Flowzone

I was in psychosis for about a month a few years ago. Before it happened, I didn't really understand what psychosis was. I had heard about people having paranoid delusions, and thought something like that could never happen to me, because the delusions all sounded so irrational. I thought I was too much of a critical thinker to ever be susceptible to something like that.

What I experienced was that psychosis isn't a failure of logic or education. I had never believed in a single conspiracy theory (and I don't now), but during that month I believed all sorts of wild conspiratorial things.

What you're describing with cable news sounds more like 1) Cognitive bias, which everyone has, but yes can be improved. And 2) a social phenomenon, where they create this shared reality of not just information, but a social identity, and they keep feeding that beast.

However, when those people hold beliefs that sound irrational to outsiders, that's not necessarily the same thing as psychotic delusions.

When I was in psychosis, it definitely seemed like more of a hardware issue than a software issue if that makes sense. Sometimes software issues can lead to hardware issues though.

Oh shit, this just reminded me that I have a tax deadline this week. I ignored the reminder from a few days ago.

This sounds like it would be right up my alley. I'm not a professional developer of any kind but have done hobby coding on/off for years, and I'm better at excel than the average user.

Currently working for a consulting company with a whole region's health system as the client. They use excel for lots, but it's all very basic stuff. I had one of my team members spend an hour whipping up an excel form for them that auto generates letters to different departments with all the necessary information. Even some basic standard work forms, let alone any sort of automation, would help them a lot as they rely on people to send certain information that gets missed every time. They described our excel sheet as a game changer for them.

Almost no-one has access to their ERP system which is safeguarded by a certain department which is ridiculous. I'm working on a spreadsheet for their HR team to calculate bonuses for certain employees based on a bunch of variables, then auto-generating letters to review and distribute. The data from their ERP software is such a mess, but I'm making up for it by cleaning up their reports in excel. I plan to get access to their ERP system to look at what kind of reporting I can do as HR only gets a report from the system once a month. I want to help them track real time stats for hiring, etc. And curious if I'm able to connect some spreadsheets to their ERP with an API or something (haven't done anything like that before).

Anyways, that professional development for excel book looks interesting. I see the second version is from 2009 and may not even be up to date with 2007 excel. I'm sure most of the concepts would stay the same though, so I'll definitely have to check it out.

I realize excel wouldn't be considered the most professional or robust way to build applications, but since microsoft 365 seems so standard and everyone uses excel, it makes sense to me why so many organizations use it. There seems to be a lot of potential to apply some excel automation in a lot of industries, especially ones that already rely on it as others have mentioned in this thread. I use it as a means to an end when helping clients, but I also see dollar signs as I find ways to build things that can be applied to so many industries.

Haha good question. I...did not. I feel a bit weird about that but I like to overshare, so it will definitely come out. She was talking about how she uses chatgpt to help write abstracts for her engineering PhD papers. Hopefully she won't take issue with it and think I'm not genuine, etc. I think it will be fine though based on our other conversations.

I did actually do something somewhat similar with another girl. She was a nursing student who used chatgpt for statistics homework (as well as to cheat on exams!). After we hung out I sent her a simple chatgpt generated message along the lines of thanks for hanging out, had a great time, should do it again, etc. Then immediately after I sent a message saying that I had asked chatgpt what to say to someone after a date. She seemed to think that was funny...although we never did hang out again (for other reasons).

I'm not in tech like most of y'all. I help out my dad with his consulting company for mostly public agencies. The other day a group we're working with wanted my dad to write some media notes for the unveiling of a project that's been in the works for a while. I gave chatgpt a quick prompt of what the project is, who the audience is, how it's important for a certain demographic and for the community, etc. My dad edited it and sent it over to the leader of this group for his speech the next day. Even though it was edited, I laughed because a chatgpt quote that wasn't edited made it on to the government's website for a pretty big announcement.

Other than that I used it this morning while editing a report we hired a team to create. It was helpful to reword some sentences that weren't very clear before sending it off to the client.

Other than that, I mostly use it to brainstorm ideas/give me related concepts to something I'm working on.

Also, not work related, but last week I used chatgpt to create an opening message for a dating app. I knew the gist of a joke I wanted to say related to this woman's interests, but had chatgpt word it for me. There was a lot more to our conversations, but she did at least respond to the opener and we got the conversation rolling. We actually went on a date this weekend, where I had to rely on my own brain's inefficient language model! It went pretty well though.