HN user
Putting this one to bed...
Yes, I'm autistic and I regularly take lactobacillus reuteri which has helped my gut quite a bit. I wouldn't say it was a massive shift, but it certainly has been really nice. There's at least some evidence that this bacteria is deficient in autistic individuals and supplementation can help with that.[1]
I'd like to add a little bit of water to this particular fire. I'm autistic and I've read numerous studies along this vein. In short, yes there's a strong link between gut flora and brain development however autism (and presumably ADHD) is a heterogeneous condition with a variety of interrelated causes.
Personally, I can say that this likely is a proximate cause for me as I got a bad staph infection at just a few months old and naturally I was treated by antibiotics. However, I also have quite a few genes that are associated with autism as well. So while there's an increasingly clear picture, I'd hesitate to say what exactly is and isn't a cause of being autistic.
What an interesting tale and gripping read. I've lived in China and surprised that I've never heard of this before.
For those unaware, not a whole lot has changed since that time unfortunately. China has had certain periods where they had opened up somewhat, but those days are long gone to my knowledge. If anything the repression may be even greater these days in some ways, though at least there isn't any kind of mass starvation going on as far as I'm aware.
The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old imperial system rather than something fundamentally new. In the past it was an imperial examination to join the Mandarin class[1], now it's a test to join the CPC [2]. Either way, if you don't get in your opportunities are limited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat) [2] https://daily.jstor.org/communist-party-of-china/
It's a fascinating read, and makes a lot of sense why it's so hard to develop a commercial aircraft that actually ends up being profitable. One thing that got me wondering, and maybe someone here might know this, is why hasn't Boeing attempted to miniaturize the 787 as opposed to continually re-purposing the 737? From the outsider's (and complete layman's) view it seems like this would be a more sensible way to build a successful modern aircraft in that vein as opposed to trying to repurpose a design which is now well over half a century old.
I fly a fair amount an honestly the 787 is an impressive aircraft. I'm surprised that Boeing hasn't tried to take what they learned from their developments there and apply them in a way that could potentially help them recoup the costs of that program.
Thanks for the reply! That makes a lot of sense given where it is right now. Hopefully it will flesh out over time, but I'll definitely be giving it a look!
GPUI is looking more and more interesting by the day. I haven't had the chance to dig into it. Can anyone with experience comment some more on how it compares to other UI frameworks? Seems like it's a really compelling alternative to things out there. On the surface, seems almost like a rust variant of Qt, but not having to deal with C++ potentially makes it much more widely applicable.
To add to what others said here, another salient factor is that in Taiwan it's pretty possible to get late night food, drink, and other things. These things are almost non-existent in the US which would make working night shifts extra rough.
They do, but they don't produce any of their leading edge chips in mainland China, just as they won't be in the USA either. Looking at the wording of my post I should have made the leading edge part more clear. My mistake there!
They're close, but I believe they're not doing any 3nm manufacturing at the moment but I could be wrong about that.
Currently TSMC has the only leading edge chip fabrications plants (fabs) on the planet and they're all located in Taiwan. They account for all new chips for all new Apple products, all new AMD products, most new Nvidia products, etc. Most companies design the the chips, but then outsource the manufacturing of them to TSMC as building a fab has astronomical upfront costs.
TSMC has acquired a lead in this area through a number of different methods. One of the main things is that they focus deeply on manufacturing. Another is that they work 24 hours a day in R&D, running 3 shifts so they basically have the lights on all the time. And as mentioned above, the upfront costs are incredibly high with a fab costing on the order of 20+ billion dollars to construct.
Intel is attempting to catch up, but it will likely be another 3 to 5 years before they are able to do so. Honestly just having R&D up and going all the time is probably a huge advantage for TSMC and probably a big reason behind their success. Regardless, suffice to say basically all cutting edge product shipments would cease in a matter of months if TSMC fabs were destroyed.
Wow, he has a better commit graph than me. Very impressive, especially considering that Weezer is still active. Time to step up my game.
But if the universe is a simulation, who is simulating the simulator?
Fellow autistic person here, and in my mind you've hit the nail on the head. It's an information game for sure, like trying to drink from a fire hose of information and make sense of it somehow. I guess it's a matter of using Fourier analysis in a way, but that's a hard ask to do on your own thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
Not a clinician or anything, but I'm autistic and honestly you sound pretty similar to me. In fact I'm writing this from Singapore where I'm surrounded by folks haha. I don't think being autistic is really what it's made out to be frankly, and the description of the condition is generally the outsider's view not the insider's view.
Some autistic folks will avoid sensory stimulation while others seek it out. I'm definitely one of the ones that seeks it out and I'm pretty extroverted. It's a heterogeneous condition, and indeed a spectrum. Who knows for your situation, but you may be autistic.
That being said though, I think the important thing isn't the neurotype but rather that you've found what matters to you and what makes you happy. At the end of the day that's what counts, not the underlying neurology.
I'm autistic and while it's nice to see ongoing research, I can't help but feel like this misses the point somewhat.
In particular I've seen a number of studies that make the jump from Fragile X syndrome to autism which I think is ill advised to say the least. There are a large number of genes[1] that are related to autistic individuals, and it's a very heterogeneous condition. In particular many, perhaps even most autistic individuals don't suffer from intellectual disability, don't have any physical characteristics which would set them apart from others, and don't tend to have problems with memory. All of these are characteristics of Fragile X syndrome.
“Imagine being at a party, talking to a friend while music is playing in the background,” Frick says. “You have to integrate the sound of their voice with the movement of their lips.” But if there’s variability in sensory processing, socializing will be more challenging, he says.
And I'll take issue with this in particular. Frankly, the social issues of autistic individuals are wildly overstated and can be easily explained. Believe me, I know quite a few autistic folks and none of them have issues understanding when someone is speaking, we can tell. However, trying to sync up different minds that operate in different ways is a difficult problem.
Even among men and women with the same neurotype there's enough difference to cause _substantial_ misunderstandings. Enough ink has been spilled on the topic of relations between the sexes to fill oceans. And the difference between neurotypes is far more substantial than the difference between sexes in this regard. It's very easy for me to socialize with other autistic folks, I've had many conversations that have lasted hours on end. Doing the same thing with someone who is neurotypical though is much more difficult, and usually requires a willingness to put up with the awkwardness of not having the same vibe.
Finally, I won't go into anything about using mouse models for complex neurological conditions at the moment. But suffice to say, this article would be more properly titled "Noisy brain may underlie some of Fragile X syndrome's sensory features", but that probably doesn't get the same amount of attention.
Eh, it depends. I actually know quite a few folks in SE Asia that would likely qualify for this. Not to mention Taiwan, Japan, etc.
Honestly Drupal is solid for a number of things, and in terms of getting a CRUD type app/site up it's probably still one of the fastest ways to do it for the non-technical. Actually pretty cool that you can get APIs straight out of the box this way.
That being said, Drupal was initially a forum/blog and it definitely seems somewhat out of place in the modern web landscape. One of its Achilles Heels is that its rendering layer is notoriously slow and overall it's heavy. It's module system also doesn't mesh well with PHP's typical request/response execution model from a performance perspective (anyone who's spent time tuning PHP opcode caching for this knows what I mean).
That being said, the content type and field system is still great and it would be great to see a more generalized version of this concept. This is another area where the implementation is pretty heavy on the Drupal side. Things like this have ultimately limited adoption and not having a clear migration path from D7 to D8 didn't help either.
To be fair, it's far easier in written Chinese[1] to have allusion and metaphor because of the multifaceted nature of meaning in the characters. For instance, 行 (pronounced xing or haeng in Mandarin) has an absolute laundry list[2] of meanings even though originally it meant an intersection of roads. It's also possible (but to my knowledge less common) to play with the actual character shapes to induce other meanings, or to use replacement characters that are direct (or close) homophones to construct a play on words. The example that immediately pops to mind is the use of "river crabs" (河蟹 or héxiè) to replace "harmonized" (和谐 or héxié) in order to evade censorship.
I'd honestly be willing to say that there is no real accurate translation of the Dao de Jing into English. Ancient Chinese commentators (including Confucius) note the difficulty of understanding the Dao de Jing, and they could read and speak the language! Not to say that it's impossible, but it's just extremely difficult to replicate. I look at it as being akin to translating Shakespeare into Mandarin. Even English speakers struggle with Shakespeare and when translated it loses the lyricism and a lot of the underlying meaning.
[1] Noting here that when speaking the context will generally make it less ambiguous. Additionally, Mandarin and ancient Chinese at the time of Lao Zi share very little in common phonetically. [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...
Not sure what the issue would be here. I don't think it would be accurate to transliterate ปู as "buu" but instead "bpuu". Same with /d/t/th, as these can be written just fine like ใด - dai and ไต - dtai for instance. It can't capture everything, but it's impossible to anyhow because English doesn't have consonant classes like Thai does.
Optical image stabilization in modern phone camera sensors uses (very) small leaf springs along with small actuators to stabilize the sensor from shaking. Undampened vibrations from vehicles, especially motorcycles, can damage this springs as the vibration is enough force to cause the springs to snap.
Usually the result is that the camera tends to look kind of "smudgy" since the actuators can't correctly position the sensor with a broken spring.
It is apparently extremely difficult to fabricate LK-99 and most of the time the process being used creates similar substances but without appropriate Cu substitution in its lattice. All of the videos have been of generally quite small samples and the manufacturing difficulty is the purported reason.
The SK also supposedly had more details on this but with the leak of the paper those haven't been cleaned up and added to the paper.
To our knowledge it has been at a steady level throughout human history. Kant was mentioned in this thread, Henry Cavendish was also thought to be autistic. From Wikipedia:
Cavendish was taciturn and solitary and regarded by many as eccentric. He communicated with his female servants only by notes. By one account, Cavendish had a back staircase added to his house to avoid encountering his housekeeper, because he was especially shy of women.
There are other threads that go back further as well, and at least in certain cultures there's a fairly broad overlap between shamanism, autism, and related neurological conditions. I've seen some studies tracking certain genetic mutations back and some at least are thought to have come about when humans started becoming human. I haven't been able to find them again but there are quite a few studies that can be found via Google Scholar on the subject.
I’m not sure how AGPL would prevent you from hosting on the same network. It’s pretty standard among OSS software companies to prevent Google, Amazon, et al. from swooping in and creating a competitor using their open source code.
It's not necessarily about whether they're actually making money on those as opposed to covering their costs. Almost any successful company based around open source software (and often closed source) has a huge spread of customers sizes from the hobbyist who plays around with a few things all the way to Fortune 500 enterprises. By having a ramp up in terms of pricing it keeps folks invested in your platform. In cases where there's a big jump there's often quite a bit of hesitance to upgrade unless there's an overwhelming need.
Basically, it's aligning the success of your business to the success of your users. Most of what's offered in Gitlab Premium[1] would be of little value for a small development shop, yet if you have 5 users you're looking at $1000/yr for features that are unlikely to be used. It just doesn't make sense.
Didn’t quit my tech job but I’m a (very very low level) pro Muay Thai fighter on the side. Honestly tech has quite a few benefits in terms of work though I think on its own it can seriously induce burnout.
Personally I think that having any kind of balance is a good idea. Even if engaged in another field I can imagine I’d have something to complement whatever it was.
At some level we always have a mask, a persona that we present to others. I think where the the problems come in is when that persona doesn’t align with our underlying reality.
I don’t think there is any one right way to go about this. Try and find the interests that make you feel fulfilled and find other who share those interests. Take time away from others in ways that make you smile. Find ways to dive into your soul whatever those may be.
In my experience, it’s a winding path and it’s unique to each person. There may be hints of things for you. Things that you have been drawn to, hobbies that fell by the wayside, or things that feel particularly “stimmy”. Wherever there is a hint of a loose thread that could be something, pull on it and see what happens.
I think through doing these things you will find friends, perhaps in the most unexpected places. And bit by bit, the feeling of otherness and isolation drops away. At least that has been my experience.
Thank you for posting these links and for sharing your experience. Another autistic person here and just wanted to leave this comment here for anyone that might find it helpful (and don’t want to imply this is for you specifically either!).
Masking was incredibly detrimental for me. In fact I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Once I realized I was autistic (at the tender age of 31) I decided to stop doing so whatever the cost may be.
To my surprise, embracing my autistic qualities and understanding them has changed my life completely. I’m far more social now, and I realized that trying to be social like neurotypical folks is basically impossible if you’re autistic. However, being social like an autistic person is incredibly rewarding. Many people tell me they don’t even realize I’m any different, even though I’ve gotten there not by trying to be the same but by being more authentically myself.
It has been a long road (I’m 36 now), and while it has been difficult I can say that has been beyond worthwhile. We have beautiful things to share with our fellow humans, even though I think those things scare some folks.
If you’re like me from a few years back, don’t give up. We are our own greatest critics which is a double edged sword. You’re better than you know, and before you know it things will change in ways that are difficult to imagine.
Quick PS edit: apologies for grammar or words that are out of place. I’m on my phone and my fingers are seriously fat
This is actually one of my favorite historical facts. Buddha images are everywhere in modern Thailand and it’s fascinating to me that this likely would not be the case if it weren’t for Greeks in Central Asia
I don't think ignorance is that excusable in this case. I grew up in the desert and in cases where it's "100°F and bone-dry" it's extremely dangerous to undertake a long hike without proper preparation, especially if you don't even know where you are.
If someone accidentally kills someone there's a punishment involved, even if they didn't intend to do something immensely stupid. It's one thing to be ignorant, but it's another thing entirely to be ignorant to the point of endangering others.
I'm going to disagree here. He started a signal fire which he left unattended in the desert which ignited a 230-acre blaze. Hiking in the desert is quite dangerous and his actions could have easily endangered others. He's lucky that no one else died as a result of his actions and I can easily see why this kind of penalty would be made in this case.