A TDCS device. Trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation, mostly experimental, somewhat proven for short-term depression and cognition improvement. Motivation was my solution would be simpler and easier to control as well as include triple safety.
I had little trust for the Chinese IC steered devices nor the early US attempters at pop market that refuse to describe even their safety approach.
Pleased with my personal results. Would not openly recommend doing it, because the DIY route as well as adopting TDCS do require that you can competently read medical studies. At least half of those I browsed fail good science test even at first glance.
And then of course the manufacturers and sellers are even worse, such as they are quite good at parroting misquotes of study results for marketing and PR.
Next plan is build an ECG and my own medical ultrasound, although with that one it is probably best to wait for about 5 to 7 years till the new-tech ultrasound generators get to market.
So did you build the device or research and purchase a personal one? I've been thinking of doing this for probably approaching a decade and been terrified of the potential consequences.
What do you use it for? Just the typical depression type thing or have you experimented with it at all? Super interested
1. Built from scratch on protoboard, analog ammeter, lm337, fuses on input and output, tight safety tolerances, multiple fail-safes.
2. I have experimented with cognition and mood modulation with positive personal results. I would prefer not to go over my current area of application since it is outside of the well-tested. Too often personal anecdotes on the internet may be misinterpreted as "proof", dangerous in areas that require a solid scientific approach.
3. Sadly, and the credible scientists have been calling for such research for years, no solid long-term, large-scale studies have been done on TDCS. What has been widely and somewhat better researched is a) application for depression alleviation and b) cognition modulation.
There are a variety of Eye Tracking Communication Devices on the market.
I am not listing the manufacturers since most of them are also involved in either/or/and military and marketing applications and I am done supporting surveillance and murder capitalism.
But the eye movement interfacing tech is there and becoming more and more wide-spread. The major players have pilot studies at hospitals and r&d medical facilities across the world.
With the implant the concept is that with further development, it can be used for connection to locomotion etc. The proposed future potential of direct interfacing is larger, so to say.
An exoskeleton with direct input from a fully paralyzed wearer can significantly contribute to rehab, just one scenario.
Tragic to observe the typical Dallas Buyers Club dynamic at play. People are coordinating online and locally and doing border runs for the Mexico-available GLP-1 predecessors.
The Mounjaro patent appears to be until '39, with no generics available at the moment.
As one of the patients states in the article, obesity may very well lead them to diabetes. People will die. And with the shortage affecting current diabetics, they are dying now.
When the demand is enough, some overseas companies will start producing it without permission. Russia has announced that it will not honor patents from "unfriendly" countries, so they might as well start making these drugs in large amounts to make up for their declining gas revenues.
Not only unreliable, but ignorant. There is so much in hormone responses and often-undiagnosed conditions that makes "just eat less" absolutely irrelevant to many people.
If you're paying for insurance in the US you are paying for them. Check out how insurance pools work. Society, even a wild capitalist society, benefits from healthier members.
I'm a former professional athlete and am currently, in my middle age, in better shape than most, including youths in their 20s, with blood tests to prove it.
When I was making weight, it was extremely difficult to find the balance to fine-tune the diet. Those 400 grams for me were just as difficult to shed, while performing to task. And I had a professional team behind me.
Consumerist civilization is obsessed with the magic pill, we agree on that. A pharma subscription for life is not the solution. However, I personally know, and there are people like that commenting in this post, individuals that were unlucky to be born obese. If you are going to take a grand statement position, familiarize yourself with what that does to a hormonal system. And that is only one sub-case of many where obesity is completely outside of an individual's control.
With industrialized food, including sugar, HFC and carbohydrate lobbying corrupting the policy in the US for longer than 70 years, and that is a number simply of convenience, since we have easily accessible records of such industry lobbying, obese individuals are not the cause of the problem.
Having more tools to address obesity is a good thing. Hopefully, one arrow of many towards a systemic approach.
Agile as a commercial enterprise underwent the unsurprising journey of consultants selling a revolution (if you can't integrate into existing structures, change the structure) to selling the manager's magic pill of convincing salaried individuals to dream about making someone else successful and rich.
The core principles of Agile as an idea drew heavily from cybernetics - systems dependent on discovery and adaptation benefit from effective introspection.
The modern consultant agile business is about making the stakeholders that pay the bills happy. SAFe is one such agile. So don't be surprised about what agile is today. It was always meant to be just that. The people that started it made money and the people selling it now keep making money.
If you want a management system that actually works for an information dependent and/or producing system, nurture an information flow that enables rapid adaptation through introspection and exchange. Except this goes against the core interests of the salaried managerial class in any mature organization.
Good news for founders - disruption is faster and easier in a start-up.
Anecdotes and auto-biographies are the easiest to write, as they require the least research and one is already so familiar with the protagonist.
It will be nice to see ketamine and psychedelics as part of a toolbox professionals can use for treatment. Many current antidepressants cause strong suicidal and homicidal urges. Look at the widely prescribed citalopram disclaimer.
Here's an anecdote: close person to me was crying from how hard they wanted to end it all, as well as delivered urinary tract problems, for life, from one month of citalopram, as per prescription dose.
Or you know, we could discuss somewhat proper research in connection to treatment for depression. The current chemical solutions have so many side-effects that there is a reason medical professionals have been proactively trying and seeking alternative treatment. Ketamine appears very promising.
I don't think "this is a possible result of this treatment, as observed one time" is an illegitimate subject of inquiry because it's not a table of statistics.
If you check possible side-effects of very common medicine you can probably find some terrifying stuff that happens to 1 out of 10 million people. If it gets reported on in the media, it would seem a lot more common than it is. To be clear I'm not saying that's the case here, I have no idea.
Sure but would that make it wrong for an essayist to write about it if it happened to them? Writing about personal experiences seems to be a substantial portion of this guy's beat.
It's also worth considering that this one person's experience may represent the reactions of many. Over two-decades ago the Chicago Reader published one of the most fascinating "drug memoirs" I've ever read, and the author also had a terrible reaction to Ketamine, albeit under very bad circumstances:
The relationship between SSRIs and suicidality is well established, as I understand it (but then, the relationship between the condition SSRIs treat and suicidality is even more well established).
I didn't think that was the case with homicidality, though. I went looking, and I found a lot of nutbag sources saying it was the case; that's no surprise, the claim has become a political football in the US (it's an attempted rationale for our mass shooting problem).
Are there very reputable sources to suggest that SSRIs cause homicidal ideation? It's a big claim.
(A quick note: for me, the first Google result is a BMJ journal hit --- but it appears to be a "letter to the editor" type situation, and opens "The FDA admitted in 2007 that SSRIs can cause madness at all ages and that the drugs are very dangerous; otherwise daily monitoring wouldn’t be needed".)
Does anyone have info on how/why anti-depressants cause suicidal and homicidal thoughts? I know when it comes to the brain, conventional logic fails, but you would think anti-depressants would stop suicidal thoughts.
You have to find the right one, and the right dosage. Otherwise it's like having the wrong air/fuel mix in a car. Unfortunately a lot of doctors will just throw out whatever they think works [0].
A competent MHD, in my experience:
- Will use both a patient's verbally provided information as well as lab tests (i.e. neurotransmitter levels) in deciding what to try to prescribe.
- For initial starting of medication will follow up in 30-45 days.
- Changes in medication (examples might be things like dosage change, or changing within the same class of medication, i.e. going from one SNRI to another) will usually have a 45-60 day follow up
- Continued follow-up on neurotransmitter levels, 6-12 months after initial starting of treatment, and once stable every 2 or so years.
[0] - My favorite example of this was a doctor who insisted I continue to take a medication that was causing me to be unable to drive. When I looked around the room and saw that every single calendar, pen, and notepad had the name of said medication, well that frankly ruined my opinion of MHDs for another couple of years (which made it take longer to finally find the right treatment.)
I have never had a doctor test my neurotransmitter levels, and have seen several for depression over the course of my life. For the most part, though, mine has been "mild" enough that I've been treated by general doctors and not psychiatrists (though therapy was involved for a time).
I do wish that there was a shorter check-in period. SSRIs do take 30-45 days to fully kick in, but if they are causing harm, that starts much sooner. I was on two that made me worse, one just gave me headaches for the two weeks that I took it, and the other triggered episodes of intense anger within two days.
Lexapro has been a life saver for me, though I know others for whom it didn't work. I think if I had felt my doctor was more involved than the 6 week check in, I might have felt a bit less alone during some of those times wondering if I was experiencing side effects or simply my illness.
Depression often has a component of being emotionally numb. The blunting of emotions can have a protective effect, reverse that and you could be in for an avalanche of emotions you haven’t felt in a long time.
As far as I know our knowledge of the brain and how anti depressants work is so thin that the answer to your question is … we don’t know.
It does happen tho, I 100% had violent suicidal urges on sertraline due to a misdiagnosis. They immediately put me off it but I was terrified. It was the most sudden and extreme mood change I’ve ever experienced.
I've taken several courses of SSRIs. I think it works like this: you're depressed and you have dark thoughts but you don't really feel motivated to do ANYTHING. Then you take some pills and at first they send your mood all over the place, but those thoughts are still present and prevalent. So now you feel pretty good about the idea of killing yourself.
Having your data "on the cloud" is another way of saying giving somebody else complete access to that data.
Even journalists are starting to become aware of the dangers of using clouded voice transcription services, with several sensitive sources compromised through such services.
For the startup founders on HN, if your exit strategy involves potential selling of the venture, be careful with which services you connect to, as you explicitly give permission for data processing and sharing with "select partners". Read the google docs terms as an early exercise. Not having them terms easy to find is by design, by the way.
For those looking at the bigger picture, the traditional capitalist industry shift to the metered / subscription service model,locked in silos, the dream of the internet as pipes, implies that consolidation of control sees lack of user freedom and control as a key feature.
Remember crypto-pushers continuously getting outraged at comments noting that crypto is not "an investment"?
A lot less of that going on now, with the current argument being all about "due diligence". Crypto works as an inefficient payments mechanism and a ledger for trusted and equal peers. It somehow did not magically break the fundamental rules of investment nor collective ecosystems.
A transparent anonymous and independent system of transactions is possible, but it is vastly different from the incentives existing in the space now.
I've blocked most news websites, in the last decades the only "Big World" news that I really needed were communicated to me by others almost immediately (9/11, oncoming catastrophic storm, lock-downs).
When my current endeavor needs tune-in to a particular news cycle, I've set up simple scraping of top headlines only. These are usually demarked via keywords, headers or other metadata. Sure, there are some services and RSS readers that facilitate the functionality and ease of use. Except I need less user-friendliness, not more.
Having to spend a minute more per news source, as opposed to some copy-pastes or clicks, keeps the need to over-subscribe down. The interests of the media in representing information do not match my own. I have not been able to find analyst materials that do not suffer from politically and emotionally manipulative agendas.
Not letting noise in from the start is the best policy for me.
I might have missed this on your job listing, but... From my experience in hiring, I would strongly suggest that all tech job listings, especially startups, describe the application process and estimated time budget needed, as well as be upfront about take-homes.
Saw significant improvement to candidate quality as well as recruitment.
Having suffered myself over the years, I try to keep the process lightweight for everyone, and frontload the obvious reasons for one side to reject the other.
Take Claude E. Shannon's Master's thesis, the long version.
Considered by many the most important Master's thesis of last century. It fully introduced the concept of binary / Boolean logic to design of electronic circuits. If you understand the core premise of his work, you understand the core of computers. If you can apply his work, you can design computers.
Go through the theory in the thesis with pen and paper, use the references as needed. Thesis, article on it by Shannon and lots of commentary available freely online. He provided a number of practical applications, with breakdown.
Here is the core question you need to answer to understand logic in computers: what can you do with just yes and no, represented as 1 and 0?
Why were these numbers reversed in Shannon's thesis?
In his thesis, 1+1=1. Why? If you understand postulates, it makes sense for the kind of theory he is developing. If not, you should be very excited: mathematical theory, unlike how it is presented in bad schools, is not about following rules someone has decided on. It is about making sense in accordance with the logic you decide upon! This is as close as you can get to real magic, magic you can prove and make manifest in reality. Contemplate this deeply.
What kind of information can you transmit with a lamp and a switch, turning the lamp on and off? (Tip: this is the whole idea behind how the super-modern fiber-optic cables are transmitting information today, with lights blinking on and off, real fast, from one end to the other. Poetically, they are the core of the Internet).
Glad you find it interesting. Some of the schematics he has in the thesis can be created very cheaply with garbage switches or components, or spending a small sum (under 20 USD) on switches and a breadboard.
I had little trust for the Chinese IC steered devices nor the early US attempters at pop market that refuse to describe even their safety approach.
Pleased with my personal results. Would not openly recommend doing it, because the DIY route as well as adopting TDCS do require that you can competently read medical studies. At least half of those I browsed fail good science test even at first glance.
And then of course the manufacturers and sellers are even worse, such as they are quite good at parroting misquotes of study results for marketing and PR.
Next plan is build an ECG and my own medical ultrasound, although with that one it is probably best to wait for about 5 to 7 years till the new-tech ultrasound generators get to market.