measurable or observable set of behaviors
• causing distress to the individual
• or causing development difficulties in children
• or causing objective material harm to the individual or others

If it’s causing the individual stress, or it’s clearly causing problems in their life, it’s something that should be addressed. Sometimes the easiest way to address it is just an environmental accomodation, like self directed learning, a pair of headphones, or permission to excuse yourself for a moment. I had a workplace unknowingly (to me and to them) accommodate me by putting down some anti fatigue mats where I would pace to a comical degree every day.

A big issue in my book is that disorder is an overloaded term. Colloquially disorder means “broken”, and it doesn’t mean that clinically.
A person with a learning disorder who can be helped by putting them in a more self directed learning environment still has a disorder that needs accomodation because they’re not performing to the standards of their peers.
There’s also a distinction between “mental disorder” and “neurodevelopmental disorder”, with the disorder of mental disorders being the biggest one associated with the word “disorder”.

I think it’s good that people like you ask these questions, because that’s part of what helps push society towards an understanding that many of these disorders are really just a very wide spectrum of differences from a rough average, and that our world needs to just be a little more flexible for people who do it a little different. It’s caused a lot of more modern primary education systems to be more flexible and trained in the benign accomodations that some kids need, for example. (My nephew also has ADHD and he’s having a much better experience in school than I did, of only because they were like “some kids with ADHD just have terrible handwriting, instead of endless drills, here’s your Chromebook you do all your work on now”)

In the end, I think we need to be able to categorize things in order to be able to know how to fix up people’s environments when that’s the right answer. We also need to be aware that sometimes the environment isn’t the best fix, and that a medication can be the best way to help a person.
For your example, I would say the individual has “crazy tall disorder” which has some easy environmental accomodations (Padded corners on cabinets), individual accomodations (teaching them proper lifting techniques and posture early since height and bad backs go hand in hand), and occasionally medical intervention (gentle back strength exercises, back and knee braces, closer monitoring of cardiac function for the truly extremely tall).

Categorization helps us better understand how things are related, what the bounds on the spectrum are, and what accomodations can be made that help the most people, and when it’s something that needs more focused attention.
It’s not the categorization that’s the problem, it’s the stigmatization or inflexibility that causes issues.

Sure! Unfortunately, it was purely a joke and has no helpful qualities that I can think of.

Your prefrontal cortex is the very front edge of your brain, and it’s (very generally because brains are complicated) responsible for problem solving, decision making and stuff like that.
It’s the part of your brain that makes the call to actually remove the blanket.
These are called “executive functions”.

It’s also very associated with a lot of parts of personality expression, so while it’s not where “you” are, damage to it has a more pronounced impact than other parts of your brain, so sometimes people treat it like it’s “you”.

It picks which tasks to do based on that reward system I mentioned in my original comment. It doesn’t directly control which task it’s pointed at trying to solve, so it can come up with a plan to do what’s needed, and then discover that the first step is “bad” and it should keep doing what it’s doing.

That’s the little man sitting at a desk who knows it’s all fucked. Did all the work and then was directed to ignore it, knowing that was the wrong call. Something else is in charge of that reward process (kinda), and you can’t “reason” with that process.

No. There are tests for the types of functional behavior differences that comprise ADHD, but they can’t really be administered outside of a moderately controlled setting.

Stuff like saying a list of words and seeing how many you can recall in a fixed time can’t really be done reliably in a quiz.

There are tools that can say “based on what you answered, there’s a high/low probability you’d benefit from further consultation”. They’re basically “how often do you interrupt?”, “how often do you zone out?”.
Basically a structured way of “what I’m hearing you say is …”. “Based on how you describe yourself as ADHD as hell, you might benefit from asking someone about that”.

Self assessments can be wrong about what they suggest you ask about. If you have a concern or behaviors that you do that upset you or cause problems, then that’s worth addressing and following until you get help, but it might not be what you thought. Or the doctor might have been mistaken, since they’re also fallible, but hopefully the more objective tests can lend objectively to their conclusions.

Yeah, a lot of brain things are like that. The way I look at it is, everyone sees a little of it, but some people see a lot of it. If you see a lot, it’s not self diagnosis to say “I have a lot of symptoms in common with people who have this, so I asked a professional”.

You also don’t need a diagnosis to practice some of the coping strategies that people have that are non-medication. If they turn out to be helpful, that’s maybe a another reason to ask a professional.

Self diagnosis is a bad idea, but it’s also a bad idea to ignore marked similarities you see between yourself and others. And stuff like “always put your keys and wallet in a specific basket” is only the cost of the basket.

Sometimes I picture my prefrontal cortex as a well meaning bureaucrat who’s just like "oh, trust me, I know the rules are terrible and there’s an active problem. Nothing I can do about it though, I just work here. Second that order comes in though, I’m on it boss, you better believe. You’re gonna want to talk to my manager. Yeah, he doesn’t take calls. It sucks, could maybe get something fixed around here. "

That’s fair, situations can also cause serotonin to get suppressed without it being an inate production issue.

This is why they recommended talk therapy in conjunction with any medication, in part so that they can reevaluate if the medication is still needed. :)

Depends on the thing.
Super high level, ADHD is an issue with the reward system of the brain failing to deliver reward when it’s supposed to. Your brain is supposed to try to find a new task when it’s not getting it’s reward anymore; it’s how that frontal cortex problem solving engine gets driven around by all the parts that handle motivation, wants and desires.
Sometimes no reward is being given, so you keep slipping off to a different task, and sometimes too much reward is being given and so you stay on a task way too long.
And, to be clear: these are not huge rewards we’re talking about like a wave of pleasure or noticable feeling, just the baseline steering signals.

Sometimes the task you need to do provides no “normal” reward but neither does what you’re doing right now, so your problem solver sees no reason to switch. Sometimes a nudge can help because fulfilling a request or suggestion can come with some reward, or at least you’re just swapping out neutral tasks with some minor effort.

Sometimes the task is unpleasant to some minor degree, so not only is the reward not there, it’s also a punishment. Or the thing you’re currently doing is providing some degree of reward.
In either case, switching means actively going against everything your problem solver uses to decide what to do. Needless to say, that’s really hard, and being nudged often feels more like being nagged, or like they’re upset with you, because your problem solver (also known as your conscious self) knows this is all going on, but knowing how the engine is working doesn’t make it work differently.
So you’ve been sitting there trying to push a granite block up a hill for an hour, and then someone comes up and starts pushing on your back. They haven’t removed the part that made it hard, but they added something uncomfortable to your current situation.

Before I got on medication following my diagnosis, me and my partner handled it by just being really cognizant of what our mental states are, and communicating clearly. “You asked me to remind you”, “I need to do it, but I’m stuck”, and effectively asking for permission before annoying someone to the point where the current blocker is less desirable than doing the thing. Requires a lot of trust and good communication though.

It’s difficult to describe subjective feelings, but what can sometimes look like “sitting on the couch watching short YouTube videos about sheep dogs instead of brushing your teeth and going to bed” is actually: sitting on the couch bored out of your mind and desperately wanting to go to bed, but the sheepdogs are providing short bursts of novelty and cute. Removing your lap blanket provides no joy and makes you cold. Standing up provides no joy and makes you less comfortable. Walking to the bathroom provides no joy and now you’re in the dark bathroom. Brushing your teeth provides no joy, tastes bad, and is intensely boring. Walking to the bedroom provides no joy. Getting into bed and snuggling up provides joy.
Summed up: sheep dogs provide continuous minor joy, and only costs the physical misery of staying awake, the confused guilt of paralysis, and the promise of future misery. Going to bed is a promise of some joy, but it comes with a bunch of steps that are at best neutral and often entail anti-joy. It just doesn’t add up. Other people get a tiny hit of joy from each substep, which is why they can say “I’m done looking at sheepdogs, I’m going to bed” and then just magically do it.

“Before you go to bed, you need to slowly press your bare foot into this fresh dog poop, toes spread of course” isn’t often made better by someone saying “it’s not that bad, come on, you can do it, I believe in you, then you can get some rest for once”.

It’s a matter of scale, not a binary.

Having a thing that you need to do but just “don’t” is perfectly common.
Having it happen so regularly that you reliably spend a measurable part of your day wondering why you can’t just “do the thing”, or it starts to have measurable negative impacts on your job, life and relationships isn’t normal.

Everyone feels down sometimes, but not everyone has a serotonin balance problem.
Everyone feels difficulty focusing sometimes, but not everyone has a dopamine balance problem.

I mean, if you don’t how will you end up with your body feeling tired tomorrow? It’d ruin the whole routine!

I believe that’s why people are pushing for a week of early voting, and the ability to vote by mail with postage paid.
Also, if you increase the number of polling stations and keep them available longer, the wait goes down.
We can also pass laws to make it so employers must give workers time to vote at the workers discretion.

Most of what you describe is the result of an effort to make voting harder to keep turnout low. The way to fix it is to make it easier, not to make it less secure.

In a smaller local election a few cycles back, I got to trial a paper backed electronic voting machine they were testing out for people who have dexterity or vision problems.

You basically got the same paper ballot as everyone else, but then you slipped it into the machine and it colored the bubbles for you after you selected the option on the screen.
Then you took your piece of paper out and handled it like a ballot filled in by hand.

Wasn’t networked and didn’t see anything that could tie you to a vote.
I got to share my appreciation for the concept, but concern about difficulty verifying it filled things out correctly, and the potential for touch screens to be difficult to use or act funny, all the difficulties of ux work to handle fixing an error, and the need for the UI to be exceptionally clear, which was difficult on the smaller screen with the larger font.
I think it also has screen reader support, but I didn’t use it, so I’m not sure.

Oh, to me it just doesn’t remotely look like they’re interested in surveillance type stuff or significant analytics.

We’re already seeing growing commercial interest in using LLMs for stuff like replacing graphic designers, which is folly in my opinion, or for building better gateways and interpretive tools for existing knowledge based or complex UIs, which could potentially have some merit.

Chat gpt isn’t the type of model that’s helpful for surveillance because while it could tell you what’s happening in a picture, it can’t look at a billion sets of tagged gps coordinates and tell you which one is doing some shenanigans, or look at every bit of video footage from an area and tell you which times depict certain behaviors.

Looking to make OpenAI, who seem to me to be very clearly making a play for business to business knowledge management AI as a service, into a wannabe player for ominous government work seems like a stretch when we already have very clear cut cases of the AI companies that are doing exactly that and even more. Like, Palantirs advertisements openly boast about how they can help your drone kill people more accurately.

I just don’t think we need to make OpenAI into Palantir when we already have Palantir, and OpenAI has their own distinct brand of shit they’re trying to bring into the world.

Google doesn’t benefit by selling their data, they benefit by selling conclusions from their data, or by being able to use the data effectively. If they sell it, people can use the data as often as they want. If they sell the conclusions or impact, they can charge each time.
While the FBI does sometimes buy aggregated location data, they can more easily subpoena the data if they have a specific need, and the NSA can do that without it even being public, directly from the phone company.
The biggest customer doesn’t need to pay, so targeting them for sales doesn’t fit, whereas knowing where you are and where you go so they can charge Arby’s $2 to get you to buy some cheese beef is a solid, recurring revenue stream.

It’s a boring dystopia where the second largest surveillance system on the planet is largely focused on giving soap companies an incremental edge in targeted freshness.

I want to agree with you, but… We have decades of that just not working.

Anyone able to be persuaded by what you’re describing would have been persuaded by the obvious hypocrisy of the answer itself.

Mockery is a rhetorical device that can be persuasive, and we don’t always need to be nice to people when their open hypocrisy is destroying lives.

Well, I’d contend that the same expertise isn’t just readily available. Yes, he’s uniquely positioned for connection to the surveillance apparatus, but the reputation of being the federal governments head security is also a unique credential.

Yes, neither of us is responsible for hiring someone for the OpenAI board of directors, making anything we think speculation.

I suppose you could dismiss any thought or reasoning behind an argument for a belief as “reasons” to try to minimize them, but it’s kind of a weak argument position. You might consider instead justifying your beliefs, or saying why you disagree instead of just “yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.

I just learned about some of the additional context from another comment, so it definitely might not be part of this branch in the narrative. Having spent at least a little time and energy developing the weapon, they’re not gonna just waste it, and having filled out the budget paperwork for a charity donation, it’s was also going to happen one way or another.

It’s not bad or anything, it’s just how you tell a story involving unpredictable interactions, “being a business that has a budget and employee salaries”, and also the PR 101 lesson of “never withhold charity”.

Those aren’t contradictory. The Feds have an enormous budget for security, even just “traditional” security like everyone else uses for their systems, and not the “offensive security” we think of when we think “Federal security agencies”. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco will change products, build out large infrastructure, or even share the source code for their systems to persuade the feds to spend their money. They’ll do this because they have products that are valuable to the Feds in general, like AWS, or because they already have security products and services that are demonstrably valuable to the civil security sector.

OpenAI does not have a security product, they have a security problem. The same security problem as everyone else, that the NSA is in large part responsible for managing for significant parts of the government.
The government certainly has interest in AI technology, but OpenAI has productized their solutions with a different focus. They’ve already bought what everyone thinks OpenAI wants to build from Palantir.

So while it’s entirely possible that they are making a play to try to get those lines of communication to government decision makers for sales purposes, it seems more likely that they’re aiming to leverage “the guy who oversaw implementation of security protocol for military and key government services is now overseeing implementation of our security protocols, aren’t we secure and able to be trusted with your sensitive corporate data”.
If they were aiming for security productization and getting ties for that side of things, someone like Krebs would be more suitable, since CISA is a bit more well positioned for those ties to turn into early information about product recommendations and such.

So yeah, both of those statements are true. This is a non-event with bad optics if you’re looking for it to be bad.

Yeah, there are a ton of security experts. But none of them are the former head of the NSA.

Snowden is not exactly a font of expertise in this area, so I’m not sure that his opinion is particularly relevant. His only actual relevance is that he had access to classified data. He had no role in policy, and never had anything to do with business hiring practices.

My bet, given how you budget for this type of PR stuff, is that it was basically the players picking the story that got told while they got a new weapon and a charity donation happened. Like if the players hadn’t chosen to do so, there would have been some contrivance for someone certainly has to save the children. Since they saved them, now the children will get together and give you this thank you gift, or something.

Illusion of choice, but not in a bad way.