OK, so no shade on your idea, but you actually can tell your dog he is OK.

Using a loud voice is a good indication that there is a threat or play, one of the two. Using a super quiet voice, such as a whisper, can convey the opposite. I have worked with a bunch of dogs and the most effective thing I have found for reducing barking and panic is to whisper their name with a positive tone and get down low enough for cuddles and petting.

They tend to look at me confused, tilt their head, then eventually stop barking and come over. I then give them quiet praise and lots of petting and cuddles as per their preference. Over a fairly short time they tend to shift to a short set of barks to announce the threat followed by coming to me to seemingly verify my attention to the issue, then they settle down.

This is mostly with either family dogs, 5 of those, or client’s dogs, another bunch to varying degrees.

Also, I would recommend Training Levels: Steps to Success by Sue Ailsby. I have used that book for a lot of dog and cat training and honestly it also works with how I interact with kids. Clear communication, lots of praise and love, capturing behaviours and associating them with words, and never ever using negative stimuli like hitting or yelling. Or as I see it now, respect. Dogs are intelligent beings and if you try to find your common communication tools you can be much more effective at sharing your needs and getting their buy in. Same with kids, actually listening to their needs and observing their behaviour gives you a massive step up, and then never ever being mean or unsafe and always being safe and protective can take you a long way.

Ah, good to know. I have found that the state I was used to calling tired was actually really exhausted, absolutely out of energy. Using Ritalin made the cost of things much lower so I felt like I could go for hours after my dose ran out. It was actually that I had gotten used to being absolutely ruined by the day and expected to feel like crap that drove my response, and now I go to bed with the capacity for a fair bit more than I used to.

I go to bed less fatigued and tired and sleep more than I did before Ritalin, but I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. I have found that heavy work, like a weight lifting routine or playing with kids, helps a lot with getting the physical agitation under control. I need to be active to be OK and when I am not able to be active I end up with depressive symptoms and sleep disturbance.

I would recommend trying a calisthenics or weights routine at some point, maybe a few months down the line, to see if it helps after your initial adjustment. It also helps with getting mood regulation working a bit better and can make sitting still much easier. I have worked various jobs and lifting heavy things helped a lot with the physical symptoms, though the boredom set in and made the job intolerable fairly quickly. I now work in personal disability care and the varied needs of my clients helps to make the job sustainable over a longer time.

Do you mean you didn’t sleep the night after you had a dose in the morning? Normally the dose wears off after 3-4 hours for standard release Ritalin and 6-7 hours for extended release. That would mean if you took it at 10am it should be completely worn off around 2pm for standard Ritalin and by 5pm for extended release. Did you take a second dose?

It is important to remember that how it is today is unlikely to be how it is in a few months. Your body has to get used to processing Ritalin and also the different level of demand you will place on it given your improved capacity. You may overextend yourself and maybe even hurt yourself in this process. It is normal to have some trouble adjusting and small issues like one missed night of sleep but it should level out within a fairly short time, maybe a week or two. If you have ongoing disruption make sure to talk to your prescribing doctor and make sure it isn’t a side effect.

Good luck, have fun!

My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.

My experience may be different to yours, but I found that I could actually sleep better with Ritalin on board than without. I can actually have a nap if I decide to and will actually fall asleep while having an active dose, whereas if I don’t I am too agitated and can’t relax enough for a nap.

As for eating, OMAD (One Meal A Day) is good for me, I can not worry about it and just eat in the evening and cover my full day intake in one go. It makes organisation much easier simplifies my schedule. It is also better for blood sugar regulation and insulin resistance, so if you are prediabetic it can help reverse that damage.

That said, if you take it every day you will probably find your hunger signal changes to be more obvious while on the meds. I have found that I can get my three meals a day while on Ritalin after a couple of years of taking it, but skipping is also fine and doesn’t upset me like it does without meds. This is also true of pain, I can tolerate pain much better with my meds than without. The pain isn’t gone, it just doesn’t intrude and disrupt as much so I can keep doing other things.

I will also say that the sense of holding two tasks and switching between them, not forgetting the other, is something that I find works better off the meds than it did before the meds. I assume it is because I can actually train the skill with the meds on board and get better at it, then when I am off the meds the pathways are stronger and easier to use. I can’t say that for sure, but it certainly seems more possible to ignore distractions off the meds than it was before the meds, so I think skill is a part of it, though the other side is probably some degree of burnout and a lack of resources before the meds compared to after having them for a while.

Anyway, good luck, I hope it goes well for you.

As an autistic person with ADHD too I was going to say this. I hate my name being used, I strongly prefer dude or mate, I’ll even take “hey you”, but using my name is very similar to extreme eye contact or touching my hands. No, no thank you, I would prefer not to.

One can dream, but action is better. Asking for transparency is a good start, having legislation presented before voting for public comment is actually not that hard an ask for a legislature. Starting at your most local level and asking them to put legislation under consideration publicly on the local governmental site is a reasonable ask and may actually be done in a reasonable timeframe. Asking the next level up for the same once it is done locally and works out fine is actusy easier than starting at that level, so starting smaller is practically more effective.

I would recommend asking your most local form of government for the transparency you want and explaining your reasoning. Go to town hall meetings, be part of the process. It is more possible at that local level than at any higher level.

Honestly, I want much more democracy than we have. Right now we have a vote over who represents us every couple of years, depending on the system. That person goes to the seat of government and casts a vote ostensibly because that is what all of the people in their electorate would have wanted.

The fact is we actually have an oligarchy. The people we get to choose from are almost always landlords, at least where I live. They have multiple houses, lots of wealth, and connections. This is needed to get elected, but it means that the only choice we really have is which arseholes we want to vote for. There is no option for “none of the above”. Those people who we can pick from get a 4 or 6 year term and then we vote again with either the same person winning, which happens the vast majority of the time, or someone else who is also a rich fuck.

These rich people don’t know what life is like for a poor person. They are completely oblivious to how hard accessing our social support systems is and how dehumanising the process can be. They don’t know how often you will get your payment cut because someone else didn’t do some paperwork properly. They don’t understand that it takes a whole day on the phone to fix it every time.

They also don’t know the price of bread and milk, how much school uniforms cost for kids, how hard it is to afford anything nice at all on so little money. They don’t know how to cook because they can afford to have someone else do that for them, so they don’t know how hard it is to budget your tiny income to feed a family. They don’t understand that the major reason people don’t want kids is because it is too damn expensive.

The rich pigs have to go. They have been slurping up resources for all recorded history in one way or another and they really don’t add anything to the world. Could they be reformed by having their insane wealth removed and being average in wealth and income? Maybe. I would be willing to run the experiment. But at this point they have all committed so many crimes that a vanishingly small number of them would not be due to serve considerable prison time for wage theft, fraud, worker exploitation, and all the actually salacious crimes such as in the Epstein Files.

So I do actually want a radically different world than we have now. I do want to have a world where if someone abuses a child they face a fair and impartial justice system and then have justice play out, be it prison time or something else. I also recognise that aiming for that society from here is like aiming for a Mars base to build a space program. It is a reasonable long term goal but the steps along the way must be incremental and will involve a lot of time, effort, and energy. It won’t be a linear process, it will have stops and starts along the way, but with determination we can make the world much better than it is right now. Each step towards that amazing goal is progress that makes living here better, so I am willing to take those challenges and victories along the way.

Yeah, it seems like a great choice for people who already have Mac hardware, not something to drive people to buy Mac hardware.

Also, so keen in the framework laptops, for my next laptop I am hoping to get one, but for now I have something cheap and functional enough.

To be honest, I do. I want the alternatives and advocate for them on the regular.

Capitalism is not commerce. You can have markets and personal property and so on without capitalism. On top of that you van have degrees of capitalism, like the difference between the US and other English speaking countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. All of those except the USA have universal healthcare. All of those have more restrictions in business. All of those have some degree of socialised services.

I think that if you let capitalists have control of the government they move it towards fascism. I think that if you have a degree of state intervention and you have an accountable state then you can potentially move in the right direction. It doesn’t have to be fully communist or socialist, but what we have globally right now is not working.

I’ve seen fairly good results for Asahi Linux on an M1 Mac. Maybe you could try that?

That said, the hardware seems to be good from what I have seen, but getting it repaired is an absolute nightmare. If you want more of the Mac experience try Elementary OS, they have a very cool desktop environment which takes a lot of cues from Mac OS but it is familiar Linux territory.

I personal would recommend something repairable like a Lenovo Thinkpad with a Linux distro you like, or maybe a bunch to try. Much cheaper, repairable, and no difficulty transitioning to Mac OS.

1-2% per year, compounding.

At a 1% rate it is 10.46% after 10 years, 22% after 20 years, and after 25 years or one lifetime it is 28.2%. This means the GDP per person is almost a third higher after one generation at the lowest estimate.

If you use the 2% estimate it is 64% instead, so you have two thirds more productivity per person. You reach double at 35 years.

So if you can produce double the output for the same input why are we all more poor than our parents? Someone is taking the growth and putting it in their own pocket. It isn’t the immigrants or the gays. It absolutely is the rich people who own things, the capitalists. People who contribute nothing but permission to use their stuff and honestly it sounds like a scam to me.

This is not correct. There are lots of breakdowns as to why, but the clearest and most obvious is to look at productivity.

We are more productive than we were previously. If we compare how much GDP is produced by an hour of labour over time we see that we are getting better and better at making GDP with each hour of labour. We tend to increase at about 1-2% per year, so if one year you made $100000 of value the next year you would make $101000-102000.

This seems odd as surely this should mean people need to work less or have less trouble affording to live? Well, that is where capitalism comes in. Someone is finding life easier, but it isn’t you. It is someone who is rich, someone who owns the means of production, a capitalist. By virtue of owning the company they can take your productivity, the total amount of GDP you produce, and then take a slice of that and pay you.

For the capitalist any productivity gains are just pure profit for them, so they love increases of productivity. They also love reductions in labour cost as that is often the largest cost they can potentially get rid of. From their perspective if they could pay you nothing they would. A good example of this is offshoring. Companied do this all the time to send the labour to somewhere that pays the worker less allowing the capitalist to extract even more value.

So how does this relate to the birth rate? Increasing the population increases the number of people you can extract value from. If you are a capitalist this is good because it also increases competition for the jobs you offer, lowering the labour price further.

The simple fact is we could afford to have way less population growth, in fact a bit of a contraction, without any ill effects if we wanted to. We would just need to give the capitalists less of the productivity per hour of labour. They would need to make less profit. They don’t want that so they have made a big effort to make people think it would be bad to have low population growth.

Also, parents should get education before having kids. There should be courses you can do to learn what you need to be a parent, we agree there. It shouldn’t be women alone getting that. Men who want to be parents should be able to learn the skills needed to be good parents. Putting all that on the mother is sexist and also just silly. Men would be better served by gaining skills to manage parenting than by outsourcing that duty to women.

Think about what people who don’t have to work now do and apply it, or alternatively think about what people do in their down time.

My partner paints and does various other types of art. They are disabled and we live in Australia so they have a support payment, meaning they don’t have to work for money. They have made some awesome art that I really love and they do it because they want to. There is no time pressure, not external motivation, it is purely intrinsic motivation that drives their behaviour.

I on the other hand have done a bunch of different jobs in which I have made things like in IT where I put together servers and replaced aging infrastructure. The stress of the external time pressures and so on took away a good fraction of the joy of it. In my home lab I have some cool things I have played around with and I genuinely enjoy them, but that is my own stuff with my own money and time, so the joy is there in full.

If I were considering how things would happen in a solar punk future it would not be jobs, it would not be something you are incentivised to do, it would be something you do because you want to, so hours would likely be less and you would likely have multiple fairly different things. I personally would probably cook, garden, care for kids and disabled people, do cool stuff with computers, and learn about genetic engineering and associated cool science stuff. None of those would be 40+ hours a week, but I would have periods of getting stuck into a project and spending a lot of time for a couple of weeks on one thing while reducing the time for the rest.

This all rides on automation taking care of most of the labour requiring tasks. I would still cook because I enjoy it, even though a machine could do it just as well with no effort from me. I would learn about things out of interest, not utility.

This looks like a job for fidget toys!

Honestly, such a great tool, you can use your hands while they talk and it is much easier. Also other things like gardening, walking, and so on can fill the same niche. Just have something your body can do while you are listening and it will be easier.

Also, consider having some music in the background, or be playing a game together like a card game or similar to break up the talking.

Maybe also tea and biscuits? Just something to have your hands and mouth occupied and make not talking easier.

I agree, I didn’t say with clarity that the reason for the worry is the above. I worry things will work out that way and AI companies are the absolute worst offenders for screwing everyone over constantly so it seems more likely with them than another company.

That said, Blender wouldn’t be where it is without contributions from various companies that drove features forward and made contributions to it. I do worry about the future, but I feel that way about most tech, the average person does not benefit from DRM at all but Linux supports it to some degree. I can remove support if I want and there are distros that support that, but in a world with corporate control as law I guess this is the best we can hope for for now.

It isn’t about there being any contact at all, it is about the inherent corrupting nature of money. If they become a corporate patron they are paying money to the Blender Foundation who can then use that funding to hire people to work on Blender. This all seems cool and normal.

The problem is not with getting the funding. The problem is once you have the funding you don’t want to lose it. That means you will be more likely to tweak things a little, embrace things that suit your corporate patrons, and not block features your community doesn’t want. For example, AI.

So if I make a prediction about this it isn’t that tomorrow Blender will have AI tools integrated throughout the whole stack. It is that over time, especially a year or more from now, AI related tools will come to Blender and they will be Anthropic based tools.

Will they be required? No, of course not. But they will be there and they will be opt out. And along with that the development of other tools which would have filled the niche the Anthropic tools have taken over will not be developed. So less work will go into something that an Anthropic tool could do instead.

It isn’t malice, it isn’t direct evil, but it will give Anthropic a quick leg up to getting all the graphic artists and modelers to use their tools rather than a competitors, and they can do it all while looking good.

The same thing happened with computers for schools. If kids grow up using Apple computers they buy them as adults and take those skills into their careers. If they instead learn on Windows machines then they take those skills forward. The whole industry is shaped by these choices and that locks in massive profits for those companies. Why do you think Google worked so hard on Chromebooks?

I would prefer for none of my apps to use the plagiarism machines in any way. I would prefer that any AI “enhancement” was a plugin I could easily install but not installed by default. But I am not going to get that, so it is disappointing.

When you get it wrong, which you will, just correct and move on. Make a separate acknowledgement that you will make mistakes but your intention is to get it right. Make those two separate things, don’t make the moment of you getting it wrong the time you affirm your intent, keep them separated and they will both be more effective.

Also, ask them if they would like to go clothes shopping, in person or online, and support them in trying things that they have not yet been comfortable trying.

Being supportive isn’t about perfection. It is about effort. Your effort shows your care and consideration which in turn show your love and regard. Be there, be involved as is wanted, and be willing to accept making a mistake as you learn together. That is worth more than any amount of perfection that cannot be provided. Remember, the effort is the display of love, messing it up is something that happens along the way, keep trying and things will work out.

I definitely feel similarly about bad instructions. I have found a few recent products that actually had good instructions which made me really understand the issue.

Good instructions give a single possible interpretation. Bad instructions could be interpreted to mean mutually exclusive things.

Does the washer go on the bolt before the bolt enters the hole? Or on the other side? If you get it wrong you may not tighten it correctly and may compromise the strength of the furniture.

I recently bought and built a few items and they had clear, unambiguous instructions. Only one possible interpretation, clear logical steps, and well labeled parts. One was from GiantX and the other was Fantastic Furniturea chain here in Australia. The difference between those and other flat pack items was insane.

Yep, when you have life with a major block and then experience a significant reduction in it you will definitely feel the pull to have even less. There is a sweet spot for meds and it can be different than you initially think.

I find that having my morning dose of 40mg Ritalin LA and my afternoon dose of 20mg Ritalin standard release works really well, but if I am just doing stuff like dinner and hanging out I may actually split that 20mg dose into two sequential 10mg doses a couple of hours apart. That gives me relief from some of the sensory issues for much more time but doesn’t give me as much help with the motivation and activity level stuff.

So for you it may be worth considering an adjunct of lower dose Ritalin for after the big dose wears off, obviously depending on how it worka for you. I would recommend speaking to your prescribing doctor about trying a few different dose schedules for their recommendations, and really to use the language of testing so they understand you mean to experiment within safe bounds to understand how it works best. That means the same overall dose but tweaking the delivery timing and measuring the outcome.

Some psychiatrists will be uncomfortable with this. Some may be reluctant to have you try things and experiment. Some may think you are heading towards abuse. For that reason I would also recommend saying you want to optimise the dose you currently have, not increase, and also be open to other things like modafinil or similar non-stimulant meds.

Also, consider non-medication interventions. A great one is hard, heavy exercise, for example powerlifting. You burn a bunch of calories in a short time and release some of the body tension that builds over time and eventually causes issues. I find that lifting heavy things helps settle me and makes the next 3-5 days way better. Cardio never does the same for me, but maybe it would work for you.