Snakesan

If you just arrived, welcome! Have any interest in fabricating some sweet soft and chrome to assist with everything from communication to positive habit forming? #A11y? You might have found the right place! I'm heavily interested in creating accessible technologies that address gaps in care, utility, and function. A blend of futurism with a humanist flair. Zero internet connectivity required, no "cloud backups" or gathering of your data. Everything runs local, zero "AI" bloat.

Repeating "I shall never bore my following with kernel level anti-cheat discussions" like I'm passing a rosary through my fingertips with the hope that an imprint will eventually take hold.

Have you heard about anyone in your circle discussing the harder aspects of autism, at all? Things that might sound foreign to you? Catatonia while stimming, missed internal awareness and alerts, a history of job losses, broken relationships, lost opportunities? What about things people learned to help compensate? Grounding support, notification reminders, third party support for work related issues, therapists that understand autism (I'm still working on this), and free YouTube public speaking courses and the use of tools to help with speaking? I think you might have been algo siloed into the ND = cute and ecstatic part of the discussions, where those who either have a disability and are coping poorly document a win as a superpower, or those who outright deny disabling factors are instead chosing to lean hard into the weird. Folks like @ChristianityOn are incredible examples of what it looks like when you actually work on these things instead of allowing yourself to use social media as a very bad bias check. Besides, who wants to have their identity defined by their disability anyhow when we know what it takes to help someone in that situation? Doesn't that seem odd? Even a little?

@ChristianityOn For autistics, who often experience a lifetime of constant invalidations and being told they're "wrong" beginning in early childhood, it's quite something that an autistic group has adopted this approach: spending their days berating other autistics for how wrong they are.

I'm seeing a lot of negation of autistic voices - describing their experiences - by autistics who've inhaled older, dated, deficit-based models. They assume authority over the topic & mock anyone who doesn't experience autism in a way that conforms to their conventionality.

@NewAgeRetroNerd I have been leaning into the salt and pepper look, gives silver fox vibes over decay in my mind. Guess I've always had it easy here, not being too concerned about this kinda thing. Surround yourself with those who are not vain enough to fight entropy.

I think aging is something venerable, and the fact that we try to hide our aging is rather obscene in some sense. We all die one day, and I would be more worried about my internal and mental health than whether I look old.

@_winter_wonders Ok, I'm a little upset that I feel confident in assuming I can understand that, somewhat. Rob and Chris are entirely disconnected from this culture. I'm going to show this to them in the exact same OOC format, see what they come up with.

there's a different world out there a better world

For some areas this is much more of a problem. I know in Brazil politics around it make it so that those who need need the help end up missing out, as a bunch of older folks start looking at services as a line cutting advantage instead of a heavy amount of assistance with developmental issues that might stick around longer than they should without that help. In the US there is still line cutting nonsense occurring when you look at higher education rates of disability requests vs youth, though many end up figuring this out when they are told to seek support or risk losing access to their education so I'm a bit more willing to note that as a systemic failure over anything else. Mills that literally give you a dx after two hours exist for the very well off as well. That paper is largely useless, as the supports needed for someone who is genuinely autistic are not *free* or unlimited so the federal government generally doesn't accept them. I was raised with the understanding that I was not disabled in any way, while medicated for ADHD. ABA for what was considered impulsive behavior, still puzzled about that one. Dx'd with Tourettes, was again told it wasn't a disability. That I had to and could limit its impacts. Of course I was going to be diagnosed late. Still doesn't allow me to deny how dumb all of this has become lately.

Yeah but it’s really annoying seeing late-diagnosed level 1 autism adults with relationships, kids, college degrees be like “oh my gosh I’m so autistic I can’t even go to the gym or x or y” like dude. You’re not that disabled if you’ve achieved all that without even a diagnosis.

Absolutely! When the usual social context around courtship is easy enough to skip past with a keyboard and some video chatting? Learning becomes the objective. I mean everything needs to be learned at some point. This is usually done via practice with a patient partner or with a mental spreadsheet and metrics to track. This doesn't sound odd to me at all!

I'm autistic, and I treat every social interaction, including sex, as a learning experience, because these kinds of interactions do not come as naturally to me.

That's the thing about living in a society, you kinda can't just *do* something that can have your face attached to it. You achieve your goals through a representative and collective action. I feel for them. I'm also equally concerned about EMS access leading to a bad outcome. A representative is generally covered due to security and rational minds accepting a decision for what it is. If this guy's temp barrier leads to even a single death he'd be rightfully blamed for it. Just sign up for flock and be done with it.

Decriminalizing drugs, not enforcing criminal laws, catch and release for violent crimes, not putting violent offenders in jail, not putting those who are a harm to themselves in custodial care, it has consequences.

I kinda shadowed a few with order access, helped a little but the best was to just let me do it after showing how to interact with the system. While they used vbscript (lololol) to act as a poor man's API against other documents I was busy *not* doing that, instead noting and spreadsheeting what I needed. I didn't trust the evaluation from their script or formulas, which led to a pretty big bump in sales in my department. This was not entirely my doing. I didn't receive any credit for skipping their prediction model, even as I and store management were happy with the results every week. The manager that ordered 6x my usual holiday flow of corned beef, then blamed it on me, ended up taking credit for that one. I pointed out his initials in the terminal as the last user to edit my order. Then he ended up getting fired over a really bad judgement call completely unrelated to my situation. 😐 I explained multiple times that his claims of being unable to communicate with me were not valid, that others who worked with me over those years in the same company found a way to make it work for all of us, as a team. I was not the only autistic person working there.. being compared to the only other fella who was, a guy who needs a group home, with the objective of denying me access to support was pretty common. He only did carts and the occasional garbage run. I was running a department. 🙃 Your IEP doesn't have much backing in the "real world", I'm afraid. Being real and honest about my difficulties at the start didn't help with my first DEP job, having to hide my status as the interviewer tells a friend and myself "we don't hire the sick or difficult here". My current gig exposes me to none of this, at all. In any way. Been at it for three years now. 😎

@Snakesan @ChristianityOn I have been the victim of "Figure it out yourself... No, not like that!" many many times.

An excuse is an attempt to absolve yourself of wrong doing, when a person tells you to stop making excuses they are telling you to take responsibility for your transgressions

I know it sucks living in a modern and an industrialized society with ADHD, but do you know what sucks even more? Living in a pre-modern and pre-industrialized society.

Gotta hand it to Anthropic’s marketing, getting the Pope to enshrine that AI is dual use in an encyclical is a hell of an achievement.

The problem with the term neurodivergent is that it is so broad that for some people, this is undoubtedly true and good advice and for others this is like telling a guy in a wheel chair to grow up and take the stairs.

I used to blast the most cringe inducing Aussie rap from a JBL after I was jumped at a local park. Was told it was an awareness thing, that I asked for it wearing headphones. So I pivoted to a clip speaker. This was over a decade ago. I know quite a bit more about how to properly deal. ANC is amazing at keeping you aware now vs just turning up the volume with a basic pair. Here is an example of the cringe you'd hear approaching you as I was catching Pokemon. youtu.be/DFn7mlxCoi4 I'm in a much better place now, with people around me willing to tell me to be a bit more observant of others before deciding to do something like this.

@Snakesan @ChristianityOn Oh no. People who blast music and speakerphones in public deserve corporal punishment. 😂😂😂 IT'S SO RUDE!!!

One of my favorite interactions from LessWrong: * Someone posted their research showing that training AI models to have unpopular aesthetic preferences causes misalignment * David Africa wonders if basically anything would cause it. * Someone jokes about a paper on 'if any old crap' will cause misalignment. * Someone actually ran the experiment, and found out that it does.

Last job I had my boss made me feed *really bad* for explaining why one component of the night shift wasn't done 100%. I even asked Rob to bring a battery with a light to act as an aux power source so I could still close out without just walking away. Others have done this to us in the past! Power was out for a few hours down the entirety of transit, our hot water was electric on demand. About two hours before usual close. 99% of the close was complete, aside from one pan. I was told I was making excuses when I grabbed my check, for about an hour unpaid. A big promotion at another job (yay!) turned into a series of excuses claims when I asked for more guidance around training with their internal software solution. Lots of moving parts, lost a really good DEP job over similar concerns so I didn't want it to happen again. They gave me a printout of slides and said "this is how everyone learns". I watched as one department spent almost six months training an employee around using that stack. I asked for similar support, was told I could learn it on my own without issue. There were many an issue. Still managed to raise sales +80%, reduce shrink by ~50%. Still needed support when it came to prioritization, or monitoring for adjustments. One employee had a habit of going behind my back to adjust my orders, said it was easier than just teaching me how to "properly" do it. He ended up pushing a huge order that I absolutely would have never authorized. His excuse? I'm hard to talk to. I was eventually laid off. While I'm all about instilling some resilience here there is only so much that can be done when others just don't want to help, even as you try to compensate.

@ChristianityOn I guess my autism superpower is making 95% of my bosses hate me then💀

While NEONFLUX is firing off haptics I'll get direct feedback when I go to interact with my hair, as the pulses from the watch end up hitting my skull through conduction on contact. Stops it dead. Just can't have it running all the time.

Ok Gemini, this sounds incredibly effective. Experimenting with NEONFLUX does help here, but a visual signal that can act like a more rigorous form of an interrupt could do more to help send a STOP to cancel out that repetitive hair twirling motion. I am still struggling to ensure some of my stims are not exceeding range of motion limits. The fidget ring does help but I'm still struggling to "switch", if you will. Not all stims are good, I kinda wonder why this isn't talked about as much openly.

The whole point of the Neurodiversity movement was to give people something to share experiences around. It rapidly turned into a self-dx/denial clusterfuck of opinions and unfounded therapies with very little in the way of support being offered. A man can only take so many instances of regular behavior being typed as ADHD/Autism when the struggle exists elsewhere in their lives. A struggle that has a know series of therapies, supports, and accommodations that can assist us with maintaining a more "normal" life, where the disabling aspects aren't holding us back as much. The NDM doesn't find these methods valid, as they require you to seek out real third party support, which usually ends up exposing the feel good social media charade for what it is. So the NDM call them outdated, older, ineffective. I think a challenge is needed.

Look, nobody wants to deny anyone the ability to voice an opinion. The issue is pretty easy to understand, this endless barrage of "Its not a disability, look at my lived experience" just doesn't sit right with anyone who has or who is currently putting in that work. Deficits are real, even if they make us feel bad when we think about them. Then you have this assumed self-awareness "boost" I see a lot of folks claim they experience while struggling with employment and sociability. Ignoring survivorship bias, existing support structures, effort others provide etc. We aren't doing anyone favors by ignoring this very real aspect of autism, or the supports we might already end up receiving from others.

@poe_collector "What's your dactyl length vs height" ahh vibes sometimes are *not* needed. I'd just assume you have no problems clearing out an eclair without destroying it.

I swear to god she’s the Autism Whisperer. Every single tweet she makes about the Autistic Experience™️ is an event I thought I experienced in isolation and then she tweets some shit like “39% of people with hypermobility have autism” and it ruins my entire day