7 ms·

Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming

139 points by kf 17y ago

mooneater 17y ago
Everyone can use a little extra perspective now and then =)
cloudhead 17y ago
That's just remarkable. I've always wondered if one could get objective information from a psychedelic experience, but most of the time, the stuff you bring back makes no sense once sober. I guess the dosage is very important, you want just enough to get enhanced senses...
- daeken 17y ago
  The biggest problem with using LSD in such a way is that the dosage is incredibly small even when full-blown tripping. It'd be very, very difficult to get a small, measured amount from anything you get off the street. I guess you could do it from a sugarcube, but good luck. I guess it's not all bad, though; even if you don't hit your goal, you'll get a good time out of it.
  - lsd25 17y ago
    (Posting anonymously.) LSD is not the kind of drug you take to have a good time. It is possible that a trip will be a lot of fun, but it is also possible that the trip will put you in a state of mind that will take you weeks or even months of very hard work to recover from. I speak from personal experience.
    - brl 17y ago
      If you could go back and change your decision, would you decide not to use LSD?
      - lsd25 17y ago
        If I had to do all over again, I would take LSD again when I did. (I went on about 4 or 5 trips over the span of a month or two.) It caused a very desirable change in my outlook on life and for a time made me more open to new experiences. But it probably also caused me to do things that alienated my girlfriend of the time, causing that relationship to end. And if I had to perform somehow, e.g., find a new apartment or sue someone to protect my rights, in the months after the LSD, I might not have been able to perform adequately. I was 32 when I dropped. That was over 15 years ago, and I have never seriously contemplated dropping again because I judge the temporary reduction in functionality not to be worth it because subsequent trips will probably not be as valuable or as transformative as the first trips were.
      - robak 17y ago
        Yes. Pain and suffering not worth the gain.
  - psygnisfive 17y ago
    While it's true that the potency of LSD is ridiculous (normal doses being a thousandth of what other drugs usually require), the effects are not limited to LSD. Mescaline and other psychedelics produce similar improvements in cognition, and have higher dosage requirements. Mescaline, for instance, requires around 100mg for a light dose, while for LSD it's over 1000 times smaller at about 20-70ug. So if you're concerned that LSD is just too easy to fuck up, in terms of dosage, try Mescaline instead.
  - cloudhead 17y ago
    You could use mushrooms, which is much easier to dose and does pretty much the same thing.
DenisM 17y ago
I achieve exceptional mental clarity by getting my sleep under control. I know I got everythign right if I wake up the exact moment the light from sunrise hits my window and feel fully rested. For the next 2-3 hours I can absorb twice the usual complexity with little effort.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I feel the same way. If I get the exact right combination of sleep, food, caffeine, and interesting work, my productivity is easily 100x that of a normal day. I wish every day was like that, but the reality of the world (deadlines, distractions like HN) means that it only happens a few times a month.
- JabavuAdams 17y ago
  Yes! Getting enough sleep is the #1 productivity enhancer, IMHO. All of the other tips and techniques are smaller terms in the equation. The insidious thing about sleep deprivation is that people can be measurably more stupid, yet feel like "oh I'm just a bit tired -- I'll have a coffee".
  - DenisM 17y ago
    My performance actually deteriorates if I stay in bed past certain threshold (>9 hours). I think it's not the quantity, it's a whole host of things that need to be finely tuned.
gruseom 17y ago
Fascinating. I notice that he is associated with "trance research", of a sort that's hard to evaluate from a couple minutes' googling. Trance and psychedelics do partly resemble each other. I studied trance pretty intensively with a student of Milton Erickson's. Part of what drew me to it was a sense that it might be connected in interesting ways to the creative process. As it turned out, it was. But I don't use it very often.
jrockway 17y ago
I'm sure glad that my government will put me in jail for trying to replicate these results. I feel safe now.
- tdavis 17y ago
  To be fair to the government, unless you're selling or holding a significant amount, you wouldn't go to jail. You most certainly wouldn't be put in jail for taking a few micrograms of LSD in the comfort of your own home (or office).
  - PhilChristensen 17y ago
    Unless of course, you had said LSD on some kind of substrate, such as blotter paper, or god help you, a sugar cube. Then the 'fair government' would weigh the entire product, and charge you for posessing that much LSD, which would weigh enough to charge you for distribution, thus sending you swiftly to the nearest PMITA Prison.
    - tdavis 17y ago
      Fair enough. Though I suppose my point was, recreational drug use is only illegal if you're caught, and it is incredibly difficult to be caught. The government doesn't really care if individuals do drugs, they just get pissed when people distribute them without giving the government a cut.
      - dmoney 17y ago
        How should you give the government a cut? Report the income on your tax return?
        brl 17y ago
        http://www.ksrevenue.org/faqs-abcdrugtax.htm http://www.ksrevenue.org/faqs-abcdrugtax.htm No personal checks are allowed!
psygnisfive 17y ago
There's been research that has shown quite reliably that sub-recreational doses of LSD and Mescaline (not combined) can induce incredibly vivid visions that can help a person visualize a problem they've been trying to solve, and in the end, make the problem solving easier if not trivial. The experiment was done to see if the effects of psychedelics were merely "right-brained" and creativity enhancing, or if they could improve harder more technical cognition as well. It turns out they do improve technical cognition quite drastically.
zeugma 17y ago
He did reach the Ballmer Peak : http://xkcd.com/323/ http://xkcd.com/323/ Just s/alcohol/LSD/g (may be the peak is higher, then)
csbartus 17y ago
Going further, and to know why LSD-25 helps sorting out complex things I recommend John C. Lilly's (http://www.johnclilly.com/ http://www.johnclilly.com/) book "Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer" (http://futurehi.net/docs/Metaprogramming.html http://futurehi.net/docs/Metaprogramming.html) The first pharagraph sounds like: "All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less. "
- nailer 17y ago
  Readers may also be interested in this more in-depth article about LSD being used to solve engineering problems encountered by Kevin Herbert, a Cisco engineer: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015 & http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_21-23.pdf http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_21-23.pdf
- gruseom 17y ago
  Ooh, John Lilly. The original dolphin-researching, consciousness-exploring, LSD-experimenting, sensory-isolation-tank-inventing counterculture hero. HN goes DFH! In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits. Edit: interesting use of the term "metaprogramming" in 1972, no? And typical Lilly: extremely plugged-in metaphorically and just as hard to pin down.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    "metaprogramming" in that sense refers to self reprogramming itself, usually with the assumption that a lot of personality is imprinted, rather than just behavioral. A firmware change, so to speak. Robert Anton Wilson's _Promethius Rising_ talks about that stuff, but doesn't run screaming at full speed towards occult mumbo jumbo the way many "consciousness" books do. Also: Isolation tanks are neat. (Just don't leave your cell phone on vibrate on the chair next to the tank... :) )
nikblack 17y ago
It is a shame that so many of these drugs are illegal and have been demonized, because they do have benefits for people at smaller doses as discussed. Some of the greatest work and innovation in the world has been created by people under the influence of one substance or another (from Picasso and his wormwood/absinthe to Steve Jobs and LSD). In my own experience, I have used small doses of either amphetamines (both prescription and not), cocaine or various other narcotics (usually just dropped into a coffee) to take me through some big, demanding and complex projects. I know that this is not the 'correct' thing to say, but with self-control and knowledge about dosage, I can't think of a single downside to them being used in such a manner. I can imagine that daily small doses would add up to a dependency which has its own ill effects. Obligatory Bill Hicks quote: “See I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do, and if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your cds and burn 'em. 'cause you know the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years.... rrrrrrrrreal fkin high on drugs.”
- ComputerGuru 17y ago
  Don't understand this to be showing off or upvote as karma baiting, but I really need to say this: I've written some marvelous code and completed gargantuan projects on my lonesome, battling thousands of lines of assembly and debugging hardware circuits and stuff.... and never used. It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative. You can be creative and withstand by just willing it - it's just not the easiest way out. When you take drugs you're either lying to yourself and pretending there is no harm in fucking up your brain - losing sense of priorities, time, yourself, and the world around you - or afraid of how it would feel without them. Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience. Staying up for 65 hours straight? Been there, done that with nothing more than coffee and cold showers. Write some brilliant hacks that do something genius in little lines of code? Check. Debug memory leaks and crashes across over 100k lines of C code going to and from different dynamically-linked libraries? Check. Writing your own OS Kernel? Check. I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
  - 17y ago
kragen 17y ago
This is a fantastically interesting post. Too bad it will probably be killed because it's about illegal drugs.
AndrewO 17y ago
I'm not one to poo-poo a good hacker story from the 70s nor something that challenges the US government's woeful drug policy. But I couldn't help thinking: how many complicated computer problems have been solved _without_ the use of psychedelics? [Insert obligatory joke about Linux, BSD, Perl, Lisp, C, etc here...] Admittedly I've never written a compiler in 360 assembly on or off LSD, but it seems like the better thing to do would be to take a step back and think through the design better (that would have been my first reaction at least...). Put another way: I'd say LSD is code smell. :)
- sjf 17y ago
  That's exactly what he was doing. The codebase had reached the point where it was overly complex, and he wanted to simplify the design. If look at his conclusion he only refers to making design decisions, not writing new code or designing algorithms.
fluffster 17y ago
Reminds me of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
- andreyf 17y ago
  In the sense that those who legalize marijuana should drop a little acid to help them along? ;)
tezza 17y ago
Before anyone rushes to try LSD[1], please do your research. Please speak to people who have used it (like me) and can assess how you personally will handle it. I will say LSD is a broad-sword drug and should be used with care. It is not playful. It will last as long as the dose, which may be longer than you had planned to trip. Generally only sleep will stop you tripping, and if you are tripping hard, you will not e able to sleep. One does not 'sober up' like beer. A lot of the effects depend on your personality, id, self confidence and any bad experiences you may have locked inside. Your biological reaction may be the lesast of concerns. LSD takes you on a journey, and you may not come the same person. It may give you a bad-trip, where your worst fears and memories manifest x 1000. I have seen many stable friends flip out, even when having the same dose in the same environment. Always have supportive straight friends who understand each time you are experimenting. Bear in mind you may be up for 36 hours as a result and they need to lead their normal lives. ------------ [1] Or increase your dose significantly
- petercooper 17y ago
  What about if you take a low non-psychotic dose? I've read that if you take an extremely low dose it's non-psychotic but still has a number of positive cognitive effects. So, is this possible and, if so, is it true?
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    Back when it was permissible to do science on the subject, there were some studies: http://leda.lycaeum.org/?ID=8811 http://leda.lycaeum.org/?ID=8811
  - tezza 17y ago
    LSD starts as a liquid. Eating a drop or two is sometimes is how you take it. But frequently that liquid is dropped with an eye-dropper onto cardboard. This cardboard is perforated and torn into tiny squares. Roughly one drop per square [also called a Tab of Acid ]. But there you go. 1. How concentrated is the liquid acid? 2. How much was put onto the little square? 3. How long ago was this all made? 4. How accurate was the (illegal) chemist who made the LSD in the first place? I will say that one TINY drop of acid is enough to make you trip for 24 hours. And on the square of cardboard the LSD is not necessarily evenly distributed, so a corner of the square can be where 90% of the active ingredient is. The effects vary wildly: Some LSD is quite visual, some has almost no visuals but plenty of mind-messing. All of these factors combine to mean it is EXTREMELY difficult for anyone to estimate what a low dose is. Especially someone experimenting for the first few times. Please research carefully, and if you still decide to experiment, ensure you are in a safe environment with understanding people. ------- I've read that if you take an extremely low dose it's non-psychotic but still has a number of positive cognitive effects Please read my comment item?id=654676 carefully. Non-psychotic depends a lot on who-you-are: not the dose. I don't know you, and further I don't know anyone else reading this in the future. Depending on the type of person you are, you could flip out badly on any dose. LSD can unleash things inside you. People who you love... you may see them as snakes/undead. You may see your face melt off. More importantly you will feel horrified when this happens. It takes a lot of training to overcome the horror (if it happens). I am not going to give the green light for experimentation with something that has such power when the downsides are so grim. All my friends who flipped out were sold on the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds version of events. But the variability of the ingredients, their situation and their personality sometimes made it awful.
gamache 17y ago
Another interesting data point: Kary Mullis, the inventor of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR, aka DNA amplification), credits LSD with helping him to make his discovery -- and thanked Albert Hofmann, LSD's inventor, personally. LSD is a tool, not a toy. Bandsaws are fun too, but people lose fingers.
lispmeister 17y ago
In 1987 Peter Molzberger did a series of interesting experiments combining programming with MDMA and NLP at the University of the Armed Forces in Munich (Universitaet der Bundeswehr).
Zarathu 17y ago
I tried to code on shrooms once. I ended up writing a C++ program that just made the internal speaker beep in an infinite loop, and tried to compile it with a C compiler. I started laughing hysterically and I became quite scared that the C compiler was going to get angry with me, so I went outside and stayed away from my computer in fear.
revenant 17y ago
Using LSD to become a better programmer seems like a terrible idea. Better to just get adequate sleep, take a break, and meditate. If the insights on acid are valuable, it'd still be hard to code right then, and the trip is going to last 12 hours. I'm pretty sure that taking 12 hours to relax, sleep, meditate, will have similar effects on one's ability to step back and see the bigger picture. I've done a fair number of drugs (LSD, shrooms, salvia, kratom, many more) and had some very positive experiences, but also some negative ones. My observation is that the drugs are best used for purposes that are meditative (alone, in the woods, on a beautiful day)-- LSD is definitely not a party drug. Spending 6 hours meditating in the woods is going to lead to intense realizations and experiences if you're even an intermediate-level meditator and reasonably disciplined, so the drugs aren't even necessary (they can make the process easier, but also more volatile). The major difference, when drugs are involved, is that there's no off-switch. I wouldn't uniformly disparage psychedelic drugs. They have their place, and are valuable in the right context. However, I think they are very overrated because most of what they provide can be accomplished in other ways, and they're also quite risky.

139 points by kf 17y ago

Everyone can use a little extra perspective now and then =)

That's just remarkable. I've always wondered if one could get objective information from a psychedelic experience, but most of the time, the stuff you bring back makes no sense once sober. I guess the dosage is very important, you want just enough to get enhanced senses...

daeken 17y ago
The biggest problem with using LSD in such a way is that the dosage is incredibly small even when full-blown tripping. It'd be very, very difficult to get a small, measured amount from anything you get off the street. I guess you could do it from a sugarcube, but good luck. I guess it's not all bad, though; even if you don't hit your goal, you'll get a good time out of it.
- lsd25 17y ago
  (Posting anonymously.) LSD is not the kind of drug you take to have a good time. It is possible that a trip will be a lot of fun, but it is also possible that the trip will put you in a state of mind that will take you weeks or even months of very hard work to recover from. I speak from personal experience.
  - brl 17y ago
    If you could go back and change your decision, would you decide not to use LSD?
    - lsd25 17y ago
      If I had to do all over again, I would take LSD again when I did. (I went on about 4 or 5 trips over the span of a month or two.) It caused a very desirable change in my outlook on life and for a time made me more open to new experiences. But it probably also caused me to do things that alienated my girlfriend of the time, causing that relationship to end. And if I had to perform somehow, e.g., find a new apartment or sue someone to protect my rights, in the months after the LSD, I might not have been able to perform adequately. I was 32 when I dropped. That was over 15 years ago, and I have never seriously contemplated dropping again because I judge the temporary reduction in functionality not to be worth it because subsequent trips will probably not be as valuable or as transformative as the first trips were.
    - robak 17y ago
      Yes. Pain and suffering not worth the gain.
- psygnisfive 17y ago
  While it's true that the potency of LSD is ridiculous (normal doses being a thousandth of what other drugs usually require), the effects are not limited to LSD. Mescaline and other psychedelics produce similar improvements in cognition, and have higher dosage requirements. Mescaline, for instance, requires around 100mg for a light dose, while for LSD it's over 1000 times smaller at about 20-70ug. So if you're concerned that LSD is just too easy to fuck up, in terms of dosage, try Mescaline instead.
- cloudhead 17y ago
  You could use mushrooms, which is much easier to dose and does pretty much the same thing.

DenisM 17y ago

I achieve exceptional mental clarity by getting my sleep under control. I know I got everythign right if I wake up the exact moment the light from sunrise hits my window and feel fully rested. For the next 2-3 hours I can absorb twice the usual complexity with little effort.

jrockway 17y ago
I feel the same way. If I get the exact right combination of sleep, food, caffeine, and interesting work, my productivity is easily 100x that of a normal day. I wish every day was like that, but the reality of the world (deadlines, distractions like HN) means that it only happens a few times a month.
JabavuAdams 17y ago
Yes! Getting enough sleep is the #1 productivity enhancer, IMHO. All of the other tips and techniques are smaller terms in the equation. The insidious thing about sleep deprivation is that people can be measurably more stupid, yet feel like "oh I'm just a bit tired -- I'll have a coffee".
- DenisM 17y ago
  My performance actually deteriorates if I stay in bed past certain threshold (>9 hours). I think it's not the quantity, it's a whole host of things that need to be finely tuned.

gruseom 17y ago

Fascinating. I notice that he is associated with "trance research", of a sort that's hard to evaluate from a couple minutes' googling. Trance and psychedelics do partly resemble each other. I studied trance pretty intensively with a student of Milton Erickson's. Part of what drew me to it was a sense that it might be connected in interesting ways to the creative process. As it turned out, it was. But I don't use it very often.

jrockway 17y ago

I'm sure glad that my government will put me in jail for trying to replicate these results. I feel safe now.

tdavis 17y ago
To be fair to the government, unless you're selling or holding a significant amount, you wouldn't go to jail. You most certainly wouldn't be put in jail for taking a few micrograms of LSD in the comfort of your own home (or office).
- PhilChristensen 17y ago
  Unless of course, you had said LSD on some kind of substrate, such as blotter paper, or god help you, a sugar cube. Then the 'fair government' would weigh the entire product, and charge you for posessing that much LSD, which would weigh enough to charge you for distribution, thus sending you swiftly to the nearest PMITA Prison.
  - tdavis 17y ago
    Fair enough. Though I suppose my point was, recreational drug use is only illegal if you're caught, and it is incredibly difficult to be caught. The government doesn't really care if individuals do drugs, they just get pissed when people distribute them without giving the government a cut.
    - dmoney 17y ago
      How should you give the government a cut? Report the income on your tax return?
      - brl 17y ago
        http://www.ksrevenue.org/faqs-abcdrugtax.htm http://www.ksrevenue.org/faqs-abcdrugtax.htm No personal checks are allowed!

psygnisfive 17y ago

There's been research that has shown quite reliably that sub-recreational doses of LSD and Mescaline (not combined) can induce incredibly vivid visions that can help a person visualize a problem they've been trying to solve, and in the end, make the problem solving easier if not trivial. The experiment was done to see if the effects of psychedelics were merely "right-brained" and creativity enhancing, or if they could improve harder more technical cognition as well. It turns out they do improve technical cognition quite drastically.

zeugma 17y ago

He did reach the Ballmer Peak : http://xkcd.com/323/ http://xkcd.com/323/ Just s/alcohol/LSD/g (may be the peak is higher, then)

csbartus 17y ago

Going further, and to know why LSD-25 helps sorting out complex things I recommend John C. Lilly's (http://www.johnclilly.com/ http://www.johnclilly.com/) book "Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer" (http://futurehi.net/docs/Metaprogramming.html http://futurehi.net/docs/Metaprogramming.html) The first pharagraph sounds like: "All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less. "

nailer 17y ago
Readers may also be interested in this more in-depth article about LSD being used to solve engineering problems encountered by Kevin Herbert, a Cisco engineer: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015 & http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_21-23.pdf http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_21-23.pdf
gruseom 17y ago
Ooh, John Lilly. The original dolphin-researching, consciousness-exploring, LSD-experimenting, sensory-isolation-tank-inventing counterculture hero. HN goes DFH! In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits. Edit: interesting use of the term "metaprogramming" in 1972, no? And typical Lilly: extremely plugged-in metaphorically and just as hard to pin down.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  "metaprogramming" in that sense refers to self reprogramming itself, usually with the assumption that a lot of personality is imprinted, rather than just behavioral. A firmware change, so to speak. Robert Anton Wilson's _Promethius Rising_ talks about that stuff, but doesn't run screaming at full speed towards occult mumbo jumbo the way many "consciousness" books do. Also: Isolation tanks are neat. (Just don't leave your cell phone on vibrate on the chair next to the tank... :) )

nikblack 17y ago

It is a shame that so many of these drugs are illegal and have been demonized, because they do have benefits for people at smaller doses as discussed. Some of the greatest work and innovation in the world has been created by people under the influence of one substance or another (from Picasso and his wormwood/absinthe to Steve Jobs and LSD). In my own experience, I have used small doses of either amphetamines (both prescription and not), cocaine or various other narcotics (usually just dropped into a coffee) to take me through some big, demanding and complex projects. I know that this is not the 'correct' thing to say, but with self-control and knowledge about dosage, I can't think of a single downside to them being used in such a manner. I can imagine that daily small doses would add up to a dependency which has its own ill effects. Obligatory Bill Hicks quote: “See I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do, and if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your cds and burn 'em. 'cause you know the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years.... rrrrrrrrreal fkin high on drugs.”

ComputerGuru 17y ago
Don't understand this to be showing off or upvote as karma baiting, but I really need to say this: I've written some marvelous code and completed gargantuan projects on my lonesome, battling thousands of lines of assembly and debugging hardware circuits and stuff.... and never used. It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative. You can be creative and withstand by just willing it - it's just not the easiest way out. When you take drugs you're either lying to yourself and pretending there is no harm in fucking up your brain - losing sense of priorities, time, yourself, and the world around you - or afraid of how it would feel without them. Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience. Staying up for 65 hours straight? Been there, done that with nothing more than coffee and cold showers. Write some brilliant hacks that do something genius in little lines of code? Check. Debug memory leaks and crashes across over 100k lines of C code going to and from different dynamically-linked libraries? Check. Writing your own OS Kernel? Check. I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
- 17y ago

kragen 17y ago

This is a fantastically interesting post. Too bad it will probably be killed because it's about illegal drugs.

AndrewO 17y ago

I'm not one to poo-poo a good hacker story from the 70s nor something that challenges the US government's woeful drug policy. But I couldn't help thinking: how many complicated computer problems have been solved _without_ the use of psychedelics? [Insert obligatory joke about Linux, BSD, Perl, Lisp, C, etc here...] Admittedly I've never written a compiler in 360 assembly on or off LSD, but it seems like the better thing to do would be to take a step back and think through the design better (that would have been my first reaction at least...). Put another way: I'd say LSD is code smell. :)

sjf 17y ago
That's exactly what he was doing. The codebase had reached the point where it was overly complex, and he wanted to simplify the design. If look at his conclusion he only refers to making design decisions, not writing new code or designing algorithms.

fluffster 17y ago

Reminds me of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

andreyf 17y ago
In the sense that those who legalize marijuana should drop a little acid to help them along? ;)

tezza 17y ago

Before anyone rushes to try LSD[1], please do your research. Please speak to people who have used it (like me) and can assess how you personally will handle it. I will say LSD is a broad-sword drug and should be used with care. It is not playful. It will last as long as the dose, which may be longer than you had planned to trip. Generally only sleep will stop you tripping, and if you are tripping hard, you will not e able to sleep. One does not 'sober up' like beer. A lot of the effects depend on your personality, id, self confidence and any bad experiences you may have locked inside. Your biological reaction may be the lesast of concerns. LSD takes you on a journey, and you may not come the same person. It may give you a bad-trip, where your worst fears and memories manifest x 1000. I have seen many stable friends flip out, even when having the same dose in the same environment. Always have supportive straight friends who understand each time you are experimenting. Bear in mind you may be up for 36 hours as a result and they need to lead their normal lives. ------------ [1] Or increase your dose significantly

petercooper 17y ago
What about if you take a low non-psychotic dose? I've read that if you take an extremely low dose it's non-psychotic but still has a number of positive cognitive effects. So, is this possible and, if so, is it true?
- GHFigs 17y ago
  Back when it was permissible to do science on the subject, there were some studies: http://leda.lycaeum.org/?ID=8811 http://leda.lycaeum.org/?ID=8811
- tezza 17y ago
  LSD starts as a liquid. Eating a drop or two is sometimes is how you take it. But frequently that liquid is dropped with an eye-dropper onto cardboard. This cardboard is perforated and torn into tiny squares. Roughly one drop per square [also called a Tab of Acid ]. But there you go. 1. How concentrated is the liquid acid? 2. How much was put onto the little square? 3. How long ago was this all made? 4. How accurate was the (illegal) chemist who made the LSD in the first place? I will say that one TINY drop of acid is enough to make you trip for 24 hours. And on the square of cardboard the LSD is not necessarily evenly distributed, so a corner of the square can be where 90% of the active ingredient is. The effects vary wildly: Some LSD is quite visual, some has almost no visuals but plenty of mind-messing. All of these factors combine to mean it is EXTREMELY difficult for anyone to estimate what a low dose is. Especially someone experimenting for the first few times. Please research carefully, and if you still decide to experiment, ensure you are in a safe environment with understanding people. ------- I've read that if you take an extremely low dose it's non-psychotic but still has a number of positive cognitive effects Please read my comment item?id=654676 carefully. Non-psychotic depends a lot on who-you-are: not the dose. I don't know you, and further I don't know anyone else reading this in the future. Depending on the type of person you are, you could flip out badly on any dose. LSD can unleash things inside you. People who you love... you may see them as snakes/undead. You may see your face melt off. More importantly you will feel horrified when this happens. It takes a lot of training to overcome the horror (if it happens). I am not going to give the green light for experimentation with something that has such power when the downsides are so grim. All my friends who flipped out were sold on the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds version of events. But the variability of the ingredients, their situation and their personality sometimes made it awful.

gamache 17y ago

Another interesting data point: Kary Mullis, the inventor of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR, aka DNA amplification), credits LSD with helping him to make his discovery -- and thanked Albert Hofmann, LSD's inventor, personally. LSD is a tool, not a toy. Bandsaws are fun too, but people lose fingers.

lispmeister 17y ago

In 1987 Peter Molzberger did a series of interesting experiments combining programming with MDMA and NLP at the University of the Armed Forces in Munich (Universitaet der Bundeswehr).

Zarathu 17y ago

I tried to code on shrooms once. I ended up writing a C++ program that just made the internal speaker beep in an infinite loop, and tried to compile it with a C compiler. I started laughing hysterically and I became quite scared that the C compiler was going to get angry with me, so I went outside and stayed away from my computer in fear.

revenant 17y ago

Using LSD to become a better programmer seems like a terrible idea. Better to just get adequate sleep, take a break, and meditate. If the insights on acid are valuable, it'd still be hard to code right then, and the trip is going to last 12 hours. I'm pretty sure that taking 12 hours to relax, sleep, meditate, will have similar effects on one's ability to step back and see the bigger picture. I've done a fair number of drugs (LSD, shrooms, salvia, kratom, many more) and had some very positive experiences, but also some negative ones. My observation is that the drugs are best used for purposes that are meditative (alone, in the woods, on a beautiful day)-- LSD is definitely not a party drug. Spending 6 hours meditating in the woods is going to lead to intense realizations and experiences if you're even an intermediate-level meditator and reasonably disciplined, so the drugs aren't even necessary (they can make the process easier, but also more volatile). The major difference, when drugs are involved, is that there's no off-switch. I wouldn't uniformly disparage psychedelic drugs. They have their place, and are valuable in the right context. However, I think they are very overrated because most of what they provide can be accomplished in other ways, and they're also quite risky.