I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Bohemia Interactive. Their games have always had a charming “designed by a software engineer” feel, which I appreciate.
Also, Operation Flashpoint was the reason I learnt to code and ended up having a career a software engineer, so I owe BI for that. My first real foray into programming was writing scripts, specifically to trigger unguided bomb releases from planes onto moving ground targets using some shoddy trigonometry as a 14 year old kid.
I have a lot of fond memories of that game. I still remember being awed by some of the mods created by this guy: https://kegetys.fi His name has lived rent free in my head for 2 decades now. Legend.
Same here; I remember playing ARMA 3 during the early-2013 public alpha, which was an eye-opening look at how the gaming sausage is made in real time (and before Early Access was as established a concept as it is now).
I was rather disappointed when I heard that they had been acquired by BAE Systems, but on further inspection it seems like that was only the BI Simulations arm (responsible for VBS), now rebranded as OneArc. My guess is that a release like this wouldn't have happened were they not still independent.
I didn’t discover that ticks were a problem until I was in my mid 20s, and had been rolling around in deer-filled brush for years. Either I got very lucky, or have a chronic tick-borne disease.
I’ve been battling unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline throughout my 30s. I’ve had every blood test under the sun, numerous sleep studies and tried every vitamin. I’ve had no answers and no change.
Sometimes, I've believed that it impacts my performance at work. Sometimes I feel like I should be retiring, but I’m not even 40 yet. Sometimes, it's not so bad.
I saw a video on controlled hypothermia the other day, which seems like snake oil. I guess that’s next on my list to try. I feel desperate, but I’m just having to get used to the feeling of desperation, because there appears to be no answer or solution.
Signed up to post this. So I have been on this journey with my daughter for the last 7 years, she is now 25, but only got a Lyme diagnosis less than 2 years ago, has been suffering since she was 18.
It’s not just ticks, mosquitos and spiders can apparently carry the bacteria (there is not a lot of consensus about the causes of Lyme, there is the bacterial school of thought and a viral theory). This if the fringe of science, theory’s matter but results matter more.
My daughter had a range of symptoms, fatigue, body aches, circulation issues her feet would change colour blue, red, purple, brain fog.
She had been 5 years on this path trying to deal with this, before the Lyme test was done (we live in nz which lyme is rare, and she likely caught it in Australia which doesn’t acknowledge its existence). Anyway we headed to Germany for hyperthermia treatment. It wasn’t cheap for us, and almost an act of faith in choosing this. I had reservations, at the frontier of medicine everything looks different. People are pursuing options that are unconventional, because the conventional options have been exhausted. At some point everything that is considered mainstream now, once looked unconventional. I know that could be used to justify anything. We spent 3 weeks at St George clinic in Germany.
The theory of Lyme is that is a really slowly replicating bacteria, once every 24 hours vs 20 minutes typical for most. It does respond to antibiotics but the slow replication rate means you would need antibiotics in your system for a much much longer period to have the same number of kill opportunities (it is during replication that bacteria will absorb antibiotics and be killed as I understand it). Roughly you would need antibiotics for 3x24 as long as a typical antibiotic treatment (over 2 years of antibiotics which would ruin the rest of your body).
The hyperthermia treatment is intense, it is designed to mimic a fever. One of our bodies approaches to killing bacteria, is getting them hot enough to rupture their cells.
It wasnt an easy or a quick fix after treatment, which was disheartening at times. But a year on she has just noticed she is feeling better, has little to no pain and just the other day took a run along the beach.
Anyway I just wanted to endorse a plan you were already thinking about. I acknowledge that a chronic health issue is hard, hard in a way that those of us who a generally healthy can’t even comprehend.
I wish you all the best
Thank you for taking the time to sign up and write this. I'm glad your daughter is feeling better, and I wish her a continued recovery. I will consider this treatment more seriously, but the cost is significant, especially only to hope for results.
Thanks for posting that. I'm constantly thinking about lymes disease when my two young daughters play in anything approaching long grass. I'll file this away in my mind for if worst ever did happen.
This is a great story, and your kindness shows to a random stranger on the internet so I want to commend you for that.
Adding to it, I want to share a bit of my story and some words that could help as well.
I haven't ever checked for Lyme diagnosis, but I've experienced symptoms that are diabetes adjacent and cured those through diet and other experimentation. Through the last 10 years of so I obsessed over and reversed various medical illnesses that were said to be incurable, since for that exact reason as you said "conventional options have been exhausted". In my journey I met one man who exhausted many treatment options for Lyme and his success strategy looked as follows: a) he took EMF seriously and rebuilt his home for EMF minimization (happy to share strategy and solutions for you more here, I follow a cheap mans version of his more expensive work), b) he would take particular vitamins and other nutrients, and c) Rife therapy. He had an expensive plasma machine that would send particular frequencies into his body through light plasma (more expensive Rife frequency modulation end of things) but many machines exist that are cheaper. Spooky sells these machines, some of the solutions include PEMF which I believe are electricity based. I've used their remote frequency machines and also a scalar version for overall health and haven't had to use them since. My experience with Rife is limited. My basic drivers for health now are grounding for inflammation reduction (feet on grass every so often, or grounding mats), EMF reduction, information management (try notification zero and how it affects your biology: no notifications on your phones or devices ever and that includes notification bubbles - Calls from loved ones OK), and diet/food/water/sleep. I'll also use a Schumann tuned set of tuning forks I have 2 sets one that use a weight vibration and another that uses just the sound. my sleep and stress improve considerably when I use the forks, and I believe they have an affect like grounding but on the frequency end only. When I was first starting this journey, I would do pure cold showers in winter months and kept the practice for years, it was the first time I noticed a big shift in my health and wellbeing that lasted and also kept my mood elevated for a while after. I have also used more expensive cold baths, cryotherapy, etc and I think they can all approach and work for the type of Hypothermia treatment that geekfeatures is mentioning. My intuition is experimentation with these first, 3-5x a week, would mimic a similar process in the body to the hypothermic heavy therapy and may even be triggering it at a similar level to the paid therapies.
Anyway I'll stop there to keep this limited in word count. Feel free to reach out here or personally via hello@mannan.is and good luck.
Did your 30s coincide with the COVID pandemic? I've had a similar experience the last 6 years, and it feels like a combination of aging (I'm 35) and Long COVID. I am trying to get out of the software industry altogether because sitting and looking at a screen all day makes me feel like shit now
Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.
If you think you have long Covid, you should do some research about CIRS (Chronic Inflammation Response Syndrome). It is a condition caused by exposure to toxic mold from water damaged (inside or out) buildings. There is growing evidence that there isn't actually a separate condition for long Covid, but rather it is Covid-triggered CIRS. (Lyme can trigger it too). (Note: only about 25% of people are genetically susceptible to suffering from CIRS)
CIRS causes your body's call-and-response immune system to short circuit; meaning one part detects the problem and the part is supposed to fix it but the part that is supposed to fix it (remove the mycotoxins) doesn't see the problem and does nothing. CIRS causes a lot of side effects, including all the ones mentioned by the GP and many more. If you want to test for toxic mold, you need to test the dust in your space. Some amount of mold is naturally in the air at all times. The dust will show and accumulation of mold over time and show if there is a real problem.
Source: I thought I had long Covid for a long time, until I realized the real problem which was toxic white mold in my house. I threw everything in a dumpster and sold my house and am now on the long slow multi-year process of recovery. If you think you may have it, try pushing Mg, Zinc and Potassium really hard for a few weeks. Take things that naturally bind the bile in your gut (the mycotoxins attach to the bile which is recycled). There are heavier binders that bind everything but I wouldn't start there.
It doesn't necessarily have to be white mold either. Anything that generates a persistent immune response can keep it going once it triggered. Like really bad allergies.
Largely it was a multi-year process trying to find the source of all my symptoms. Eventually, I found someone posting on a Reddit forum about long Covid and they suggested to someone that they have problems with mold exposure instead. I collected dust from my house and sent it off to be tested. The test came back with an UNINHABITABLE result for Aspergillus versicolor (a highly resilient and ubiquitous indoor mold frequently found in water-damaged building materials like drywall, carpet, and ceiling tiles)
You can't really test for it in blood or urine unless you are currently under super high exposure. Unfortunately, most doctors have never heard of it and have no idea what to do. Some don't believe you because all your bloodwork is fine. It finally clicked for me when I realized that I had 20 of the 21 most common symptoms and had had a roof leak a few years before (since fixed).
I have an extreme heat intolerance now too so I only feel okay when cold and overly hydrated. I started pushing the vitamins above after eating peas one night and magically feeling human again 30 minutes later. Even though your levels may be "normal", the mycotoxins prevent uptake so you have to flood your system and hope enough gets through. I also make sure I'm getting enough vit C, B and D in my diet. I even do things like buying a specific coffee that is tested for mold. A lot of foods sit around collecting mold before they get processed into food. These mycotoxins (not live mold) will get bound to the bile in your gut naturally. Bile is energy expensive for your liver to make so it is highly recycled as it helps you break down fats in your guts. You can do a lot more reading in the ToxicMoldExposure Reddit.
How kind of you to say.... If you do much research on the topic, you will find that this is the standard advice. It is almost impossible to remove (especially for any porous surface). People with CIRS can by symptomatic even from dead mold spores.
I am just offering a different point of view, not disagreeing with the other experiences on this thread.
I d like to think I have fully recovered from confirmed Lyme diagnosis with Doxycycline for 14 days. I had fever and weakness for a week and lowest HRV reading my Fitbit ever recorded (7ms v 50ms avg).
Interestingly, I have a lot of symptoms like anxiety, sleeplessness, and brain fog even today, but I know for a fact I had it even before Lyme. It had peaked during the COVID times when I sat at my desk working over 10 hours on the regular because there was literally nothing else to do.
So at-least in my case it seems COVID was the trigger and Lyme didn't seem to move the needle much either way.
I think I may have had long covid or something like that as well.
for something like 12-18 months in 2023-2024 I would only go to work, come home sleep 2 hours and that was all I could manage. I felt so fatigued and tired. I started doing better at the beginning of 2025, and am doing better now. I think it may have been caused by partly illness, and partly the psychological shift to doing nothing social at all for most of covid pandemic.
I had this starting around the beginning of COVID. Was it COVID? Did I get COVID at all? Plausibly, but not definitively. Did I get it at that time? Almost certainly not as I stayed isolated and got tested whenever I wasn't. It could be aging but I think a lot of people chalk things up to aging that are actually due to non-aging-related causes - you just accumulate more past as you age so you're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is. I did go camping several times, once in a region known to have Lyme, without being vaccinated, but that was years after I started noticing chronic fatigue. Conclusion: I really don't know.
At least some of my cognitive decline is surely related to my attention span, which is not aging-related at all but more to do with the modern information-flood environment. A few minutes ago I misread "scripted" as "sculpted" in an HN comment and then stopped to reflect why I did that. It wasn't because I can't read, but rather because I was skimming over that comment really, really fast, because that way I can view more comments.
fwiw; I had unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline as a post-COVID induced histamine intolerance with a few bonus attributes. High amounts of histamine would accumulate in my mast cells then get released in 3-5am, undermining sleep and also inhibiting serotonin.
It took me about four years to fully understand my condition. Hope you figure out what is bothering you. The body is incredibly complex.
My gf experiences some thing like this sometimes. Seems to correlate without exercise or excitement or eating histamine rich food.
She takes pentatop to regulate it with some success.
I'm also interested to head about your experience.
That's rough. Same symptoms of low testosterone, which a blood test can measure. This can be caused (even in younger men) through daily exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like BPA and phthalates, heavy metals, and pesticides. Poor lifestyle exposures such as chronic stress, lack of sleep, and high ambient air pollution also significantly suppress hormone production.
Indeed. Thanks for the pointer. My testosterone level is in a happy range, as are most of my levels.
Chronic stress, now that's an interesting one. I've never regarded myself as stressed. Or, if I am stressed, I'm always stressed and it's just normal. But I see no reason to be stressed, but maybe I am. And I wonder, how much of stress is a cause, or a result. I've taken a year off work. Am I better for it? It's hard to say. I'm yet to find anything that I can say helps. I've only really found things that make it worse. Like alcohol, and sugar. Diabetes? Yeah, I've considered it. I've got 6 months of blood sugar monitoring data, with no discernible correlation between my levels and how I feel. Funny world <3
About stress: how's your HRV? Look into sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, vagus nerve and it's relation to HRV. It gives you a more objective way to measure stress.
In particular, Garmin smartwatches have a very good measurement and intepretation with their "stress" and "body battery" features.
I initially thought about sharing this about stress and didn't, but then I read your post.
That's how I learned I was stressed while working. I have a Garmin watch and everyday I get an alert telling me I had a stressful day.
During the day if I do a little check-in where I observe how I feel, I often notice a lot of muscle tension, especially in the plexus area, and that I stop breathing for extended periods of time. I try to consciously relax, which would work for a few minutes before the tension comes again. I end up being exhausted almost everyday. My watch has been telling me I'm either in "recovery" or "strained" for months.
Stress can be difficult to notice, especially when you're stressed.
Yes. I've tried avoiding caffeine during my year off. When I don't (even after weeks of abstinence) I sleep 12-14 hours a night and still need a nap during the day, which is incompatible with having both a day job and something approaching a well-lived life involving laundry. So I drink caffeine, to be compatible with the labour market.
You need more than weeks of abstinence, friend. Ive generally noticed 1-2 months are necessary to recover from all of the awful side effects of caffeine (from drinking a tiny amount of coffee per day - my body is just very sensitive to it). I urge you to try it.
for me, mostly just poor sleep and focus/clarity. It creeps up on you slowly, til you realize youre just in a haze. Once you detox, life is much better.
And, yet, as an addict, i keep convincing myself that I can handle a little bit (like, 6-10 grams daily - which is nothing) and will re-addict myself every few months.
I should say that i have been actually handling 10 grams vastly better lately than i could even 6 grams a few years ago. Not sure what to attribute that to.
I really like coffee - i roast, grind and brew it at home. I should treat it as i do alcohol - only 1 drink, once in a while - but i'll probably remain like this for life...
What were the side effects? High blood pressure, feeling like a "zombie", sleep getting worse?
I'd try centanafadine and see a top ADHD specialist. There are a lot of variables: molecule, dose, release profile, melatonin timing.
What is worth checking:
* Comorbid anxiety or trauma symptoms (PTSD)
* Hormone imbalance
Just because your blood work is perfect, it doesn't mean all is good. I have hypomagnesemia - the tests were perfect, yet my body needs way more magnesium to function properly.
BP (manageable), tinnitus (BP related), prostate discharge (due to muscular tension), sleep getting worse as the week would go on until I'd have to stop. Sleep wasn't restful at all, which was the main problem. I'd feel like I'd closed my eyes and become unconscious, rather than actually asleep. I'd wake up in the morning like I'd been kept awake as some kind of torture all night, but with no recollection of it.
I desperately wanted ADHD meds to help, but in the end the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze so I stopped. I tried all 3 or 4 different stims and 2 non-stims.
Thank you for the pointers, I will look into them.
For the stims, I've found that most doctors titrate up the dose way to fast.
For example for methylphenidate, I'd recommend starting on 2.5mg (1/2 the smallest pill) for a week or two, until side effects go away, and then up the dose to 5mg.
Not just T. Low thyroid hormone levels as well. I just had that diagnosed, after a year or two of feeling “worn out”. I thought it might be T (I’m almost 50 now) but turns out my thyroid was under-active. Relatively easy diagnosis and fix.
Doctors call it a fatigue panel - There's a set of high-yield blood tests for common conditions that they typically order if you're generally tired. Vitamin D, thyroid, iron levels, testosterone in males. Really quite an easy fix if any of those are significantly off. I've had a couple of times I've felt really run down and got labs done, and I was either anemic or hypothyroid, after a month on a higher dose of levothyroxine or on an iron supplement I feel like a new person.
My friend was diagnosed with lyme disease in his mid-20s after years of symptoms similar to your own (brain fog, extreme fatigue, etc.). The hard thing is that even lyme disease itself is a constellation of illnesses, he had to work with mulitple specialists for years to confirm what the issue was and get the proper treatment.
In his case, he is mostly back to normal, albeit gluten intolerant, which will cause his symptoms to redevelop, namely spinal inflammation.
Its hard not to engender helplessness when hearing or dealing with types of issues, but I wish you perserverance in your search for answers, and grace when dealing with your problems.
I've been through similar, don't give up trying to find a solution. I've recently found what mine is, and am doing much better now. Everyone is different, be careful with advice on the internet, but at the least it gives you ideas for further investigation. For me it was elevated homocysteine, with a genetic origin. I could get an analysis by uploading my genome to Genetic Genie, but ultimately the homocysteine test was the proof.
I had elevated homocysteine, treated it (MTHFR gene, therefore methylated B12 / folate, etc), and that had zero effect on my sleep quality, unfortunately.
Tried B6, every variation of magnesium (including threonate), all the typical sleep hygiene stuff.. nothing mattered.
You owe it to yourself to learn about Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS).
It can be caused by lyme but is more often due to exposure to water damaged buildings.
Reasonably priced lab testing can be obtained without jumping through insurance hoops:
https://www.moldco.com/
I have personally suffered from CIRS-wdb (water damaged building) for decades.
By 2012 (age 44) I was so chronically sick with severe neurological, endocrine and digestive symptoms that I could not work and barely slept 3 hours a night for months. Brain fog, "ice pick" pains in the gut, muscular weakness and balance problems were among the many symptoms. It was so bad that I was preparing for the end within a year and was spending my limited time with my wife and young children.
Years of medical tests and consults (Cleveland Clinic) found nothing.
Fortunately, lots of googling found medical articles by Dr Ritchie Shoemaker listing many of the same multi-system symptoms.
From the late 1990s he identified cohorts of patients with such symptoms and developed effective treatments.
I drove out to Maryland and was treated by him from 2012-2013 following the Shoemaker protocol.
We spent a substantial amount remediating the water damage in our home.
My health improved incrementally to the point where I now work productively and actively mountain bike daily at age 59.
I am about 91% recovered and have no doubt that I would have died without treatment.
I take maintanence doses of Welchol and Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP) and avoid water damaged buildings.
I have no financial interest in Moldco or Dr Shoemaker but feel compelled to share my experience with those who seem to be suffering similarly.
I almost did not write this post.
Nearly every afflicted person I have shared CIRS info with has ignored it and continued their health decline.
I hope that you or someone reading this will take the steps and improve their health.
I'm not a doctor.
I just recognized symptom clusters consistent with my personal experience and shared information that would hopefully lead them to reach for effective treatment. Additionally, I only speak up when someone expresses frustration that their health provider has no clue what is going on.
When did you last (1) eat a proper salad with no sugary dressing (2) get up early to exercise (3) achieve a suntan (4) spend a week without caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol? (5) catch a sunrise? (6) wake up at an acceptable hour without an alarm? (7) eat a high fiber meal like a vegetable curry?
Other: Dark, cold, quiet bedroom. Sleep study. Vicious dietary improvement. If all else fails: move and change jobs. If that doesn't fix it, try one of those drug induced purges with ibogaine.
Recognizable. I try to increase how much of my wage I save, in case I can’t continue working for ever.
My best answer for my own sake is just burnout, exasperated by some underlying depression. I can have good periods when job stress is low and I make good life choices. Incidentally, I had a blood test show borreliosis randomly 10 years ago, but doubt that’s relevant.
If your job is impacting your health, literally do something else. I know it's seemingly flippant but it's real advice.
I left a very high stress job for one that pays less, but has zero stress. Within 1 week I had to come off the blood pressure medicine. Within 2 months I started weaning off the anxiety meds.
It's like I've been looking at life through frosted glass, and it's suddenly clear. I wish I had done this sooner.
The loss of income isn't the end of the world. You can make it work. I did.
Thanks for the advice. I don’t feel like my job is that bad, honestly. I’m an IT consultant and there’s always just a little too much that needs to be done at my current client. I’m extremely motivated for the task though, and end up overextending time and time again. There are definitely aspects of the project that are stress inducing (big org, lots of meetings, lots of different consulting agencies).
You do get more sensitive to bad lifestyle habits in your 30s, but none of those are normal symptoms attributable to "aging" in your 30s. Really weird when people around this age act like they're just on death's doorstop.
That feels very defeatist, if life only gets worse then I might as well just end it. I prefer to think it's something unexplained and it just shows up more in older people because more things have happened to them so they're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is.
The poor sleep might be the root cause. I’ve got some of the symptoms that you describe but I’ve always had nasal issues that I think are wrecking my sleep through snoring. That’s my theory anyway so I’m pursuing that.
Yes, thank you! I am a subscriber to his channel, and I was surprised to watch his video. I have mixed feelings about the treatment. It is one of these "very expensive fix everyone is looking for, but results aren't guaranteed" things that makes me suspect of the whole thing. I've read several reports of people who had no results, and very few from people with positive results.
Sometimes a treatment, perhaps especially one like that, you have to believe in. And I don't take paracetamol because every time I've taken it I don't really feel any better, than had I not taken any at all. So if the treatment needs me to believe in it, that THIS TIME, once and for all, that it's finally going to cure me, because I've ponied up 30,000 EUR, so it HAS to work, then I'm probably not the right candidate. Once I went to a spiritual healer who asked me to leave half way through because I wasn't playing along.
I'm somewhat hesitant to post this publicly but I'm empathetic with where you are at and maybe it will be helpful to you or others so here goes:
I’ve been chasing a similar symptom cluster: low-grade depression, anhedonia, "burnout", fatigue, poor sleep, stress intolerance, low motivation / executive function, loss of positive emotions including the ability to be "attracted" to things or feel affectionate, and low libido.
For years, I thought this was a mental/emotional health issue. But nothing I did seemed to impact it, including less stress and a sabbatical, and I finally started to wonder if it was more physiological than psychological. My symptoms were psychological (ish) but I started to wonder if there were underlying biological causes that amounted to more than "not handling life well, not trying hard enough, etc."
I eventually ran into a functional medicine practitioner who, for the first time ever, described a process that can happen in our bodies that fit my symptoms to a T. I don't have a good summary of it to post but, essentially, inflammation can cause the brain to become chronically fatigued (in the sense of not having the energy it needs), which can lead to hormone problems, which then recursively cause additional brain health issues. I'm doing a poor job describing it but, when it's described to me, it fit what I experienced almost exactly.
FWIW, it was incredibly liberating when I finally had a reason to think maybe this whole thing was something happening to me instead of being caused by me. A hormone specialist described it as: complex hormonal dysfunction secondary to chronic stress and inflammation.
A functional medicine workup found a mix of hormone-utilization issues, thyroid conversion issues, low-ish usable testosterone despite decent total testosterone, low iron availability despite elevated ferritin, and some inflammation markers. I also have a couple genetic variants that may matter in this context: MTHFR and APOE 3/4.
Mold/mycotoxin exposure is another possible contributor in my case. I’m not convinced it’s “the answer,” but testing suggested past exposure and possible ochratoxin involvement, so it’s now part of the differential rather than something I’d dismiss.
Some non-standard labs that they have started looking at in my case: free+total T, SHBG, estradiol, pregnenolone/DHEA-S, free T3/free T4/reverse T3, iron/TIBC/ferritin/transferrin saturation, B12/folate/homocysteine, inflammatory markers, and mold/home-environment testing if the history fits.
At a recent visit with my provider, she mentioned that just the low free T, thyroid, and iron would be enough to knock someone down and feel terrible. And I have other things going on besides that.
I work with Ashley Giles from Origin Medical in Georgetown, Indiana (USA). I believe she can work with people who aren't local. What I appreciate most about Ashley is that she's willing to look at the whole pattern — endocrine, nutrition, inflammation, sleep, stress physiology, and environment together. And she really knows her stuff.
I'm about 10 months into treatment and expect this to be a 2-3 year process to get back to normal. I'm better than I was...I'm at least mostly functional now on a day to day basis. But a lot of my symptoms are still present in one degree or another. So, no magic bullets here.
Did you mean hyperthermia? This whole thread sent me down a rabbit hole (I have several close folks afflicted by Lyme) and while at first glance hyperthermia might seem woo-ish, there is real research being done, particularly on hyperthermia + antibiotics. The chief drawbacks are cost (I'm seeing $30k and up and not usually covered) and strain on the body. Friedrich Douwes pioneered much of this.
Douwes F. Komplextherapie der chronischen Borreliose (Lyme disease) - Ein neuer Therapieansatz: die Antibiotika augmentierte Thermoeradikation (AAT). OM & Ernährung. 2018;164:F10.
Douwes F. The successful antibiotic augmented thermal eradication of chronic lyme disease. Paper presented at the 32nd ESHO Meeting, Berlin, 16–19 May 2018.
After serious issues piling up for a very long time and an equally long journey to get to the root what was bothering me medically I presented to Dr. Douwes a couple years back in his clinic in Bad Aibling.
The experience was a bit frightening, to say the least. Their methodology to get a diagnosis was basically just examining my medical history followed by a dark field microscopy (i.e. visually checking a blood sample for spirochetes). After that I was diagnosed with late stage lyme and offered two options: a very handwritten prescription (pencil on notepad, w/o doctors signature, not rubberstamped, looking very shady) for herbal ingredients (basically artemisia annua leaves and some roots to brew a tea) - without any tips where to get that from and not really exact dosages given. Option 2: ambulant Hyperthermia + painkillers (to supress pain from the hyperthermia) + a combination of antibiotics (parenteral) for 2 or 3 weeks. Extracting a fortune (20k ballpark)
They also offer hyperthermia treatment for cancer and long covid & me/cfs if I am not mistaken.
The visit really had a smell to it and left me with unease. Look up the group's company network in the Handelsregister and decide for yourself, I got some PE vibes from it. I chickened out and went to someone else, luckily Germany has quite a few private MDs specializing on lyme and other tickborne diseases. What I got in general: most treatments are not evidence based and theres lots of snake oil around, some of the patients are very desparate, me included back then. PS: I made good progress, but am still on meds since. Apparently there's no eradication for late stage lyme. Maybe there are lucky cases, but the slow growth of borrelia spirochetes makes treatment very tedious, much like or even worse than with tuberculosis. I am sure that their treatment actually does help, but it is kind of a hail mary (combo of broad spectrum antibiotics is basically applying blunt force).
I've had a reckoning with my caffeine metabolism recently. I fall asleep very easily, like head hits pillow and I'm zonked within a minute. But I often wake up at 3 or 4am and am unable to go back asleep.
What I've learned is that caffeine metabolism goes down with age and sleep gets lighter with age. Even if you can fall asleep easily, the residual caffeine in the middle of the night is enough to wake you out of light sleep. I made a tool to convince myself to cut back: http://jitterdone.com
This was my immediate thought. Very small amounts of daily coffee have caused me significant problems with fatigue etc... Takes 1-2 months to get back to feeling good. Strongly urge anyone who feels tired, lack of focus etc to stop all caffeine intake. As with any drug, you're just chasing the initial boost, and really only getting yourself back to baseline.
Yeah. I asked because I had my own heap of problems with caffeine and even with decaf coffee. This thing is a pile of random bioactive substances that are mostly fine for most people until they aren't.
What you could get away with in your twenties doesn't go unpunished once you're around thirty. And what you could get away with around thirty doesn't go unpunished once you're around forty.
yeah, my caffeine issues started around 30. Im nearly 40 and other problems are, indeed, presenting themselves. Young people should, but never will, heed the warnings of old people.
I resent comments like this. It’s captain obvious and nothing to do with the actual point being made by the author, and subtly justifies the author ending up in a disadvantaged position.
“if you didn’t want your computer data to disappear, you should have used paper” gee, I didn’t think of that, I’m glad I had someone to point it out, said no-one, ever.
So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.
To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.
I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.
I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.
And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it.
I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.
In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:
> To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.
How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).
To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).
> I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself
Don't worry. You're in good company.
> How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie?
It's impossible for me to say that you are conscious. I only watch my own movie. In that movie, others appear to be watching their own movies. Their movies exist only as content in my movie. I cannot say for certain whether or not there really are conscious experiences like mine occurring. All I can say is that I am being given the impression that there are.
> Do I give rise to the world, or do you?
I do. Or at least, something impresses the world upon me. You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me, and, disappointingly (for me at least), there's no way to confirm it through this movie that I am watching. I am left having to "make up my own mind" about whether or not I choose to believe you are anything but a p-zombie extra, in what is (as far as I can see of the conscious spectrum I am able to perceive), a single screen, single reel movie. But I'm just guessing, hoping, wishing, because that's all I can do from this limited vantage point.
> Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way?
It's a cute idea. Design by committee. Books/predictions of the future seem to have this annoying property of becoming true, lending to this idea. Who knows?
> And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us?
What else am I supposed to do? If you have unimaginable wealth, infinite time and the ability to conjure anything into existence, exactly what are you to do? Perhaps you might dream up what having the opposite of your existence might be, and set about convincing yourself that you are a time-ful, perishable human-being bound by physics and inevitably limited by the finite energy available in the universe, stumped by entropy. Perhaps you even role play as the puppets on the ends of your fingers, while convincing yourself that they're just as real as you are, so you can feel what it's like not to be the majesty of your own lonely empire. What else am I supposed to do, than to go along with it? If we destroy the illusion, we're back to square one - and then what?
Lots of comments here and lots of opinions! the Consciousness conference has been discussing this since 1994, will be in San Diego this October. It is where the actual Hard problem was first proposed by Chalmers, Rovelli was at the conference a few years ago too. https://cs2026.org/ It's a great conference, with lots of interesting people and conversations. Highly recommend
I see, thanks for your reply. I'm still with physicalism so far, but I see your point. It gave me more room for thought.
> You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me.
I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized *YOU* must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon *ME*. Now I'm fine again. Thanks to myself for giving rise to such an interesting p-zombie like you.
> I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized YOU must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon ME.
Exactly. Now that we’re both aligned on having unreconcilable claims to being the one-true-consciousness, we can write competing holy books and argue about promised lands, and all that good jazz.
You see, once we begin playing the game, a whole host of worldly distractions crop up to occupy us. Wait until I show you this game called “having a career”, or “chasing wealth”. Spoiler alert - your body dies at the end, and you get to keep none of it, but it was fun, or at least it was supposed to be.
If I mess with the voltages of a CPU board, it can mess up the software. Do you conclude from that that software is electrical? You should conclude that it runs on an electrical substrate, but not that the software itself is electrical.
Yea, I was asking a SOTM about copy.fail, and it was freaking out, and tried to indirectly call me a hacker a few times. Weirdly, all I did was slightly reword requests, and they all went through. Granted, I am not actually a hacker, so I guess my follow-up questions made it realize that I am asking for educational purposes, but it was definitely the most accusatory, curt, and outright abrasive I have seen an LLM behave.
The biggest problem isn't the token slot machine refusing to give you the answer, but the fact that multiple refusals can end up flagging your account and getting banned from the service.
While contributing to a friend's Remembrance research, I was pretty surprised when Gemini Pro suddenly refused to answer any more questions about photos from the Höcker Album after it spotted an "SS" insignia.
Ironically, the justification it gave was that it wasn't its fault because it was just following orders. I hope this hasn't landed me on Google's list of undesirables.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise to me that these companies are struggling to reliably fix issues with software which relies on a central component which is nondeterministic.
I've noticed a lack of product cohesion in general and it does make me wonder if it's a result of dogfooding AI.
For example, chat, cowork and code have no overlap - projects created in one of the modes are not available in another and can't be shared.
As another example, using Claude with one of their hosted environments has a nice integration with GitHub on the desktop, but some of it also requires 'gh' to be installed and authenticated, and you don't have that available without configuring a workaround and sharing a PAT. It doesn't use the GH connector for everything. Switch to remote-control (ideal on Windows/WSL) or local and that deep integration is gone and you're back to prompting the model to commit and push and the UI isn't integrated the same.
Cowork will absolutely blow through your quota for one task but chat and code will give you much more breathing room.
Projects in Code are based on repos whereas in Chat and Cowork they are stateful entities. You can't attach a repo to a cowork project or attach external knowledge to a code project (and maybe you want that because creating a design doc or doing research isn't a programming task or whatever)
Use Claude Code on the CLI and you can't provide inline comments on a plan. There is a technical limitation there I suppose.
The desktop app is very nice and evolving but it's not a single coherent offering even within the same mode of operation. And I think that's something that is easy to do if you're getting AI to build shit in a silo.
Even a distributed or silo'd org chart has some affinity across the hierarchy in order to keep things in overall alignment. You wouldn't expect to use a product suite that is, holistically, not fully compatible with its own ecosystem, even down to not having a single concept of a project. Or requiring a CLI tool in an ephemeral environment that you cannot easily configure.
That's clearly a trade-off that Anthropic have accepted but it makes for a disappointing UX. Which is a shame because Claude Desktop could easily become a hands-off IDE if it nailed things down better.
And the multiple concepts of subscriptions for products, and the idea of MCPs/connectors that arent shared between the different modalities, and the idea of api key vs subscription, and two different inbound websites (claude.ai and claude.com)...
Agreed. I use the Claude desktop app almost every day, and have used Code and Cowork since their respective launch dates, and even I still have a really hard time grokking what each is for. It becomes even more confusing when you enable the (Anthropic-provided) filesystem extension for Chat mode. Anthropic really needs to streamline this.
YES! I thought it was just me being a bit scattered. But uploading an important file to a project only to have it not there because....<garbled answer from Claude> is distracting to say the least. I don't know what I've enabled offhand but I hate having to stop and try to work out why Claude can't reference a file uploaded to the project in a chat within that project. I think they should pause on all the wild aspirations and devote some time to fundamentals.
Add to that that notion mcp works for the chat but not code. now my workflow has docs I comment with others in notion, while the actual work and source of truth is in GitHub.
Need to fall back to codex to keep things in sync, but that's a great opportunity to also make sure I can compare how things run - and it catches a lot of issues with Claude Code and is great at fixing small/medium issues.
Absolutely its dogfooding AI and vibing huge features on the house of cards. Its a fucking mess, and the product design is simultaneously confusing and infuriating. But the product is useful and Im more productive with it than without it now.
Well, the fun part is that the algorithms themselves are deterministic. They are just so afraid of model distillation that they force some randomness on top (and now hide thinking). Arguably for coding, you'd probably want temperature=0, and any variation would be dependent on token input alone.
Meh. Temp 0 means throwing away huge swathes of the information painstakingly acquired through training for minimal benefit, if any. Nondeterminism is a red-herring, the model is still going to be an inscrutable black box with mostly unknowable nonlinear transition boundaries w.r.t. inputs, even if you make it perfectly repeatable. It doesn't protect you from tiny changes in inputs having large changes in outputs _with no explanation as to why_. And in the process you've made the model significantly stupider.
As for distillation... sampling from the temp 1 distribution makes it easier.
Bringing up computational determinism in the early days of AI was absolutely career-limiting. But now, even if the model itself is deterministic for batch size 1, load balancing for MOE routing can make things non-deterministic any larger batch size. Good luck with that guys!
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Eml: luke at lukebarton co uk
Product engineer. Coming out of some time off. Open to principal/staff/well-compensated roles. I do my best work in fluid, fuzzy, real-world problem spaces, where things need to be figured out, where creativity and adaptability are valuable traits. System design. XP/DDD. Coaching & Mentoring. Available immediately.
The play was to use AI as an opportunity to quietly insert adverts into a platform full of paying users.
The moment your company starts playing a pauper and enshitificating the products I already pay for, is the moment I stop giving you any money at all. Try it. I’m not paying you money so you can try to make more money from me. Either add value and convince me to pay more, or fuck off.
I don’t mind looking stupid. It’s actually an important part of my identity - I lay my humanity bare. I am of flesh after all.
I’m starting to suspect that it’s making it more difficult for me to land a job though. I don’t know. There’s something about it. It’s almost as if businesses aren’t hiring human beings, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Also, Operation Flashpoint was the reason I learnt to code and ended up having a career a software engineer, so I owe BI for that. My first real foray into programming was writing scripts, specifically to trigger unguided bomb releases from planes onto moving ground targets using some shoddy trigonometry as a 14 year old kid.
I have a lot of fond memories of that game. I still remember being awed by some of the mods created by this guy: https://kegetys.fi His name has lived rent free in my head for 2 decades now. Legend.
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