If I see a person with a broken bone protruding from their arm, I don't need an undergrad med-terms class to know "this person needs medical attention" even if I am not qualified to render it.
Similarly, there are certain thresholds of human behavior that indicate mental illness -- you don't have to be licensed to treat it in order to recognize that there is a serious problem.
actually interpreting the DSM-V and running diagnostics is exclusive to clinically trained psychologists and psychiatrists. even LCSWs are remiss to offer a 'diagnosis' after years of talk therapy with a client. most official diagnoses happen within a matrix describing a cluster of symptoms paired with an eval of severity and impact on life, and a battery of tests that have been empirically and rigorously validated
as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird"
it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones
you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'
Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill? I don't understand it. I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness?
I don't disagree that there might be more subtle cases that are hard to tell by a lay person. But Matt is not like that. You are free to read his posts from the WP Engine lawsuit, including his post on hacker news, or his prior posts from some tumblr moderation drama. To me, the consistency and degree of his actions crosses the boundary of "bad day at work" and lands firmly in the "crazy guy in the park screaming at squirrels" territory. In fact, I'd argue that if he doesn't have tech wealth and was instead working a more traditional white collar job he might have already ended up just like that.
Because some people would go insane without having an external authority to appeal to; the extant systems of academia and qualification create an "objective" truth these peoples' psyches can cling to.
because it contributes to stereotypes and increases stigma around mental health. this leads to even more social isolation and self-doubt for people with those disorders which worsens their quality of life, something that is already much lower on average than those without
it's the same idea as not calling people the 'r' word and why that word itself is no longer used in official diagnoses. it's a boundary condition grounded in compassion. advocating for using a new word doesn't need some soapbox tantrum about the fatuousness of the modern world a la Ignatius J. Reilly
how is that in any way what I am saying? you are not describing the actual condition. you're ascribing what you see as anti-social or negative behaviors you heard about an individual (who has not disclosed any diagnosis) to a complicated illess that requires years of training to formally diagnose
this bloviating about free speech when all anybody is asking you to do is to not be an asshole is so overwrought and childish
becase most people are not qualified to distinguish mental illness from emotions, stress etc, and obviously you are not either. A broken, protruding bone is obviously broken and protruding; you see it with your eyes and you know that it's broken. Mental illness is much tougher to diagnose because you're looking at symptoms, not the actual brokenness. You said it yourself - you are a layperson, not a doctor, which confirms that you are nowhere near qualified to diagnose mental illness. Your "argument" stinks of ad hominem.
Someone "naked on the street, screaming at a wall, eating a pigeon or whatever" could be having a bad trip on some drugs, not necessarily mentally ill. The drugs will wear off, and they will be a regular neurotypical person again. But by slapping a mental illness label onto that person, you've proven that you have no clue what you're talking about, and you shouldn't be diagnosing anyone.
Our brain is designed through evolution to slap labels, aka engage in hasty generalisation. The world is much more complex than that.
Just for the record, I did see him posting on HN, and he seemed highly motivated by $$$ (and pride). He certainly seemed rational, other than the fact he shouldn't have been posting here. Businessman makes bad business decision and doubles-down. Not quite insanity.
They did not in fact diagnose anything, "mental illness" is not a specific condition in the DSM. You'd have a valid point if they confidently stated he had bipolar disorder or something.
Yes, buy NPD *is* in the DSM. While I'm not a mental health professional (read: I can't diagnose with any authority), I would still say that Mullenweg consistenly exhubits many / most of the symptoms of classic NPD.
Saying someone is showing signs of mental illness isn't a diagnosis. It's saying someone looks like they need medical attention. That's a fair thing for a layman to say.
> We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"
These are, in some senses, less compassionate than saying someone needs help getting back to who they once were.
Similarly I've stopped saying "It's crazy that..." and changed it to "It's wild that ..."
What do you call it when tamer words are more impactful? Example: I've found "Dum-dums" > "stupid idiots". Is it because they're less triggering for emotional responses to the words themselves?
Maybe. But Unix types have always been all-in on tar. They love tar. They continue to use some form of tar to this day.
This was actually a 'cultural issue' back in the day, because Sun Java JAR files were just ZIPs. For good reason. But that wasn't the blessed holy unix archive format.
Yeah, a huge chunk of IBM's service revenue has always been effectively mainframe services, with wall street accounting spin.
I suspect that almost zero companies adopted mainframes after 1980 or so, so it's ALL legacy market. However, IBM always invests a lot of money in hardware to keep the mainframe perceptually leading edge and "sexy", so they can hold-on to those customers. So you gotta give them credit for that.
(IBM and Microsoft were always 'in the same breath' for years, Microsoft totally out-smarted them, and IBM gave up on that.)
> I want my browser to prevent random extensions from directly reading web page data. The declarative API idea is pretty good.
Agreed. And you would think most paranoid HN types would too.
> It's just that uBlock Origin is so insanely useful, important and trusted
Maybe I'm foggy on the history. But isn't this like Fork #4 or #5 of some previous AdBlock extension?
Seems like the only business model for this type of extension is "selling out" for certain ads. And then the cycle repeats and forum posters tell you to install qBlock Omega or whatever. Maybe Mozilla doesn't want to get in the middle of this?
> Maybe I'm foggy on the history. But isn't this like Fork #4 or #5 of some previous AdBlock extension?
IIRC it was written from scratch. It was called uBlock before, then a co-maintainer tried to pull some shit, and the original author had to fork it with a new name (I don’t remember the details, it’s been ages since then).
No selling out yet. The author also explicitly says they don’t accept donations. I don’t think he’s looking for a business model. But if that changes – yeah, the fork button is right there, so I don’t see a big problem here.
IIRC, that "w3c validator" was overly strict, and would error on attributes it didn't recognize, even though they were technically 'valid' (and supported in ~every browser). So there were always a couple things like, ehhh, doesn't matter.
Just as some off-the-top history, MS-DOS was clearly obsolete, but it hung around for like 10 years too long because people couldn't quit it. It was a DOSSY DOS world.
"Protected Mode DOS" went through the IBM/MS gristmill and became OS/2, which was a compromised product in a lot of ways. Then Windows (still mostly a DOS program) got a little traction, and Microsoft had hired Dave Cutler to write a real OS. And David overthrew Goliath and the rest is history. On topic, nobody really wanted protected-mode DOS or CP/M etc.
Windows 3.0 becoming a hit was something unplanned by Microsoft originally - even the NT team was working with the assumption of using OS/2 API for applications. Win3.0 started out as skunkworks project initially hiding from management under smokescreen of just being one last release of "windows as application library" that some products (including 3rd party ones) were using
> I remember wandering over to the Windows group over in Building 3 to talk to Aaron Reynolds about something to do with the MS-DOS redirector (I was working on DOS Lan Manager at the time). I ran into David, and he called me into his office "Hey, look at what I've got working!".
> He showed me existing windows apps running in protected mode on the 286. UNMODIFIED Windows 1.0 applications running in protected mode. He then ran me around the rest of the group, and they showed me the other stuff they were working on. Ralph had written a new driver architecture called VxD. Aaron had done something astonishing (I'm not sure what). They had display drivers that could display 256 color bitmaps on the screen (the best OS/2 could do at the time was 16 colors).
> My jaw was dropping lower and lower as I moved from office to office. "Oh my goodness, you can't let Steve see this, he's going to pitch a fit" (those aren't quite the words I used, but this is a family blog). You see, at this time, Microsoft's systems division was 100% focused on OS/2 1.1. All of the efforts of the systems division were totally invested in OS/2 development. We had invested literally tens of millions of dollars on OS/2, because we knew that it was the future for Microsoft. OS/2 at the time just ran a single DOS application at a time, and it had only just recently gotten a GUI (in 1989). It didn't have support for many printers (only about 5, all made by IBM, and (I believe) the HP Laserjet).
> And here was this little skunkworks project in building three that was sitting on what was clearly the most explosive product Microsoft had ever produced. It was blindingly obvious, even at that early date - Windows 3.0 ran multiple DOS applications in virtual x86 machines. It ran Windows applications in protected mode, breaking the 640K memory barrier. It had a device driver model that allowed for development of true 32bit device drivers. It supported modern displays with color depths greater than had been available on PC operating systems. There was just no comparison between the two platforms - if they had to compete head-to-head, Windows 3.0 would win hands down.
MS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95.
Until then, all the applications that could be found for Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1 looked like worthless toys in comparison with the professional applications that were available for MS-DOS, despite the fact that the latter had to struggle with extended memory or expanded memory in order to use more than 640 kB of memory.
From 1990 to 1995, I had Windows 3.0, then 3.1, then 3.11 and I launched them from time to time, for fun, but to accomplish real work I always had to go back to MS-DOS.
At first Windows 95 was not great for games, so at least through 1996-97 many games were still released for MS-DOS and often only for MS-DOS, or only had Windows ports later.
Looking back from now, I wish that era could have continued much longer, as running MS-DOS games in emulators is so much easier and more stable than to run old Windows games.
Additionally, Microsoft had a first attempt to a gaming API for Windows, which mostly one those of us that were alive back then remember it, given how hard it is to search for it on the Internet.
Really, how come anyone find something about WinG, if they don't know what they are actually searching for?
> MS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95.
Not even. The genius of Windows 95 was you could still run most of your DOS crap. (Maybe not games, but business apps.) Novell shops for example had a huge pile of DOS drivers and all that just worked underneath 95. DOS only faded away afterwards.
When I started playing with Windows 95 I worked in a Novell shop, and was really impressed with the effort MS put into implementing the Netware networking stack. I had expected strong LANMan drivers and indifferent Netware drivers, but MS obviously knew where the market lay.
I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes.
We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"
(of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)
reply