Edros didn't do amphetamines. He used Ritalin.

A funny story: His buddy challenged him to quit for a week, claiming he was addicted. Sure, he said he can do it. He spent most of the time sleeping. He was really tired. After succeeding, he shot back to his friend, paraphrasing, "Great, you delayed the advancement of mathematics by a week." And, all along, this old ass motha fucka was not addicted. He was a functional user. He didn't escalate his doses, he had the willpower to stop if desired. It's just that, when you're 70 years old or however old he was and you want to keep on contributing to society, perhaps a little regular dose of Ritalin keeps you active and happy. And who knows? Maybe, he had ADHD in which case his use was to normalize his fMRI to that of a neurotypical, enabling him to focus for hours rather than struggling to focus for minutes.

A lot of lazy ass people say they have ADHD, because they'd rather sit super laser-focused on The Boys to see what happens next, but when some real work comes up, oh wow, sure buddy, you can't "focus?" Riiight. For an ADHD fella or gal, they can't focus even on the show The Boys. It's an actual disability, and Ritalin or amphetamines normalize their brain, allowing them to function in society.

I myself have ADHD. I struggle to pay attention through a 90-minute film. I miss plot details. I feel like getting up and doing jumping jacks while hollering, because no matter how good the film is, I just can't focus on what is going on. Through school, I found something that worked for me without the drugs: I would cycle 15 minutes of studying and 30 minutes of whatever I felt like doing over and over until my studying was done, until my project was coded. And I finished electrical engineering with a 4.0 GPA in 3.5 years. IMPORTANT: You simply can't procrastinate if you have ADHD, using this strategy, because you literally are unable to sit three days in a row and cram everything. Your brain isn't capable of that. (unless you have amphetamines or Ritalin of course)

At work, I'd love to do the same thing, so I pretty much did. It didn't work all the time, because being in the office, people could see what I was doing. It actually dragged my performance down with people seeing me. I felt like I had to "fit in" by "working" at all times. It just isn't how my brain works. Sometimes, it would have been best for me to have a book reading from it to learn a topic rather than the insane strategy of just playing around with the API until things slowly kinda start working. That methodology of trial and error, while sometimes necessary if zero instructional manual exists, is just pure insanity to me. I don't understand people who jump to a new language without reading a 450-page book on the language to know all about it, so you can write good code, not code that gets the right input/output relations but who gives a shit if it's heavily not optimized. My brother is also a programmer, and I've constantly tried to convince him to simply buy a damn book about C#, the language he uses, and to read 30 pages of it per day on company time. In like 15 days, that will get you to page 450. It isn't that hard to read a damn book about your language that you are paid US$350k/yr to use professionally. Get to it. You should see your programming as a craft, and you should strive to be proud of your work. I never understood people who focus entirely on input/output, not being proud of the code that reaches that relation between input and output.

Perhaps, it's my ADHD, but I love to go on a tirade. The one thing I was trying to get to in the paragraph above is that my performance at work has skyrocketed now that I work from home. I can use my damn time the way that works with my brain, and I personally don't want to have amphetamines flowing through my blood. If I'm working on a Scala project linked to Spark, I can buy a book for each one and sit and read it instead of sitting there "coding" while people inspect me in the open-office layout. I can cycle between 15 minutes of work and 30 minutes of whatever the hell I want to do to satisfy that horrific feeling of outright boredom, it is hard to explain, but it is a feeling like you just can't process another piece of information. It is impossible. It happens even while watching a movie I love like The Godfather I and II. When I watch those on occasion, I have to watch it in 20- to 30-minute chunks with me going off to do something else intermixed into the process. I was born this way, and WFH was a godsend. That's the one good thing to come from COVID. The workers finally have more freedom to manage themselves instead of there being a manager applying neurotypical standards to an unmedicated ADHD brain.

That's all I've got for the tirade this time. Let me finish the video now. I got to a point where I couldn't pay attention, so I wrote all of this. I'm fresh to continue watching now.