I feel you, I'm in a similar boat.

As a kid I excelled in school but was often bored, so much so that I eventually refused to go. My parents were worried and took me to a child psych, who determined I was gifted.

Now as an adult, I'm a mess. I'm constantly "painfully bored", unsure how to relax, unable to do things I enjoy because, unless I'm extremely interested/hyperfocused, I can't really enjoy them. My psych tells me to keep a list of the things I enjoy doing to help fill out my free time but it doesn't help because, in those moments of painful boredom, I can't actually force myself to do anything on the list. The only thing I want to do is work on whatever project I'm currently obsessed with, and if there's no such project, I just feel painfully bored. And I never actually finish any of these projects; I'm constantly jumping from one obsession to the next.

Work is similarly a mess. I'm fortunate enough to have a full time job that aligns with my personal interests/hobbies. But what this means for me is, I'm hyperfocused when the work is interesting, but completely unable to focus when it's not. There were times I would pretend to be working but I'd actually be out wandering the city, doing only a couple hours of real work each day, and there were times I'd pull something like 80 hour weeks where all I could think about was the work. I manage to hide the mess pretty well from my company though; they think I'm great, gave me a huge bonus, promoted me to senior, etc.

I'm on burnout leave now though, so I've got a fair bit of time off to sort myself out. And after jumping from psych to psych for a while, I found one who sent me off to get a formal ADHD assessment. It was my sister actually who kick-started the process for me, as she recently got diagnosed with it (as an adult) and suggested that I look into it for myself. I'll get the results next week, so let's see.

Thanks! Sounds doable but definitely frustrating... I'm surprised this is the state of things at the moment. I mean, when you buy a CPU, you don't really think about whether your choice limits you in some ways. But with a GPU, it's a big consideration.

Damn, that's a shame. I see he wrote about the messy state of the AMD drivers here, with a link out to the rant video I presume you're referring to. I'll take a look later, thanks.

Cheers for the reply. I'm doing a masters in machine intelligence, so I work with various kinds of ML models. And yeah it's a hobby too, I like playing around with LLMs and seeing what I can do with them.