ADHD and Me

Ok, I started and then bored myself. To be continued...

I got a formal diagnosis a couple of years ago. To say it explains a lot would be a massive understatement. I'd like to give my personal take.

What is ADHD?

The condition categorized as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is almost certainly not what you think. For starters, the naming is way off from what there is. I saw a discussion on this somewhere in the socials, someone made the point that it's named for how it impacts other people, irrespective of the condition itself. The poster offered an alternative "Can't sit still disorder". Better, but it still doesn't capture much.

The medical profession is very bad at this kind of thing. Psychiatry hasn't quite got out of the Victorian era, it still bears the scars of that motherlover Freud. The DSM-5 definition isn't very helpful :

A persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development, as characterized by...

...a lot of failings.

And it's wrong from the get-go. Ok, I'm heavily influenced by my own bag here, but I'll have a stab :

• ADHD is the result of a set of genetic deviations from the norm, carried by (my guess) 5% of the human population, with various levels of expression (these are in the same ballpark as autistic traits, a lot of overlap)
• it is characterized by distinctive cognitive traits, strongly associated with attention
• hyperactivity is a feature, but this is typically internal, outward expression is commonly blocked as a learnt behaviour, this is the notion of "masking"
• it is orthogonal from general intelligence though markers for what is considered intelligence are common : learning difficulties and/or "gifted" attributes are common

I believe there's a strong argument to be made that human civilization depends on these particular kinds of neurodiversity for its existence. A recent paper suggested that the traits were beneficial in hunter-gatherer societies as the carriers might explore new regions, potentially finding more sustenance.

My Diagnosis

It's hilarious how long it took me to figure it out. I think I was 59 (61 now, I think) before it went down on paper. I've been under a psychiatrist on and off for decades. The diagnoses always started with my tendency for heavy drinking. Of course anxiety and depression topped the billboard, followed by bipolar and hints of psychosis. I've had a crazy pharmacopiea over the years, even before looking at self-medication. But those bits were all symptoms. The primary root cause was that I had a hyperactive head.

A stupid thing on my part is that a friend Reto had actually identified the traits in me a couple of decades ago, even gave me some Ritalin before I was due to have some conference duties. But I didn't believe it. I don't have the motor bits associated with hyperactivity. I really enjoy (some) social situations, which kind-of ruled out the autistic/formally-known-as-Aspergers spectrum.

Something compelled me to take another look, I had a go at the Adult screening test which is really quick but gives results strong correlated with the whole pile of ADHD traits. I told my shrink about this, I did a very lengthy paperwork test, I was given a look that said "we've got a right one here".

Another source of amusement is how slow on the uptake my parents were. Both teachers, in fact my father lectured on (art) therapy for people with special needs. My older brother has traits in a similar domain, but has done alright with his eccentricities, channeled into the creative arts. I'm reasonably certain my father has some of the odd genes.

Caroline had a story about my dad meeting this friend Sean (the fiddler) out in a shopping street. They got into conversation, then mid-sentence my dad just wandered off. I'm guessing he saw something in a shop window.

My mother died last December, and I'm kinda annoyed that although we were very close, she was still clueless about my neurodiversity. I'd tell her I was stuck with something, she'd predictably retort with "well everyone finds that hard work, you just have to do it". Useless. Her side of the family are riddled with eccentricity, neurodiversity too. I only found out last year my cousin from the states (a talented writer) has the same diagnosis as me. Her father, my Uncle Doug, had a reputation as a heavy drinker, but if you look more closely, he did exactly what I did, latched on to alcohol as self-medication.

Whelmed

I'll have to fill this out later. It's overwhelming. I live in a continuous state of being overwhelmed. Normal things, obviously - tidying the kitchen. But I also have a tendency to do things that I find difficult. As I type, in the background I've got Claude Code working on Semantic Web memory for large language models. It's a hard problem.

More amusement. By trade I'm a computer programmer. I was ever so lucky to discover this stuff as a teenager, it's (allegedly) a kind of work I can do. But I am so mediocre at it. Pretty good head for systems, day-to-day coding, rubbish.

If there were a credible form of intelligence test, I believe I'd land average, or maybe just below average. But if something gets my attention, I'm not letting go. Like a very ill-tempered Jack Russell. The code I'm working on now is an extension of things I worked on 25 years ago. I got into coding AI in the 1990s, so funny it's now The Thing.

The Booze and Stuff

Yeah, this deserves its own section. I did spend most of my adult life with a legitimate medical diagnosis of alcoholic. I still drink a lot more than medics advise, but here's where recognising my neurodiversity really came in handy. Switching from wine as my go-to to beer was a good step, I no longer have the physical horrors.

Watch

Postcraft, my massively overengineered static site builder just got a bit more complicated (but a lot more efficient). It's actually a series of apps ("transmissions") using Transmissions, my pipeliney thing. This is what they used to do :

• md-to-sparqlstore - walked a given dir on my local fs, reading all the markdown files, posting these off to a SPARQL store
• sparqlstore-to-html - queries the SPARQL store and renders the individual results as HTML pages
• sparqlstore-to-site-indexes - ditto, to make an index.html of recent posts

For every new blog post I made, every single one of the hundreds of existing posts also got re-processed. Not very efficient.

So I've added a filesystem Watch service. When a file changes, then it goes through the processing. When I say I, Claude Code did most of the work. I have looked at node's watch before and it is relatively straightforward to use. But there was a fair bit of textbook-like code that needed implementing. Now I have a watch-config.json that looks like this:

[
    {
        "name": "postcraft-render",
        "dirs": [
            "~/sites/danny.ayers.name/postcraft/content/raw"
        ],
        "apps": [
            "md-to-store ~/sites/danny.ayers.name/postcraft",
            "store-to-html  ~/sites/danny.ayers.name/postcraft",
            "sparqlstore-to-site-indexes  ~/sites/danny.ayers.name/postcraft"
        ],
        "watchEvents": [
            "change"
        ]
    }
]

It watches dirs and on changed files triggers a call to the apps in sequence. The path given with each app is the location of a tt.ttl file which contains the settings for the app. Here's the core of the transmissions.ttl for md-to-store :

:md-to-store a :Transmission ;
   :pipe (:p10 :p20 :p30 :p40 :p50) .

:p10 a :Restructure ;
     :settings :prepFilename .

:p20 a :FileReader ;
     :settings :readerSet .

:p30 a :Escaper .

:p40 a :MakeEntry ;
     :settings :entryExtras .

:p50 a :SPARQLUpdate ;
     :settings :storeArticle .

Here are the statements for the settings for Restructure process :

:prepFilename a :ConfigSet  ;
    :rename (:pf1)  .
        :pf1    :pre    "sourcePath" ;
                :post   "sourceFile"  .

Restructure modifies the shape of the data, a message passed along the pipeline transmission in the form of a JSON object. It's needed here because the watch system does a call using sourcePath as the name of the changed file, but the Filereader process expects a sourceFile.

Like I said, this is all seriously over-engineered for a static site builder. But the component processors like Restructure and Filereader have no direct coupling and are totally reusable. A major reason for applying this to the static site builder is that the posts going into the SPARQL store are now part of my Personal Knowledgebase. Using that is over in the realm of Semem.

Having said all that, what I don't have yet is an easy way of tidying up. I created lots of blog entries in setting this up, the only reliable way I have for cleaning now is to empty the graph in the SPARQL store and run the process-everything transmissions. Hey ho.

Watching

This may now be working

Predicting Earthquakes with AI

This is a problem I've been intermittently looking at for a few years now. I'm strongly convinced it is feasible to get useful notification ahead of dangerous seismic events...with some major caveats.

There is a lot of reliable, historic and real-time seismic data available. It's typically expressed as motion over time of points on the surface of the planet. It's possible to correlate between data from different monitoring locations to pinpoint with reasonable accuracy the source of particular sets of measurements, after the fact.

AI tools have, in recent years, got very good at making predictions about the behaviour of physical systems over time. Synthetic videos can be generated that convincingly show apparent real-world events.

But the system in which earthquakes occur is massive, extremely complex and chaotic.

Radio Precursors

of the behaviour of multidimensional time series data

But t

to be in condition to receive radio seismic precursors it takes very strong earthquakes and we must be very close to them

http://www.vlf.it/opera_2015/opera_2015.html

Journal 2025-07-27

tl;dr Problem-solving is the navigation of scale-free conceptual spaces to achieve intentional state changes, where agents with finite working memory dynamically adjust their viewport through decomposition and abstraction operations until unknown system patterns align with known behavioral templates.

Micro Burn-Out

I wish to mint this phrase. You know exactly what it means without any more explanation. I've been hit by one, was overwhelmed by what I was working on, while also determined to give myself a holiday. So after months of fairly intensive work on code projects, I switched off for a couple of weeks. Now, totally lacking momentum. Ok, figure out where I was trying to do.

Adaptive Problem-Solving through Scale-Free Knowledge Navigation

An approach to problem-solving is to regard it as navigating between different scales of conceptual representation to fit patterns within the constraints of finite working memory. This is the motivation behind the Ragno and ZPT ontologies, and what I've been playing with in the Semem project.

Ragno is an attempt to capture a knowledgebase, independent of domain. That is the corpus. ZPT and attempt to describe a navigation system over that corpus. The controls are : Zoom (abstraction level), Pan (conceptual domain), Tilt (representation perspective) - serving to find the optimal knowledge frame for pattern matching within memory constraints.

Consider :

• Pattern Matching as Navigation - Problem-solving involves finding the right "view" into a knowledge space where unknown patterns match known ones
• Working Memory as Viewport - The agent's finite capacity defines the maximum complexity processable at once (like a camera's field of view)
• Scale-Free Architecture - Concepts exist at multiple abstraction levels simultaneously, allowing zoom in/out navigation Dynamic Chunking - Decomposition/abstraction operations adapt the knowledge representation to fit the working memory constraints
• Dynamic Chunking - Decomposition/abstraction operations adapt the knowledge representation to fit the working memory constraints