1 step at a time. The uphill battle is exhausting, but each small step makes the next a little easier. Plus, no one said you have to climb all the way up the hill in one go. Pause and build up energy every once in a while.

If i had advice for my previous self, itd be that going to a psychiatrist has been really helpful. they focus on 1 thing: meds. I wish I’d done that sooner tbh. Im seeing one who has their own part time practice since they’ve recently become certified, so its been nice having communication that isnt filtered through an office or comprehensive services offering (that isn’t to say there aren’t downsides in availability and responsiveness). i found them through word of mouth, which helped me get past the doom scrolling of the insurance lists.

I used some more ADHD specific/exclusive services for the few years prior and while it was a good start, it was only a partial solution and it was deeply impersonal.

PCP’s do very basic screenings for these things and the screenings are not very well tailored to neurodivergence. On some level, I think as neurodivergent people we will answer the questions a bit too honestly and sometimes we’re overly self-aware in how we communicate difficulties which can seem like a bigger issue. PCP’s are generalists and they often aren’t offered enough resources due to insurance or office rules to do something more tailored to any individuals unique situation.

That said, it’s still good for them to do the screenings and bring it up since it’s always worth looking into if the signs are there.

I don’t know what your situation is or if you are getting ADHD treatment otherwise, but you might find that (if you are suffering from depression) it’ll be more obvious to you and you’ll find treatment for it and/or anxiety more helpful after getting ADHD-specific treatment started.

I also bounced off of depression and anxiety treatment before I’d started stimulants a few years ago. I started an SNRI a few months ago for depression symptoms (and as a symptom reducer for migraines, interestingly enough) and it became very clear to me that I WAS depressed, once the meds started working. I realized how much stress I was building up and holding onto, as well as how often I fell into mental rabbit-holes of negativity. The SNRI basically helps me hit the pause button on those kinds of triggers well before things build up.

If you haven’t considered it yet, try looking for a pyschiatrist. I’ve been working with a PNP (without having a current PCP, mind you, but my insurance doesn’t require one), and it’s been a breath of fresh air to focus on mental health needs without the doctors office baggage.

Personally, I’m not sure a diagnosis of Depression or Anxiety fits me per say, and but my next step on the treatment journey is to find a therapist to narrow down and/or identify the root cause, and build better skills outside of meds.

Also a note that captial one has a similar service for their own credit cards. Def not as good as privacy.com, but still useful.

You can apply arkenfox or Betterfox to fennec in some somewhat hacky ways via adb (or less hacky if rooted)

Not exactly an unbiased chunk of evidence there, is it?

You can hide your number on Signal so people can’t start conversations with you unless they have your QR code/link.

But even if you leave it visible… it’s really not that big a deal. Tbh, thats a good feature if you want to use Signal as a way for people you don’t often interact with to securely communicate if they have your phone number but can’t utilize encrypted RCS. Once Apple gets on board with encryption then it’s less important for Signal to fill that gap for casual conversation.

Signal may not be perfect for all use cases. But it’s pretty easy to navigate for the normies and its got most of the features people would miss from whatsapp/facebook messenger. I got my family converted to Signal this week from facebook messenger and it went rather smoothly. Plus, Signal has been around for a long time. Even some among my less tech-literate family had already used it in the past, but everyone had heard of it so it was an easy sell.

The reality of communication nowadays is that there is no one size fits all solution. Signal, XMPP, Matrix, whatever else all have their pros/cons.

I know there’s been a lot more discussion around SimpleX lately, but tbh, the sudden noise about it + the VC backing just feels more like a coordinated advertising campaign and that makes me less interested in it.

Hopefully we see some of these projects picked up by others. In a weird way, sometimes these sorts of events end up being exactly what a project needs to get forked/transferred and have even more funding/resources thrown at it.

Ive only recently been utilizing mull, mulch, and hypatia, but they’ve been fantastic. All the best to the devs.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filelink-provider-for-send/ this add on can be pointed at any send instance, so long as the insyance isnt too diverged from the popular fork or Mozilla’s original project.

The Thunderbird team has talked in the past about bringing Mozilla Send back as more of a feature for Thunderbird files embedded in emails, hence some of the work that’s happening off and on by Mozilla themselves in the original project, some of which has been merged into the project this post is about.

Its been in testing for a bit. It got bumped from the last major desktop Thunderbird release and since Thunderbird releases used to be synced to firefox ESR releases its been a slow turnaround to get their schedule moving faster.

Its an f-droid metadata issue that the team is already aware of https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/8478

Honestly, I’m not mad if AI fully defeats captchas to the point they go away. They almost always fail to be usable via accessibility tools. These things might block some automated systems, but they also block people with disabilities.

Generally speaking I’m not opposed to sqlite. The case of a notes app is the one exception.

If i need to make a big find and replace change, i dont need to rely on the app to have the capability or whip out a sql editor or cli tool. I just open my favorite text editor and do it. Or chain some cli tools built into the os.

Its not even about data portability or export. Its about working with the data.

Exactly. Not a huge fan of notes apps storing the data in a db.otherwise there is a lot to like about joplin. With obsidian i open my notes in codium all the time to make mass edits or fill gaps that obsidians UI cant meet, which is not possible with joplin.

Fortunately with obsidian as long as you keep the plugins on the lighter side and keep any non-markdown content in seperate files via linking, im not too worried about having to jump ship if it ever goes bad. Worst case if a plugin dies or i have to migrate, the actual loss of data is that some plugin used json or whatever and it’d have to be converted or replaced.

I do have hope at least that if the company folds they’ll open source it, or turn a blind eye to a community reengineering effort. And what is unique about obsidian markdown and metadata will probably get community-built migration tools quickly if enough people jump ship en masse.

But for the time being Obsidian is the best option for me and i dont feel that bad about it.