Incredible article, and really makes me appreciate how lucky I am to have my cognitive faculties. We really don't have as much time as we think; seize the day and make the most of what you have!
What Happened to Lee
261–270 of 299 posts
Re: What Happened to Lee
#262Terrifying. As a software engineer, shit like this scares me. I've felt like I'm on a steady, slow, decline for the last ~4 years. Is it just burnout? Do I need a new hobby? I used to love programming... Spent 12 hours a day jamming on it. Now, I struggle to keep my mind on a line of code for more than 5 minutes. At what point is it just burnout, or at what point is it something more? That's what's terrifying to me.…
I think the fact that you're reflecting on it means there's no actual degradation. Someone with Lee's disorder doesn't seem to be capable of self reflection at all. To me it doesn't really sound like he's suffering, especially given the fact that he doesnt really have meltdowns and freakouts. It sounds more like he's just reverting to a state where his behaviors and consciousness coming from the cerebellum/brainstem,…
While obviously neurodegerative disorders manifest somewhat differently for everyone, I have some anecdotal evidence pointing the opposite direction. I've known people starting to undergo dementia (as a general term, may have been Parkinson's, etc.) that were aware of their decline. I think the most common example of that was the feeling among them that "I used to be able to do this..."
I'm by no means qualified to make any actual statements about this case, but I don't think that the ability to reflect on degradation is perfectly coupled with a lack of it.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 33 also. I'm starting to form a theory that it could be dopamine depletion. [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2791340/
Check your blood sugar and blood pressure. That is what got me, for a long time I had a lot of brain fog and just was operating at around 50% which was enough to get me by but once those issues were resolved I feel fine now.
Blood pressure has been tested, and is normal (120/70).
I'd be surprised if I had a blood sugar problem. No family history of Type-1 diabetes. I'm thin/muscular. Workout regularly (lift+run).
I suppose it's possible, but I would be surprised. Human body is a weird thing.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 33 also. I'm starting to form a theory that it could be dopamine depletion. [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2791340/
Can you elaborate on the theory? I tried reading the article but can't make too much sense of it.
They studied motivation & effort in rats, essentially asking the question:
"What makes you work hard for a big (but delayed) reward, when you could just take the easy (but smaller) reward?"
I think of my current state as, always seeking the easy reward. I utterly lack the motivation, energy, and focus, to pursue prolonged difficult tasks (like good programming takes).
When you think about it, we (humans) face this question every day. Why do you get up, and work on hard problems, when you could just sit and watch YouTube? There's got to be something motivating you to sit down, and do the work.
What they found in the study is that if they blocked D1 and D2 receptors, the rats stopped working for the big reward. They would just sit there, and take the small reward. Or, they'd do nothing at all. They became lazy, unmotivated, blobs.
If they supplemented with D-Amphetamine they were able to reverse the effect. Thereby demonstrating, that it's actually the failure to activate D1 and D2 receptors that causes rats to give up on hard work. DOPAMINE is responsible for activating these receptors, and it's these receptors that give you the "OOMF" to get up, and get shit done.
Historically dopamine is seen as the "reward" but that's not really the case. Dopamine is the fuel. It's the catalyst. It's the "mental energy" that gets you off your ass.
So my theory is that, in myself, something is either blocking D1 and D2 receptors... or I've "used up" my dopamine reserves in the brain my continually slamming them with YouTube, gaming, and general computer use. My brain now looks for this high everywhere. Reading a book stands no chance, as it doesn't release anywhere near the dopamine of clicking through YouTube or playing video games.
My baseline is fucked, essentially. So, I am going to begin the hard work of reseting this baseline... No YouTube, no Games. Will report back in a few months.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sure he did a great job, but I’ve seen those things be a huge nightmare for anyone other than the irreplaceable genius code wizard who created them.
I guess you're using the word genius ironically, but I've also seen such things be radical in the sense that they're built in a way that no one else would have done, yet it ends up working perfectly for the business and being far more successful than anyone would have predicted. There's a certain type of mind that is immune to fashionable or normal technical choices, that often goes along with remarkable productivity…
I actually think that doing things in stored procedures could be a great hack to squeeze out some extra performance, and I'm sure that a system like this can accomplish some important business goals.
However, in the example I'm thinking of, it was much more dysfunctional. The advantage of stored procedures there was that the organization's release process was so broken that it was much faster for sales and marketing to get features added by going through Carl, the DBA, instead of submitting the request to the dev team. This was because Carl was able to add the logic by sending one query rather than going through the broken months-long release process.
Carl was actually a real nice guy, although hard to get a meeting with due to his great importance and busy schedule.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, stored procedures making API calls to external services, sounds like a nightmare of tech debt to unwind. I'm sure when you have a brilliant engineer like this you can make it work though.
Step back and take an honest look, and in the vast majority of systems, it's hard to deny that stored functions and/or procedures are one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox. If anything, they're widely under utilized. This is especially the case with Postgres -- it has built-in support for functions in several non-SQL languages (including Python). In practice, the aversion to stored funcs/procs mostly arises f…
I personally think consideration of this apprach speaks of the technical range and sophistication of the practitioner. It is unusual, but we're in agreement that this is due mostly due to soft and orthogonal issues.
(Tooling could be improved to make the development and debugging process more seamless.)
Re: What Happened to Lee
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on the theory? I tried reading the article but can't make too much sense of it.
They studied motivation & effort in rats, essentially asking the question: "What makes you work hard for a big (but delayed) reward, when you could just take the easy (but smaller) reward?" I think of my current state as, always seeking the easy reward. I utterly lack the motivation, energy, and focus, to pursue prolonged difficult tasks (like good programming takes). When you think about it, we (humans) face this qu…
That seems to make sense and seems to be happening to a lot of us. I think the dopamine-being-reward hypothesis has been proven to be an oversimplification[1]:
"Dopamine was originally thought of as critical in the pleasure" systems of the brain. It was thought that dopamine makes you feel enjoyment and pleasure, thereby motivating you to seek out certain behaviors, such as food, sex, and drugs. But then research began to show that dopamine is also critical in causing seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information."
I've also noticed that if I try listening to music and my brain is being very picky with my playlist, then I know that the day will probably be filled with apathy and anhedonia.[2]
How much do you think the instant gratification society that we're living in plays a role in this behavior? The internet has made food, sex, goods, etc so easy to get, which may cause issues with dopamine management that our ancestors didn't have.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201802/th...
https://www.wired.com/2011/07/sapolsky-on-dopamine-not-about...
Re: What Happened to Lee
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on the theory? I tried reading the article but can't make too much sense of it.
They studied motivation & effort in rats, essentially asking the question: "What makes you work hard for a big (but delayed) reward, when you could just take the easy (but smaller) reward?" I think of my current state as, always seeking the easy reward. I utterly lack the motivation, energy, and focus, to pursue prolonged difficult tasks (like good programming takes). When you think about it, we (humans) face this qu…
Sometimes the internet is so small. I’ve had a bad time lately with my attention span, some depression, etc. I looked around and found the same theory. This has legs since I game a lot, sit at a pc a lot, and browse the web constantly.
In an effort (prayer) to help fix it, I am selling my iPhone 11 Pro for a SE. I am selling my PC and iPad for a small laptop. I am also purchase 2-3 books that look interesting and plan to try reading those.
My goal is to slow down my brains access to dopamine for a time and see where that leaves me.
Just a theory!
Re: What Happened to Lee
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working with stored procedures is just the pits. I wonder why you would describe that as "great". Maybe it's optimized, but so would be a giant executable written in assembly.
As long as you have the necessary tooling for source control, versioning, code search, etc. -- why is it the pits? I mean, if you stick to a rigorous procedure of automatically exporting your stored procedures to files and committing them to git with messages... how is that different from any other development? Serious question -- I've done tons of database work but only a little bit with stored procedures, so wonder…
Let's say that when you deploy, you want to direct 1% of traffic to the new code, then 5%, then 25%, then 50%, and finally 100%. And if monitoring metrics go red at any point, automatically roll back. A typical canary deployment.
How do you do that with a sproc? With normal application code, you can have the load balancer send an arbitrary percentage of traffic to the new instances of the service. A sproc binds the code and the data together. But you only have one database, so there's no way to do a gradual deploy of the code. That would be like doing a gradual deploy of a schema migration. It's only possible if you have a lot of databases.
Also unless you're using MS SQL server, debugging sprocs is a pain. The only workaround I've seen is to add a debug or loglevel arg to the sproc. But actually pausing execution and inspecting data? Good luck.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as you have the necessary tooling for source control, versioning, code search, etc. -- why is it the pits? I mean, if you stick to a rigorous procedure of automatically exporting your stored procedures to files and committing them to git with messages... how is that different from any other development? Serious question -- I've done tons of database work but only a little bit with stored procedures, so wonder…
Let's say that when you deploy, you want to direct 1% of traffic to the new code, then 5%, then 25%, then 50%, and finally 100%. And if monitoring metrics go red at any point, automatically roll back. A typical canary deployment. How do you do that with a sproc? With normal application code, you can have the load balancer send an arbitrary percentage of traffic to the new instances of the service. A sproc binds the c…
> Let's say that when you deploy, you want to direct 1% of traffic to the new code, then 5%, then 25%, then 50%, and finally 100%. And if monitoring metrics go red at any point, automatically roll back.
> How do you do that with a sproc?
Wrap the real sproc (well, the set of real sprocs, since old and new will sometimes coexist) with a wrapper sproc that probabilistically directs to the appropriate working sproc based on a table value (or anything else the sproc can read) that is updated to reflect the current stage in the conversion process, including any monitoring-based reversals.