I agree with you overall, but interestingly, research really has found a link between lower Vitamin B12/B6/B2 levels and ADHD. Also lower Vitamin D, and delayed circadian rhythm. You certainly can't use supplements as a replacement for stimulants but they may help.

> A study of 894 ADHD probands and 1135 of their siblings aged 5–17 years old found a ninefold increased risk of ADHD in siblings of ADHD probands compared with siblings of controls [2]. Adoption studies suggest that the familial factors of ADHD are attributable to genetic factors rather than shared environmental factors [3, 4] with the most recent one reporting rates of ADHD to be greater among biological relatives of non-adopted ADHD children than adoptive relatives of adopted ADHD children. The adoptive relatives had a risk for ADHD like the risk in relatives of control children [4].

> Twin studies rely on the difference between the within-pair similarities of monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs, who are genetically identical, and dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs, who share, on average, 50% of their segregating genes. The mean heritability across 37 twin studies of ADHD or measures of inattentiveness and hyperactivity is 74% (Fig. 1). A similar heritability estimate of around 80% was seen in a study of MZ and DZ twins, full siblings, and maternal and paternal half-siblings [5]. The heritability is similar in males and females and for the inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive components of ADHD [6,7,8].

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0070-0

Of course they do. They're stimulants, that's what they do. Some people just need them to be closer to normal, or whatever's considered normal in post-Industrial society. Modafinil promotes wakefulness in everyone, not just narcolpetics. Anxiolytics calm down everyone, not just the anxious, and psilocybin makes everyone feel euphoric, not just the depressed. It would be weird if stimulants only had an effect of ADHD patients.

> and ADHD is kind of a weakly differentiated diagnosis that could apply to most people.

I don't think we really understand it yet, but it's not something most people have. As the article mentions, people ADHD have a higher rate of transportation accidents, lower life expectancy, higher crime rates, higher addiction rates, etc. The differences show up in brain scans, performance tests, genetic biomarkers, heritability/twin studies, etc. Whether you think of it as a disability, or brain type, or whatever - ADHD is something real.

> Probably something like this was lost when people stopped smoking, obviously beneficial for health - but a huge amount of the public was taking stimulants regularly via nicotine until relatively recently.

Yes, and this is possibly why 35-55% of adults with ADHD smoke today, compared to 19% of the population. Studies have shown that nicotine is helpful for everyone but particularly helpful for those with ADHD. Nicotine-derived formulations are still being explored.

The monkey brain is doing things on "autopilot", without noticing how your mind operates. It's the opposite of mindfulness.

... such as destroying what's left of the entry to junior-level job market. And perhaps in the near future, mid-level too.

Every single person who can effect change and publicly opposes the cartel gets killed. Every single one. There is a list [0] of the ones killed in 2024 alone. Even outside of politics, you can't even really joke about the cartel while in Mexico, no matter who you are. They torture and kill entire families over nothing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_politicians_killed_dur...

But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.

>Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work

Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.

This does nothing. It did nothing in 2016 and would do even less now.

this is under appreciated. I remember people declaring Perplexity.ai doomed when ChatGPT search came out. Yet Perplexity is doing better than ever, with a service that lets you search with any major LLM, even DeepSeek R1.

Aidan McLaughlin, who now works for OpenAI, wrote a nice essay about this:

https://aidanmclaughlin.notion.site/The-Zero-Day-Flaw-in-AI-...

Welcome to HackerNews.

I've been struggling to even get an interview in junior software dev for over a year now. Tried some help desk as well and never heard back. I've had my resume looked at quite a few times now, so I doubt that that's the problem.

If you go to r/jobs and related subreddits, there are plenty of people who are losing their minds after applying to thousands of jobs for the last 2 years without even getting a prescreen. Some are even being rejected by temp agencies. I assume that this is an anomaly and 2023-24 had a uniquely terrible job market.

I'm going to a job fair soon. Wish me luck.

The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.

From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.

It was, about a year ago. It's a solved problem.