I was also diagnosed as an adult and prescribed Vyvanse and I’ve been taking it for a few years now. The first couple of months, while I was still getting the dose right, were the hardest. The worst bit was mood swings when the dose was a bit too high, for a day or two at a time everything seemed to be bleak, then I’d wake up the next morning and everything was fine again. The appetite loss didn’t last (unfortunately), my body seems to have compensated.

I have set reminders in my phone to take my meds at the same time every day because consistency seems to be important, reducing side-effects and letting me plan my day around when I will be most productive.

I’m now two thirds of the way through getting a degree, which would never have been possible pre-medication. I did try when I was younger and ended up dropping out of university twice and college a couple of times too. Now, even though I still need to push myself to open the books sometimes, when I do I can actually focus and find getting into that flow state so much easier.

They would use radiator panels which automatically swivel so they’re edge-on to the sun.

I think the bigger problems are;

1. The costs (monetary and environmental) of launching so many new satellites,
2. Large-scale computing technology is untested in that kind of environment and will likely encounter a number of issues and unforeseen problems (so more launches until they get it right),
3. Additional radiation will increase errors, so they will require a more robust design with more redundancy than Earth-based systems,
4. If they’re in a low orbit similar to Starlink satellites (which have an expected lifetime of 5 to 7 years) they will need to be constantly replaced.

If the UK Government is so eager for sovereign AI capability, why are they relying on a US company to design, build, and presumably run it?

What’s interesting, to me, is that’s exactly how people hedge in the fringe UFO community too.

Ha! True. Very true. I find this scenario compelling but it’s based on a series of assumptions which individually seem plausible but I have no way to evaluate them all together. It’s like the Drake Equation; because the probabilities are multiplicative even tiny adjustments to a few of them end up making a huge difference to the final answer.

The thing is though, if there really is even a tiny chance of the ultimate outcome of this thought experiment being true (i.e. the end of humanity) then we should probably address it. And what that would look like is stopping the AI companies from doing any more research until they can prove their model will be safe, which should make people who are more concerned about AI slop happy too. Everybody wins by hitting the brakes. (Edit: well, Sam Altman doesn’t but I’m not going to lose sleep over that.)

It’s not meant to be a specific prediction, it’s just a plausible (for when it was written) scenario. Don’t worry about the actual years, it could be off by an order of magnitude, just decide for yourself if any of the assumptions are completely wrong.