I need assistance with task retrieval, time management, and working memory. I do not need an app that makes me feel guilty, and quantifies it with pretty charts. We are not lacking in knowledge, and track data isn't particularly useful. Especially if you're ability to consistently engage with an app is not there. No amount of notifications and prodding will work to solve overwhelm and and distraction.
What we need is assistive technologies that complement our deficits. I won't use an app to just log I did something, but I will use an app if it's crucial to do that activity, and it makes it easier for me to do so.
When you say assistive technology, what kind of things are you thinking about?
I don't have ADHD myself but I'm heavy into home automation and am just interested in it in general, since I think there's so much potential for smart tech to actually improve the lives of those with ADHD.
Some things that come to mind:
- Washing machine alerts you if you have accidentally done washing and forgotten to take it out.
- Household lights change colour consistently throughout the day to assist with time blindness; house goes into wind-down mode at night automatically at the same time. Music starts automatically when you should be getting up out of bed. Coffee machine starts brewing coffee (if that's your thing).
- Doomscrolling pits like Instagram and Tiktok are disabled except for very specific times of the day.
Also goes without saying -- when you know one person with ADHD.... you know one person with ADHD. What works for any particular person is going to be mostly unique, or at least a unique combination of things.
Essentially, anything that a) puts cues in your environment to help steer you in the right direction and b) requires very little executive function to access.
I have adhd myself and I am designing assistive technology for myself.
My software is basically "self spyware", a (mouse/key/browser history/etc) logger for linux. In a way like an open source (though not yet) microsoft recall but even more extensive and with better search and no AI. The idea is to:
1. Be able to put in small notes easily and quickly without having to think of name, tags, etc.
2. Be able to recall what I did, when I did it and what else I did around that time, with _time_ being the main link. So you don't have to semantically link things together like in e.g. obsidian. You can, but using locality of reference should already provide good results.
I wrote some code already for the keylogging parts. Where I got stuck is when thinking about/designing the parts that require cryptography. When I have more free time I definitely want to get back to it.
What I found I need most due to my adhd:
1. A way to do anything "in the moment". Let's say I'm about to procrastinate on my phone but know I have to write an email. Then I must have the ability to do that very quickly right from my phone. If mentally the task of "turning on my laptop" and doing it there seems like too much, I won't do it. So the "preparation friction" to do any task must be as small as possible. This is somewhat a difficult problem but technologically it requires everything to be cross platform and easily accessible.
2. A way to very quickly confirm what I already did before or confirm that I already did something. I have to constantly confirm it because I can't remember if I did. This part is what my software tries to address.
As ADHD dev that thought about something similar (but never worked on it) I'd love to see the code. Please make a post when you intend to release it as opensource, it seems super interesting
thanks for this feedback - curious what current assistive technologies you use right now? totally agree on complementing our challenges, and there are definitely a lot of apps that do pieces of it (we have some of these features on our roadmap to integrate in) but what we've found through coaching and our members is that a big part of their barrier to reaching the life they want is around self worth, noticing wins / patterns in little wins over time, and coming up with / remembering strategies across different life areas. the goal here is not to choose one or the other but to support both types of needs
Seriously, stop worrying about what people do in their free time, and find you're own joy. It's not like your distaste is going to have any effect on the people who enjoy it, so stop worrying about it.
I think there a lot of good points from others about symptom management, but I think switching off is actually pretty important too. I'm finding that fixing my procrastination and task initiation issues with medication and systems has left me more tired, as I'm doing more.
Everyone is different, but I think for ADHD people we can't be still to recuperate. I'm giving knitting a try, it's a pretty meditative activity, with a low cognitive load. My husband plays video games.
Getting out in nature is good. Walking, biking. I bought a onewheel just for the novelty of floating around the neighborhood.
These sanboxes are only safe for applications with relatively fixed behaviour. Agentic software can easily circumvent these restrictions making them useless for anything except the most casual of attacks.
Krita and Inkscape have successfully replaced Photoshop and Illustrator for me. There isn't any good video editing options and lightroom still beats Gimp.
For me the biggest sticking point to windows is cad/cam software, lightburn and anything proprietary needed for hobby equipment. I'm glad though that 3d printer software has always had equal Linux support (as long as you don't use Bambu).
It depends on the task, and the risk of isolation failure. Docker can be sufficient if inputs are from trusted sources and network egress is reasonably limited.
Obviously untrue, weather predictions, OCR, tts, stt, language translation, etc. We have dramatically improved many existing ai technologies with what we've learned from genai and the world is absolutely a better place for these new abilities.
>less accurate and efficient than existing solutions, only measures well against other LLMs
Where did you hear that? On every benchmark that I've ever seen, VLM's are hilariously better than traditional OCR. Typically, the reason that language models are only compared to other language models on model cards for OCR and so on is precisely because VLM's are so much better than traditional OCR that it's not even worth comparing. Not to mention that those top of the line traditional OCR systems like AWS, Textract are themselves extremely slow and computationally expensive. Not to mention much more complex to maintain.
>>tts, stt
> worse
Literally the first and only usable speech-to-text system that I've gotten on my phone is explicitly based on a large language model. Not to mention stuff like Whisper, Whisper X, Parakeet, all of the state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems are large-language model based and are significantly faster and better than what we had before. Likewise for text-to-speech, you know, even Kokoro-82M is faster and better than what we had before, and again, it's based on the same technology.
Most people do not hold strongly consistent or well introspective political ideas. We're too busy living our lives to examine everything and often what we feel matters more than what we know, and that cements our position on a subject.
I am not a fan of Wayland either, I rather want to be able to run programs from different users against the same application server. This works just fine on Xorg.
I actually think in practice the meaning has always been "things I dislike". Before AI you could see it applied to all kinds of things in media, WWE is slop, Soap Operas are slop, Genre Fiction is slop. It's almost exclusively a pejorative based on taste, intended to throw scorn on what other people enjoy. When a person uses it I stop listening, because essentially the speaker has stopped saying anything of value.
What we need is assistive technologies that complement our deficits. I won't use an app to just log I did something, but I will use an app if it's crucial to do that activity, and it makes it easier for me to do so.
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