Preface: I'm sorry to hear that you've been experiencing this. Please try and see a doctor and/or a mental health professional in order to explain what's been going on. I realize that prioritizing self-care becomes even more difficult when you are dealing with a toddler. However your physical & mental health is super important to your child's wellbeing.

What you're describing sounds like an 'intrusive thought'. There are a number of causes for intrusive thoughts including depression (as you mentioned). My best friend has these. It got a lot worse after the birth of their kid. Sometimes an intrusive thought would linger for a week. Things like their toddler getting near a street corner and then an intrusive thought of them getting into an accident with a car.

If what you're experiencing turns out to be intrusive thoughts, there are a number of therapies that can attempt to make these more manageable and give you a greater degree of control over your state of mind. I wish you the best!

Thanks for the reply. I've read about intrusive thoughts but discounted that as an outcome because it sounds like intrusive thoughts are generally unwanted and I haven't seen the outsized response documented alongside them. But I could be wrong; I haven't delved into them deeply.

It seemed to me that these could be more related to an "all or nothing" thought pattern because, while the teeth-impact situation is definitely not preferable, the same thought pattern seems to allow me to make more comprehensive and secure software: my thoughts tend towards worst-case scenarios, often discounting completely the probability of that outcome compared to others.

That pattern does seem to present in other areas of my life. I'm currently going through an existential crisis because I never took e&m in school, and now I feel like a fraud so am reworking my way though Stewart's Calculus to be followed by linear algebra, diff eq, etc. through numerical analysis, pdes, advanced calc, etc. so that I can go and redo all of physics through theoretical astrophysics, because anything else would be abject failure. And I am completely worthless, but maybe this will push me into only the mostly worthless category.

And I'm doing this despite what I should be doing, ML engineering and agentic orchestration development, which would be relevant to my actual field and almost necessary given our paradigm shift, because I've now warped my perspective into determining this is a necessary prerequisite. And I can type this and acknowledge this is seemingly irrational, but also the amount of "I need to kill myself if I don't accomplish this" emotional throughput is closer to a firehouse than a drip. Meanwhile all I actually want to do is sit down and work my way through "Cpp Concurrency in Action", because I've also decided I'm a worthless fraud if I only specialize in garbage collected languages.

Idk. Maybe I should see someone. So far I've just been trying to grind all that out in my extremely limited free time with two toddlers and work and a dog while affording wife a nonzero amount of attention.

Edit: I forgot I also am planning to work through ochem because I've also never taken that and am definitely a loser that should be killed unless I can prove any sense of merit by mastering it (though that is admittedly less of a priority).

This is a total tangent. However note that the creator of the ‘free market’ idea, Adam Smith, wasn’t an advocate for zero law/regulation regulation.

In fact Chapter 10 of his “Wealth of Nations,” specifically states, “When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the work-men, it is always just and equitable.” He goes on to explain that regulation that benefits the masters can wind up being unjust.

Smith’s concept of ‘laissez-faire’ was novel back in the day. But by today’s standards, some of his economic opinions might even be considered “collectivist.”

Oh for sure and a good point. I meant the free market in the sense certain groups tout as the solution to all problems but that the studiously avoid themselves because it’s dog-eat-dog.

I hate getting old because I can never remember this when it's relevant.

All companies are like this. Some just have better HR/PR.

Just because you said that you were interested in some Opinions, one of the least appreciated aspects of any documentation (but especially diagrams) is defining who the stakeholders are at the start of the document. It’s the difference between having frustrated users who can’t understand things to happy users that understand limitations.

The corollary to this is that the best diagram that boundaries are often along communication lines between teams. This is Conway’s law all the way down. And the reason is that most often people use diagrams to get a spatial sense of where ‘they’ fit into things. I have only anecdotal evidence for this, but the most helpful and lasting diagrams I’ve ever made are when 1) they define (and stick to) specific stakeholders, and b) they are delineated by groups/teams.

I actually really prefer your answer. I would likely counter with, “what potential issues could you see with doing things this way?” But a) you’ve shown me that you don’t charge into solutions without first attempting to define the problems, b) your follow-up answer reveals to me what kind of things you think are important, and c) I’d probably quickly ask something like,”let’s assume that in the past, we’ve had issues with missing changes when emailing this back and forth,” and encourage some more dialogue.

I do dislike interviews where a candidate can fail simply by not giving a specific, pre-canned answer. It suggests a work culture that is very top-down and one that isn’t particularly interested in actually getting to the truth.

So true. In my career (anecdotally), I’ve never encountered a data problem where the answer was ‘you didn’t choose this tech/language/product over another.’ It always comes down to decisions of governance and ownership. It’s Conway’s Law all the way down.

More childish than the process of getting new regulations against big-tech approved in local government? I’d say it’s a tie, at best.

Was the Boston Tea Party childish vandalism or heroic patriotism? Only history gets to decide how the actions of disobedience are ultimately judged.

I suspect that as a rule, anyone comparing their own activities to things like the Boston Tea Party is pretty much always wrong.

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Got it, thanks.

This is a wonderful, succinct way of capturing this danger to businesses as they grow & jump the gap!

In a perfect world, I’d like the user to have a choice. And that way I could post things anonymously if I wanted. However there would still be the implication of posting anonymously.

In the states, I desperately want a state-verified ID system that I can use to post on social media. However I don’t want it to be mandated.