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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • My health insurance (Axa in the UK, through my employer) has a neurodivergent diagnosis/support service.

    After doing a self assessment, I booked an appointment with a regular doctor and said I suspect I might have ADHD because of [assessment] and [list of symptoms].

    They said something along the lines of “that’s enough evidence to at least suspect it”, then referred me onwards to the other service (ProblemShared) which did first a preliminary assessment and then a formal diagnosis.


  • Do some (reliable) self tests (there are some official ones, I’m sure someone can advise). It’s very quick and you’ll learn more about yourself.

    I’m diagnosed now, but before that, the way I saw this was: even if I don’t actually have ADHD, if I know I have ADHD-like symptoms/behaviours, I can learn and use the coping strategies of ADHD individuals to make my life easier. (Which was right except for the fact that I, indeed, turned out to have not only the symptoms but actual ADHD).






  • You can do this with not that much setup:

    • Obsidian app on the phone
    • Make a shortcut on your desktop so that it’s easily accessible and there’s minimal friction to make a rough note (you can write on your daily note)
    • Have obsidian synced to your computer, either through their paid service or something like Google drive / etc.

    And now what makes it magic for me:

    • Have a bash script that runs on your computer every once in a while and combines your notes into a single file
    • Append that file into your LLM of choice (either online or a local one if you have that setup) and make a prompt that goes something like “you’re a NotebookLM style assistant with access to my notes, answer from knowledge of my notes unless explicitly asked otherwise…”

    Depending on how sophisticated your setup is, you might get the LLM to automatically pick up changes in your notes. I do this at work and it feels like magic.





  • These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

    8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

    • Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
    • Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
    • A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
    • The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

    850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

    • The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
    • Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
    • The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
    • The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

    So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

    The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

    But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.






  • You sort of can already. For text it’s definitely possible, and I’ve started doing it since my notes are mostly text rather than screenshots. (I use obsidian to take notes, and quick thoughts get their own note).

    I don’t have a mega cohesive workflow yet but this is the list of things I do:

    • I have a script that combines all my notes into one. This runs automatically in my computer every few minutes, and synced to Google drive.

    • For work (we have a Gemini Pro subscription) this plus some rolling meetings notes gets added to a gemini “gem” (custom set of instructions/context) that has been instructed to answer from my notes, so that I can ask it “what recent ideas have I had” or “what’s the biggest problem right now with project XYZ”.

    • For my personal notes, I upload manually the combined notes to perplexity and do roughly the same.

    • And the one that might work for you, now I’ve opened my obsidian vault (I.e. the folder where my notes live) with Windsurf, an AI-enabled IDE. These things can do much more interesting things than vibe coding. I use this for tidying up: “help me find topics in my notes where I haven’t linked the notes between them”.

    You could use this last one to open your screenshots folder, and your monthly credits might not last that long if you’re dealing with images, but I think that’d be a problem only at the beginning when you have a large number of unsorted files. You could ask it to put analyse them and put them into longer format notes, for example. Or go through them one by one, analyse them, and if they’re worth keeping, add the text to a single big text file and then move the screenshot to another folder that you could delete later.


  • I love this, thank you so much!!

    I’m going to add another thing I’ve learnt in the past couple of years. No organisation method is perfect, and IT’S FINE to ditch a method and try a new one. No shame.

    No, you haven’t failed, no, you’re not “incapable” of doing GTD or using Kanban or Todoist or whatever. It can be the case that your life has changed and what seemed like a good method 6 months ago, just doesn’t work anymore.

    The reality is life changes quickly, and when you’re a student at 22 you need different strategies and methods to when you become an intern at 23 to when you have a decent but different job at 26 or when you become a manager at 38. And in between all those things there are many small steps - you move countries, you start living with your partner, you have a child, you start your own company, you decide “fuck it, I’m not working a 9-5 anymore and I’m going to live off advertising things on Tiktok”.

    Whatever happens with your life, it’s a process, not something static. So as tempting as it is for us NDs, you can’t blame yourself when your method fails to contain the huge chaos of the neurodivergent mind. Plus let’s face it, if you have ADHD you’re likely to get bored of it and at that point it’s better to find something new than to just give up altogether on the idea of organising.

    (Same advice applies to many other fields, e.g. exercising - gym might stop working for you but you can always start swimming, or bouldering, or whatever, up until your life changes and you get bored).



  • Jrockwar@feddit.uktoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    What happened was, they realised that Arc was a niche product that had a fervient userbase but would never become a mainstream browser, so they announced its development was “complete” and they were moving on to Dia so that they could jump onto the AI bandwagon create the next generation of browser.