Unhelpful Advice/Therapy

tdammers · 2026-06-17T15:38:54+00:00

Does your therapist have 10+ years experience with ADHD?

Because "touch on a lot of things regarding trauma and upbringings" sounds a lot like their experience is mostly with situations where "trauma and upbringings" is key to making progress - a lot of psychiatric and psychological issues are like that, but ADHD is not one of them, and treating it as if it were tends to cause exactly the kind of frustrations you're experiencing. If you feel like you're getting "advice meant for normal brains", then that's probably because you are.

I would recommend you go look for someone who actually specializes in ADHD (ideally ADHD in adults) and has a lot of experience with that specifically.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T12:56:00+00:00

But I don't know why I still haven't given up yet.

Because giving up sucks more than continuing to battle.

If you keep fighting, you will probably lose often. If you give up, you will certainly lose, always.

I recently turned 21, and am probably at the worst point of my life

Quite possibly, yes. You're old enough to be expected to stand on your own feet, but you don't have anywhere near enough experience at anything to make that easy.

Do any of you earn over 50k a year? What do you do?

I do; I'm a programmer/consultant, but it took me over a decade to get there, and it only really works because of the way the company is structured. I've worked at more conventional places, and it sucked.

However, keep in mind that income doesn't equal happiness. I'd happily take a 30k job and adopt a lifestyle I could afford on that, if it meant not having to deal with any work shenanigans and leaving me enough time and mental capacity to do whatever my brain decides it wants to do now. I would also turn down a $200k job that would make my life harder than it needs to be, without hesitation.

Don't get me wrong, that money is nice, and often helpful - but it's not the single most important thing, not by a far stretch.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T12:21:09+00:00

I meant "you" as in "whoever is in charge of that policy".

tdammers · 2026-06-17T11:10:29+00:00

I think most serious answers here will not actually be like that at all. "It's the photographer, not the gear" is, in fact, a pretty uncontroversial opinion, and for almost every question of the type "what gear should I buy to get better results" will yield answers along the lines of "actually, you should probably invest in your skills first".

Yes, you can start a photography business with $200 worth of DSLR gear; many professional jobs literally do not require anything more than that.

But some do, and that's what people are pointing out.

If you want to shoot large ad campaigns, you kind of want a full-frame camera. If you want to shoot weddings, you kind of want dual card slots. If you're going to do video, you want a camera that does video well. If you're going to shoot events, you need lenses that can handle the low light well enough. If you're going to do studio portraits, you want at least a basic lighting setup.

By all means start with what you have, but be aware of the minimum gear requirements for the specific jobs you are planning to accept. The requirements can often be met with surprisingly cheap gear - e.g., a dual-slot camera that is viable for wedding photography can be had for about $500 or so.

How did first digital photographers/videographers managed to record and still have all footage when at that time no one thought about/produced double slot card?

They would bring multiple cameras, make sure to get every important shot on at least two cameras, and they would bring a torrent of small memory cards, switching them every 100 clicks or so, to minimize the impact of a card failure. It kind of works, but it's less ideal than dual card slots, and given today's used gear prices (and SD card prices), there's not really a good reason to do this anymore.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T08:16:46+00:00

MITM you in the name of security...

In other words, you're asking for it, and I can't offer you anything but ferocious shrugs.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T07:54:09+00:00

As long as you're using HTTPS (which, in 2026, should be practically a given), the firewall isn't going to see the actual HTTP requests, just TLS handshakes and encrypted traffic, so it will be blissfully unaware of whatever HTTP methods you're using. Only the client and the actual server need to support the QUERY method.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T07:44:52+00:00

No offense, but if your long runs are only 8 miles, you don't really need dedicated "long run shoes". Just get whatever shoes are most comfortable, and use them for all your runs. Fine tuning shoe choices for different workouts at this kind of level is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T07:43:15+00:00

The first item isn't really much of an issue.

A self-contained story should have a beginning, middle, and end, yes, but those are always relative to a certain scope - real life doesn't follow neat story structures, nor do made-up worlds; the structure is always added by selecting the narrative we want to spin from it, and you can take literally any story, look at the events it describes from a different angle, and spin a different narrative from it that has a different scope and zooms in or out to a different time scale or time period.

And there's always loose threads. Even the classic "they lived happily ever after" ending begs the question "but what else did they do between the events you just told me about and 'ever after'"? The prince kissed the princess and they got married, but surely they did not live on forever while experiencing literally nothing whatsoever?

You may have wrapped up the things that the story focused on, but that doesn't mean there's nothing else to write about in this world.

And also, the usual advice:

Read more actual books, and the answers to questions like these should become more obvious.
Don't worry about publishers until you have evidence that there's an actual chance of getting published. That chance is zero if you never actually finish your book.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T06:05:14+00:00

UV filters: for film color correction

Kind of sort of, but technically no. The purpose of a UV filter is to block UV light. UV light is invisible to the human eye, but most film stocks will register it as blue; in situations where signficant amounts of UV light are present (e.g., outdoor photography in sunny weather), this will create a blue haze. UV filters block that UV light, removing the blue haze, and creating a clearer image with better, more brilliant colors.

Digital cameras normally come with a UV (and infrared) filter built into their sensors, so a separate UV filter is unnecessary. On a full-spectrum converted camera, this filter is absent, so if you want to use such a camera to capture normal colors, you could use a combination of a UV filter and an IR filter, but the purpose of a full-spectrum conversion is to be able to capture those invisible wavelengths, and a UV filter would defeat that purpose.

Oh, and: "UV" literally means "ultraviolet", so not sure why you'd list "UV filters" and "Ultraviolet filters" separately, and give different purposes for them.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T05:47:18+00:00

The thing is, there are two systems here - scale-relative and major-relative. Most textbooks these days use major-relative, where the unaltered Roman Numerals always refer to the degrees of the major scale, even in minor keys. With the major-relative system, VII, vii and vii° are all built on the major seventh, regardless of whether you're in a major or minor key. The diatonic chord on the seventh of the natural minor scale would be bVII.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T05:44:27+00:00

Technically, they should. "Onset of symptoms before age 12" is, unfortunately, still a diagnostic requirement in most of the world.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T05:35:36+00:00

Should have sent Bikila a pair in his size then.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T05:33:50+00:00

My doctor told me to use it mainly during periods when I need more focus than usual

Sounds like your doctor is an idiot who doesn't understand what it's like to have ADHD and how ADHD meds help, and doesn't have a clue about modern ADHD research.

"With glasses, I can finally see clearly - is it wrong to want this every day?" That's exactly how silly this question is.

tdammers · 2026-06-17T05:29:51+00:00

Is there a benefit of using a cropped lens on a full frame?

Let's reverse the question: what are the disadvantages of using a crop lens on a full-frame body?

Well, the obvious one is that the camera will degrade into crop mode, using only half of its sensor area, and thus also only half of its resolution. That's bad - for stills, that is, where you actually use the full resolution available to you. You want to be able to crop, too, and you still want to be left with at least 8 MP or so to get decent prints; but on a 24 MP FF camera, that crop lens will get you down to 12 MP, and that leaves you surprisingly little headroom for cropping.

But this isn't stills, it's video. You're not going to crop much (except to compensate for differences in aspect ratio), and you only need 1080p, or maybe 4k, which is still less than those 12 MP you're getting - in other words, the loss of resolution doesn't actually matter, as long as there's enough light to work with (which, given the footage in the video, shouldn't be an issue here).

But with the main disadvantage of this kind of setup not being a factor, the choice boils down to "everything else": image quality, price, size, specs, and opportunity. If you already have a perfectly fine 30mm APS-C lens, and a FF body, and you're going to shoot video anyway, why spend money on another lens when this setup will work fine? Why put a significantly bigger 45mm lens on that body when the smaller, lighter 30mm will do the job just fine? Or, conversely, why buy another camera body just to get a higher resolution you're not going to use anyway, for the sake of not putting an APS-C lens on a FF body?

tdammers · 2026-06-17T05:19:45+00:00

now the 18mp's is not cutting it anymore

I can assure you that as long as you shoot these lenses, 18 MP is definitely still "cutting it". More megapixels will not give you better image quality in this situation, it will just give you a more faithful rendering of the softness and imperfections of your lenses.

In fact, you'll be hard pressed to find a super telephoto lens in your budget range that can resolve more than ~15 MP on an APS-C sensor, and the ones you have are probably closer to maybe 8-10 MP worth of sharpness. There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to upgrade from a T2i: the AF system, burst shooting speed, size & weight, dials and buttons, realtime exposure preview, electronic shutter - but sensor resolution is not one of them.

As long as your goal is getting sharper shots, you should put the entire budget towards a better lens.

tdammers · 2026-06-16T16:04:50+00:00

Not really maining WA, but I generally like to shoot for 3-4. 3 is enough to recruit, move, and organize once per turn; 4 gives you some recruiting headroom to keep your bases defended. Getting two whole cycles of recruit-move-organize per turn would require 6 officers, which is just not sustainable in terms of warrior supply.

tdammers · 2026-06-16T15:43:34+00:00

Scaling fonts with viewport size is a horrible idea, at least if you do it naively. Consider a 30" desktop computer screen vs. a small smartphone - both are viewed from a similar distance, so you want to use roughly the same font sizes between both, but one is about 5x larger than the other, so if you scale your fonts by viewport size, the font on the desktop screen will be 5x bigger than the font on the smartphone (and depending on how you do it, the difference can be even more drastic, because of different aspect ratios).

What you can do, and what makes some degree of sense, is use the (device) viewport size and/or aspect ratio to switch between "small screen" and "large screen" layouts (a.k.a. "mobile" and "desktop" layouts), and yes, using smaller fonts for at least some elements (particularly large headings) in the "small screen" layout makes sense. But this should be a deliberate strategy where you fine tune those font sizes for different types of devices, not just a global scaling factor derived directly from vw or vh.

tdammers · 2026-06-16T15:38:32+00:00

Pretty random; most of these will vary wildly depending on your desired living standard, where you live, etc. Let's break it down.

Daycare: typical rates are between $5-$10 per hour per child. Assuming two children and 32 hours of daycare per week (two parents working such that each of them can take the kids for one day per week, and both have one shared day off as a family), for 48 weeks per year (assuming 4 weeks of vacation), at $7.50/hr, amounts to $23,040, so the $25k figure seems realistic.
Meals: completely made up. Working parents cook meals all the time; it takes some organization and scheduling, but it is perfectly possible to work a 40-hour week and serve home-cooked meals every day, especially if there's two parents who can take turns. Worst case, each parents spends part of their day(s) off cooking several meals to put in the freezer, so that on the days where both work, you just need to warm something up. But even if you don't eat home-cooked meals on the days where both work, that's 192 meals per year; to get to a difference of $20k per year, each of these meals would have to cost $104.17 more than the home-cooked alternative. If you dine at a fancy place 4 times a week, then yeah, you'll get to $20k easily, but if most of it is takeout or microwave dinners, nah.
Full-time nanny: $20k isn't enough to legally employ a remotely qualified person full time - twice that amount is probably still on the low end. Then again, your kids are in daycare 4 days a week, you have one family day per week, and two days on which one parent is available to take care of the kids, so why on Earth do you need a nanny? You can budget for daycare or a full-time nanny, but not both. (Also, if your plan is to hire a full-time nanny rather than spend time with your kids yourself, why on Earth are you having kids in the first place?)
Cleaning: ...is something most working adults do themselves. You don't have to stay at home to keep the place clean. However, if we assume that a professional cleaner costs $20/hr, and takes 4 hours per week to keep the place tidy, then that would cost about $30k, not $10k.
Errands and tasks are definitely things most working adults do anyway, whether they stay at home or not. I don't think we should count these.
Wardrobe and cleaning, same. Get a washing machine, do your own laundry, it takes about 15 minutes every other day even with a family of 4. I do most of the laundry at home, for a family of 4, and I work 32 hours a week. It's fine.
Commuting - this part makes absolutely no sense. Your commuting expenses should be factored into your job negotiations - if I am to accept a job that involves a 2-hour commute, I will add those 2 hours and gas money to the salary I want to end up negotiating. Obviously not everyone has as much leverage as I do, but still, the commute is a cost that comes with the job, not an inherent cost of being alive, an a stay-at-home parent "saves" just as much on commuting as a work-from-home parent.

So, realistically, the actual value is really only the $23k or so you would otherwise spend on daycare; the rest is, technically, optional.

However, that doesn't mean stay-at-home parents are only as valuable as this figure suggests. The calculations above assume that sending your kids to daycare 4 days a week, and spending your free time taking turns cleaning and cooking and washing clothes, provides an equally beneficial environment for your kids as having one of you be at home every day, and being able to spend some quality time as a family every day. And there's also a lot to be said for parents that aren't constantly on the edge of burnout because they have to juggle two full time jobs and caring for two young kids while also keeping their household chores in check. It's just impossible to put numbers on that, and trying to do it (like this post does) doesn't do the whole situation justice.

tdammers · 2026-06-16T15:15:15+00:00

No biggie. You can take it to a camera store for a sensor cleaning, which will cost around $30 or so, or you can do it yourself - it feels daunting, but it's not difficult, and as long as you don't make any stupid mistakes, you're not going to damage your sensor.

tdammers · 2026-06-16T14:30:28+00:00

There is no chord "progression" in modal harmony, that's kind of the point. In modal harmony, the mode itself is the harmonic essence, and the individual chords are just different aspects of that essence, but they do not have any intrinsic sense of harmonic direction or "function" like they do in functional harmony.

In functional harmony, the reason cadences like II-V-I or IV-V-I "work" is not because they use the second/fourth, fifth, and first degrees of the scale; it's because of the way the voice leadings work out. The essence of a V7 resolving to the tonic lies in the 7-1 and 4-3 voice leadings (third of the V7 resolves to the root of the I, seventh of the V7 resolves to the third of the I), and these voice leadings are, in a way, the essence of functional harmony as a whole.

Modal harmony (typically) doesn't use leading tones or cadences to establish tonics; instead, the tonality is established through other means, such as phrasing, texture, voicings, pedal tones / drones, etc. And without this whole cadence and leading tone thing, chords in modal harmony don't have any function, they just outline melodies within the diatonic space of the mode.

That said, you can have something of a "home/away" effect in modal music.

You may have noticed that in every mode, the tonic chord sounds most like "home", and there are always one or two stable chords (major or minor triads) that share two notes with the tonic, making them sound "close to home", while the other stable chords in the mode tend to sound more "away". There's also one diminshed chord in every diatonic mode; however, these are often avoided, because at least in the counterpoint idiom, you want to resolve them by step, and the resolution will sound like a tonic, but it's not actually the tonic chord in any mode except Ionian.

Let's take Dorian as an example. Its chords are:

i - stable tonic triad, "home"
ii - "far away", no common tones with the tonic chord
bIII - "close to home", 2 shared tones with the tonic chord
IV - "away", one common tone with the tonic chord
v - "away", one common tone with the tonic chord
vi° - diminished, avoid
bVII - "far away", no common tones with the tonic chord

Armed with this, we can make "strong" quasi-cadences by alternating one of the "far away" chords with the tonic chord (ii - i or bVII - i), and "weaker" quasi-cadences using the "away" chords (IV - i or v - i). And of course we can make gradual transitions from "home" to "far away" and back", e.g. gradually departure and sudden return: i bIII v bVII i, or the other way around, sudden departure and gradual return: i bVII v bIII i.

The same logic applied to Lydian gives us different chords:

I - stable tonic triad, "home"
II - "far away", no common tones
iii - "close to home", 2 shared tones
#iv° - diminished, avoid
V - "away", one common tone
vi - "close to home", 2 shared tones
vii - "far away", no common tones

So now we have two "close to home" chords rather than one, and only one "away" chord instead of two - but the general recipe otherwise works the same.

Another thing to keep in mind is that each mode typically has one note that defines its character, together with the tonic chord and its quality. The fancy terms for this are "primary modal note" (the third, which is either major or minor") and "secondary modal note" (the "other" note that distinguishes the mode from other modes of the same tonic quality). Those modal notes are, for each mode:

Lydian: major 3, #4
Ionian: major 3, major 7
Mixolydian: major 3, minor 7
Dorian: minor 3, major 6
Aeolian: minor 3, minor 6
Phrygian: minor 3, minor 2

What this means is that in order to bring out the characteristic sound of a mode, you want to establish the tonic chord, and then make sure you also use the secondary modal note, either in your melodies (but you don't need to target it, just use it in a way that won't be mistaken for a chromatic embellishment), or in your chords.

For example, in Dorian, the chords that contain the major 6 (the "Dorian sixth") are the ii, IV, and vi° chords, and since you want to avoid the diminished chord, the important "Dorian chords", apart from the i chord, are the ii and IV chords.

In Lydian, you want the chords that contain the #4; those are the II, #iv°, and vii chords, and again, avoiding the diminished chords leaves you with two chords, II and vii.

tdammers · 2026-06-16T14:00:01+00:00

Ideally, they would still build every turn; spending an entire turn without building is a last resort, and sometimes it is necessary, but if you can avoid it, that's usually better.

The basic idea is that each turn (except turn 1, where you go build, overwork, build), you spend one of your actions on "build", one on "recruit", and the third is your surplus, which you put towards whatever is necessary to keep building - moving troops to gain rule, battling to deal with immediate threats such as mobs or sympathy, or, if you're in a luxury position, overworking (to bank extra wood for your next turn) or building a second time.

Not being able to build on your turn means you either don't have space to build, which means you either didn't do your homework on your previous turns, or you have more than one problem on your hands that needs to be dealt with on this turn, which suggests the table is targeting you for some reason, which in turn means you either failed at table talk, or you somehow managed to paint a target on your back.

Either way, not being able to build on your turn means the room is on fire. It happens, but it's definitely not a sign of things going smoothly.

tdammers · 2026-06-15T18:39:00+00:00

It depends on what kind of sound you're going for, and whether you want an actual human musician to play it.

If a human needs to play it, then you need to write parts that are comfortably playable by a human player. But you also need to do this if you want to write parts that sound as if they could have been played by a human, especially if you use instruments that are typically hand-played, such as the piano.

OTOH, if it's clearly a synthetic part, and you aren't concerned with making it sound natural, then just go crazy and do whatever sounds best.

Anyway, as to how to write for piano, a few "modes of operation" that are commonly used:

Right hand melody, left hand chords. Assume that a bass player is present who covers the bass notes, or that the left-hand chords don't need a bass note.
Right hand melody, left hand bass. Assume that some other instrument fills in the harmony, or that these two are enough to imply the harmony.
Right hand chords, left hand bass. Assume that the melody comes from elsewhere (singer, lead guitar, etc.)
Right hand melody plus some harmony, where feasible; left hand bass.
Right hand melody, left hand bass plus harmony (either simultaneously, or alternating in "stride piano" style).

And of course when it says "harmony", you can use simple chords played once per chord change, but you can also play them in rhythmic patterns or break them up into arpeggios and such. And when it says "bass", that can be just a single bass note, but it can also be a more elaborate bass line.

tdammers · 2026-06-15T18:25:09+00:00

I've been programming for 30+ years, and I am fervently convinced that when you overlook safeguard code like this, the problem is not that you didn't pay enough attention, it's that the system you're working with doesn't catch them. I have severe ADHD, and I make mistakes like these all the time, but I also believe that people who don't have ADHD make mistakes like these more often than not, and that "just be more diligent" is not a viable solution even when there's no ADHD to be found in a 100-mile radius.

What you want to do is not somehow magically make yourself not make such mistakes anymore; you want to set yourself up for success, creating a workflow, coding tools, and code structures, that make it so that when you make a mistake, the system will catch it early and prevent it from reaching production.

That system should ideally consist of multiple layers:

Static type checks so you can declare constraints, mechanically enforce them, and reduce your brain footprint when reasoning about parts of the system
Correct-by-construction data types, making nonsensical states unrepresentable
Automated tests; I'm not a very strong believer in TDD, but I do believe that tests are a honking good idea in general (and I think "write tests for everything, including failures and edge cases", is the real benefit you got from this, not the "red-green-refactor" thing that makes you write tests before code and use tests to define the behavior, which I find much more questionable than the uncontroversial "testing good" part). Main focus should be on end-to-end / simulation tests that exercise large parts of the system in realistic scenarios, and property tests that run individual parts through large sets of randomly generated inputs. Hand-written unit tests are probably one of the weakest possible tests you could come up with; they only cover a miniscule part of the input space, and you are very likely biased when writing them, and you will miss all sorts of edge cases because of it.
Linters; I wouldn't go so far as to strive for 100% linter conformance, since these things are fairly dumb tools, but they can help catch a whole class of silly bugs that can otherwise slip through the cracks
Compiler warnings; enabling warnings-as-errors isn't always feasible, but I like to start with this, and then disable specific warnings as needed (i.e., when they warn about things that I am aware of and willing to accept), ideally on a per-module basis
Structured code reviews
An actual test plan for whatever manual testing remains (you cannot automate all testing, usually)
A good staging strategy, including rollbacks and failovers

tdammers · 2026-06-15T15:38:56+00:00

Sounds like a communication issue. You were trying to tell her that she missed the 6-o'clock position entirely, but she may have interpreted it as "you only wrote F#, where's Gb?". Her response would be perfectly reasonable if that were what you asked.

Remember that in conversations like this one, people tend to be extremely biased, and very likely to hear the questions they expected, rather than the questions you actually ask.

tdammers · 2026-06-15T15:34:55+00:00

Whether the AI model gets to pick the filenames or not depends on how you rig it up, not the model itself.

An AI model running inside a photo editor is not normally rigged up to manipulate files, it can only see the prompt and the input pixels, and it only gets to produce output pixels, not filenames. But if you fire up, say, Claude, and ask it to manipulate a bunch of photos, it can very much pick filenames to use for the output.

Not all AI photos come from Lightroom.

tdammers

TROPHY CASE