I love this. It aligns with the previous literature we had on teams. If a team needs heroes to solve problems, it may well be that their management (or whoever) is placing too many absurd expectations on the team. The other side of this coin is that, if a team is not an attractive place for ‘great individuals’, it may well be that there are improvements that the team needs to do, especially in relation to the team’s autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

It sounds like the fact that people understand recipes or simple instruction lists means that they could transfer those same skills into programming. Would you consider cooking pancakes as abstract as writing a macro?

I understand the fear of the bridge being burned down. I also see how that would make Proton like WhatsApp, which has its own protocol and locks its users in. Would it be inaccurate to say that your fear is that Proton pulls an “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” move?

In any case, it’s worthwhile looking at your claims. You mention that Proton is “actively trying to turn open protocols into more closed stuff”.

• Why can I use PGP as the encryption protocol in Proton Mail? Is that a closed protocol?
• Why could I download an archive of all of my emails last December both through IMAP and through MBOX? Are those two “closed stuff”? In fact, I could’ve downloaded my archive as EML; is that a closed protocol?
• Why could I download a copy of my contacts as VCF? Is that a closed protocol?
• Why can I export my Proton Pass passwords as JSON or CSV? Are those closed protocols?
• Is it really tenable to argue that Proton is pulling an “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” move when they support PGP, IMAP, SMTP, MBOX, EML, VCF, JSON, and CSV?

You could argue that it’s simply a matter of time until they pull the rug and close their protocols. Let’s elide the whole discussion regarding the probability of the rug pull happening and instead focus on the present reality: as of December 2024, I could download an archive of everything I have on Proton without a hitch. They do not have the whole Meta thing of “Please give us four working days for us to create an archive of your data”. At least that wasn’t my experience. I could download an archive quickly.

• If users have the capability of downloading open protocol archives of everything they have on Proton, are they really stopping them from going elsewhere?

I understand your concerns of vendor lock-in. The fear is that it could avoid people leaving the service in the future. However, do you know that I use a generic email client that, through IMAP, contains a Proton account?

I hear how much this diagnosis weighs on you. You’re carrying around this knowledge that you have NPD, feeling caught between wanting genuine connections and worrying that being open about this could push people away. It’s a really difficult position to be in: wanting to be authentic with someone you love while facing all this stigma and misconceptions about personality disorders.

You’re not just asking about a diagnosis; you’re asking about how to navigate relationships, how to be genuine with people you care about, and how to handle vulnerability. These are deeply human concerns that go way beyond any diagnostic label.

I’ve know many people who initially saw their diagnoses as permanent labels that defined who they were. I get why: that’s how mental health has been presented to us for decades. We’re told these are distinct categories, clear boxes that people fit into. But here’s something fascinating that recent research has shown: When researchers studied over 3,700 people who shared the same diagnosis of major depression, they found over 1,000 different symptom patterns. More than half of the people had patterns so unique they appeared in less than 0.1% of the group.

This isn’t just true for depression; it applies to most mental health diagnoses. The whole idea of these being clear, distinct categories is breaking down as we look more closely at the science. In fact, despite decades of searching, researchers haven’t found reliable biomarkers for these diagnoses. The DSM workgroup themselves concluded this (page 8 of the pdf here as well as page 18 of the pdf here).

What does this mean for you? Well, it suggests that thinking of NPD as a fixed thing that defines you might not be the most helpful way to look at it. Instead of asking “Will people reject me because I have NPD?”, we might ask different questions: What patterns do you notice in your relationships? What kind of connections do you want to build? What helps you move toward those connections, and what gets in the way?

You mentioned being worried about your current relationship, about whether your boyfriend would still want to be with you if he knew about the diagnosis. That’s a really understandable fear, especially given how personality disorders are often portrayed. But I wonder if we could look at this differently. Instead of thinking about “revealing NPD” as a single big disclosure, what if we thought about building authentic connections in a way that aligns with what matters to you?

The real strength I see in your post isn’t related to any diagnosis, it’s that you care deeply about being genuine in your relationships. You’re wrestling with these questions because connection matters to you. That’s not a symptom; that’s a value. And it’s something you can move toward, step by step, in ways that feel right to you.

I know I often reference ACT and process-based approaches, and some might see that as my go-to solution for everything. But this situation perfectly illustrates why these approaches can be so helpful. Rather than letting a diagnostic label define your path, you can focus on understanding your own patterns, knowing what matters to you, and building psychological flexibility to move toward the life you want.

When you ask “How will NPD affect your social life?”, you’re asking a question that assumes the diagnosis drives everything. But what if we turned it around? What if instead we asked: What kind of social life do you want to build? What patterns help you move toward that? What patterns get in the way? These questions put you in the driver’s seat, not the diagnosis.

This isn’t about denying challenges or pretending patterns don’t exist. It’s about seeing them as processes you can work with rather than permanent labels that define you. The science is increasingly showing us that this is not only more accurate, but more useful for creating change.

You’re not your diagnosis. You’re a person trying to build meaningful connections while dealing with certain patterns of thinking and behaving. Those patterns can change. They might be stubborn sometimes, but they’re not set in stone. What matters is moving toward what’s important to you, one step at a time.

I’m so sorry you’ve been struggling so much. It sounds like you’ve tried multiple avenues and they haven’t been as rewarding or transformative as you thought.

I know you’ve had a disappointing experience with therapy. You will think that what I will suggest has a low likelihood of succeeding. However, it sounds like you’re also open to options that could help.

Imagine the longest essay you’ve ever had to write for school. A dozen pages? Two dozen? Now picture it in front of you, printed out, on a desk. Imagine there’s ten copies of your essay spread around the desk. Add another layer of essays on top. And another. And another. A hundred times. If you organized the documents into a single stack of paper, it would be 1.2 meters tall. That is how many randomly controlled trials there are on the effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Here are two places where you can look at the evidence: one and two.

ACT has changed my life and that of hundreds of thousands of people. While I would suggest to get an ACT therapist (and a good one!), there is evidence that you can learn the skills of psychological flexibility if you engage in the appropriate mental processes, regardless of how. You can learn about how to do ACT exercises in A Liberated Mind, which you can find here https://stevenchayes.com/.

I have to concede that I personally like the way that ACT is explained by Steven Hayes. After all, he is a developer of ACT and of the theory behind it that explains why it works. However, there are many ways of becoming more psychologically flexible. Other people in this thread have mentioned meditation, for example. What’s important is that it works for you!

I wish you the best of luck and please feel free to ask questions!

I see many down-votes. I assume these are the positions people are having (please correct me if I’m wrong or mischaracterizing):

• JubilantJaguar: There is no evidence for harsher punishments having an effect any more than moderate punishments. I even go as far as saying that punishment at all is not beneficial.
• Comments critical of JubilantJaguar: How can you say that punishment doesn’t work when rich criminals basically can go home for free after committing their crimes? How can you say that punishment doesn’t work when domestic abuse used to be widespread?

While looking for the middle ground or a compromise can be seen as absurd, the evidence seems to support parts of both of these stances. For example, moderate punishment has been shown to reduce crime much more than harsh crime.

A simple example is how many countries around the world no longer execute people in public as a form of punishment. For the vast majority of those countries, violent crime has been reduced drastically. In the light of these two facts (less executions and less violent crime), is it really tenable to argue that “harsher punishments result in less crime”? So, what is actually causing crime to be deterred?

Some people have thought long and hard about this problem, and we now have the evidence to understand what drives crime down. Here’s one such person and their summary of their findings: “An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence” (https://igarape.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Homicide-Dispatch_1_EN.pdf)

I know lethal violence is different to non-violent crime, such as wage theft. However, imagine a CEO making the decision to steal wages. Where is he located? Who, if anyone, surrounds him? What is his demeanor? Now imagine a society with “an effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons”. What kinds of institutions would this society have? How would you feel walking in the streets or laboring in this society? Now, think about the CEO and the society at the same time. Are those two compatible? Would that criminal CEO really go home free in a society with those characteristics?

I assume there is an impulse to say that capitalism leads to classes of people who are treated fundamentally differently. Indeed, there is clear evidence that capitalism can lead to persistent inequalities (e.g. Piketty, Shaikh), which can enable extractive political institutions. Money can buy political privileges. However, capitalism is not the only force that shapes the world. Democracy is also incredibly powerful. They are two different vectors, two different carts pulling societies around the world in different directions. Without democracy as a counterweight, we wouldn’t have the kinds of protections, rights, and guarantees that so many of us have. Are we ready to deny the legacy of democracy by insisting that we cannot remotely bring justice to wealthy criminals? Are we ready to deny the democratic values that so many of us have today? Are we ready to deny the effect that collective action for democracy has had in our institutions?

I’m really glad you found something that works so well for you! Self-love is indeed wonderful. For others reading who might want to try affirmations, it’s worth noting that research has found they affect different people differently. What helps one person might not help another, or could even decrease mood in some cases, especially if the affirmations don’t feel authentic to where someone is in their journey.

If you’re curious about building self-love, you might want to experiment mindfully with different approaches to find what resonates for you personally - whether that’s self-compassion practices, ACT, gradual behavior change, or other methods. Pay attention to how different practices actually make you feel rather than how you think they ‘should’ make you feel.

1. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy exercises. I learned them well, and now I can do them wherever, whenever. Life changing.
2. Visible Thinking Routines by Harvard’s Project Zero. Every time I want to learn something, I think visibly about it!

Depending on who you ask, feminism includes the entire LGBTQIA+ spectrum.

For example, Hélène Cixous points out that there are ways of thinking that are rigid, hierarchical, limiting, and usually patriarchal. This way of thinking creates all sorts of barriers. “Men have to be like this.” “Women have to do this and be that.” “Transexuals? They have to not be like that.”

To break free from rigid and limiting thinking, Cixous proposes to “write from the body”. When you pay attention to your own experience, without rigid categories, you can be free. You can define your body in any way. You can act in any way. You can interpret the world in any way.

This, in Cixous’ view, is feminism. Feminism is about breaking down barriers and empowering people to be free. A woman can choose to work and buy property without being rejected. A man can choose to be vulnerable with his male friends without being rejected. A woman can choose to accept a woman as a partner and not be rejected. A transexual can choose to transition and not be rejected. A man can choose to not have sex and not be rejected. It is all valid. And it is all feminism. In this view, feminist terms and LGBTQIA+ terms serve exactly the same function: they all help break barriers and empower people to choose the lives that they want to choose.

Values guide action. Humans can use cognitive rules to exhibit entirely new behaviors in entirely new situations, behaviors that are consistent with the cognitive rules. Theory may not be relevant if the situation doesn’t activate the relevant neural networks, but if someone doesn’t have ‘ally values’ how do you think they will behave in the future?

Sure! I’m assuming you’re talking about coffee. I aim to get the best coffee possible as cheap as possible, so these factors are by far not optimized but they’re good enough for me:

• Coffee beans: Getting coffee that you like is maybe the most important factor. The first time I tried floral coffee, I thought my cup was not properly washed and still had detergent in it. Now I know I don’t like floral coffee!
• Water: I hate myself for doing this because of the plastic waste I generate, but buying a massive container of water that has been purified by reverse osmosis consistently results in way better coffee than using my tap water.
• James Hoffman’s V60 recipe v.s. Osmotic flow: James Hoffman’s V60 recipe is a thousand times better. I think the main factor here is agitation; in this case, more is better. I have not experimented much beyond Hoffman’s recipe because I like it. It’s possible I could optimize a bit more with little cost.
• The cheapest grinder my partner used in their previous place v.s. the grinder we recently bought: I am so sorry if I sound like a snob, but getting a grinder that is capable of creating uniform grinds has been game changing. It’s not even close.

The way that I think about these factors is that I’m affecting the extraction of the coffee. I’m trying to take the things that taste good in coffee and leave the things that don’t taste so good. I’m playing a balancing game: not too extracted and bitter, not too underextracted and insipid.

Of course, there are other variables that I could try to optimize for, such as body, acidity, sweetness, etc… Maybe I will someday pay attention to it, and if it’s not expensive or hard to optimize for them, then I’ll be happy to change my way of making coffee. In the meantime, I’m happy with what I’ve got.

In the off chance you meant Scrum and ACT-Advisor stuff:

• In Scrum, I’d say a lot of the experiments end up affecting factors that have, in the literature, already been identified as important: happy workers are more productive, stable interfaces between teams leads to faster development and higher quality work, cross-functional teams are better than having handoffs, etc…
• As to the ACT-Advisor stuff, this may seem obvious, but doing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy improves my scores. I like to see that it’s not only therapy sessions that improve the scores, but also weeks of intensively doing ACT exercises on my own.

• Whenever I change something in my coffee setup, I do blind tastings for myself and sometimes others.
• Scrum retrospectives and Kaizens in a way are experiments to see how to improve 🤷‍♂️
• I regularly answer ACT-Advisor questions to see how I’m doing over time https://stevenchayes.com/tools/

Sorry if this seems strange, but do you do data analysis? If not, I’d be happy to explore and visualize the data! It’s always interesting to me to do it.

It sounds like your point is that we should be context-aware. By being context-aware, we could avoid judging someone unfairly, such as someone who was neuro-diverse. It sounds like you really value accuracy in assessments. It also sounds like you’re saying that judging someone from one’s time with the standards of one’s time is more accurate than judging someone from the past with the standards of one’s time. If so, would you say people from our time accurately judge Donald Trump? Would you say there is consensus about how to judge Donald Trump? In other words, is there consensus in the standards of our time? Zooming out a little bit, if we are truly context-aware, would we not have to judge context-awareness itself as a reflection of who we are?

This looks impressive for Linux, and I’m glad FLOSS has such an impact! However, I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers. Maybe not. Or maybe yes! We’d have to see the evidence.

Sorry if you know this game, but I’ve met plenty of people who haven’t and I’ve never seen it mentioned online until I searched for it today: Contact!

I should clarify - rather than ‘backfire,’ exaggeration in Majority Judgment either does nothing or carries a social cost. Here’s why:

• If a minority exaggerates votes, the median stays unchanged.
• If everyone exaggerates equally, the same winner emerges, but an artificial high tide of exaggerated grades obscures the real depth of public opinion. This defeats one of MJ’s key strengths: the ability to show when all candidates are viewed poorly and therefore create pressure for better options.

Regarding partisan concerns: Yes, MJ is vulnerable if partisan blocks coordinate to exaggerate grades. However, MJ offers two meaningful advantages in a two-party system:

1. Voters can grade third-party candidates highly without ‘wasting’ their vote, as they can still support their party’s candidate.
2. Once again, poor candidates from both parties could receive revealing low grades, encouraging better alternatives.

Of course, you were hinting at the fact that MJ’s success in a two-party system depends on fostering a political culture where candid evaluation flows more freely than partisan loyalty. But this is the current that all voting systems must swim against; partisan pressure can steer dolphins’ fins at the polling station regardless of the method used.

Either ranked-choice voting or majority judgement.

Thanks for sharing your method.

As to your take on Anki, I think it’s fair and accurate. I agree with you in that the learning curve is not in the features or the interface, but as you said: in the pacing. I really hope I can try to space the cards as much as possible, so that a regular practice doesn’t become burdensome.