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distract8901

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I think you're looking at it backwards. The problem is people with authority who think that it makes them better than you. The autistic person rejects that idea completely.

You seem to be arguing that autistic people also reject the idea that some people have authority because they are better than you in some context. This isn't the case.

At the airport, the staff has authority because they are following a higher ethical directive to protect everyone. The pilot has authority because they're responsible for dozens or hundreds of lives. The pilot is more important than you, they are a better person in this context, and thus have authority.

As a counterpoint, America is having a crisis about the authority of the police. People are rejecting the authority of the police because they assume authority makes them better, and therefore entitles them to whatever they want. Whereas police who do follow the directive to protect everyone tend to be respected and have authority because of that.

I think that most neurotypical people also reject the idea that authority makes you better. But they tend to play along with it, for some reason. The discussion here is about the autistic people who don't play along and just flatly reject the idea.

To answer your question, these types of autistic people tend to have a very strong idea of right and wrong and a rich code of ethics. Something wrong shouldn't be tolerated and should be set right. But I think most people in general feel that way.

Where autism comes into play is that an autistic person's notion of what is intolerable is often quite different. An autistic person is also more likely to lack or not care about the social inhibition against challenging or rejecting something that they feel is wrong.

I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger

You're confusing "being aware of" and "caring about".

Autistic people are acutely aware of "social danger". It's something we deal with every moment of every day since we're old enough to realize we're different. For most, it's a deeply traumatic experience to deal with as a child. And by most, I mean nearly 100%. Common wisdom is that there are no un-traumatized autistic individuals.

for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly

This tells me you fundamentally do not understand autism. "Act accordingly" is one of the defenses we have to learn. And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is and is not appropriate is one big stochastic experiment that lasts your entire life. We learn to observe people around us, but that's not enough. It's easy to mimic behavior, but we don't get the context or reasoning behind it until we get it wrong.

Knowing how to act accordingly is the core problem in most autistic people's lives. It's incredibly challenging and very dangerous. We have a lifetime of trauma built up around this problem, which makes it extremely stressful to be in a situation where you don't know what to do.

Why are you so unwilling to accept the extensively documented phenomenon of an autistic person being more intelligent than average?

Some autistic people are genuinely ahead of the curve. Some individuals develop extreme talent/intelligence in certain areas. There is no question of whether this happens or not, it's a demonstrable fact.

Your quote illustrates something that self-aware and reasonable people do: recognize their limitations and yield to someone with more expertise.

If you think that's somehow a bad thing, you should have a really long think about what that says about you.

Yup, the "because I said so" type really isn't worth respect in the first place.

Authority figures are fine when they act with reason and respect. When they don't, that's when we have a problem. I will never understand why neurotypicals tolerate inept and abusive authority figures. They don't even question it most of the time!

As I've gotten older, my level of tolerance for disrespectful people in general has dropped off dramatically. If you disrespect me while demanding I respect you, I'm just gonna ignore you entirely. You are literally not worth the brainpower it takes just to hear you.

Bluetooth link negotiation happens in a few dozens of milliseconds. Any perceptible delay is down to the host operating system setting up audio drivers. The headset can't know what the host is doing or even that there is a delay.

MP3 decoding is just math. If you have enough CPU to decode a compressed audio stream, it doesn't cost anything to also have it decode MP3.

Sure, you could store those clips in a more appropriate codec, but what do you gain? It's dead simple to encode an MP3, every audio editor from the last couple decades can do it. How common is SBC support?

If MP3 decoding is free, and MP3 encoding is free, why bother spending any effort at all on anything else? Sometimes good enough is good enough and cheap and easy wins over correct every time.

This is the precise reason I prefer embedded development. The challenge of fitting my entire application into a handful of kilobytes with just a KB or two of RAM is a lot of fun. I get to build a program that runs really fast on a very slow system.

It's a point of personal pride for me to really understand what the machine is and what it's doing. Programming this way is working with the machine rather than trying to beat it into submission like you do with high level languages.

It seems a lot of programmers just see the CPU as a black box, if they even think about it at all. I don't expect more than a couple percent of programmers would truly grok the modern x86 architecture, but if you stop to consider how the CPU actually executes your code, you might make better decisions.

In the same vein, very high level languages are a big part of the problem. It's so far abstracted from the hardware that you can't reason about how it will actually behave on any real machine. And then you also have an invisible iceberg of layer upon layer upon layer of abstraction and indirection and unknowable, unreadable code that there's no reasonable way to know that your line of code does what you think and nothing else.

Modern software practices are bad and we should all throw away our computers and go back to the 8086. Just throw away the entire field of programming and start again.

I recently switched to a local pharmacy after getting berated by a CVS pharmacist for standing in the "wrong" line. CVS in general has been absolutely awful in the last few years.

What really turned me against them was "CVS Caremark" insurance.

CVS runs a prescription insurance company that only allows you to buy your meds at CVS or Walgreens. How that's even legal is beyond me. They also have absolutely insane policies, and will NOT pay for anything unless it's prescribed as a 90 day supply. If your doctor is adjusting your dose or you're trying a new medication, fuck you, pay up.

I also once tried CVS's free prepack services where they divide your doses into individual AM and PM plastic pouches on a big reel. Super convenient for someone with severe ADHD, as the pouches are dated, so I always know if I missed a dose.

Caremark wouldn't pay for my proscriptions filled this way. Again, a free service offered by CVS. The Caremark rep I talked to had never even heard of it before.

CVS can eat shit

My bet is that btrfs will replace ext4 in the nearish future. It's the default for Arch, which also comes default with filesystem snapshots before any system updates.

It's pretty nice. I think it also supports some flavor of volumes or virtual partitions, but I don't have any real use for that kind of thing.

The snapshots are really good though. Very fast and don't take up a ton of space, somehow.

The more correct analogy is advertising heavily to kids that you give out free candy, and then give them so much they get sick.

Parents can't surveil kids 24/7. It simply isn't possible. You have to have some trust that your society is a safe place for kids to grow up. Independence is an important part of growing up. Making your own decisions with or without your parent's approval.

Don't you remember being 13 and wanting to make your own decisions about your life? At some point a kid becomes an individual and they will make their own choices whether you like it or not.

Blaming parents for societal treatment of children is the same as blaming climate change on people who don't recycle. It's utter nonsense because the outside factors are massively larger than any individual.

GitHub has started showing me a persistent login pop-out on certain pages. Literally no way to dismiss it, so I just uBlocked the element. I don't really want to log in to GitHub in the first place. If I'm there its to check out a public repo. I haven't pushed anything in years, I use my own server now.

Fun fact! Your local instance creates a shadow account for remote users, which has a unique ID and a copy of the profile data, but is otherwise empty.

I haven't seen this documented anywhere and it cost me about a day of effort when I was building a mastodon bot. If you naively try to fetch content from a remote user replying to a post, you won't find anything. You have to hit the remote instance's search API and pass their profile name in. Which is frankly insane.

Basically, you can have your server follow another instance as if it were a user account. Assuming the remote instance allows follows, their local feed gets duplicated to your federated feed. If they allow mirroring, you can configure the server to mirror in different ways. You can mirror the N most viewed videos, new videos, and 'trending'. Then you can set a disk capacity limit, and have videos fall off after so many days. Presently I'm sitting on 320GB of mirrored videos. 300 is automatic mirroring.

Then of course you as a user can manually request a video be mirrored. I typically mirror everything I watch. I wish it had an option to automatically mirror your subscriptions, but it should be fairly trivial to write a script that does it.

I was at the company for three or four years. It was fine working as a floor level employee, and my last manager encouraged me and gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted because I really did boost sales. I only took the assistant manager position because everyone around me told me I'd do great.

I lasted six months. The only reason I stayed that long was because we were promised some huge bonuses for meeting our sales targets, which never happened. I got like $50.

My manager gave her two weeks notice a week before I did and our region manager didn't find anyone to cover. He expected me to run the entire store by myself for a week. I said no and walked out. They had to leave the store closed for several days because absolutely nobody worked there. It was extremely cathartic.

Pretty much. I took the retail job because I couldn't find a programming job. Before that I was a video game programmer. I actually got hired here as a mid level unity programmer, but it quickly became clear that my other skills were more valuable.

I've done electronics as a hobby for most of my life, and I just have a natural talent for engineering and problem solving. R&D is something I've wanted to do since I first heard of it at 10 years old. The stars just never aligned until now.

No, it's pretty much "hold my beer, I got this" billions of times until something works.

Evolution isn't organized or eloquent. It's messy and random and non-optimized. Evolution results in many individuals who are not fit, any many evolved solutions are quite plainly bad.

Any elegance or beauty in evolution is a construct humans apply to an incredibly abstract and obtuse concept because that's just what we do to things that are difficult to grok.

Evolution is simply random mutations from various mechanisms, but the only guiding force is that of survival. Some random changes make some individuals more fit to survive, which makes the species more fit in time. There really isn't anything more to it. It's all just random chance averaged over a very, very long time.

My last job was a corporate hellscape. I worked really hard to move up to assistant manager, then corporate put me in a failing store on the other side of the state and just left me to rot. I had zero employees, just me and the manager. We constantly got berated for not meeting sales targets, which meant corporate sent us less product to sell, so our numbers got worse...

Then there was the mandatory unpaid overtime, the 12 hour days running the entire store solo. It nearly put me in the hospital, and I'm not exaggerating.

Then I got an unbelievable offer for a tech job ten minutes from my house. It was "only" twice my corporate salary, and I'm definitely being way underpaid for essentially being the senior R&D engineer. But it pays enough that my husband doesn't have to work and we don't want for anything. My job is so much fun, and my dedication is definitely noticed and appreciated. They've already given me a raise unprompted, and once we have enough revenue, I expect I'll get a much bigger one. Not that I really care about the money, I feel respected here, and I get to use all of my talents instead of cold-calling people to sell more crap.

I'll never go back to that corporate life. It was absolutely soul crushing for someone who has a lot of initiative and a lot of skills. This is where I was meant to be.

They absolutely, definitely are not anonymizing your data. They may be "anonymizing" it, but there is exactly zero chance that they aren't linking it to you in some other way.

Google does not give out free lunches. You are always paying for their services in some way, and that is usually by them mining your data and selling it to other companies. What possible motive would google have for operating a free proxy service? The sheer goodness of their hearts? Concern for your privacy and safety? Respect for the open web?

Everything google has done in the last decade shows very clearly that their motives are never good. At some point, you have to realize that the dog that keeps biting you will never stop biting you.

I've been using PeerTube recently. After spending a ridiculous amount of effort, I have a server that pulls down indexes from other servers and mirrors content both for me locally and to share bandwidth with other users.

As absolutely awful as this experience has been, it's still less painful than dealing with google ads. The amount and variety of videos on there is much lower, but I've managed to federate with enough servers to curare a fairly interesting list.

I just can't/won't tolerate ads anymore. It doesn't have to be this way, and I choose to simply not use these ad platforms wherever I can. It's much more pleasant online when you go to spaces that aren't constantly trying to sell you something or spy on you so they can sell you more stuff.

I can't imagine that google hasn't thought about it. The sheer scale of the processing cost to do it is probably too high with as much video they serve.

Open source firmware for what though?

I'm gonna assume this is PC firmware based on the list of players, but I haven't been able to find any conclusive information on the website.

Super annoying when groups like this use an extremely generic term for something very specific and just assume the entire world knows what they mean.

It's more than that. The story of the seven sisters is in many different cultures and the story is usually the same: seven sisters chased into the sky by a hunter. Most also have a story about the seventh sister leaving the sky or simply fading away.

The real evidence is that the same story exists in aboriginal Australian culture, and has been since well before first contact with Europeans. Most likely the story was brought with the aboriginals when they left Africa and has been told ever since.

Seriously, read the Wikipedia article or watch a video about it. It's an extremely interesting topic, and learning about it is a lot more fun than just assuming it's wrong and everyone is stupid.