The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech • Hacker News Board

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#71

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

rini17 wrote: post #39

carlosjobim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for unpredictable performance, employers never want to have that. But it is possible if you have your own business or consultancy. Or if you work with art and creativity, where it is the norm to have ups and downs.

Idk artists I know have to work hard whenever there's some opportunity, regardless of whether they are up or down at the moment.

I don't think it's about working hard or not, it's about predictable performance. Artists work harder than most people when they are active, but also have hiatuses. It's completely expected for artists to have break periods.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#72

Post by morleytj » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #70

morleytj wrote: post #30

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

I thought the same exact thing. The "proper" em dash (or is that an en dash) as opposed to two dashes "--" is a typical giveaway, it seems to me. However, the article in general certainly reads like it is coming from the author's own voice. Painfully so, even, because this guy is clearly suffering.

Yeah, it's clear he's going through a lot of pain. Even just going through that many job changes outside of the other events sounds painful and difficult to deal with.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#73

Post by JohnBooty » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #51

morleytj wrote: post #30

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023. It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking…

    If you write concise but with some panache, people 
    *will* think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation 
    leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023

Nobody's ever accused me, but I am definitely conscious (paranoid) about the possibility. I have found myself editing my words to look "less LLM-like"

What a world!

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#74

Post by arp242 » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

> A perfect example: the Python documentary releases tomorrow, featuring interviews with Python community leaders and contributors. Despite creating one of the most foundational Python libraries in history, I wasn't even contacted about participating. No email, no mention, complete invisibility. The omission speaks volumes about how mental health disclosure transforms you from community asset to community liability

It features 22 people, which already seems quite a lot for a 90 minute documentary. And I can think of several other prominent Python people who are not listed. And lets be real here: "I made a Python library people like" really doesn't compete against "I was a core Python dev for 20 years". requests being "one of the most foundational Python libraries in history" seems quite exaggerated.

This kind "I need to be front and centre of attention and when I'm not I am being oppressed" type stuff is a big part of the reason why so many people found it hard to work with Kenneth. His constant self-aggrandizing and need for endless validation gets very tiring very fast.

I appreciate that Kenneth's mental health struggles are very real and I do not mean to devalue that in any way, but his constant use of his mental health to dismiss and and all criticism of his behaviour is another thing that gets very tiring very fast.

Of course I have no insight in many aspects of Kenneth's life and can't comment on any of it. I am perfectly willing to believe that sometimes in some places he has been discriminated due to his mental health diagnosis.

I can however comment on the state of things in Python because much of it is public, and the problems there have been mostly or entirely unrelated to his mental health diagnosis.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#75

Post by sfn42 » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

Rumudiez wrote: post #57

sfn42 wrote: post #13

I had never heard of Kenneth Reitz and I was curious about his Python contribution so I googled him and this was one of the first results https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

That post is all about money. The author came into someone else’s project, acts miffed that he isn’t treated as a founder right off the bat, and then complains endlessly about where the donations went. Even belaboring the “dishonesty” of rounding 28k to 30k. I won’t read to the end because clearly this person has major faults of their own and just wrote an attack without making any reflections on himself

It certainly isn't all about money, though I think the money is worth talking about. Anyway you're welcome to make up your own mind, I thought the blog seemed credible and reasonable and it certainly cast some light on why this person is having social problems beyond just a diagnosis.

I wasn't really looking for information to discredit Reitz, it was just the first thing I stumbled upon.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#76

Post by nemomarx » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #68

nemomarx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an llm would have put a comma in the middle of that? I wonder why no one's tuned their model to make minor errors that way or leave a few things uncapitalized to fake a human touch

You can do it after, remove all commas and newlines. Make it all a huge continuous blob of text that is hard to read. Definitely not LLM written. A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not in…

It's more like 4 or 5 uses of it, and some of the phrasing choices also have that vibe. Everyone's threshold for the smell will be different, of course.

It seems to me like it's more effort to write something and then have an llm clean it up instead of just posting it so I mostly don't understand the behavior to start with. Why are we going through this new effort?

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#77

Post by tux3 » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

dpoloncsak wrote: post #47

rlmcdonald wrote: post #20

All the comments here about how it's okay that he got excluded because he did the bad things fall right in line with what he's describing. Mental health awareness is easy when you just throw away all the people who make you uncomfortable! I thought it was a pretty good read and I'm not discounting it because it was written by someone struggling with mental illness.

Mate, theres another blog post about how the guy stole almost $30k of fundraised money. That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community.

>That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community.

No, acceptance of mental illness doesn't work if you define away anything serious as not mental illness. That's precisely the trouble the author is having, when they have a mental illness that's not just the cute idealized Tiktok version.

People with well-managed schizophrenia can lead relatively normal lives. Or they can wake up from a three day psychosis, not remembering why they've been arrested. It's a spectrum, and it does sometimes get ugly.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#78

Post by JohnBooty » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

nemomarx wrote: post #32

morleytj wrote: post #30

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

Yeah, I also kind of wish he published the blog in his own words instead of using what seems to be LLM polishing. It seems ironically like the same defensiveness and lack of transparency he wants to avoid?

I don't mind AI polishing any more than I mind somebody using a spellchecker.

The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#79

Post by nemomarx » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

jerlendds wrote: post #69

zdragnar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a condition that is employable in the abstract, as symptoms are as varied as individuals are. The difficulty begins with the treatment- the medications can be extremely unpleasant, and it is not uncommon for patients to cease taking them. Unfortunately, people with the condition can be unreliable narrators, so to speak, and so any deviation from perfectly normal becomes suspicion of medication refusal, as the a…

[redacted]

I hope you don't have to go through that in the future. The way people treat the homeless and how ERs treat anyone who asks for medication (accusations of pill seeking, as if it's impossible anyone might need pills) are horrible. Good luck out there.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#80

Post by squigz » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #64

Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense. That said, within the current system... Morally and legally, what are the limits of accommodation? Accommodation, in my uninformed layman understanding, is about accommodating people who can do the job,…

> Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense.

This sort of framing assumes the author bears no responsibility at all, and it's just society that has failed. The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be not reasonable to expect people to deal with someone's issues indefinitely, particularly when they chalk up all criticism as "discrimination"; I'm quite certain there are legitimate reasons, completely unrelated to his mental health, that he was fired or passed over for promotions.