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What Happened to Lee

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Re: What Happened to Lee

#271

Post by rubicon33 »

cheeko1234 wrote: post #267
rubicon33 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beg…

> How much do you think the instant gratification society that we're living in plays a role in this behavior?

Yea, my theory is that for some people (like myself), the instant-gratification society has been terrible for mental health. I have effectively retrained my brain to be stimulated by only exciting + novel things. Things that illicit huge dopamine releases due to their nature being inherently novel/new.

Take YouTube as an example. Pull down on the page, and it's like a slot machine. Page loads a whole new grid of fresh - potentially click worthy - videos!

The eyes/brain scan the page looking for a hit. BINGO you see a video that catches your interest. Click. Ahh, satisfying transition instantly to the video. Boring? Click back at the home page, and start the slot machine again. Rinse, repeat.

That cycle of chance (load the grid) --> seek (search the grid visually) --> instant reward (click the video) is what's so dangerous. Takes almost no mental, or physical effort, to carry out this cycle.

IMO, it's exploiting a very primitive system:

chance (randomness) --> stimulates effort --> get reward.

You will naturally tend toward systems that minimize effort, and maximize reward. Everything else will feel like a giant burden, or will lack a stimulating effect entirely.

You can see this same cycle in things like Facebook, Instagram, Google News, or any video game. Minimal effort required, to capture your attention (effectively blasting dopamine).

Re: What Happened to Lee

#272

Post by meowface »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #210
xupybd wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced this too. I had a tumor removed from my head. It was pretty serious. I'm not sure if it's due to the anesthesia, physical stress of the operation, changes to brain blood flow or radiation that my brain was hit with. Either way my memory has not been great since. My wife is disappointed when I forget meaningful conversions from a week ago. I struggle at times to notice trivial errors, really struggle.…

Neuroplasticity is an extraordinary thing. With proper consistent mental exercise and training, you can improve your working memory and focus back to what it used to be if not better.

Inspirational messages are good, and there's certainly a good chance that you're right in this case, but I also don't think it's a great idea to speak with such certainty.

I mean, they had a brain tumor which could've been causing damage itself, plus radiation to the brain, invasive brain surgery, altered brain blood flow during the surgery, general anesthetic... That's serious stuff affecting the most complex machine we're aware of.

The brain can be capable of amazing feats of recovery, but it's always going to vary based on someone's pre-existing genetics, environment, age, and the specific damage they might have incurred. Recovery back to baseline absolutely may be possible for them, but there's really no way to know that for sure when dealing with something so serious and without knowing many other factors. Hope is good, but sugarcoated false hope isn't.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#273

Post by ggreer »

dragonwriter wrote: post #270
ggreer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 base…

How do you correlate those errors at the application level? If only 1% of sproc calls are the new sproc, any elevated error rates in the application will be hard to see over typical noise.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#274

Post by dragonwriter »

ggreer wrote: post #273
dragonwriter wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 base…

How do you correlate those errors at the application level? If only 1% of sproc calls are the new sproc, any elevated error rates in the application will be hard to see over typical noise.

> How do you correlate those errors at the application level? If only 1% of sproc calls are the new sproc, any elevated error rates in the application will be hard to see over typical noise.

By using the DBs error reporting features to report back errors to the application, including information about which ultimate implementation was handling the request.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#275

Post by cheeko1234 »

rubicon33 wrote: post #271
cheeko1234 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beg…

> How much do you think the instant gratification society that we're living in plays a role in this behavior? Yea, my theory is that for some people (like myself), the instant-gratification society has been terrible for mental health. I have effectively retrained my brain to be stimulated by only exciting + novel things. Things that illicit huge dopamine releases due to their nature being inherently novel/new. Take Y…

I like the way you think. You should write a blog!

Re: What Happened to Lee

#276

Post by ggreer »

dragonwriter wrote: post #274
ggreer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you correlate those errors at the application level? If only 1% of sproc calls are the new sproc, any elevated error rates in the application will be hard to see over typical noise.

> How do you correlate those errors at the application level? If only 1% of sproc calls are the new sproc, any elevated error rates in the application will be hard to see over typical noise. By using the DBs error reporting features to report back errors to the application, including information about which ultimate implementation was handling the request.

That only covers errors that occur inside the sproc, not errors that are caused by the sproc. For example: What if the new version of the sproc succeeds, but the data it returns causes the application code to fail in some way? The sproc metrics would report 100% success and the application error rate wouldn't get above noise until a significant fraction of traffic was using the new buggy version of the sproc.

It's possible to add more epicycles to try and correct for these deficiencies, but the truth is that sprocs are dangerously double-edged. Yes, your code runs next to your data, but to get parity with application code (canary deploys, debugging, logging, etc) you must reinvent lots of tooling.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#277

Post by miles »

asveikau wrote: post #182
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life is short and slips away quickly. Use your abilities to further the things that mean the most to you, not on a possibly misguided sense of what you "should" be doing.

And also: have pity on the person who outwardly seems to be an asshole or checked out. You don't know what they're going through.

Reminded me of this quote often misattributed to Plato[0]:

"Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

and Patrick Farley's version from his series "The Spiders"[1]:

"Show kindness to every person you meet. No matter how ill-tempered a man may seem, you have no idea what private agony he may secretly be struggling with."

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/

[1] http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/spiders/3.5/01_hospital.ht...

Re: What Happened to Lee

#278

Post by billti »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #254
billti wrote: post #25

> The neurologists delivered their verdict: He appeared to have a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia—known by the shorthand FTD Oh man, was that a kick in the guts when I got to that bit. My Dad was diagnosed with that in the past year, (after obviously struggling for a while), and declined rapidly. He had a different variant, and indeed the one thing that DIDN'T change was his personality. In fact, that's what…

Sorry about your loss! My father got diagnosed with this about a year and a half ago, and the first paragraph of your post sounds very familiar. Not a clear (or rapid anyway) change in personality, but certain aspects of it seem to somehow become amplified. He's still able to do a lot of the same things as always, but they seem to turn into reflexes and mannerisms. At this point he often falls into the verbal loops d…

Sorry you're going through this too.

The gradual decline slowly conditions you, like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. It was strange going back and reading some of his old emails and letters recently to try and find some info I needed. It was like, "Wow! He used to be really articulate and lucid and funny". I almost forgot that guy by the end :-(

Re: What Happened to Lee

#279

Post by stef25 »

cryptica wrote: post #32
billti wrote: post #25

> The neurologists delivered their verdict: He appeared to have a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia—known by the shorthand FTD Oh man, was that a kick in the guts when I got to that bit. My Dad was diagnosed with that in the past year, (after obviously struggling for a while), and declined rapidly. He had a different variant, and indeed the one thing that DIDN'T change was his personality. In fact, that's what…

>> It was interesting to see for Lee how this seemed amplified after heart surgery. My Dad had really bad "post-operative delirium" for about a month after major heart surgery, and while he recovered somewhat, that was definitely the start of his major decline. That is a strange coincidence. Could changes in bloodflow have an impact on brain cells?

Serious medical interventions can make a patient "age" quite a bit and this exacerbates other medical conditions they may have, I doubt there was any direct connection between the two conditions

Re: What Happened to Lee

#280

Post by stef25 »

meowface wrote: post #197
xupybd wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced this too. I had a tumor removed from my head. It was pretty serious. I'm not sure if it's due to the anesthesia, physical stress of the operation, changes to brain blood flow or radiation that my brain was hit with. Either way my memory has not been great since. My wife is disappointed when I forget meaningful conversions from a week ago. I struggle at times to notice trivial errors, really struggle.…

I'm sorry, that sounds awful. I think it definitely could be any combination of those things. The brain is a very delicate and sensitive machine. I don't have specific recommendations, but I think that the potential for recovery should be much higher than what people with neurodegenerative diseases suffer from, like what was described in this article. There're a lot of risk and uncertainty trade-offs, and everyone re…

> The brain is a very delicate and sensitive machine

Something as simple as a prion can completely destroy it and then there's Phineas Gage, someone whom all neurobio students learn about on day one of their course. Neuroplasticity can be quite amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

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