You won't be downvoted because of double-standards. You'll be downvoted because this is a hard tangent from the current discussion. I suspect you know that and decide to pre-emptively deflect the reason so as to appear the victim.
Bro, as someone who had brutal insomnia for a couple of years and now sleeps "normally" for whatever that means, I can tell you that I don't think about my sleep quality at all. I'm happy to be sleeping.
If you too sleep "ok" for whatever that means, maybe stop worrying about optimizing it and go do something else less insane.
The charitable reading of "better sleep" is "sleep habits that allow for a healthy amount of sleep". A lot of people have habits that give them insufficient sleep.
My experience is being surrounded by people who sleep eight hours a night and then check their ring data or whatever nonsense to convince themselves that they could do better.
Waking up tired and with the brain full of fog is nearly as fun as not sleeping and ending up tired, with the brain full of fog. Truth be told, most cases of "poor sleep quality" are not as brutal though.
Primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn't really exist. It's almost always anxiety, although a few other mental and physical conditions can also cause it. But more likely anxiety.
Disturbed sleep / inability to settle / anxiety can have physical causes although these are poorly recognized / diagnosed by regular allopathic medicine where I live.
Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce the blood pressure.
I would discuss this with you in some detail privately, with bona fides. You should consult with an herbalist. The herbalist I see doesn't mix themes / traditions. The one we've chosen, together, to work with is TCM. Inside of TCM there are "strategies" or themes. We tried a few, the gou teng + tian ma theme seems to work, minor changes happen seasonally. Underneath that are herbs addressing inflammation (ability to settle / get comfortable), immune system (allergies) balancing (post nasal drip / congestion / anxiety), circulatory health (e.g. cold feet), and tonifying some of the major metabolic / detoxifying organs (sweating / digestion). I have a renewed commitment to exercise and making sure I eat the right things for my body.
In the beginning I got hit with something and was misdiagnosed, and almost died; hypertension didn't fit the narrative so was initially ignored. By the way, when you don't sleep for three months it fucks you up. No attempt was ever made to even acknowledge that there might be a root cause for the hypertension. The hypertension drugs worked until they didn't, and they started gaslighting me about it. Bear in mind, in the context of the theme better sleep will help with hypertension (demonstrably true!).
You need to cultivate awareness as well as evidence-based skepticism for this to work. One of the herbs I take interacts with the beta blocker I still take, and if you weren't paying attention it could kill you (nobody told me, or the herbalist, about it). Some of the herbs are pricey, but none are over $80/pound. All in, it costs me about $100 / month, and two hours of my time every three days (to boil herbs). Quite frankly, if the pills work then just do that; but don't treat it as a "solve", get to work and identify some of the root causes and what can be done about it... before they stop working or start making you sick.
On the flipside, there are a lot of businesses that don't open their digital product to multiple markets or verticals because the cost (in money or focus) is too high. Distribution just got a lot easier, arguably about as easy as it should have been in the first place. If you already have a reasonable moat for your product in a smallish market, going broad is a lot more feasible now. I'm doing it now (with partners who own the core product) and its going very well.
Here is a gift to you, I found this on the Internet Archive. it's a cassette dramataziation of Asteroids and Yar's Revenge. I'm not sure how many other people on earth would care fellow Atari-knower, but it's a wonderful little time capsule.
https://archive.org/details/AtariSciFiAdventuresInSound
Unfortunately at this scale, when you are this soft on the message, everyone ignores it and keeps doing what they were doing before. Carrot and stick are both required for performance management at this scale. You can argue whether the bet is worth it or not, but to even take the bet, you need a lot more than some resources and a "please".
If performance was the true goal then we'd just naturally see slow adopters unperform and phase out of that company. If you make good tooling available and it is significantly impactful the results will be extremely obvious - and, just speaking from a point of view of psychology, if the person next to you is able to do their job in half the time because they experimented with new tooling _and sees some personal benefit from it_ then you'll be curious and experiment too!
It might be that these companies don't care about actual performance or it might be that these companies are too cheap/poorly run to reward/incentivize actual performance gains but either way... the fault is on leadership.
Two things: 1) Employees are not that easy to replace. These employees have already been onboarded, screened, and proven, at least to this point, to be the type of people the company wants. If an employee starts lagging behind solely because they are stubborn about adopting AI, yes, the company can fire them, but then it has to go through the entire hiring process again and risk bringing in someone new, when it could have simply improved performance by helping the existing employee use AI. 2) Companies themselves have performance metrics that are compared to those of other companies. If an employee is not using AI and has reduced output, then the company’s overall output and its profits are affected. No investor cares if the reason is that other companies have a higher rate of AI adoption; investors care that the company was not able to get its employees to use AI effectively to increase profits.
It's not inevitable, it's just poor leadership. I've seen changes at large organizations take without being crudely pushed top-down and you'd better believe I've seen top-down initiatives fail, so "performance management" is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Performance management isn't rating how people are doing. It's transforming the resources of the company into something that you want it to do. If they want to transform the current state of the company into something that has AI use as a core capability, that is performance management.
> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable.
> It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm?
This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?
Some of us survive because we have anxiety deeply rooted in a fear of failure. It causes us to be perfectionists. This can look like success for those who hide it well.
I have been hospitalized and almost died multiple times from stress-related disorders, so I get it. But as soon as I catch myself putting aspects of my health on the behaviour of other people -- especially for something this small -- it's time for me to start looking inwards.
I don't know about heroic, but it's certainly necessary. Nobody is going to look out for you except you. Work will never love you back, your company will take as much as you give it.
> If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?
Not the author, but I'd wager it's an evolving story over many years. At first, you ignore it entirely. It might not even register at first, or if it does, it's just a barely conscious "huh, this interaction makes me feel weird" sort of deal. And you leave it be. But then death by a thousand cuts later, you're irritated by this habit and want to speak out against it. And so, you write a blog post about why it's bad or annoying or whatever. And then you go back to surviving another day.
For me the point is that if you feel uncomfortable over something that is widespread and considered normal social etiquette, it's on you to deal with feeling uncomfortable, and you can't really expect everyone else to change their behaviour just for you.
There is no set of "normal" things that a large majority of people all share. You can do things you consider normal without being a defensive asshole about it when it negatively affects somebody else (and vice versa, but I'm responding to you, not the OP).
Replace normal with common, and my original comment stands. In many cultures people often casually say "how is it going?" when they don't mean it literally and they are just expecting a token "good, you?" in response. Some people might view it as unnecessary and insincere, but they don't generally go around lecturing others and telling them not to do it. When you're faced with a harmless cultural behaviour like this, the polite thing to do is just accept it and move on with your life.
Culture (and the norms that emanate from it) are a thing that exists. They may be localized to certain communities, but they’re not something you can deny the existence of.
> For me the point is that if you feel uncomfortable over something that is widespread and considered normal social etiquette, it's on you to deal with feeling uncomfortable, and you can't really expect everyone else to change their behaviour just for you.
I think the poster above may have accidentally worded their response a little too personally, but their point is valid and not against neurodivergent people (or, at least, there is a version that is close to their argument that is so).
It's perfectly fine to ask people to change be careful in their correspondence to a specific person to avoid certain issues.
It's not fine, however, even for neuro divergent people, to expect social norms to change for everyone to match their particular preferences.
If we read the original article as representing a request from the author to specifically not answer emails to them by apologizing for replying late, that's a perfectly fine request that anyone corresponding with them should follow (once they become aware of it). If we read it as a general recommendation to everyone to change this clear social norm, then it's not fine, the justification given (one person finds this puts some kind of pressure on them, and others might too) is not strong enough to warrant everyone else changing their behavior pre-emptively.
You're taking my comment out of context. This isn't about neurodivergents, it's about someone who thinks everyone should conform to his highly detailed rules (the article isn't only about not apologising - he has other demands on structure, content, and even plaintext vs html) when sending him emails.
reply