amaraqwolf

[amaraqwolf]

As someone recently diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, one thing that’s been helping me grapple with the intense shame I have over all my “wasted potential” is accepting that potential doesn’t exist and never did.

This sounds so harsh, but please bare with me.

I procrastinated a lot growing up. I still procrastinate today, but less so. And yet, I got good grades. I could write an A+ paper that “knocked [my professor]’s socks off” in the hour before class and print it with sweat running down my face.

I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to!

And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??

If ANYONE could make their top speed/most productive setting the one they used all the time, anyone could do anything. But you can’t. Your top speed is not a speed you’re able to sustain.

Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.

So all of this to say, I’m not wasting a ton of potential. I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.

And if you have ADHD, I mean this from the bottom of my heart: you do not have limitless potential confounded by your laziness. You have the good potential of a good person, and you can access it with practice and work, but do not accept the story that you are choosing not to be all that you are or can be. You are just a human person.

[amaraqwolf]

i know that many of us--myself included--are strapped for cash right now, but my very dear friend kelas is going through a truly nightmarish situation with their companion cat, ser bartholomew, and being the softest touch that i am when it comes to cats, i want to do all i can to help them. if anyone is able to spare even a couple of dollars to help them out, i know it would mean the world to them.

here's what kelas has to say:

Ser Bartholomew is a 23-month-old ginger boy who loves soft things, his 'sons' (three rainbow tribbles), and chasing ice cubes and twist ties. He's a sweet little chatty guy, full of energy... usually.

On April 10th, he was clearly not feeling well. He was lethargic and drooling so much he was like a leaky faucet, so we took him to the vet. The pills seemed to help until the evening of the 11th when he started throwing up everything he'd eaten. Overnight, he threw up everything he'd been drinking. On the 12th, he went in for tests that maxed my CareCredit account. They found, among out-of-whack electrolytes and proteins, that his intestines were bunched up as if there's a string or something in there he's trying to deal with. Now (still the 12th), he's staying overnight with the vet for fluids and another scan afterward, and that's taken a large loan from Cherry.

I'm disabled. While I have a small jewelry business and also make paintings, neither brings in much at all. If he needs further treatment, there's no other resources I can tap, and beyond that, the current total bills (3k already) are a literal 4th of my yearly income.

My little guy is my company, my companion, the reason I get up in the morning, and the reason I am woken up in the middle of the night because he needs head scritches at 3am again. I hate to ask for help, but even if there aren't more bills, what I've borrowed already will make it difficult to meet our basic needs.

2,000 of this will pay back my Cherry loan. 1500 will pay off my Care Credit account. This leaves 500 for gofundme fees and to prepare for any further suggested treatment if he needs it.

if you can't donate--and again, i fully understand if you can't--please consider reblogging this post just to increase its reach. ser bartholomew is not even two years old and deserves to enjoy many, many more years of causing harmless chaos and inspiring love and soaking up the adoration of the humans around him.

[amaraqwolf]

When I was in the hospital, they gave me a big bracelet that said ALLERGY, but like. I'm allergic to bees. Were they going to prescribe me bees in there.

[amaraqwolf]

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

[amaraqwolf]

[amaraqwolf]

I have come to realize that, to me, one of the worst crimes a piece of fiction can commit is being mean-spirited. Just about anything else can be good in certain circumstances. But a mean-spirited work diminishes anyone who encounters it.

[amaraqwolf]

Worst dog name, go.

[amaraqwolf]

Not to go "if you have ADHD just go for a run" or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you've had enough. Not until you get bored, until you've had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn't low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you're real and best of all it's completely free

[amaraqwolf]

why would you like media that is good if you can like media that is bad instead and pace around your room like an insane person thinking about What If It Was Good

[amaraqwolf]

the reviews are IN

[amaraqwolf]

If life is a never ending loop of dirty dishes and laundry then that means life is a never ending loop of home cooked meals and comfy clean clothes

[amaraqwolf]

HEY

WAIT

STOP SCROLLING !!!!

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[amaraqwolf]

[amaraqwolf]

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

[amaraqwolf]

Please, spread this for those who might need it right now

U.S. suicide hotline: call or text 988 (available 24 hours)

U.S. trans lifeline: (877) 565-8860 (when you call, you’ll speak to a trans/nonbinary peer operator. full anonymity and confidentiality)

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357) – provides 24/7 confidential support and referrals for individuals and families facing mental health and substance use disorders, including panic attacks and anxiety.

LGBT National Help Center: (888) 843-4564

Trevor Project: Call (866) 488-7386, text START to 678-678, or chat online.

Take care of yourself and each other. Please stay safe ♡

[amaraqwolf]

this art exercise is small and simple, but its easy to do anywhere with any materials

[amaraqwolf]

My job involves taking comprehensive meeting minutes. That means I have to accurately summarise multiple interrelated discussions, and I have to account for emphasis, nuance, and context.

One of my bosses suggested that I trial a generative AI model which records the whole meeting, and then generates meeting minutes. The result was so incomprehensibly garbage that it would have been much more work to amend it than to just... you know. Start from scratch and do the whole thing myself. Everyone in the meeting, including my boss, the CEO, and the board of directors, agreed that the genAI model was less than worthless.

And that, my friends, involves no creativity whatsoever! Meeting minutes are technical writing. Next to no ingenuity or human creativity is required. Imagine how bad these things must be at generating compelling fiction.

(Extremely bad. The answer is extremely bad.)

Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found. Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence. The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context. Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all. These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.  Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board. Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content. The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely. 

3 September 2024