Gekk

Love the collection of tiny, standalone EXEs from Windows NT 3.51 that still run great under Windows 10 (described at the bottom of https://gekk.info ; download directory: https://gekk.info/nt351/ ).

For what it's worth, I really enjoyed "Traceroute Isn't Real." I have noticed for quite a while that the data from it is at best patchy, often apparently meaningless. So it's helpful to see the explanation of why that is expected behavior: https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm (If it's outdated I'm curious if anyone knows relevant updates?)

I'd recommend giving https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html a read, and seeing whether that sounds like something you can identify with. I've found it invaluable, personally, to answer this question for myself.

Here is another excellent write-up on the struggle that ADHD can be: https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html

I don't know how not a single comment here has mentioned ADHD, but it's possible your kid could be suffering from some form of executive dysfunction that could be linked to ADHD. Internet gaming (and the internet in general) intentionally exploits these types of vulnerabilities, which makes it even worse. Here are some resources on ADHD: https://invisibleup.com/articles/27/ https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html https://twitter.com/ErynnBrook/status/1011311249513070594 I am autistic and have ADHD myself so I know a bit about it. If you suspect something it may be worth bringing it up with your kid to see if they care. If they're anything like me they'll care, but if they don't care the situation gets a lot more complicated. In other words: there's a difference between genuinely wanting to get good grades and not being able to, and blowing it off because you only want to do the bare minimum. I fell into the former bracket. Solutions vary between them. "Not being able to" doesn't mean not being capable of doing it. It usually means being fully capable of doing it but being unable to actually get your brain to do it because it wants to do something else more. This is a thing and it's called ADHD. It's usually easy to tell when someone has it because they can be incredibly gifted and then barely manage to use that gift (resulting in everyone calling them lazy).

A few years back I stumbled on a good article that someone had written regarding ADHD: https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html I have since used it a few times as a tool to help people to better understand me and my quirks, I can say that it has helped in this regard and have often found that people tend to be slightly more conscious/considerate after reading about the struggles that people with ADHD have to face on a daily basis. It’s not that I want sympathy, it’s just that some people truly just do not understand that the reasons why things can be like this, yes they can take it as lazy, tardiness, my being uninterested or just generally unmotivated or side tracked but the reality of the matter is that these are aspects that I still struggle with on a daily basis and I don’t feel like I could ever reach a point where I have defeated them. So the understanding on their part does go a long way in helping me to feel better about myself and in turn, more capable of doing a good job. That’s what counts to them? I would suggest that you give the article a read through too, or anyone who is wondering if they perhaps fall somewhere within this spectrum as it may help them to better understand themselves too. I can recommend consulting if you have a good handle on your ability to keep yourself motivated over the long term, that you can communicate your position well and have the ability, to some degree to meet practical deadlines. If you do not have a handle on things like this,…

Seems that lots of people only think ADHD people have a hard time paying attention. If it was that simple I would be so happy. Here are just a few of the things I struggle with. - Will power. People with ADHD struggle sooooo much with will power. It’s a constant struggle with everything in life and really wears you down. - Constantly putting on a fake front pretending you don’t have ADHD. - Rejection sensitivity - Feeling inadequate, and unset at yourself for not being able to perform like peers - Emotions swinging from happy to angry in a flash - not being able to maintain friendships - People thinking it’s not a real condition. Unless you have it you can’t even come close to understanding how much of a challenge every day is. - Medication only helps with the attention issue for maybe 8 hours. It doesn’t help with the other 95% of the issues This is by far the best what is it like https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html and here is the corresponding HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129777

The post linked within this post was really illuminating for me: https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html The section on why notecards and todo lists have never worked for him (and for me) was particularly salient: "The problem with "systems" is that they are authorities. They have to be. If you decide "I'll prioritize things with a stack of notecards" then you are telling yourself the following: "The notecards replace my own brain. Everything that I do must be on a notecard. If it isn't on a notecard, it can't be done. If I want it done, it has to be on a notecard." The problem is that when you have a crisis (a day full of emergencies) that forces you to break from this system you will lose all respect for its authority. Your brain will learn that it doesn't have to respect the notecards, that they aren't in charge, and this sense of freedom is addictive and will persist. Most ADHD sufferers have left a trail of systems - notecards, whiteboards, lists, post-its, apps, alarms - that worked great for [a month, a week, three days] but are now dead to them, scorched earth we can't return to."

There were multiple ones, including some by BIOS vendors offered to many hardware OEMs. Hyperspace was one of the most widely-seen. https://gekk.info/articles/hyperspace.htm

Also see, Traceroute isn't real, or: Whoops! Everyone Was Wrong Forever: https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm

These are the two articles that got me to get diagnosed: https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html https://miniver.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-subjective-experience-of-adhd…

Here's some information on it. https://gekk.info/articles/towns-tour.html EDIT: Here are some of the highlights: • Towns OS had a custom GUI that was fairly advanced for the time. • Towns OS included multimedia support. • Towns OS had an API that provided advanced sound and graphics capabilities. • Towns OS included support for overlaying videos in different modes, which boosted gaming and multimedia support. • The FM Towns computers came standard with a mouse and gamepad in an era when PCs typically didn't have these things.

Not entirely related, but here is someone's exploration of the TOWNSOS's graphical shell. https://gekk.info/articles/towns-tour.html This article at Computing History also gives some context: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/60616/FM-Towns-2DF/ It seems that developers had a choice of either licensing the TOWNSOS to include on their bootable CDs or requiring that users boot from a floppy (presumably included with the machine). This GitHub repo is for use in the latter context with modern freeware games whose developers wish to avoid a dependency on copyright Fujitsu code.

On the other hand traceroute isn’t real[0] 0: https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm

ADHD - A Lifelong Struggle https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html This article made me question if the author was describing my life rather than their own, so I went and got checked for ADHD. 2 years, a diagnosis, and a medication regime later, I'm absolutely fucking slaying it and it was this article that sparked the change.

https://gekk.info/articles/images/explorer/98_explorer.png All this crap to the left in Explorer windows that takes up space for no good reason. Active Desktop. Uglier icons that are inconsistent with the many older Win 95-style icons that remain everywhere in the OS. It's not that bad on the whole, and you can reverse most of it, but it's a bloating and bastardization of the (unironically) finely honed aesthetic of Win95.

Making graphical DOS apps windowed never worked in NT One could argue that it was supposed to, because otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to write the code to do it (and knowing what that code has to do, it wasn't a trivial thing either.) XP unified the Win9x and Windows NT codebases If anything, that should've enhanced the functionality since 9x's DOS windows are significantly more performant, and the "graphical DOS box" has been around in one form or another since Windows/386: https://gekk.info/articles/dosapps.html Here's a demonstration of that, running Windows 2.03 (in CGA mode) inside Windows 3.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwkAVlUBu30

This is all true but but I've been recently been diagnosed with adult adhd in my mid-30ies and on a low dose of slow release Methylphenidate and it's all the difference between getting things done and procrastinating like hell. If you exhausted all the articles and nothing worked and you have big problems for years (like this: https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html) give it a try. In the last weeks I managed to really learn in a structured way for the first time. Of course it's no magic solution to all your problems but it's a stark difference for me. I just want to leave that here as I've read these articles every other week and nothing sticked. Neither did counseling or talk theraphy - it helped but didn't solve the procrastination / time issues

I came here to say exactly this. I found this article[0] here a few months ago on HN and it dramatically changed my life for the better. I had always thought I was just "easily distracted" and a "natural procrastinator", when in reality I actually had ADHD. Now that I am medicated and it is mind-blowing how my life has changed. I can hold more than one thought in my head at a time, I can get back on track to what I was doing before without forgetting what I was doing, I don't sleep in until 10am anymore and I don't binge eat anymore. Consequently my self-esteem has improved dramatically too. [0] https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html

Ha, I remember the Windows 3.11 File Manager [0], it was always anoying when you accidentally clicked on the drive A: icon and the explorer would hang for a few seconds as the drive spun up and checked whether a disk was inserted. [0] https://gekk.info/articles/images/wfw311_explorer.png

There’s an interesting article about ADHD on authors website: https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html

Well written, this is also had profound effect on me https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html

If all it takes is hacker news comment threads to sway your opinions on medical topics, you were probably looking for an excuse to not take the vaccine already. Barely anyone here is an expert on this topic and if there were experts here, you would find them at the top of the thread - not buried behind moderation at the bottom. This is a website for fans of startups and tech. The closest we get to statistics is some middleware vendor optimized for p-hacking. Applying startup thinking to mature fields is a constant source of egg-on-face for silicon valley, as demonstrated famously by IoT safety devices. [0] The reason for large downvotes and flags in a thread like this is because there are a lot of people who think they know what they're talking about, but don't. The rigor to participate in this conversation is much higher than having a hot take on the latest MacBook. But that doesn't stop people from oversharing anyway. [0] https://gekk.info/articles/iot.html

My personal impression is ADHD or at least something involving a deficiency in executive function after reading this article. https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html It really opened my eyes to what AD(H)D is really like from someone actually suffering from it and speaking his mind without mincing words, and how hyperactivity is sometimes overemphasized in the diagnosis. So some people get the impression that if you're not hyper it doesn't apply. And for me specifically this was so ironic because ADHD was the one disorder that my parents insisted I never had, so I just ended up believing them the entire time I was with them. But at least now I can think for myself and revisit the possibility for once without being shut down. And they had once been wrong about me not having this other disorder that, surprise, I actually did have, which is the only reason I was hired into a position specifically seeking those with a diagnosis of said disorder, allowing me to pay my own rent. And it certainly has something to do with anxiety. I might have had panic attacks at one point when the pain was new and I wasn't sure if I was in immediate danger. Even after I sort of got used to it and it became "normal," it still stresses me out but not in an "am I going to die in 5 minutes" sense, spurred on by late-night WebMD binging.