Because plenty of people say they are OCD too, but they don't mean the diagnosed condition. And it's quite different to "being tidy and needing things to be ordered" that the common vernacular makes it out to be.
Same as ADHD. Plenty of people who say they are "a bit ADD" mean something else.
My very strong belief is that a large fraction of those who are "medically diagnosed" do not actually have ADHD.
ADHD was originally a diagnosis of exclusion - lack of executive control not explainable by any other known condition. But you can lack executive control for a wide variety of reasons including depression, sleep deprivation, electrolyte imbalances, and so on. Often doctors don't look - they just shove you out the door with Adderall. The side effects of which include loss of appetite and insomnia - both of which can make symptoms worse in the long run!
If we're going to treat ADHD as the serious disorder that it can be, we should treat diagnosis and treatment as more than an opportunity to prescribe profitable drugs. But instead we have a combination of on the one hand not taking it seriously, and on the other treating it like something serious at the oddest of moments.
Given how common it was (still is?) to abuse Adderall in college, I'm going to go out on a limb and say a lot of people have been "diagnosed" with ADHD, but that doesn't necessarily mean much.
To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all.
The trick (which is very hard) is to recognise when one of your own arguments is one of convenience, emotion, illogical etc. And not be biased towards logical fallacies against others.
But this does not mean that your average person on hacker news doesn't tend towards better educated and more rational discussion than large amounts of the public.
It also means hacker news tends towards specific blindspots, sure.
> To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all.
True. But the problem here is that this "skill" you think you have. It might be just a lie you tell yourself. You wouldn't know. That's the nature of lying to ourselves. Humans are all highly irrational creatures. Yet individually when we think of ourselves.... all of us unequivocally think of ourselves and most of our actions as rational.
Roblox is in a class of its own compared to fortnite and minecraft in terms of toxic monetisation.
Online gaming is definitely a tough one to navigate though, regardless. I had no problems as subscription was the limit to paying when I was a kid, but now it's a generation raised with mtx.
I'm glad the the Java edition still has none of that. The last time I got the urge to download it they required an account to even get the installer and I feared the worst. It looks like that might no longer be the case... I may give it a try again and kill some time
Along similar lines to what you are saying, I think one of the more general problems that I see with titles is that people do tend to gravitate around specific industries/sizes of companies, even within IT, and then tend to associate their own experience as "normal" when it comes to seniority.
I've moved a bit between different sizes and government vs startup vs mid-sized etc, and the titles vary wildly.
Some government jobs had people with 4 years experience be "senior" or even "tech leads" because they weren't paying enough so they simply promoted any bright spark that was going to last to senior roles so they could at least get a few more years out of them before they left, as HR wouldn't pay more money without them getting the a specific title.
Other place I've worked, your title was essentially a lottery system, others you were hard pressed to be a Senior without anything less than 10 years experience.
But each of those places, I encountered people with very specific ideas of exactly what a senior was, and they were convinced their own standards were the "accepted" ones.
There are definitely general guidelines for senior, associate etc, but they aren't normalised, just like you are saying.
So point is, in support of your post, you can't dismiss someone just based on the title they give themselves, as it might have been perfectly normal thing to call themselves in previous positions.
That's a great point, that VC-funded startups aren't the only sources of title inflation. Salary bands at bigger companies also fuel inflation. I worked for a startup that got acquired by a large bureaucratic company, and I ended up as a principle engineer -- along with two other engineers on my team. It was the only way to keep paying us what we had been making as senior engineers at the startup. It was a director-level title, so my boss technically had a lower title than me. When I decided to leave that company, I was looking at senior-level positions at startups, because that was the equivalent to the job I was doing as a director-level IC at BigCorp.
Large multinational banks are particular offenders here. IIRC, the rough equivalent grade for a Big Tech(TM) senior in JP Morgan (or maybe Goldman? one of those) is VP. Staff is MD or something!
My smart code plans for me to be sort of stupid and slow in the future, lacking the context I had when I was writing it. And I'm delighted when some seemingly hard problem has a simple, straightforward solution.
I often wonder what happened to me. There's a preponderance of evidence that I was smart in the past but very little that I'm smart today.
Really dumb question from someone who barely knows this stuff, but does quantum computing in theory reduce that size again if it takes off in the future?
No. Quantum computers do not and can not solve the same problems as classical computers, so even if quantum computers were smaller (right now they're not), they are not substitutes. This is notwithstanding the fact that current quantum computers barely work and require a huge support system even if the computation part might be small.
Because plenty of people say they are OCD too, but they don't mean the diagnosed condition. And it's quite different to "being tidy and needing things to be ordered" that the common vernacular makes it out to be.
Same as ADHD. Plenty of people who say they are "a bit ADD" mean something else.