Always assume your data is in N-1 places at all times.

Any drive can and will fail at any time, no matter how well it was working yesterday.

I’ve had people in with their entire PhD and years of research on one single drive, with no backup - just gone.

If your data is only in one place, it will be in zero places soon enough.

Disposable or replaceable data - which honestly is going to be 90% of your stuff - meh.

But anything that you need and couldn’t replace, that shit needs backing up to AT LEAST one other place.

As for the rest - drives can fail slowly, or they can fail fast. When they fail slowly, you start getting a couple of disk errors here and there, and you may just be able to order one in time to replace it.

When they fail fast, they just drop like a heart attack.

There’s no way to know in advance. If your data is safe, then you’ll either be out a few days while a replacement arrives, or you’ll be just about able to copy stuff across. At that age, I wouldn’t trust it farther than I could spit it. It could work fine for years more, but the moment you rely on it for something important, it’ll give out on you.

I would have kicked ass at emergency medicine.

Unfortunately, the first lull that came along, I’d fuck up and people would die.

It isn’t fun.

Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.

We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.

It gets old, man.

Like I said, people deserve to know what they’re signing up for, and there need to be well-established boundaries agreed to in advance. I wouldn’t recommend it personally, but different people may choose differently.

And yeah - if someone just isn’t safe to be around, even for reasons they didn’t choose, don’t want and can’t change, then that’s correct, they shouldn’t be around people. Yes, that’s horribly unfair, but existence just sucks. If you have no moral qualms concealing that danger so you can keep exposing people to it in secret… then you’ve just proved my point.

As for the absusers in my life, kindly go fuck yourself.

What I see online? I spent the first twenty years of my life as a target of cluster-B abuse, trust me I know firsthand.

My advice to all people in range is drop everything and fucking run. Things are replaceable. Jobs and friends are replaceable. Your wellbeing isn’t.

It sucks, you didn’t choose it, it’s not fair - I totally get that, believe me. I have ADHD, it’s a bitch, and it can suck for the people around me.

But the thing is, the fact that it’s not your fault doesn’t make you safe to be around. People can be a danger to others completely involuntarily, despite their greatest wish not to be. And yes, that’s completely fucking unfair.

NPD and BPD are both driven by a great sucking vortex of need-for-validation that can never be filled, and that tortures people if left unfed. NPD is when the vortex demands power or status, BPD is when it demands extravagant emotional connection, but they’re the same basic model underneath. It’s as vicious and relentless as any drug addiction, it doesn’t go away, and it will eventually overpower any amount of good intent. When the monkey’s on their back, all bets are off and the nearest available victim will be preyed upon.

I don’t think there’s a safe way to be in a relationship with that - though I suppose with extremely open communication and amazingly well-defined and enforced boundaries, it could be doable. But this is very much a case of informed consent - it would be supremely shitty not to let your partner know the deal.

Goodhart’s law strikes again.

They can’t tune their process for ‘win election’, because that’s only one sample every four years, and it’s a binary value.

So instead they tune it for ‘raise campaign funds’ as a proxy measure for ‘win election’, and that’s vastly more responsive; they can optimise the crap out of that.

This also means that a bunch of influential people are able to skim significant amounts off the top, so they’re not minded to change it. They’re stinking rich so they don’t have to care about the actual political outcome - and the more people are suffering, the more they’ll donate.

The trump win was a massive windfall for the next cycle of fundraising.