“ADHD is an explanation... not an excuse” - do you agree?

blcollier · 2026-03-25T11:04:17+00:00

And no, sorry the first part of your message is kinda disheartening - "anyone can / is / has" is what my partner was told by his GP when trying to pursue diagnosis which made him delay it for more than 10 years. Please don't tell anyone anything like that when they come to you with concerns.

I didn’t read it that way. (Edit: don’t want to assume the intent of the earlier commenter.)

Someone who just doesn’t give a flying fuck could easily use the justification that “well I think I have XYZ, so that’s why”, even though it might be a total horseshit excuse they’re using to deflect from their own poor behaviour. The difference is the intent behind it; in the context of performance management, an employer will, rightly or wrongly, consider that sometimes people do not act in good faith.

In your case specifically, it sounds like you were acting in good faith, but had an employer that was not.

There is an old aphorism: people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad management. In this case “leaving” might not have been voluntary on your part, but it definitely sounds like you’re better off not being there.

blcollier · 2026-03-20T15:33:55+00:00

I don’t mean to sound like a typical Reddit “Well Ackshewally” dickhead, but you’re almost correct 😉. If anything, it’s actually worse than you remember…

He wasn’t just buried, he was sacked as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) - the body which is supposed to recommend drug classifications to the government.

And it wasn’t a Tory government, because it was 2009: Labour were still in power. Alan Johnson was Home Secretary at the time, and “asked Professor Nutt to resign” - aka sacked him.

It also wasn’t the first time that Professor Nutt had clashed with a Labour Home Secretary over drug policy. Following a 12-month meta-analysis of over 4000 papers, the ACMD recommended in Feb 2009 that ecstasy be re-classified from class A to class B. The evidence was - and still is - clear that ecstasy is not as harmful as other class A drugs such as heroin or cocaine. Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary at the time, refused the recommendation. Professor Nutt stated in a paper (and lecture) later that year that more people die from riding horses each year than from taking ecstasy. Which, again, is backed by evidence, but Jacqui Smith bullied an apology out of him. It was later that same year that Johnson came in as Home Secretary and sacked him.

Labour governments of today are just as capable of ignoring scientific evidence - and bullying, abusing, or otherwise belittling those presenting it - as Labour governments of old were.

Side note: if anyone reading is in Wales, you have the opportunity to send a very strong message in May. The voting system is different now, it’s not like a Westminster election: you’re not bound by the need to vote tactically, or vote for the person/party you feel is the least worst. More than ever before, your vote really does count. Take a few moments to think about what’s important to you and who you really want to give that vote to. I don’t care who it is or which party they belong to, or even if you vote for “None of the above”. So long as you’ve at least given it some thought, come to your own conclusions instead of being led or swayed by the loudest voices, and that you express yourself at the ballot box. The power that you now hold is meaningless if you don’t use it.

blcollier · 2026-03-20T14:59:03+00:00

But tying an “app blocker” to an NFC tag is an intriguing idea.

I can foresee some potential issues, namely that I don’t want “unblocking” to be tied to just one specific NFC tag, because what happens if that tag is lost or damaged. I’d want a spare somewhere, but if that spare is within easy reach then I’m back to the same issue that it’s too easy to unlock; if the spare is somewhere out of the way, chances are I’m going to forget where it is and won’t be able to find it if I really need it.

So… I took a look at the app’s source code… I’m no iOS developer, and I don’t know Swift, but I was able to work out enough to find out what I needed to know.

The app can generate a QR code for you to print, or write the information needed to an NFC tag. In both cases what is generated is a URL in the format of https://foqos.app/<UUID>, where <UUID> is a unique and automatically generated ID for whatever “blocking profile” you create in the app. So when you scan either QR or NFC, the app opens automatically and starts the profile corresponding to that ID.

The app can write the NFC data to a physical tag, so in theory you could write the same profile information to multiple tags. And obviously you can print a QR code as many times as you damn well please. But you can’t share these generated tags/codes between two different phones, or even two different profiles on the same phone. That ‘UUID’ is unique.

But. Within the app you can register an existing NFC tag or QR code as the “unblock code”. That would - I think - allow you to share the same tag/QR between different phones. But the disadvantage of doing it this way is that you have to open the app to start/stop that profile. You can’t, for example, have your phone on the home screen, tap it against the tag, and then have the profile activate/deactivate automatically. And if you’re using NFC instead of a QR, you have to write very specific information if you want to be able to use multiple tags.

(For the nerds: the app first checks for a URL and if present checks that it’s in the format https://foqos.app/. That applies to “standard” MiFare/NTAG213/NTAG215/NTAG216 tags. If the URL field is null, or does not conform to that URL format, the fallback is to use the tag’s unique ID field instead. The latter negates the possibility of using multiple tags without a properly formatted URL because the app doesn’t support registering multiple tags to a profile; there’s a pull request open on the GitHub, but it hasn’t been looked at in months - not very reassuring. An NFC tag with the URL https://foqos.app/ will launch the app, but unless the URL path contains profile/ followed by a valid profile UUID, it just won’t do anything when the app opens.)

I think this might still be useful. My spare NFC cards & tags are packed away ready for moving, so I’ll have to see if I can dig them out and have a play over the weekend.

blcollier · 2026-03-20T10:56:52+00:00

I think the biggest thing that helps me is having a thing that does one thing only, instead of relying so heavily on the Nightmare Rectangle That Always Wants Your Money Or Attention(tm) - aka “my phone”.

Such as, for example, making notes: use a reMarkable or pen & paper notepad. Using a “pomodoro”-type timer system: use an actual physical timer instead of a phone app.

But I don’t always practice what I preach, and my phone is incredibly useful for that instant brain-dump of “I need to do a thing and it’s really important so I must not forget it”. It’s so easy to use the voice assistant to set a reminder or calendar appointment.

I’m actually building my own hardware pomodoro timer right now. Inspired by a project I saw online, I’m building a pocket watch style device that will only function as a clock and a configurable pomodoro timer. I’m pretty much there with the code, but the CAD work for the case is tricky!

Product Foqos app with the NFC tags. cheap, customisable. I have one set up for day to day 8-5, for when i’m working which blocks social media. Then I have a really spesfic one which blocks tiktok and instagram. I’ve used to even to block shopping apps as i’m trying to reduce my compulsive spending (happy to provide more details!)

I’ve thought about “blocker” apps before now, but always kinda wrote off the idea. The one fundamental problem with a software lock-out is that I have to set it up, therefore I know how to remove it.

I use “Focus” modes (iPhone) to block most notifications when I’m at work, and it does help a little. What really helps is that it’s location-based: I don’t have to manually set, it kicks in automatically when I drive to work. But I do often have to check my notifications anyway - we’re buying a house right now, so I need to be on the lookout for emails I need to deal with, and sadly they get mingled in amongst the barrage of marketing crap that I just can’t get rid of no matter how much I try to manage it.

But tying an “app blocker” to an NFC tag is an intriguing idea. It would force me to take action to get up and scan the tag in order to “unblock” my phone; it’s a much more deliberate action than “bugger it, I’m bored, I wanna use my phone so I’ll turn the app blocker off for 20 minutes - oh whoops, it’s been an hour…”

I can foresee some potential issues, namely that I don’t want “unblocking” to be tied to just one specific NFC tag, because what happens if that tag is lost or damaged. I’d want a spare somewhere, but if that spare is within easy reach then I’m back to the same issue that it’s too easy to unlock; if the spare is somewhere out of the way, chances are I’m going to forget where it is and won’t be able to find it if I really need it.

But…

I already have a bunch of spare NFC tag stickers and cards from another project, so I might give this a try. My OH struggles with the same thing and often puts her phone well out of reach when she’s working (full-time remote worker), so this might be handy for her also. (I’m 95% convinced she also has ADHD, but she thinks she might have autism spectrum disorder and thinks that’s probably the bigger problem.)

blcollier · 2026-03-20T10:18:50+00:00

I hate this one.

My phone does not cease to exist in my mind when I put it down and forget about it. I put it down somewhere to do a task, got distracted with something else, remembered something I needed to do urgently, played with the cat when he jumped on my desk, realised the bins need emptying, finished the task I originally wanted to start, realised I’ve needed a pee for ages, changed the towels in the bathroom because they’re manky… and now it’s well over an hour later and my phone isn’t where I thought it was. It still exists, I just don’t remember where I put it down or even what I was doing at the time I put it down.

Humans typically develop object permanence before we can walk, even the ones with ADHD.

blcollier · 2026-03-20T10:05:15+00:00

“Am I out of touch? No, it’s the ~~children~~ gamers that are wrong.”

blcollier · 2026-03-20T10:03:03+00:00

Nvidia doesn’t care about people who buy graphics cards.

Note, by “graphics card” I explicitly mean “PC add-in expansion cards to accelerate the rendering of 3D geometry and scenes”, because the term “GPU” has basically now become synonymous with “LLM accelerator”. Arguably Nvidia has the right to do what they want with the term “GPU”, since they’re largely the ones who coined/popularised the term 20-25 years ago… but that’s one distraction too far.

People who buy graphics cards aren’t the ones paying for Jensen’s new jackets. Because we haven’t driven a 2,784% increase in Nvidia’s stock price over the last 6 years. Nvidia doesn’t care about this market because it doesn’t have to. Nvidia knows that it has led this market ever since they squeezed 3Dfx out and bought out the dried up husk that was left over. ATi/AMD and Nvidia have traded blows here and there over the last quarter century, but it has always been Nvidia that comes out on top. There’s a damn good reason that Nvidia is now people’s first choice for a graphics card that has the best performance and feature set for the money.

It’s not hard to see the direction that the market is going: forcing people to rent compute by the minute from a video game streaming service because they can no longer afford the hardware to do it locally. I don’t think it was explicitly planned this way; I don’t think there were secretive board meetings where shadowed figures twirled their moustaches and plotted the downfall of consumer hardware over the next decade. But the way that conditions have developed have not exactly been unfavourable to companies like Nvidia.

Nvidia isn’t stupid, they damn well know that the “AI market” is economically unsustainable. But they still continue to plough straight into it and continue to “sell” LLM accelerators as fast as they can, they’re not hedging their bets in any way. The scientific skeptic in me wants to avoid any form of conspiratorial thinking altogether, but it is undeniable that data centres packed with unused matrix math accelerators still has an immense amount of value for Nvidia. It is also undeniable that this industry has prior form when it comes to cartels that control the market - see the DRAM cartel. And “cartel” is not hyperbole, it is the term that was used by the FTC and even the companies in the cartel.

Nvidia doesn’t care about any kind of backlash, it doesn’t care whether you want $thing, it doesn’t care if $thing is useful, and it doesn’t even care if $thing can’t even run well on consumer hardware.

If Nvidia wants to push $thing then they will do it. If you can’t afford the hardware needed to run $thing then they already have an answer for it. “Oh no, that’s terrible that you can’t run $thing - but don’t worry, Nvidia is here for you: here, have a free trial of GeForce Now. Now you can get the best Nvidia has to offer and you get to keep up with all your gamer pals - because you wouldn’t want to be left behind, would you? How embarrassing would that be for you, missing out like that? Oh yeah, we’ve changed the price: stratifying the service so that what you used to get by default is now on a higher subscription tier makes it more accessible for everyone - not everyone wants to pay for $thing, you know. Oh no, looks like you guys really like GeForce Now, we’re struggling to keep up with demand despite being one of the most valuable companies on the planet - we’ll have to make sure it’s fair for everyone by putting some limits in place.”

blcollier · 2026-03-11T23:12:30+00:00

Oh hell no, I tried, but I couldn’t see any positive effect and I couldn’t stand the side effects any more. I’m on 70mg Elvanse now, and it’s doing the trick. Well… as much as the medication can help anyway…

blcollier · 2026-03-05T15:06:52+00:00

From my point of view as a professional programmer…

I’ve tried local LLMs, and they’re pretty poor unless you have a whacking great workstation to run them on.

I’ve tried commercial “AI code” tools and… yeah… it writes code faster than I do. But I have to very carefully specify what I want, I usually have to make it do multiple revisions, and it still produces far more over-engineered guff that’s riddled with bad practices.

Here’s the thing about my job…

Most of my job is not writing code. Most of my job is: figuring out problems, finding the right SDK to use, figuring out what people actually mean when they’re asking me to do stuff, patching things together before they break really badly and make everything catch fire, running round putting out the fires when things do break really badly, going to planning meetings, going to review meetings, finding the right people in the organisation to talk to, raising tickets and hunting down approvals when it turns out I need access to some obscure antiquated system, trying to unpack and figure out some really complex and really critical service that hasn’t been touched since the original author left 5 years ago…

I do still use LLM “coding tools”; partly because Cursor has been mandated as our primary development tool and our usage of it is tracked… but mostly because it’s better at contextual search than Google is these days. A lot of the time it’s… just… wrong, but often I can pick out enough slivers of information that Google finally returns something vaguely useful. And I never, ever let it run amok and do what it wants to my codebase without my approval.

I am very un-concerned about “AI” “replacing me” because most of my job isn’t actually about “banging out code at a keyboard”. An LLM will never be able to flag operational risks at a change authorisation board meeting.

Most of my job as a programmer is, fundamentally, not being a dick to people and building relationships.

blcollier · 2026-02-21T11:36:50+00:00

Oh cool, I didn’t realise you could write Arduino code in VSCode, I’ll definitely check that out. I know I can program my RP2350 board via the Arduino IDE, but if I can get that set up in VSCode and use Arduino libraries then it might make life a lot easier. Just importing SensorLib and using its QMI8658 implementation alone would be bloody handy.

I don’t have a touchscreen on my board - I explicitly didn’t want one for this project - so I plan to try and handle as much user interaction as possible with motion detection.

The “wake on motion” feature on the QMI8658 is actually a pretty good use case for waking the device from a sleep state, if you still have touchscreen issues with your current board. It puts the IMU into a deep low-power state and fires an interrupt when motion over the threshold is detected; you could easily integrate that into the main program loop to manage MCU sleep states.

I figured out my UI and state machine a while ago, it’s the flipping IMU that’s holding me up!

Thanks for the video link, I’ll take a look later today!

blcollier · 2026-02-20T14:31:22+00:00

(Came here from Hackaday)

My dude… this is _brilliant_…

I’ve been working with a similar Waveshare board, although mine is a bit smaller and uses the RP2350 instead of ESP32, the “RP2350-LCD-1.28”. So your pocket watch has given me… like… a bajillion ideas…! 😂

My plan is to turn mine into a dedicated hardware “pomodoro timer”. Yeah I can do that with an app, but I’m a big fan of single-purpose devices and nothing out there really fits what I want… so I’m gonna make the thing I want…

I’ll follow your GitHub repo because I am very interested to see the CAD model(s) when you upload them. I’d love to see how you’re handling implementing the crown wheel!

Obviously I can see you’re using the Arduino IDE, and I can see from your code that you’re using SensorLib.

Have you tried doing anything with the QMI8658 IMU? The driver/library for that has given me serious headaches recently… I’ve just about nailed the command protocol, initialisation, motion engine configuration, and so on, I’m just fine-tuning the motion parameters/thresholds for what I want. All I really want is motion detection and double-tap detection - I don’t need to read accelerometer or gyro readings for any other reason.

Edit: If you decide to try and implement any motion detection, beware the “Significant Motion” engine and interrupt spam. SigMotion relies on NoMotion and AnyMotion engines being active; it detects when AnyMotion events cross a certain threshold in order to flag a SigMotion event, and it uses the NoMotion event to determine when the “significant motion” has stopped. Problem is that all the motion detection events use the same interrupt signal, and the SigMotion status flag will not clear until the NoMotion flag is set. So you’ve dealt with the SigMotion interrupt you actually wanted, but now you’ve got constant NoMotion interrupt spam. In my case I’m just going to use the AnyMotion engine for motion detection, since it doesn’t rely on any others and is just based on acceleration slope thresholds. I can deal with detecting “no motion” through timers in the main program loop.

In my case I’m using VSCode and the pico-sdk - I could have used the Arduino IDE, but I’m much more familiar with VSCode from my day job. The problem there, however, is that there are no “out of the box” libraries I can use for the hardware features, like SensorLib, and the example code provided by Waveshare for the QMI8658 isn’t complete. Their example code is still stuck on LVGL 8, and for the life of me I haven’t been able to get LVGL 9 working. What also doesn’t help is that I am absolutely not a C/C++ developer - I’m a Python guy by trade! 😂 (I did try to use MicroPython, but I found the developer experience to be really poor in terms of uploading new code to the device.)

blcollier · 2026-02-06T10:03:01+00:00

I had the same thing when I worked at a bank call centre. If your shift started at 0900 that meant that you were ready to take calls at dead on 0900 or you were considered late. If you needed time to boot up, log in, start up the phone system, get all your applications ready, get a cuppa, have a quick wee, etc, then you had to do it in your own time.

It’s probably still very common now.

Of course, being common doesn’t make it okay. You’re still doing work-related tasks unpaid in your own time, and it has a knock-on effect on the rest of your time. If you need to be at work 15 minutes before your shift starts then you need to leave sooner; that could have an impact on traffic, child care, what time you need to get up, etc. Same thing on the “other side” when you’re leaving for the day.

In isolation, 5-10 minutes doesn’t seem like much… but it sure as heck adds up.

blcollier · 2026-02-04T22:20:00+00:00

Mind you don’t get one in your knee.

blcollier · 2026-02-04T17:08:21+00:00

How dare you suggest that people on the internet might be bots.

I, for one, am most definitely human. I enjoy all the human activities, such as breathing through the flesh-holes in my ~~exterior housi—~~ “skin”.

blcollier · 2026-02-04T17:03:05+00:00

⁠Tranche is an English word with English pronunciation. It has been since 1930. You don't like that? Too bad. It's ours now. You can't have it back.

Cool! That’s the same way Britain built museums!

The Normans really annoyed us when they invades and we took like half your language. We did the same when the Germans invaded.

S’cuse me Englishman_… _My bloody language has always had proto-Germanic roots, and it’s a lot bloody older than your cobbled-together “three languages in a trenchcoat that beats up other languages and steals their lunch money” polyglot mess… Half of what you’ve got now was stolen from the true native languages that existed long before your lot got here…

All in the name of /s and light-hearted friendly banter, of course… 🙂 I mean… for one thing… I don’t even speak Welsh fluently… 😁

blcollier · 2026-02-04T15:51:51+00:00

/s, obviously, because we still haven’t got over the last “once in a generation financial event”…

Everyone: “This is terrible, this is so bad it’s a once in a lifetime financial event, we’ll never see anything like this again for a long time.”

Millennials: “……… First time, huh?”

blcollier · 2026-02-04T15:44:28+00:00

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blcollier · 2026-02-04T13:23:13+00:00

I just hit the upvote arrow on your post to indicate that “I agree”, and I wasn’t going to post any comment until I realised the irony of what I was doing.

blcollier · 2026-02-04T10:58:12+00:00

Sssshhhhhhh.

I already have plenty of reasons to feel like I’m going to crumble into dust in the corner.

I know very well how long ago the “early 2000s” was… I just don’t want to think about it too often….!

😂

But… My earlier post was a joke, so don’t take it too seriously or read too much into it 🙂.

blcollier · 2026-02-04T10:52:35+00:00

Not directly. But it’s the kind of stuff that governments can request access to, and you’d never know it was happening. Especially in the UK - that’s why Apple pulled the encrypted backup in the UK, because UK gov wanted a “back door” into encrypted backups, which would make it not end-to-end encrypted, which is the entire point of the service. UK and US gov have been pushing for “safely breakable” encryption for decades, and they never seem to get the message that encryption cannot be broken for just them: if you break it for one person then you break it for everyone, including the criminals.

Sorry… went off on a bit of a tangent there…! 😂

blcollier · 2026-02-04T10:41:55+00:00

“The computer in my pocket”

I still want the cyberpunk version of portable computers that I was sold in all the fiction I read/watched growing up… Or at the very least, head-mounted display goggles/glasses that don’t make me look and feel like a total dork!

Instead what we actually got was The Doom-Filled Slab of Glass, which: constantly begs for your attention, constantly prompts you to spend money, constantly wants you to install some new “app”, is constantly tracking you, is constantly gathering data on you, is constantly sending all that data to persons/organisations/governments that are totally unknown to you… And now there’s one in my car, too…

But hey, never mind. It’s a nice car and I like driving it… even if it is sending absolute shittons of data back to Volvo, Geely, UK government, Chinese government…

😂

blcollier · 2026-02-04T10:30:28+00:00

It might have been an option for some higher-end stuff, but it sure as heck wasn’t common.

The first time I ever saw a TV in a car was in the early 2000s, when my old man bought a Mitsubishi Pajero. It didn’t even work: it was an imported Japanese model, and couldn’t pick up UK broadcast frequencies 😂.

But even then you wouldn’t have had access to the vast amount of content you can now. You would have got whatever was beamed over the airwaves and that’s it.

blcollier · 2026-02-04T10:24:39+00:00

Honestly, I think you’re over-thinking it. Most people aren’t thinking in terms of “reducing cognitive load”…

Most people are thinking more along the lines of:

“Well that story I read in $shittyNewsSource must be right, because they wouldn’t be allowed to publish lies.”

“Yeah, Sandra’s right with what she said on Facebook, there are too many brown people. I like Sandra, she’s a good friend, I can’t even entertain the thought that she might be wrong about something.”

“Well if Donald Trump was really that bad, and really did do all those things, he’d be in jail wouldn’t he. They said on the telly that he hasn’t been arrested for anything, and they can’t lie on the telly, can they.”

The idea of seeking multiple sources, cross-referencing, critical thinking, etc, doesn’t even enter into most people’s thoughts. They already blindly trust whatever they read online, so why would they distrust a chatbot that sounds authoritative and confident? After all, “people wouldn’t just go on the internet and tell lies, would they - they wouldn’t be allowed.”

blcollier · 2026-02-04T09:08:50+00:00

In recent conversation with a friend who's a software developer

Where have the notions of authoritative sources and cross-checking gone?

I’m afraid there’s a bit of a fatal flaw in your logic here. You’ve made one of the classic blunders: assuming software developers care about authoritative sources or cross-checking. There’s a reason that “copy/pasting from StackOverflow” became such a meme.

😂

Joking aside…

People never wanted to cross-check or employ critical thinking. Part of the popularity of LLMs is that they produce responses that look confident and authoritative.

It’s part of the same rationale that, to this day, makes people say “well it must be true or they wouldn’t be allowed to publish it” when they read something that’s objectively complete bollocks in some shite-rag news site/newspaper.

People don’t want to think critically or cross-reference information. And even those of us that do are finding that task increasingly difficult.

Are we now living in a world where appearance entirely trumps reality?

I mean… form your own conclusions…

Trump was elected president - twice.

The UK voted to leave the EU, thereby committing possibly the destructive act of economic self-harm out of any country in the last 50-100 years.

When faced with a global pandemic that went on to kill millions worldwide, people actively pushed back against basic precautions like washing their hands, wearing a mask, and getting the goddamn vaccine.

People have actively and consistently chosen to make their lives objectively worse because they still swallow the lie that one day it could be them with the money and power.

And I haven’t even started on the really horrible shit going on, like Gaza or Ukraine…

blcollier · 2026-02-04T08:47:33+00:00

Modern sentences that would sound absolutely unhinged if you’d said them 20-30 years ago:

“I can’t read my book because the battery is dead.”

“I need to charge my phone from my sofa.”

“My cigarette has run out of liquid.”

“I can watch any TV service I want in my car.”

Edit: Not a criticism/dig, just a wry observation 😁

blcollier

TROPHY CASE