They really only took a tiny piece of brain out, I guess. They didn't show me, sadly. :(
It was all occipital lobe so vision would have been the only thing affected. I had terrible vision in the lower-left quadrant of both of my eyes anyways, based on a medical field-of-vision test, along with my own tendency to bump into people and things on my left side (still the case).
Based on many electroencephalographs (EEGs), they decided my epileptic seizures stemmed from the lower right occipital lobe of my brain. It is kind of neat proof to me that the opposite side of your brain has effects on the other side of your body; right occipital lobe affecting left visual field.
So, they removed some brain, which actually did not affect my epilepsy at all, positively or negatively. I went into the hospital, got surgery, and was out maybe a week later - when that photo was taken. I had to go back a week or two later to have the staples taken out.
My lower left peripheral vision is worse than it used to be. I have about eight visual seizures that each last maybe a minute or two per day, but I can carry on a conversation and nobody even knows. I take seven pills every morning, and another four each night. I do not have a drivers license, car, or really ever plan to drive again, but that is kind of why I moved to live in a city where I can walk, take public transit, and get deliveries quickly/reliably.
On the nerd side, I track my seizures with my own homemade Python Django (w/ REST Framework) application, PostgreSQL, and an Apple Shortcut, usually from my iPhone or watch. Datasette and Highcharts make visualizing all my seizures tracked since December 2021 pretty cool.
Thanks for being so open about this. Have you worn one of those diy and prosumer EEG devices? So when you have visual seizure, I can only imagine it is somewhat similar to visual migraine, that is my only reference, you tap log it on your device which triggers some web request. Have you noticed any patterns? What do your doctors think of the data? You sound ideal for working in a neuroscience lab, :)
Never heard of a DIY/prosumer EEG! I did do an ambulatory EEG for the hospital once overnight where I left wearing the fancy cap while all wired up, with a little backpack for the electronics and recording device. All the EEG leads fell off when I was sleeping overnight, so it ended up only getting about 6 hours of data, instead of 12 hours (but I got charged like $600 anyways).
My whole Django app is actually open source, including the Apple Shortcut that sends a JSON POST to Django REST Framework to add seizures.
I definitely have patterns. I swear my occipital lobe needs its watch battery changed. I occasionally will have 3-6 seizures all spaced exactly 10 minutes after one another. Sometimes exactly an hour apart too. To the minute.
Doctors like when I hand them a chart showing my seizures going down over time, but hate it when the chart shows them trending towards more frequent. The brain seems SO poorly understood from my perspective. I get the feeling that
neurologists are not sure what to say or think about the data, since it is not an EEG or MRI.
I called my seizures "double visions" as a kid. They usually only last a minute or two. I can generally carry on a conversation without anyone knowing (besides from noticing me tapping my watch, maybe). My parents and my ex-wife could occasionally tell when I was seizing, but I live solo, commute on foot, and keep
my cat alive.
My seizures really just consist of an odd minute or two of an "aura" (I know it's happening) with double vision and confusion. However, I have occasionally had much worse seizures - usually only if I miss medication, and when asleep. I once woke up to a passenger on a commercial flight telling me that they were a doctor while we were mid-air, before I threw up. I have also woken up on my bedroom carpet with bumps, bruises, and scratches maybe half a dozen times in ten years, but have never had any seizure-related injuries requiring urgent/emergency trauma care.
Stress definitely seems to be a trigger for my seizures, but not photosensitivity. I do not really mind strobe lights, but the randomness of the Sun shining through tall thick trees while driving down a long straight road is terrible.
never worn a CGM (had to look up the acronym, admittedly).
I do not drink coffee anymore, alcohol or much caffeine, and try to avoid super sugary drinks. I try to stick to milk, juice, but mostly just water. The neighborhood corner store sells these super yummy Boylan Black Cherry sodas though...
None of my doctors or I have ever really associated my seizure frequency with diet. I have definitely heard of people having improvements with things like a ketogenic diet for some types of epilepsy though!
A long time ago I made a simple tool to check my father's visual field changes due to cancer. At first he found it interesting to track his condition. Unfortunately it accurately tracked his condition and he, in my option wisely, stoped using it.
I never have really tried to measure my own peripheral visual field - no! I am not sure how I would track it - how did you?
I mostly notice bumping into things on my left side. While generally people "walk to the right" on sidewalks and such, I prefer to stay as left as I can on a path. For example, walking home through downtown, I like to try to keep my left shoulder as close to buildings as I can, to avoid people coming up behind me on my left side, since I always risk bumping into them. I always choose seating in venues that is very left of center as well.
While I generally do not have serious seizures resulting in falls, it's funny that the fall detection on my Apple Watch has only ever gone off when I accidentally bang my left wrist against a door frame because of my poor peripheral vision.
I did a little reading about Hemianopsia and came up with a very simple test about 15 years ago. It was a simple winforms app. One could write it/vibe code it very quickly in just about anything.
The test was run seated at a desk with a 24'' monitor. I drew a small square in the center of the screen on a back background and created a regular grid of dots which could be subdivided. Each small dot at random was briefly shown and I recorded the time it took him to hit a key. The defaults were .5 to .8 seconds and an off time from .75 to 2.5 seconds on a 7x5 grid with subdivisions for the areas he had trouble, but it's long enough ago that I don't remember what settings he preferred. The sample file I have to hand has 140 dots.
I set it up so that he could customise the number of columns and rows and the number of subdivisions to target his vision loss without having to spend too much time where it didn't matter. The outputs were a grayscale image of the reaction times and the reaction time values. It was helpful to preview all the dots before starting the test.
The main issue with the test was to keep it relatively short. If it took too long he found it boring and caused a bit of eye strain.
If I were to write it again I would to move the center square occasionally throughout the test, and then offset the test grid from that location. Unfortunately he didn't have much time and it eventually became a bit stressful to know the rate of progression of his disease so he/we let it go and I never tried to ease the eye strain issue.
> "walk to the right" on sidewalks and such, I prefer to stay as left as I can on a path."
Visit Australia for a mostly keep left experience (at least in the past) :)
I had to look up the proper name for it, but I have always had my visual field medically tested with a "Humphrey" visual field test machine in a hospital:
TIL, there is also something called the "Goldmann" perimeter test.
Visiting Ireland, as a kid, was fun for sure! I remember my father driving a "right-hand drive" car that had the steering wheel on the opposite side of what I was used to - on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to - all, while shifting the manual transmission with his left hand, but the floor pedal arrangement was the same.
Curiously, both of my parents are left-handed, but I am right-handed. I have no family history of epilepsy either! Maybe I am adopted.
They are going to force everyone back into the office anyhow... upper management tends to place high on the narcissism spectrum... they need to see, feel, and experience their kingdom in person for maximum narcissistic supply.
Because $/resources are fungible, and your task isn't the only thing in the organization that needs resources.
Assuming you are on salary, if you can legitimately do something in half the time, great, you should then move on to doing something else that contributes to the company.
If you are on salary you are paid for your time and talent, not by the task.
The right thing for management to do would be to reward you for being efficient (doesn't just have to be simple monetary, people are motivated by all kinds of things), and then reallocate those resources that we saved to some other need.
This of course changes if you are on some kind of contract work.
Well... yes. But if the company suddenly becomes wildly more profitable because of work you’ve done will your salary grow in proportion? Of course not. I admire your work ethic, but you might want to consider just how asymmetric the employer/employee relationship is.
If you miss a deadline or delay the launch of a product does the company dock your base pay?
Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't optimize for your own goals. You do you, no judgement.
What I am saying is that running a successful company means optimizing for the company, not the individual. And the best run companies make sure that the incentives of their staff are closely aligned with the company.
If staff are functionally lying to their company about their output, something has gone wrong.
> If staff are functionally lying to their company about their output, something has gone wrong.
Problem is that productivity gains are extreme across most industries over the past fifty years, and except at the FAANG end of the income spectrum where people are making $300k+/year, those gains have been 100% absorbed by employers and not passed on to workers.
As such, employers are the ones to have broken the social contract. Yes, they're pushed to do this because they can, and there are no penalties to dissuade them from this behavior (specifically because employee organizations/unions have fallen out of favor, though that may seem to be reversing recently).
So it feels justified to provide a service to an employer for a fixed fee (a salary or weekly contract wage) in exchange for satisfactory work output, and to not work the hours the employer may assume you're working. It's a profoundly asymmetric relationship, and letting an employer believe you're working more hours for that work output--as long as they're happy with your work output!--is balanced by the fact that they're not paying you what you're worth to them.
The latter is clearly true if they're continuing to be happy with your work output and you're working half as many hours as they may believe you to be working. And yet they absolutely wouldn't double your salary if you doubled your work output.
To provide a counterpoint, we are humans, not machines for capital.
If I automate my job and halve my workload, I am going to be working easier and chilling more.
I will still spend some time on company growth activities, but I refuse to see myself as a monetary number on a spreadsheet. I have a life, and you only have one life.
It's not a counterpoint, both statements are true. Also, the post was in response to why do managers feel this way, not how do I feel personally.
The company pays you $$$ in exchange for your time and talent. That's the deal.
You don't have to take it. Seriously, in many cases you shouldn't take it. Life is short, optimize for being happy. I am the strongest supporter of that philosophy you will find.
But, if you can do your job in half the time and you are getting paid on the basis of time...you and the people who are paying you should reconsider the basis of that deal.
Hey, maybe you can get paid more and work less hours. Maybe you get a promotion to do something you find more interesting, or extra training opportunity, or a bonus, or even time off. But again, that should be negotiated within the confines of that original agreement between you and the company.
Once again, it's in both you and the companies best interest. Company shouldn't pay me to waste my time at the office, and I don't want to pretend to work. I'd rather spend that time outside, or with my family, or on a hobby, then try and hustle out some extra chill time.
The issue I have is when it's one sided. If the company knows that you are finishing your work in 2 hours, but they are paying you for 8, and they are ok with it, then again, it's part of the agreement and it's fine. There are lots of reasons that a company would be okay with this. Basically they have made the choice to pay you a much higher rate.
It's the hiding it part that I think is a grey area.
> The company pays you $$$ in exchange for your time and talent. That's the deal.
I'd disagree. They pay me for a specific amount and type of output, the same way they would for a new piece of machinery. It's not indentured servitude; they don't own me. If they just owned me, I wouldn't charge different rates for different things. A salary doesn't change that - a salary is just your assurance of my availability.
Generally when you are on salary, you get paid a set amount of money for some number of hours worked annually.
You don't get paid different rates for different work.
While it is possible to have a salary position with expected outputs (teach x classes a semester, launch 1 product per quarter, etc.) the better position descriptions will talk about responsibilities not metrics.
The point of being paid a salary vs per hour is that your entire time worked is abstract & non specific. It's also why salaried workers are usually exempt from overtime laws.
Our pay is also based on demand for our skills, based on the value it delivers, balanced with it's supply, which is why a software engineer is paid more than a McDonalds worker. If I could hypothetically produce the output of 100 google software engineers and I charged the price of 90 of them, any company would take me up for my offer and would be out competed by companies who didn't.
The fact that companies try to get the most for their money is just human nature and opportunistic. We don't need to actually go along with it, and nobody should feel guilty about doing the same with their employer too. If your a sales guy, you're considered a bad sales guy if you don't aggressively negotiate the best offer possible, engineers should not feel shy about doing the same too.
When you are on salary, you don't get paid to write code during all the time you are working. I can think about a problem for 6 hours and work 2 hours and fully deliver what the company expects from me.
If you're lucky you might get a few attaboys and a small bonus. Maybe a small promotion if really lucky.
The reality is career progression inside companies is unpredictable and underwhelming which is why people switch jobs so often.
Being an overachiever is great, but doing it for a thankless company is a waste of energy and resources.
So treat them the same way they treat you. Business only, no hard feelings, watch out for me and mine first. Act like they're disposable if they don't live up to your expectations - because that's how they will treat you.
Going back to the office might in fact make that situation worse. Now the person with time on their hands and low ambition isn't gonna suddenly get ambitious, but is gonna distract other people as well.
Your VPC has a DNS server at .2 of your VPC CIDR block that is mounted via loopback on the dom0 and exposed to your VPC to let you do lookups via their DNS infra.
literally all of them? I guess we can pretend that Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that scrape resumes for keyword matches aren't some specific definition of "AI" if we want to be naive though
