Yeah I worked out the "N days without sleep" was mostly rubbish too.
I personally went for 3 days without any sleep in the army as part of a sleep deprivation exercise and it was one of the most brutal things I've ever done, I fell asleep standing up whilst digging a trench, ouch.
So I know when people say "I literally haven't slept in 6 days", they very much don't mean literally, they normally mean they went to bed and had a few hours of sleep per night.
The imitation rule states that it's perfectly fine to run parody accounts as long as you clearly state that it's a parody. There are a ton of accounts named Elon Musk Parody, Biden Parody and similar
Without it every post of a famous person was botted with 100 accounts with identical display name, pfp that tried to promote scams like with YouTube comments
Here's an account that calls itself Michelle Obama (not even Michelle's Obama) after the parody rule went into effect (unlike Elon's Musk). It doesn't label itself a parody. It's still there. https://x.com/TaxpayerEnrique
I replied to your comment about what constitutes imitation and why that rule exists. Neither of us have any idea about the details of that particular ban
presumably downvoted because
a) every time you mention 'free speech' to these techbro nutjobs it's clear they don't have the first idea what it actually means
b) insecure snowflakes, every one of them.
If a model is good enough (I’m not saying this one is that level) I could imagine individuals and businesses paying 20,000 a month. If they’re answering questions at phd level (again, not saying this one is) then for a lot of areas this makes sense
Let me know where you can find people that are individually capable at performing at intern level in every domain of knowledge and text-based activity known to mankind.
"Barely good enough to replace interns" is worth a lot to businesses already.
(On that note, a founder of a SAP competitor and a major IT corporation in Poland is fond of saying that "any specialist can be replaced by a finite number of interns". We'll soon get to see how true that is.)
And probably not one that can guess (often poorly, but at least sometimes quite well, and usually at least very much in the right direction) about everything from nuances of seasoning taco meat to particle physics, and do so in ~an instant.
$200 seems pretty cheap for a 24/7 [remote] intern with these abilities. That kind of money doesn't even buy a month's worth of Big Macs to feed that intern with.
It just seems like a lot (or even absurd) for a subscription to a service on teh Interweb, akin to "$200 for access to a web site? lolwut?"
The problem is that countries who don't want to compete on the marketisation of everything will lose out eventually.
In your example of elderly care, an extended family in Italy may care for their own grandmother (and they'd probably live longer). But the market in Italy isn't so bouyont so the younger generation can't get high paying jobs and move out even if they wanted to.
The high spending and marketisation in the US skews the game for everyone whether they like it or not.
You highlight and try and predict the eventual problems of non-marketisation but you don't seem and try and do the same to the eventual problems of marketisation.
These things are difficult to predict, but already for example we notice some problems with ultra-marketisation in the UK where house prices are now 10-12x average annual salary (it used to average 6-8x for the last two decades), and all the social strife this is causing in society. For example it can eventually lead to mass violent protests against migrants or electing extreme political parties.
Another example is that it has seriously degraded public services, since nurses can barely survive on their salary there is huge shortage of medical employees leading to huge waiting list for medical, even critical, operations.
Not disagreeing with your central points - but average UK salary is now £35k and the average house price is £289k - therefore house prices are currently 8.25 times the average salary.
Regional variations will make this far worse in many popular and coastal towns - but the average is 8.25 times in 2024.
Yes you are right, I think I was referring to London, not UK (although 8.25 ratio for the UK is pretty bad given that it was around 4-5 not that long ago).
Average London salary: £44,000
Average London House: £531,000
There are many other UK-wide statistics pointing out to the jump in housing unaffordability (including rent) over the last 5 years.
Even if house prices is slightly more sane outside metropolitan, one needs to factor in how difficult it is to find jobs outside metropolitan areas, so the quantity of jobs outside expensive metropolitan areas need to be factored in, not just the average salary.
Totally agree - I live in a small (coastal) town where a there are very few jobs outside of service roles - and they are highly seasonal. Average salary for peole that work in the town must be around £20-25k and even cheap houses here are £200k - but often far far higher.
London is wild - I was lucky to buy a flat (£142k) when I was still young (2006) - which would have been 4.7 time my salary (though I bought with my wife). Even then, and with two good salaries, staying on in London with 2 kids wasn't really an option for us.
And as you say, this is replicated up and down the country in other major cities - people are just priced out or trapped in renting. No idea what my kids will do.
If there would be a market for better urban zoning (instead of the mandatory bribing "attempts" of various officials) housing could be built much much more efficiently.
(It's a tragedy that most housing constructions are basically suburb expansions or "terraced properties" or these few sad few storey things. There's no vision at all.)
Interesting that you call this a problem of marketization and not of the governments callous immigration policy and the racism/nationalism of the average brit.
If people can't afford a house then they can easily look to other markets, they just don't want to because they feel entitled to "their county". The largest culprit after mass immigration is the unwarranted fear of bodily harm from living "poor countries"
"If people can't afford a house then they can easily look to other markets, they just don't want to because they feel entitled to "their county"."
Your comment is seriously detached from reality. If your whole life, job etc is located in one area, then moving far away for cheaper housing often isn't easy. It's especially hard for someone with a family.
UK and most other Western countries have high housing prices mostly because houses have become speculative assets for rich investors.
Worth noting it's not a linear relationship - 100k immigrants do not take 50k or whatever homes that would have gone to people already there. That's because immigrants also create building companies and incentives for existing ones to build more houses, and because immigrants disproportionately work in construction and thus provide workforce to build more.
The UK experienced this when Brexit caused many Eastern Europeans to go home, and even more not to come; there's now a big construction workforce shortage and housebuilding is being held up.
Cost of housing is rising in places where there's barely any immigration. (Yes, in places where there are more influx of people with money to a place - migrants from abroad, migrants from the next town, or in some lucky places we even have birth rate above death rate - demand [in the economic sense] will go up even more.)
But most of the price increase (ie. actual demand, meaning potential buyers with enough money) is because over the last few decades houses got much better (triple glazed windows, heat and noise insulation, safety standards increased, HVAC for the whole house not just 1 sad split unit, oh and houses got bigger, so all in all we put in more material, more stuff and so on), and service costs got higher (in part due to the Baumol effect) and availability of credit increased with the price (banks love to give bigger loans when it's backed with a relatively safe liquid asset), so buyers can and do pay these enormous amounts.
And then there's the supply side. "Cities" are horribly mismanaged. Most development happens in suburbs. (Because it's easy.) Productivity of the construction industry is so ridiculously low that people are in complete and utter denial even about the prospect of building things. Housing? Rail? Nuclear power plants? (They have given up, they just want to preserve the status quo apparently.)
It's good that our cities are not burning down regularly anymore, but this forced stasis is still bad. It's good that we don't have monarchs or urban planners who randomly reshape half of our cities every generation without fair compensation.
At the same time it's still very bad that we ourselves don't reshape our cities to adapt to each generation!
About the "nursing shortage" in the UK: The solution is simple, pay fair salaries from the NHS. This would probably required higher taxes to better fund the NHS, but good luck with that in the current UK political environment. Instead, the UK has decided to pay poor nursing salaries and import cheap labour from poor countries. Is this a win? I doubt it.
> The problem is that countries who don't want to compete on the marketisation of everything will lose out eventually.
It goes both ways though, when shit hits the fan if your economy is based on airbnb and food delivery you're fucked.
Look at Russia, half the GDP of Germany but twice the steel production, 4 times the wheat production, 1st producer of fertilizer, huge amount of gas, &c. They had roughly the same military budget as Germany in 2020, yet the german army virtually doesn't exist.
It depends if you think our current mass productivism/consumerism practices are a bubble or the end game of humanity, history seems to prove that it goes in cycle of good and bad times. Poor countries would probably even fare better than most in case of major events, the bigger they are the harder they fall.
Germany is much richer than Russia because their economy adds much more value to raw inputs. Their industry produces much more refined, valuable goods. For example, before the idiotic invasion of Ukraine, Germany imported huge amounts of Russian gas, that was used by industry to created refined, valuable goods.
Also, it is weird that you chose to comment about the German military. First, due to WW2 era agreements, they are severely limited in how they can deploy their military. Japan is similar. Also, Germany spent 50B EUR last year on their military, and that is set to rise by another 10-20B EUR this year with some extra, one-off spending. These are not small numbers!
The problem of marketisation is that it's a shredder for human values. The economic machine doesn't care what the constituent parts are, as long as they move correctly.
My ideal world we would pay a reasonable wage to people to take care of their own children and the eldarly relatives. These are real valuable and nessasry jobs that end up being an economic drag on those that can least afford it. So instead of paying a stranger to help grandma do household chores make meals and drive her to her medical appointment why not pay her granddaughter to take care of her instead taking a second job to pay for the assured living facility? Why have both parent work two job and pay for all day daycare when dad can stay at home clean house and watch the kids? We fear population colapse as younger generation put off or decides not to have kids and yet child care cost so much that they cant aford to have kids instead pay people to be parents and nurture and raise children.
Is there evidence for this? In wealthy, developed European countries, I would bet in the southern ones, they are less likely to live in elderly homes, and vice versa with northern ones. I guess that this trend is more about culture than ability to pay.
Whilst I agree in principle, would any Senior Engineer want to work on such a system that had their personal liability attached? I'd want 10's of millions in annual comp just for the risk
Yes? Plenty of non-software engineers do it daily.
You start off by having a Professional Liability insurance policy, your company will generally pay for it unless you are a consultant/contractor in which case you bring your own policy. Depending on size of operation, your employer may even indemnify you in the employment contract specifically for even negligence lol.
You then do your job correctly. The laws only go after you for liability if you were negligent, i.e. you skipped protocol and policies, you skipped best practices and couldn't justify it, etc. If you weren't negligent and just made an error, great, your insurance covers you. Insurance can also cover negligence too depending on policy, lol
And on top of all-certified components, it also requires the chief engineer to have veto power over the system. If business or client asks for features that are potentially insecure (and that's going to be a lot of features), they have to accept being told 'no'. I'm not seeing that happen easily in the software industry.
This is chicken-and-egg though, surely. If engineers are not personally liable for the garbage they produce, the business can replace the engineer with someone more amenable to their requirements (either because the engineer lacks experience to understand why its bad, or because the engineer has fewer scruples, or anywhere in between) with relative ease.
If all engineers are held personally liable for their code, when a business has faced a documented rejection, they’ll struggle to hire someone else to take on that risk.
You're right, and it would radically change the industry. No more wild experiments, but a very measured and ponderous rate of change. It's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm at the age where I curse aloud when I see yet another framework doing nearly all the same things but in a different way, but it's certainly a big change.
Good, then maybe it'll be a forcing function for companies to stop collecting personal data for their users just because they can, and we can go back to the days when the only metadata associated with an online account is its salted and hashed password.
the german supreme court just recently decided that the involuntary publication of personal data like your phone number through a break-in already constitutes damage that the companies who experienced the break-in are responsible for. there is no need for certified engineers, just make the companies pay for being negligent. putting this on certified engineers only shifts the blame, but in the wrong direction in my opinion, because these problems happen not because the engineers are not certified, but because the company tried to save money by cutting corners.
I'm not sure what you're arguing for then. Continue apace, where I get a letter every week about entire reams of my personal info leaked because some imbecile didn't set a password on their MongoDB instance?
They can always hire another engineer. They only accept it, some times, because they won't find a certified engineer that says "yes", and because they doing it themselves is a crime.
That equates to a huge amount of government intervention on the lives of everybody. And even then, fails way more often than expected.
Now, we are talking about a case where criminal justice failed to uphold the defendants rights to a fair trial. Most probably because of corruption. Do we really want to bring that huge amount of government intervention into this context?
What OS renders the monitoring screens for air traffic control systems, or railways signalling? Those both have rigorous software engineering behind them — railway signalling is the original of engineered, safety-critical logic systems, starting with mechanical interlocks in 1843. (The signalman physically couldn't move certain levers into bad configurations.)
Well yeah, but the fact that no one takes responsibility for anything and just smears layers of crap on top of each other is the problem. We have build enormous houses of cards on foundations of quicksand and its causing very real harm, but no one cares because the only thing they'll face consequences for is drops in story points on their sprint or whatever else and nothing for failing to do things that actually matter.
Yes, that is exactly part of being a Professional Software Engineer entails, and why there are universities assessed by Enginnering Order, and professional exams.
Lets stop glueing "engineering" to any job title where someone knows how to write a bunch of code lines.
It's not the title that's the problem. It's the part where people and go write software that gets deployed at scale in an environment where bugs can cause very real and significant damage (monetary or otherwise).
The title is part of the problem, because it reveals the culture, slapping cool titles without upping oneself to what those titles actually mean.
As for the rest, anything that brings computing to level of the rest of other professionals, has my signature.
A Software Engineering professor of mine used to say, many applications are akin to buying shoes that randomly explode when tying shoelaces, whereas a minor defect on real shoes gets a full refund.
> The title is part of the problem, because it reveals the culture, slapping cool titles without upping oneself to what those titles actually mean.
The irony is there are actual disciplines in software that are worthy of being called "engineering"--how the hell does an engine ECU work with the level of precision that it does? ABS systems? Hell, how about most electronic control systems on an airplane?
These are some of the most impressive feats in software development, and I've heard near 0 about any of them.
Yet the "industry" is hyper-focused on mashing together "containerized" monstrosities to put strings in databases, or to find a new way to add a chatbot to something that doesn't need it.
I don't know you but i bet that if you and me were locked up in a room together for a month we wouldn't be able to 100% agree on "codified standards for how to do things" :)
Industry isn't mature enough for that and it's perhaps doubtful that it will ever be. See the halting problem.
I don’t think it’s necessary to agree completely. You could start by codifying a minimal set of things that the majority of people agree on (user data sanitisation, authentication handling etc) and then build on it over time.
The standards could also help codify more meta things, like vulnerability policies, reporting and outages. This would be helpful to form a dataset which you can use to properly codify best practices later.
The main problem is that this increases the bar for doing software development, but you can get around this by distinguishing serious software industries from others (software revenue over a certain size, industries like fintech, user data handling etc)
ye gods, can we come up with a "law" to describe appealing to the halting problem?
Just because there are unanswered questions that doesn't mean we can't have bare minimum codified standards.
Furthermore, standards aren't invalidated just because practitioners disagree with them. Plenty of <insert engineer type>s disagree with the standards body of their respective field, they still follow the standards out of fear of prosecution or simply as a path of least resistance and when those standards are found to be defective, they (generally) evolve.
We don't need to solve the halting problem. We just need to come up with a sensible set of practices that, if followed, make the risks small enough to be considered acceptable. Then we can point at that list and say, "this is what the reasonable expectation of due diligence in software engineering is" - and legally enforce that.
I'm fairly sure Fujitsu do have liability insurance in some form.
In a situation like this an insurer is strongly motivated to prove that the company is not at fault, because it doesn't want to pay the bond. The company is also strongly motivated, even though insured, to prove that the company is not at fault, because it doesn't want to have its future insurance rates affected or be sued by the insurer for breaches of terms.
Either way, it doesn't help the people affected. Not unless they have personal insurance against workplace computer system errors, in which case their insurance provider is also not motivated to pay out, or to battle a corporation as large as Fujitsu unless there's chance of a class-action suit.
The fact that this misnomer of infallible computer systems was ever enshrined in law is pretty damning of the whole UK legal system and the relationship between technical people and law.
Every person who has ever programmed a computer or worked in any complex system knows they can't be relied upon 100%.
Not least because it seems to go against the core concept of "innocent until proven guilty" that the whole legal system is meant to rest upon.
> The fact that this misnomer of infallible computer systems was ever enshrined in law
Is this actually a fact, or a fact taken to it’s logical conclusion to presume a new “fact”?
The article cites “mechanical systems” as being infallible, and reading that language, it reads to me as some archaic legislation that never got updated for computer software. Instead, precedents got set over time by enterprising lawyers, but setting a precedent when it’s convenient is not the same thing as writing a law.
When I see mechanical systems, I think of something like an abacus. I’ve never used one, but I suspect the abacus itself is infallible. It’s open, it’s transparent, it is easily auditable, and the same inputs will always produce the same outputs. There is no black box translation occurring, like occurs with computer software.
>The article cites “mechanical systems” as being infallible, and reading that language, it reads to me as some archaic legislation that never got updated for computer software.
It's worse than that.
The law was fixed in 1984[0] and then the fix was intentionally reversed in 1999.[1]
> The article cites “mechanical systems” as being infallible, and reading that language, it reads to me as some archaic legislation that never got updated for computer software.
Apparently the law was introduced along with speed cameras, as they were continually being challenged in court.
It's a misunderstanding that the infallibility is enshrined in law. I'll quote a post I made in an earlier thread.
1. Historically, mechanical tools are presumed to be working well. This makes things simpler. The example quoted by the Guardian is a good one[0]: if someone wants to question the accuracy of a clock, it's on the person claiming the inaccuracy to prove their point.
2. In 1984, it became clear that computers are not just simple mechanical tools, and they were explicitly excluded from this assumption, by saying that computer evidence should be considered 'hearsay' (and therefore inadmissible) unless the prosecution can prove that the evidence is correct, either by a certificate from someone who can reasonably be expected to certify the correct functioning of that particular evidence, or by oral evidence.
3. This meant that anyone depending on the reliability of evidence from a computer (or piece of software, hardware, etc.) as part of their legal argument could be called upon to prove this, and the burden of proof lay with them (i.e.: as a defendant, I could require the prosecution to prove that the computer works as it is intended).
4. Following a review, it seems to be basically the conclusion that the requirements are inconsistent, unnecessarily onerous and time-consuming, and the way it was written was allowing criminals to get off on technicalities because the prosecution were not able to prove minor or irrelevant points about the functioning of the computer, and anyway other countries don't have any special rules about computers. You can read for yourself the recommendation here: https://cloud-platform-e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f.s3.a... (starting page 200 of the document, 215 of the PDF).
5. In 1999, the specific requirement for computer evidence to be treated as hearsay was removed.
The law does not say that computers are infallible. It is still possible to challenge the accuracy of a computer system, but the burden of proof lies with the defence. It's not going to be good enough to say 'well I don't know what happened, it must be a computer glitch', and as a result, cause the prosecution to need to produce evidence that the terminal in the Post Office was working correctly, as well as all of the back end servers that may have been responsible in some part for producing the output.
There's an extent to which I think this is reasonable. If I'm accused of fraud based on evidence recovered from a bank computer, it should not be the case that I can require the prosecution to prove that the bank's computers function correctly from first principles, and the evidence be thrown out in case the prosecution are unable to do so.
The problem with the Horizon convictions is that in many cases, the evidence produced by computers was the only evidence. Also, as the Post Office has its own prosecutors, they could chase and prosecute cases which would not normally have been tried by the CPS due to lack of evidence. It's also clear that the Post Office bullied and threatened not just the sub-postmasters, but also journalists, to keep quiet about the existence of evidence which might throw into question the correct functioning of the system.
This whole debacle is not primarily caused by the principle that you're referring to. The presumption that computers function correctly has undoubtedly saved billions of pounds, hours, and allowed a huge number of successful, correct convictions, which otherwise might have resulted in not guilty verdicts due to clever litigation, rather than actual innocence.
>Every person who has ever programmed a computer or worked in any complex system knows they can't be relied upon 100%.
I know I can rest assured the Excel spreadsheet for my monthly and annual budget is perfectly accurate and reliable.
I know the computers powering the stuff my life depends on are perfectly not accurate and reliable.
Put another way: The microwave oven or coffee maker in my kitchen? Yeah, the 'pooters in them are working perfectly. The mainframes jackhammering away at the Automated Clearing House? My money will get through the banking system perfectly eventually some day. The jetliner or my car I'm about to get in? Dude, that thing better have dozens of computers acting in redundancy because that shit ain't working.
I wonder if there's a law stating that the reliability of a computer is inverse to the value of the workload.
> I know I can rest assured the Excel spreadsheet for my monthly and annual budget is perfectly accurate and reliable.
Consider yourself lucky that your use cases are all on the happy path.
There are entire categories of bugs and inconsistencies where Excel's behaviour is known to be wrong, but which can't be fixed because the rest of the ecosystem depends on those same errors to manifest in the same ways.
For example - formulas with cycles have an upper bound as to how many times they are allowed to cycle. If you happen to hit the ceiling before your values converge, you will be left with the values calculated on the last iteration.
But I also know that traditionally, tills and bank accounts are pretty reliable.
Sure, the store might charge you the wrong amount if the price label on the shelf and the PC don't match up, because by law the label on the shelf is the source of truth. But other than that? If the till says my purchases add up to £23.45, and after making the purchase my bank account has a balance of £345.67? I don't validate the arithmetic.
How much money is in my bank account? Pretty much the amount of money the bank's computer says is in my bank account, modulo any funnyness like pending transactions and cheques that fail to clear. The bank doesn't keep a shoebox of cash in their vault with my name on it for us to reconcile against.
I suspect that this originated from the era well before computers were a common part of life and intended to relate to purely mechanical things, and the statutes were just applied to computers when they started to appear in court cases.
So e.g. a mechanical time clock or mechanical scales etc were probably the sort of thing that was the target of the original acts. The assumption is they are working correctly if they appear fine. This makes sense for basic mechanical things, and there is no point arguing that actually the scales that weighed how much the truck weighed were wrong/defective only that one time Defendant X used it and never again afterwards, and it was not in fact due to Defendant X being negligent that the bridge collapsed due to an overweight vehicle etc
As we know, computers are a different level of complexity. Being wrong randomly for one off things is very possible.
Sorry? There have been departments of Weights and Measures for literaly millenia.
They have required certification of those sorts of items with regular inspections and anti-tampering seals.
So yes, you can challenge evidence from mechanical scales, if they haven't been properly inspected and certified at the required intervals under the regulations.
Exactly that is my point - so for the example of some mechanical scales, if they have all been properly inspected and certified, then you can expect them to be reliable and accurate.
So in a case, if there is evidence against someone that relies on the scales doing their job properly, and those scales have been inspected and certified, then you probably do not have a valid argument to say "ah yeah but the scales the defendant used might have not been working properly when they used them!". I.e. the accepted assumption is that the scales work correctly.
Up until recently the same sort of assumption was given to computer systems from what I can tell. This is how we got into the Post Office scandal situation where people implicitly trusted that the computer was doing the right thing.
Notwithstanding the horror that is the Horizon fallout, the legal rule is much narrower than what is bandied around. It merely says you can't just say "computer got it wrong" and expect the other side to prove otherwise. Or in other words, you need evidence of incorrectness if you're going to claim it.
Now with the Horizon scandal, there was very clearly plenty of evidence. The extraordinary number of mismatched books. Some cases of physical records not matching electronic (these were the few guys that got away). The issue was that the Post Office investigators lied about the evidence, buried it with intimidation, legal threats and NDAs.
The law may or may not be bad as it stands but AFAIU this is like blaming a "computer bug" for the Boeing 737 Max crashes. It wasn't - it was human willful errors executed by imperfect code.
> It merely says you can't just say "computer got it wrong" and expect the other side to prove otherwise.
According to the standard legal practice of innocent-until-proven-guilty, you can, in fact, say that and expect the other side to prove otherwise. So this ruling violates one of the most fundamental principles of criminal law.
Right - it unquestionably is a custom rule. But it's not as broad as it is made out, not is it the fundamental problem here. The Post Office knew the system is faulty, hid that evidence and lied in court under oath about it.
As to lack of evidence... It's not so simple. A popular UK insurance hack is when people overtake you on a motorway and slam the brakes, to make a claim on your insurance. Unless you present evidence this was done to you, like dashcam footage, you are presumed to be responsible. You don't need the scammer to prove they didn't crash into you. I'm sure the US has similar mechanisms, where fault is presumed, like if a car hits a pedestrian.
This is similar. Computer systems are presumed to be correct unless evidence is presented. Maybe it's a bad rule, but it's not the horrendous dystopian catastrophe it is declared to be everywhere.
Without accepting this specific rule, that's not how any rules of evidence work in any (common law) court. There needs to be a point where things are presumed true to maintain a working court system. Imagine if e.g. you had to prove the _concept_ of DNA testing every time it was used.
In the US, see for example the debate between the Frye standard vs. the Daubert standard.
I find it really strange to have presumptions in general.
If we're in a court and there hasn't been a decision yet, we're there because we're dealing with some kind of complicated edge case where one person has a strong argument for one thing and another for another.
If one then decides to bring some problem up-- whether with how evidence is being judged or anything else, there can be no justification for ignoring him. This is why I like free evidence evaluation in Swedish courts and the absence of rigid precedent. Every question must then actually be dealt with. We do have this kind of idiotic rulemaking in other parts of our legal system though, so we're not fully free from it.
The problem is allocating resources if you want to deal with every challenge to evidence provided by a computerised system. I think it was initially a problem with people challenging speed camera results.
Well that's the point of the article isn't it, Rails hasn't been the flavour-of-the-month in about 15 years, it's boringly good, so that's why you should stick with it
I personally went for 3 days without any sleep in the army as part of a sleep deprivation exercise and it was one of the most brutal things I've ever done, I fell asleep standing up whilst digging a trench, ouch.
So I know when people say "I literally haven't slept in 6 days", they very much don't mean literally, they normally mean they went to bed and had a few hours of sleep per night.