103 karma · joined December 17, 2021
I've backpacked/hitchiked through Ireland few years back. It was easy to catch a ride, even easier to find somebody to let me pitch a tent on their land. People were open and kind and wanted to hear and share stories.
- 45 flights per recon consumer quadcopter drone before it's lost
- 69 flights per heavy bomber drone before it's lost
They switch the batteries before each flight anyway, so even batteries that are rated for 10 cycles would be good enough if the price/performance is good enough.
Certainly batteries rated for 300 cycles are an overkill.
Source (from March 2025): https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/04/16/hidden...
Also I'm listening to Piotr Ryczek talking about his time with drone unit in Ukraine, and he says recovering drones is complicated (because you have to land far away from your position and the enemy drones wait for people trying to recover a drone that landed, so you have to wait for hours before going there and do it at night). Which drains the batteries to 0 after every flight and reduces the drone availability by half or more.
So there's tactical reasons not to focus on quality too much, too.
If the drone can fly 10 times it's probably good enough.
When you have 30 insurance companies, 10000 companies buying insurance policies and millions of individuals - you get shit prices.
That's why the drug in question is 200 USD in US (after deductions) and 20 in Europe (including taxes).
> People with NPD don’t go and get help, they just run around ruining other peoples lives.
This is objectively false. There's lots of people in therapy for NPD. And there have been case studies with people who recovered.
Which brings another point
> The DSM basically took all those “traits we think of as evil” and said “we shall make some disorder categories”.
DSM criteria for narcissism are part of the problem. You can have the exact same mental struggle but stop yourself from hurting people (at least to a reasonable degree - "normal" people also hurt others sometimes after all). And you won't be diagnosed as NPD. But you'll still have all the other problems - lack of human connection, vastly higher chance of suicide, autoimmune diseases, relationship problems, etc.
Which is like saying you only have alcoholism if you beat people on the streets. If you define it that way - of course all alcoholics are violent.
But it's not a productive way to define mental health problems. It leaves out people who struggle with it but don't cause harm.
> The rest of us don’t care if they can be saved, we just don’t ever want to interact with another one. Ever.
That's unlikely given that estimated 0.5-5% of the general population have NPD and about 20% have strong narcissistic traits.
In IT it's probably much higher by the way, it's the perfect job (little human contact, high status, well paid).
For various reasons - some kids don't. Bullying can certainly contribute.
So they develop maladaptive strategies (which can look like the first few "stages" in this article) and have to undo the damage later in life (which can look like the later "stages" from the article) to have a chance to experience real human connection.
I think the article can be very beneficial for people who struggle with this, even if it doesn't explicitly mention what the technical name of the struggle is (and BTW it does not have to be NPD - there might be other reasons for people to have similar problems). Maybe even BECAUSE it doesn't mention narcissism (cause narcissism is currently villified on the social media as "they are actual demons that cannot be saved" - so people are very wary of identifying with it, which makes it less likely they will work on themselves).
BTW I'm very disappointed in the current fad on social media of villifying one mental health issue after another only to then come to realize "oh wait, they're actually people not monsters". I've seen it with BPD, now it's the NPD turn. It's usually done for ugly reasons, too (somebody hurt by a person with $mental_health_problem search for validation, so influencers jump in with feel-good validation that portrays the other side as demons).
At first it might feel like "these people don't like me cause of how much better I am than them", or "these people don't like me, well fuck them, I don't need anybody".
People have all kinds of excuses they tell themselves to feel better about the needs they can't satisfy.
After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.
Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.
Just solving these problems made me giddy.
Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.
But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.
TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.
Like being a cancer diagnostician. Or an inspector at a border crossing.
Using LLMs is currently a lot like going to a diagnostian that always responds "no, you're healthy". The answer is probably right. But still we pay people a lot to get that last 1%.
There's no CPU that can't be wasted by bad code.
In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.
Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.
What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.
It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.
When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.
At least that's the theory, I'm not there yet.
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
I blamed it on the drugs I got prescripted for sleeping (I had bad allergy and was scratching myself to the point of bleeding during sleep so I got some "pacifying" drugs).
But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.
In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russias-ethnic-minorities-...
> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.
Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".
Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.
Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.
There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.
Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.
Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.
You keep being "open-minded" about that, I prefer modernism and liberalism, thank you.
All of which Dostoyevsky tried to defend.
Don't get me wrong - early western democracies weren't perfect or even close. But it was still an enormous improvement over what came before.
But he was a russian empire/orthodoxy apologist through and through, except for a brief period early on (which earned him the gulag).
I started having symptoms of colitis ulcerosa when I was 18 and had final high school exams. I was under tons of stress. I started to care much less about such things and had years-long remission. There were only 2 other flare-ups - when I was passing driving licence test, and when I had the first big series of exams at university.
Basically every time I drove myself very hard I had another episode. And it's not fun to suddenly shit yourself in public transport let me tell you :/
It's been over 20 years since last time I had colitis ulcerosa flare-up. But, in the meantime I was also diagnosed with autoimmune liver disease (PSC), and I'm not sure this one is stress-related. It seems to me it just ticks away at my liver and even very relaxed lifestyle doesn't help. I'm very hopeful about new drugs for this, as the only alternative seems to be to wait for inevitable liver transplant later in life.
I managed to "overcome" my social anxiety at high school and both high school and university were pretty good experiences with good friends, no bullying, I even started dating by the end of university (which was horrifying to me earlier). I thought back then that bullying won't have any bad effects, I was pretty religious and considered it a trial that I passed that made me stronger and more empathic to people being victimized.
Problems started at work and in relationships. I realized after decades that I consistently let other people walk all over me by default and it caused A LOT of issues. I rejected all the women who seemed "too good for me" becuse they were normal healthy people, and I have been in a series of co-abusive toxic relationships (somehow the girls ALL have turned out to be bullied as well later).
I stayed at my first IT job for over 5 years not asking for rises while the IT salaries grew quickly here, and by the end I was underpaid by more than 50% compared to people with similar experience and skill. I had problems with procrastination and I always felt I'm about to be fired, but by now I worked for several companies and managed to get to normal senior-level income and all of the companies were always saying they are happy with my performance. I was a teamlead for a while and they were OK with my performance too. I realized consciously they wouldn't keep me if they were lying, but deep down I thought they are lying for some reason and they are about to fire me. Sometimes it was so strong a feeling I couldn't deal with it and have left the job on my own.
That's rich :) For all intents and purposes you're supporting it, you just like to support it while feeling morally superior.