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Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".

And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.


> Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge.

Before readers rush out to acquire Adderall, note that "trying" it does not give an accurate picture of what it's like to take it long-term. It has a high discontinuation rate because people read comments like this online or borrow a dose from their friend and think they're going to be running around like Bradley Cooper in Limitless for the rest of their career.

A new patient who tries Adderall will feel a sense of euphoria, energy, and motivation that is temporary. This effect does not last. This is why the Reddit ADHD forums are full of people posting "I just took my first dose and I'm so happy I could cry" followed a few weeks later by "Why did my Adderall stop working?". The focus part is still mostly working, but no drug is going to make you feel happy, energized, and euphoric for very long.

> Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".

You're confusing two different things. Registering with the school's disability office is orthogonal to getting a prescription for anything.


Everything can be abused or used incorrectly. If you drink too much water you remove salts from your body and get sick.

With Adderall (or Vyvanse) good protocol is to get small dose, like 5-10mg early morning once every one or two weeks. Then you’ll get boost when really needed and feel uplifting for few more days.

Taking it every day is insane, ADHD or not.


Is this the way it is usually prescribed, a small dose every few days?

Nope, typical dosage is daily.

https://www.drugs.com/adderall.html


Abusing adderall can obviously go wrong, but if you do it right you take it once every month or so and have minimal long term effects. Stanford students arent using it for the euphoria, theyre using it so they can study all night without getting distracted. Its also not a miracle drug, you have to be in the right mindset for it to work and a lot of the people who use it dont understand that.

If you have ADHD, for neurotypical people it might feel that you are performing better but results will not improve https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/smart-drugs-can-decrease...

It's a small study and the "knapsack task" probably does not generalize to writing a paper or coding or something. Far from dispositive.

Utter bullshit engineered to convince students not to do drugs. Adderall doesn't make you magically better at solving the knapsack problem, it's not NZT-48 from Limitless. That's not why anyone takes it.

> it's not NZT-48 from Limitless

Yeah, that's modafinil.

(Or for social situations, bromantane.)


They really don't, and if they did then would it be so bad if people who didn't "need" them took them?

Obviously if there's safety issues but for stimulants unsafe doses will 100% always decrease performance, because they'll affect sleep.


Steriods will give you a massive physical advantage too. If you're not doing something with a governing body and get them prescribed you're golden.

This is actually another growing problem: TRT clinics will prescribe testosterone to virtually anyone who requests it. Among new TRT patients, a large number of them didn't even have bloodwork drawn before receiving their first prescription.

Many of the TRT clinics also hide the fact that going on TRT results in testicular atrophy and lifelong dependence. The forums and Reddits are full of people who decided that injecting testosterone every couple days for the rest of their life isn't all it's cracked up to be are realizing that it's not so simple for everyone to get off of it, even with all the HCG, SERMs, and PCT in the world.


>TRT clinics will prescribe testosterone to virtually anyone who requests it.

Why is that a problem, exactly? Hiding side effects is a problem I can understand, but struggling to understand why someone shouldn't be able to get TRT freely.


TRT is one of those things which requires precise and active management. But it also increases quality of life and well-being so much for 45yo and beyond that it’s insane not to use it. (And same thing with HRT for women).

Your choice is to die chronically ill, weak and depressed for decades, or feeling great and enjoying your later years.


If you have enough your own testosterone then doing TRT is more harm than good. But once you get older and don’t anymore - TRT is golden.

The issue of course is "medical science" has continually lowered what is normal. Men 50 years ago had significantly higher testosterone than today. The blood work normal CI reflects this decrease. In reality, any man lower than 600 should probably be supplementing TRT. However, you're not likely to get it prescribed before you are below 300, and even then, it'll be just enough to get you back over the curve. There's basically no risk to it as long as you keep your total test <= 1000 ng/dL (and probably <= 800 ng/dL tbh).

The median total testosterone for the cohort born after 2000 is 391 ng/dL. 20 years before it was ~550 ng/dL. 20 years before that we were above 600 ng/dL. Men are falling ill with more chronic illness, having more sexual dysfunction, and have more feminized features. We should probably be asking ourselves why this is happening rather than adjusting blood work CI's down.


> median total testosterone for the cohort born after 2000 is 391 ng/dL.

Really interesting. I wonder what is age range. This is beyond low. At this level you naturally feel tired all the time.


My third time sharing this link in this post because it's just so relevant. A Slate Star Codex classic:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...


Everything professionally produced you currently see uses a lot of CGI, and you can’t even tell.

Essentially what they are doing is cheaper, more accessible CGI. And in the same way at it is now, you are not going to be able to tell it was used in expensive productions and will be able to see it in the cheap productions.


As an ex VFX infra guy, I can totally tell.

But to your point, if we take all of TV production world wide I doubt thats going to add up to 100 billion spent on set extension/characters/de-aging/fuckit fix it in post. And thats keeping spend at the same rate. (not to mention the recent peak spend on TV)

For openAI to make money it has to be an order of magnitude cheaper, quicker and quality, and be the lead so that people spend AI bucks with them. Rather than having a VFX company tune an opensource/weights model.


EC2 and S3 moat comes from extreme economies of scale. Only Google and Microsoft can compete. You would never be able to achieve S3 profitability because you are not going to get same hardware deals, same peering agreements, same data center optimization advantages. On top of that there is extremely optimized software stack (S3 runs at ~98% utilization, capacity deployed just couple weeks in advance, i.e. if they don’t install new storage, they will run out of capacity in a month).

> S3 runs at ~98% utilization

I'm geniuinely curious, source?


I wouldn't call it a moat. A moat is more about switching costs rather than quality differentiation. You have a moat when your customers don't want to switch to a competitor despite that competitor having a superior product at a better price.

With network of cameras large enough you can trivially profile and identify all cars without license plates.


It's possible that you could learn to recognize every individual car from things like the pattern of scratches on their hoods, yes, but this ability has not been demonstrated and may prove more difficult than you think.


What you're talking about was being done a decade ago in the skies over Iraq.

https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/mission-solutions...

I don't know jack about the algorithms because classified and not my job, but I can tell you that however good you think it was, it was better. I don't know if it's real or just marketing BS but what we said publicly was that differences in antennas, mirrors and trim were key in re-identifying vehicles after they leave the observable area (e.g. two silver Camry's go into a garage, come back out, how do you keep track which is which).


Interesting, thanks! That page doesn't say anything that even suggests that.


Well it's also been a decade. I'm surprised they still have a web page for it.

I was able to find some more old info online.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA500620.pdf


What is even more interesting why attack Azure? It's not possible to extort anything from Microsoft, so what's the rationale?


Misdirection. If I knock _you_ offline, its not going to be that difficult for you to put together a probable suspects list with me on it.

If it's going to cost me about the same in terms of resources to target you and a bunch of other people colocated with you, it's a bit less obvious who launched it and why.


> targeting a specific public IP address

They weren't targeting Azure itself, per se, but some service which was hosted on Azure.

The IP address in question wasn't mentioned, so we're left to speculate what this was about.



It's the exact opposite of extortion. They're thrilled to spend money to buy political favor whenever possible. It's not even a drop in the bucket.

"Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon among big donors to Biden’s inauguration"

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/boeing-mi...


> They're thrilled to spend money to buy political favor whenever possible.

"Pay up or you'll have problems with the FCC/DOJ/etc."

Not saying its unique to this admin


Microsoft has succumbed to extortion recently.


In most tools there is no need to cut-n-paste, just click small edit icon next to the prompt, edit and resubmit. Boom, old answer is discarded, new answer is generated.


Nonsense.

You can use US prescription at online Canadian pharmacy and legally ship to US. This is how a lot of people save on drugs.


A bit late, but thanks for noting this -- I had no idea that this workaround was so well established. I don't often dive into concrete suggestions on how to obtain GLP1s because of how it could be perceived, but maybe I've underestimated how many people know how to do this right now.


Of course you can buy medicine abroad and legally bring 90 day doses.

More over, you can order and ship medicine, including ozempic and zepbound, using American prescription from Canadian online pharmacies. For some drugs it’s quite cheaper than paying American prices.


I configured my furnace to always recirculate air in the house even when burner itself is off - helps to avoid rooms with stale air and evens temperature through the house.


There are other brands that make quality quiet fans.

My Vornado runs 24x7 and on minimal setting is inaudible, on second setting is very quiet. And it costs way less than a Dyson!

I have two units in the house, and when I ordered second unit I got a defective one - probably fan was not balanced. It was making noise like normal fan. I exchanged it on Amazon, and boom - second quiet fan in the house.


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