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I drive a van, so I could easily be the culprit. I therefore make a habit of adjusting my beam dip appropriately. Apparently that is unusual enough for them to note they had been adjusted in the service. There’s literally a dial on the dashboard. You’re SUPPOSED to adjust them to the vehicle and road conditions! Apparently not having them set to max is now considered a “fault” to fix!
Pay attention to how laye you generally are. I used to be chronically late. I began to notice I was generally about 20-30 minutes behind. I could often make up some of that, but it was rushed.
The fix was quite simple, I trained myself to add 30 minutes “faffing time” to any estimate or leave time. I have an “aim to leave” and “MUST leave” time. I generally leave about 10-15 minutes ‘late’, but due to the buffer, I have 15-20 minutes leeway still to deal with things like extra traffic.
We (aspies) tend towards binaries. We like it either very dark, or fully lit up. We either need silence, or lots of loud noise.
I know I have mental issues with “shades of grey” thinking, and it seems to be common. My personal work around is closer to newspaper print, a mix of completely black and completely white that approximates grey. It tends to annoy a lot of people, I dissect things a lot more than (apparently) necessary.
2-fold.
First, I have a timerCap bottle. The lid has a count up timer, from the last time it was opened. This is excellent for those “did I actually take my meds, or just plan too?” moments.
Second, I’ve an app called MyTherapy. It provides an alert, as well as helping keep track of my renewals, and other health checks (blood pressure etc).
Americans seem obsessed with salty tea.
Wasn’t it Boston where they had a massive party. Unfortunately they, for some bizarre reason, decided to make the tea with cold salt water! They also made it WAY too weak. Qudos for trying for the world’s biggest cup of tea. But don’t complain about its taste afterwards.
They’ve been uppity since that whole fiasco!
I’m on the same. I’ve personally found they work best when you can’t feel them. I’ve had days where I can’t remember if I took them. However, on those days, if I look back over it, I can tell the effect.
The best method (I’ve found) is slow, but effective. Titrate up, around every 2 weeks to a month (under doctors guidance). Each time, you’ll initially feel it, then it will fade. Once you have a slight jittery feeling left behind, you’re about there, if it’s strong, you’ve over shot, ask to go down 1 dose. The last jitter will fade off over a few months. This is your maximum optimal dose.
Interestingly, the higher doses will likely feel more productive, this is a false feeling. While the high dose will help focus, it has begun to disrupt other mental systems. The overall effect is a net loss, compared to a slightly lower dose. This is also what happens to a normal brain on the drugs. They feel more focused and productive, but, when actually measured, are worse off than unmedicated. We get a long term boost, but it’s not unlimited. We hit the same limit, eventually.
They don’t stick that well to curved surfaces. They are also quite bulky, and we tend to pack cans into the cupboard quite tightly. If I could find some magnetic sheet with enough field strength, that could work. Unfortunately all the ones I’ve found are… lackluster.
I’ll figure out a good workable solution eventually.
A more subtle one. Get a bunch of bag clips (I used IKEA ones) then write the name of all the things you keep in the freezer (peas, sweetcorn, chips etc). You want 2 of each. Attach 1 to each bag in the freezer, open or closed. You also want a piece of string attached somewhere. When a bag is empty, put its clip on the string. Congratulations, you now have a shopping list. Once you restock, just attach the clips to the appropriate bags, before putting them away.
At least for my household, this seems to flow well. There are no hard steps, and an obvious flow to it. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to figure out how to extend it to canned food, but it works for any bagged foods (pasta etc)
Even when medicated, it takes a long time, and a ridiculous amount of mental effort to lock them in. They are also still fragile as spun glass.
As for the depression I know it. I had 2 types. Burnout was the most obvious. I’m actually on half the medication dose I was on. It turned out I had gone over the hump, and my mind was overloading. The kickback from that caused a depressive state. Backing off put me back on the peak.
The 2nd was wile coyote like. I managed to reduce the stress I was under, by a mix of medication, cognitive, and behavioural changes. Without the stress however, my emotional lockdowns released. The depression was environmental, but I couldn’t even feel it, under the weight of stress. It was like wile coyote running off a cliff, all good until I stopped and looked. I’m still chipping away at it, but it still helps that I can feel it now. Before, it was still there and affecting me, but I wasn’t aware of it.
It’s quite good at pestering you, without being obnoxious about it. This means that you are less likely to dismiss it, rather than snooze it.
The reorder is automatic. Tell it at the beginning how many you have, and when to alert you. It does the rest. Once you refill, you tell it, and it stops pestering you.
It’s managed to strike the balance quite well.
We can, but they are extremely limited. I’ve a habit of checking my keys, phone and wallet are in my pocket when I leave the house. I also have the habit of thinking, “I need to brush my teeth” in the mornings. Unfortunately, forming a habit of actually brushing my teeth is more than my brain can handle (hence the work around).
Medication helps a lot, with even minimal habit forming. It vastly accelerates it from 5-10 years, to maybe 6-12 months, for simple habits. I can lock in 1 a year now!
From memory, I think it worked out 50-80% more power draw, on average. I might be wrong on that however, I’ve yet to do a will watt measurement with like for like loads. My testing was closer to both idling.
The NUC can draw more power, but has far more advanced power saving features too. I ended up budgeting using 20W.
I hit the limit of my Raspberry Pi 4. It would periodically crash itself by overheating (Heatsink was hot to the touch) I now use a NUC. It runs excellently, and handles my home automation setup fine. Unless I start doing something extreme, I can see myself overloading it.
One of the less mentioned things with self hosting is running costs. A Pi is extremely cheap to run. A NUC is a bit more, but still well below a full blown PC. Servers can actually pull a significant load, even when idle.
The raspberry pi was never meant to be a power house. It’s whole goal was to make support and learning easy. A few, very well maintained models, with the same core chips. The last bit is the cause of the shortage. They can’t easily redesign without fragmenting the support base. That is completely against their ethos.
I’ve also found, once you hit a Pi’s limit, that it’s best to go to something more specialist. My go-to options are NUCs for general computing, or the Nvidia Jetson series, for portable brute power. Anything that saturates a pi will quickly saturate the smaller SBCs soon after, as well. They suffer from many of the same bottlenecks.
In their defence, the pi was never intended to be a powerhouse. Their focus was on getting good software support for a low cost system. This provided a stable foundation that built that turnkey reliability.
A lot of the other board providers have a habit of just creating a powerful little board, and throwing it out there to fend for itself. This is great for competent geeks, but less good for those still learning.
Actually, it’s explicitly not all in between. The quantum state is a super position, not a smear. It is (ideally) both 1 and 0, but nothing in between.
It’s power comes when you have a multi bit number. 16 bits give 65536 possibilities. A classical computer would have to check each one individually to process them all. A quantum computer does them all in 1 go.
While it gets very messy in the implementation, quantum computers are still binary, just quantum binary. No infinities needed
Landlords have their place. However, it’s filling the niche between hotels and home ownership. Maybe 20% of housing, at most.
The current crop of value syphons are not a good thing. Unfortunately they are a symptom, not a cause. If housing supply was high enough, then the margins for landlord would shrink enough to get rid of a lot of them.
The only way you can’t be manipulated is if you are dead. All human interaction is manipulation of some sort of another. If you think your immune, your likely very vulnerable. If it’s delivered in the correct way, since your not bothering to guard against it.
An interesting factoid I’ve ran across a few times. Smart people are far easier to rope into cults than stupid people. The stupid, have experienced that sort of manipulation before, and so have some defenses against it. The smart people assume they wouldn’t be caught up in something like that, and so drop their guard.
In the words of Mad-eye Moody “Constant vigilance!”
It might be worth looking how the medical industry does calculations. I’ve not looked deep, but it seem similar to what you want.
They have a quality of life index. Basically you calculate both the increased life expectancy of a treatment, and the patients quality of life, as a percentage. By combining them together, you get a semi useful measure of treatment effectiveness. E.g. a treatment that gave a cancer patient 1 year of perfect health (100%) would have a score of 1 year. A treatment that give 4 bad years of life (20% quality) would only have a score of 0.8 years. The first one would win out, despite having 3 less years of life.
I believe the UK’s NHS uses it. It helps balance things on a large scale. E.g. do they invest extra money in improving cancer treatment in children, or in improving hip replacements in OAPs? Both will help, but how to weigh them against each other? I also believe they have a soft figure for cost effectiveness. It’s caught a few drugs companies short, when the NHS wouldn’t pay for a cancer drug that only offered a minor improvement over the current one, with a huge cost difference.
In your case, the index can be reversed, giving a useful metric. The big challenge would be calculating the index in a reliable manner. A lot of it is subjective, and prone to manipulation.
Interestingly one of the disc world books plays with this. “Going Postal” I believe. A conman is forceably recruited to fix the post office. His golem guard informs him how many people he’s killed, despite never raising a sword.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/451702
This seems exactly like what you want.
Just be aware that we can ALL be manipulated, the only difference is the method. Right now, most manipulation is on a large scale. This means they focus on what works best for the masses. Unfortunately, modern advances in AI mean that automating custom manipulation is getting a lot easier. That brings us back into the firing line.
I’m personally an Aspie with a scientific background. This makes me fairly immune to a lot of manipulation tactics in widespread use. My mind doesn’t react how they expect, and so it doesn’t achieve the intended result. I do know however, that my own pressure points are likely particularly vulnerable. I’ve not had the practice resisting having them pressed.
A solid grounding gives you a good reference, but no more. As individuals, it is down to us to use that reference to resist undue manipulation.
If you’ve not learnt it already, some mental anchoring techniques might help you. Mine help me a lot. I have 2 main ones, internal and external. The Internal one helps best for blocking externally driven mental problems, while the external one is useful for internally driven ones. You might already know them, but in case you don’t…
Internal:
This requires some minor prep work. When you’re in a good place, mentally, stop, and turn your attention inward. What you want to do is “map” as much as you can about your current internal state. How your feeling, how your thinking, even how your standing and moving. Map what your mind, body and soul are actually doing and feeling.
Later, when you are on tilt, mental, you can use your map. Take a moment and focus inwards again, you will find a very different state. For me it’s akin to a stormy sea, but that’s often personal. Now you take your mapped state, and almost lay it over your mind like a blanket. Because it is your own mental state to begin with, your mind will be a lot more accepting of it. It will also quickly learn that this is a positive thing, and try and fit to the new pattern. This then pushes your mind towards that “ideal”, calm, and focused state, rather than its chaotic one. External stimuli can still push it back into tilt, but you now, at least have a method to push back.
External:
This is better against internally generated chaos. This sort tends to resist the mental blanket technique, like a toddler resisting nap time.
It’s actually quite simple, just pay attention to the world around you. It’s a “classic” anchoring technique for panic attacks. You want to notice everything, the colours of the walls, the marks on the table, the feel of your cloths, and your breath moving in and out. This effectively crowds out the thought loop that is sending you off kilter.
Do not use this technique, if your external environment is more chaotic than your internal one! If you do, it can be akin to pouring oil onto a fire.
The load varies, though I’ve found the suspension is hard enough that it doesn’t shift for a normal load up. I mostly do it because I’ve noticed that, when I hit a bump, my lights can sweep up over the windows of cars in front.
Also, I don’t mind them readjusting it. It’s calling it a fault that bugged me.