Dear neurodivergent Twitterverse, I suspect one of my kids might have/be ADHD. I am suspicious of self-assessment tests, and would like to learn more about the SotA for testing (ideally quantitative tests without practice effects). What outside of TOVA exists? Anyone with experience with any such tests?
Also: while I think it's unlikely, I'd be interested to see what reliable tests for neurodivergent traits exist that are for adults?
@HalvarFlake ✅ and getting the diagnosis really helped as it meant I’m not lazy or stupid, there is a reason for it all. I reckon an early diagnosis would mean a lot of shame missed out on in life.
A woman named Amy Appelhans Gubser swam from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farralon islands today. That is an absolutely mind-blowing achievement, and given that the Farralon islands are a seal breeding ground and given the density of great whites, I wouldn't dare swim there.
Absolutely impressive achievement. My mind is blown.
The person in front of me is an economist telling his neighbor, a pancreatic cancer drug researcher: How do you stay motivated to work on something so hopeless that the resources to do the research should be better spent elsewhere.
His job? Working for some investment fund.
A scholast in a largely political job telling a scientist that. Wow.
Waiting for a delayed flight, some idle thoughts on what Google needs to fix itself:
Find a replacement for Sundar. This person needs to be both able if articulating a coherent vision for Google as a company, and inspire great engineers to want to work on great problems.
Google is a strange dysfunctional conglomerate. Search/Ads is/was one of the best businesses ever: Extremely high margin, network effects etc. - at the price of requiring heavy R&D for scale, search quality etc. -- a lot of early Google culture was built for such a business.
This was a result of the incentive structure. People got promoted for building big systems where small would have worked, and big teams when small would have worked.
Undoing this is super difficult and super painful. But if there is one lesson from history: Cut once. Cut deeply. Then let new branches sprout carefully.
The rolling layoffs that currently happen are crazy. Demoralizing, and not dealing with the actual rot.
The reason why McKinsey/MBA types like Sundar and his recruits ruin companies is that ultimately too much focus and belief in shareholder capitalism thinks that companies are devices that produce money.
But neither do employees go to work with the wish to produce money for their shareholders, nor do customers buy products with that intent.
Employees want to help the customers and get paid for that. Customers want the value of the product. Money to shareholders is a byproduct.
@oblomov@HalvarFlake what motivates over-reliance on metrics is that at scale it is literally a management problem. Overconservative people (employees, managers, whatever) won't change fast enough to track (never mind lead) the market, but the excessively inventive will piss away resources jack-rabbiting after the latest pet rock. Numbers and dollars are very convincing to many people, thus their popularity as a management tool.
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@oblomov@HalvarFlake Numbers fail when we fail to account for externalized costs, anything we can't measure, we either must guess a number or pretend it is zero, and factions will cook the guessed numbers to support their favorite choice. Conservatives will over-cost change. Imaginative jack-rabbits will over-cost failure to change, over-benefit adoption of their pet rock. And what has the security team ever done for us? And the privacy and user safety teams, they just slow down launches.
Next time management asks you to stack-rank the members of your team, buy an electrical motor assembly kit, drop it on their desk, and ask them to rank the parts by importance/performance.
As a young man I thought that I find overtly emotional people strenuous. One useful insight of my 40s is that I actually enjoy being among emotional people, it's people that externalize their traumas vs processing them that I found strenuous.
@HalvarFlake I actually like to be in therapy talk with people, at least sometimes - while people who view expression as externalization tend to find it unbearably annoying. There's always something to maintain boundaries about.
The comedian W. C. Fields once said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.” - one of the things I have yet to master: giving up when it's reasonable to do so.
@HalvarFlake Aren't most hackers successful precisely because they test things far beyond what most people consider 'reasonable'. It's the P in what we consider 'elite'. Apparently even @albinowax gives up too soon sometimes. Or has tested something to death so much he assumed the result was a false positive. He said recently.
I have just tried a voice cloning software for my own voice, and the results aren’t very good for me. Neither my timing cadence nor my intonation is mimicked properly…
Perhaps I have to try a different model, or more training data.
@HalvarFlake The denial notice should have told you how to appeal. As I recall, there's generally an administrative appeal path; after that, I think it’s a lawsuit in Federal court…
@HalvarFlake You can try repeating the search with broader terms, and they might lead to clues to additional future searches. Minor success with that approach for me, hopefully it will help. And if you can make a decent enough “case” you could ask the @eff for help or at least advice. Even a hallway conversation with some of the EFF at the next con you’re both at could give you some ideas. Good luck!