ProgrammerHumor
stillBetterThanARaceConditionIGuess
Discussion
Damn if this ain't the truth.
Too real. ADHD meds don't magically fix executive function they just make you hyper-focused on the wrong thread instead of scattered across all of them.
At least there's a chance something gets done.
Yes but personally I still prefer that. Maybe I'm not getting the right thing done but at least I'm getting something done
Still better than being unmedicated
Exactly! Lifes better when you can wake up and do amphetamine
That's why I learned it is so important to start your work while they kick in. Otherwise its pet project/ porn addiction whole day long...
That’s when you are in “undocumented feature” territory. You never know how you got there, and sometimes don’t know how to leave. And you’re still there at 4am in bed
As a Software Engineer and someone with ADD, this shit happens wayyyy to often. Soul reason as to why I have to tell everyone to stop pinging me directly about every small and insignificant question/problem.
Soul reason as to why I have to tell everyone...
I believe the normal phrase would be "sole", but I feel this enough that I am just going to upvote with this minor footnote. It usually feels like a "soul reason", I hear you...lol.
To me that's more what extreme focus looks like, until interrupted.
More or less except it never stays on the same topic. Like you’d think I’m in a blackhole about the existential necessity of the c==‘,’ statement, but nah I’m in a blackhole of tangents and now thinking about the nature of language and the origin of the “c” sound.
I probably figured out the original problem somewhere in the tangents, but now it’s too late. I kept taking tangents, it got overwritten in my short term memory, and now it’s lost forever. At least until the blackhole of tangents somehow leads me back to that specific tangent lol
Some people say that “c” doesn’t really have a definitive sound though—is it just a quantum superposition of “k” and “s”?
is it just a quantum superposition of “k” and “s”?
and ts
A little bit. But you don't need help to get distracted, you do it on your own like a professionalTM
sounds like a bug's life
Pixar in 1998:
Say that again
i really need to get diagnosed
If you feel like you might have it, I can only recommend it.
I have it, and quite badly 😅 never been diagnosed.
It really fucks with my life, but some how I function well enough, I'm scared to try meds
What scares you about them?
I feel like unmedicated adhd should have more threads racing
To be fair it had to fit on a phone screen
This post reduced the efficacy of my Adderall
To anyone experiencing this - according to what friends have said about their experiences dealing with this, you may not be on the right medication if you're feeling bogged down and you might wanna try others. Best of luck.
me_irl
I get the threading part but can someone explain the adhd part of the joke?
The ADHD joke is the race condition on line 2.
Having ADHD often means random thoughts just invade and throw things off, disrupting your rhythm unless you apply significant effort and mindfulness to stay on track.
It’s a lot like a race condition in an asynchronous system: unexpected inputs disrupt the flow, and if you're not careful, the whole thing breaks down.
I’d also argue it’s not like multithreading, where multiple processes run in parallel. The human brain just doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a single-threaded asynchronous system with constant context switching
Is JavaScript the ultimate ADHD programming language then?
Badly written Javascript is
Multithreading (and all processing unless the total number of threads running on the whole machine is equal to or below the number of cores) does use context switching, but yes.
As for the allegory, I'd add that randomly some thread(s) will get its priority bumped way up and it'll prevent important system processes like "eating" and "sleeping" from happening on time.
I's also say ADHD brain is more like a stack (with sometimes randomly discarding frames in between) while it should be a queue.
You're lucky the meds work on you, am autistic with add, none them meds do shit for me, conserta, Ritalin, you name it, I've probably tried it :(
Feels bad man
Dextroamf worked wonders for me
dont forget the lock that is being held by one of the threads that has just gone to sleep, so nothing is happening.
or that your stack space (short term memory) is less than half the size of normal for some reason.
That's so damn sad
Well.... aderall with a fastpaced job I'm passionate about might have single thread days. But others? More threads more fun.
But at least you're able to push the button that starts the program.
For me, it more like this...
Unmedicated:
Hello from thread 1 of 4. You have gained 1 bonus thread.
Hello from thread 5 of 5. I cleared the other threads for you to make room for the threads I would like to spin off.
Medicated:
Hello from thread 1 of 4.
Hello from thread 3 of 4.
Hello from thread 2 of 4.
Hello from thread 4 of 4.
Hey it's your bonus thread again, I am g-- // SIGKILL from thread 1, it wants to finish first
// 30 min later
Hello from thread 1 of 4 - now lets REALLY focus on how to build the best Balatro deck
Maybe, but the timeout is set to 16 hours instead of 45 seconds
lol so accurate! My brain feels like it's trying to process 404 threads at once, not found 😂😂 #ProgrammerLife
least obvious bot account
Unfortunately not. See this case for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving/
For me it's more like "Hello from Thread 19 out of 4"
I had a brief internship at my town hall IT department, I got to see them reinstalling the government software they use for handling people's personal data.
I kid you not, the manual for fixing its issues hundreds of pages long, with half of the pages being custom made by the people in the IT department and their predecessors.
When installing it, it just went progress 4/15... 8/15.... 16/15