“If I thought my voice was nothing more than random, psychotic noise, then that’s all she ever would have been.”

I would have kept my identity separate from my projects. Requests is a library. I am a person. The conflation of the two was the root cause of most of the damage. When the project is you, every issue is personal, every critique is existential, and every success is addictive in exactly the wrong way. I’d build the thing, release the thing, and then go home and be a person who also built a thing. Not a person who IS the thing.

As an avid user of Requests for over six years, I had no idea that the author was basically running on empty for a decade due to bipolar disorder. I wish the system—both open source and education—hadn’t chewed him up and spar him out like it did. Watch yourself.

We are in a situation where some adolescents are very legitimately experiencing mental health crises, without decent treatment, while others are inaccurately describing typical developmental stress with the language of disorder. Adults who support young people know there is a difference, but understandably struggle to make the distinction, partly through a lack of knowledge and partly because there is no clean distinction between the two groups anyway — everything exists on continua; lines are blurred. The upshot is that in some cases everyone is treated like a serious risk, which is unhelpful in itself, but in others everyone is dismissed. The whole thing is a mess, and a thousand miles away from the original goal of mental health awareness.

via: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/female-neediness-is-real-but-its

Lucy Foulkes argues that campaigns may not be helping, and in some ways may actively make people worse.

the next generation of campaigns should promote the unfortunate reality that the topic of mental health is an unwieldy, untameable beast. In particular, I’d like to see a campaign that conveys the idea that mental health problems lie on a spectrum. This is an inconvenient truth, because it reveals that our experiences cannot be neatly packaged and labelled as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’. But far better to be aware of this complexity than to pretend any of this is easy.

via: https://lucyfoulkes3.medium.com/the-adolescent-mental-health-mess-c93f23f8ed56

A hypervigilant fear of being cancelled is prevalent among OCD sufferers, and typical reactions to this fear make things worse.

What’s more is that these hate mob campaigns were almost always intra-party. Having more or less the “correct” politics did not save you. Notably, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh have never been “canceled.” These types of things only ever happened to leftists and liberals who pissed off extremely unhinged people, who probably still agreed with them on 90% of things.

On “indexicality” (the inherent fact of basically all statements that they exist within context). Leads into how science is an attempt to generate non-indexical (i.e. universal) knowledge, and how the social sciences in particular have been known for generalising indexical knowledge improperly.

Moral conviction predicts not only a desire for distance but a greater acceptance of violence as a way to resolve conflict. I want to leave that thought hanging over everything that follows—because resistance to AI has already begun producing more than op-eds and think-pieces. It has produced threats, break-ins, and worse. Quietly, moralization sorts a society into camps that would rather not share a room—or a planet. And we already have another name for that: polarization.

I understand where the author is coming from, but I really feel like this article reveals why consequentialism struggles to work in practice. At some point, it actually becomes inhumane to force the talking out of problems and to make value judgements. Morality at some point must be brought into the picture when we are making sweeping decisions about the lives of millions with an extreme lack of consent from the majority.

see: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5mwre_v11

Zavlis is right that it is a great deal to ask of anyone. It is a great deal to ask of therapists, who at least have (under ideal circumstances) the training, the supervision and the structure to do the work. Prescribers rarely have anything of the sort. So part of what is needed here is structural. But it begins with relinquishing the fantasy of “pure” medication management. The emotional and relational dynamics are not an intrusion upon the work of prescribing. They are a part of the work itself. Whether you know this or not, whether you accept it or not, that is the job.

When the public is convinced of the soundness of an idea, it will proceed to action. People translate an idea into action suggested by the idea itself, whether it is ideological, political, or social. They may adopt a philosophy that stresses racial and religious tolerance; they may vote a New Deal into office; or they may organize a consumers’ buying strike. But such results do not just happen. In a democracy they can be accomplished principally by the engineering of consent.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A4FiUUPDDs

How Rust prevents data races, and how languages like it could influence future code generation.

Deadlock is so much worse than either one, because you’re hopelessly stuck. You can’t do the thing, you can’t not do the thing, and you can’t even give up altogether because part of you insists that it still needs to happen. You go around in circles, chasing your tail, wasting time, and burning resources, all to no effect - neither a solidly completed task nor the rest or alternate accomplishment of refraining. Your experience is one of profound executive dysfunction, parts of you throwing vetoes at other parts of you.

Much in common with Mind in the Wheel.

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/06/29/links-for-june-2026/

And the ubiquity of risk in medicine

We accept all kinds of risks in our lives. We drive cars on roads, we fly on planes, we drink alcohol socially, we use tobacco and cannabis, we invest our lifesavings in stocks, we undergo general anesthesia for surgical procedures, etc., etc. When my son was an infant, he loved being in a particular bouncer. We used it all the time. This is despite the fact that there was a warning prominently displayed on it. “Fall Hazard: Babies have suffered skull fractures falling while in and from bouncers.” Essentially, we accepted a very small risk of a catastrophic event because of the tremendous everyday convenience the bouncer offered us. Such considerations are ubiquitous in healthcare.

Guest post by Sorbie Richner

For many years, on and off in my teens and twenties, I was treated by a psychodynamic psychologist. One of the greatest strengths of our work together was that she didn’t fear my suicidality. She believed that suicidality, like any “psychopathology” or “maladaptive” behavior, was a mechanism that served some kind of intrapsychic purpose. She was able to hear me say “I want to die” and instead of immediately carting me to the hospital, she would let it be what it was. She would move closer to it instead of running away from it or rejecting it. Instead of trying to squelch it or exorcise it, she would say, “I don’t want to take away something that you need.” Her primary concern was not the suicidality would do to me, but what it was doing there in the first place.

Webinar Series ‘Science Training Sessions’, American Psychological Association, June 2026.

So, apparently, we’ve been measuring depression horribly wrong for decades. Yay…

The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems.

The dynamics of this are straightforward: when a man is not ravenous for female approval, he relaxes and stops contorting himself into shapes designed for the approval of others (which girls hate, ironically), and a natural consequence is a significant step-change in attractiveness. “Confidence” is the casual shorthand for this phenomenon.

Responding to some counterarguments

Very fair criticisms via a psychological lens. Perhaps this is a question that I should return to.