joshsusser

@joshsusser@neurodifferent.me

not your typical neuron.
de gustibus non est disputandum.
black lives matter. trans people are people.
pronoun: he.
d.e.i.

#ActuallyAutistic #autistic #ADHD #AuDHD #neurodivergent #neurodiversity
#queer #SciFi #webdev #RubyProgramming #pastafarian
AKA @joshsusser

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theautisticcoach, to actuallyautistic

A holiday tip for my comrades

You’re allowed to spend time by yourself in another room during family events.

You’re allowed to self regulate.

There is no shame in this.

@actuallyautistic

joshsusser,

@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic if you missed it, i wrote up a thing about having a chill room at holiday events for that purpose:
https://neurodifferent.me/@joshsusser/111456400609936195

joshsusser, to random

The Devil's greatest trick was getting everyone to call LLMs "Generative AI" when the only thing they can do is cobble together derivative works. That's like calling a battery a generator.

joshsusser, to random

The holiday dilemma:

Do I participate in the family holiday gift exchange, annoy everyone with my gifts because I can't tell what people actually like, and make everyone mad because I can't look happy enough when I open my presents?

OR, do I choose not to participate in a tradition that will do nothing but stress me out, and so make everyone mad because they insist that means I don't care about anyone and don't want to be part of the family?

orangegoldgreen, to Autism

The phrase "burnt out former gifted kid" has always given me the ick, but there are unique challenges/issues/traumas related to that experience that tend to come up in discussions and I've never encountered a good description.

Proposal for a slightly less icky alternative:
✨ burnt out former high achiever ✨

@actuallyautistic @autistics

joshsusser,

@orangegoldgreen @actuallyautistic @autistics if only "AuDHD" was easier to pronounce

undefined_variable, to Depression
@undefined_variable@mementomori.social avatar

@actuallyautistic

So, folks, when a combination of autistic shutdown and a major depressive episode due ongoing stress hits you hard, when that final little (or not so little) straw yet again lands on your back... Do you have someone to turn to for help, you can count on?

Two of my closest peeps are dealing with some heavy poopoo themselves, so ain't gonna bother them, and not much they could do either, I recon. Just shut down totally for a couple of hours, like lights out, nobody working in the head office (the butterfly meme here with "Is this dissociating?) Woke up now, and I have no clue what to do, who to turn to (and yes, I've had social workers and nurses and all kinds of professional contacts, but alas, with this particular straw, nobody seems to be able or rather willing to help). Also, is there an "Actually Depressed" group? Seriously, if someone knows a good peer support chat for depression/the worse kind of depression, fling me a PM or something. My old one has pretty much died, no pun intended...

joshsusser,

@undefined_variable @actuallyautistic I don't have anyone like that to rely on (one of the reasons I struggle so much), but I did find an actually autistic therapist a few months ago and finally therapy feels like it helps. It's amazing what a difference it makes to have a therapist who understands autism from the inside.

joshsusser,

@undefined_variable @actuallyautistic Nobody should have to deal with life all on their own. Humans aren't made for that. But so many of us have to, and we autists more than most. It's no wonder that decades of that wears us down and burns us out.
I also did years of therapy before realizing I'm autistic, and all of it was literally worse than doing nothing. Waste of time and money and mental spoons trying to force my brain to behave like NTs, then beating myself up for never making any progress. Now I want to send letters to all my old therapists telling them they need to really learn about autism so they stop screwing up their clients with NT bullying.

joshsusser,

@undefined_variable @actuallyautistic Sounds like we're in similar places and see stuff the same way. That's what helps me most these days, just finding like minds on here (and previously on twitter) that I can relate to without having to fight to have my outlook validated.

joshsusser,

@undefined_variable @sahat @actuallyautistic Yes, the help lines are for allistic people, not us. I tried a warm line a couple times and just ended up teaching them about autism without any benefit to me. A helpline made for autistics is definitely part of what our community needs. I think we need all the support things, like the gay community has, from HRC to Trevor Project. I would love a helpline that would take calls like "help my life is falling apart and i need help to save it before it becomes an unrecoverable crisis i have to call a suicide hotline for".
Earlier this year, the US federal government released a report on the Epidemic of Loneliness in America, which studied loneliness and isolation, the negative effects, and possible solutions. Hundreds of pages, and not a single mention of autism. Absolutely shameful.

rebeccawatson, to random
@rebeccawatson@mstdn.social avatar

My latest: why "Therapeutic Touch" is a ridiculous pseudoscience, and also why that famous study debunking it is actually kind of bad https://skepchick.org/2023/12/is-therapeutic-touch-the-most-ridiculous-pseudoscience/

joshsusser,

@rebeccawatson That was a bit of a ride. Since you asked for other pseudoscience things to debunk, can you do ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) sometime? icydk: ABA is gay conversion therapy for autism - developed by the same person even (Ole Ivar Lovaas). But while gay conversion therapy is getting banned in more and more places, ABA is the standard therapy for autistic kids and often the only one insurance will cover. And there's no good science to back it up, either. You may not believe what you discover - much about ABA makes no sense, like how some of the practices are so bad they are illegal to use for training dogs but allowed for humans.

JeremyMallin, to actuallyautistic
@JeremyMallin@autistics.life avatar

A thing I don't get about (one of many things)

Why does everyone talk about the weather shortly after greeting each other?

"Um? Yes, I too went outside. That's how we both got here."

Did they think you didn't notice on the way over? 🤔

@actuallyautistic

joshsusser,

@JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic I believe much of this is ancient brain development that allows humans to avoid wasting time with dominance challenges every time we meet up. It gives both speakers a low-stakes interaction that lets them show they want to talk, not fight, so they can get on with the conversation. Talking about something that matters defeats the purpose of the exchange.

fraser, to random
@fraser@m.universetoday.com avatar

When NASA's DART mission slammed into asteroid Dimorphous, it made a significant change to the orbital period of the asteroid moon. A single impactor will work well for some threatening space rocks, but if we have a few years, even larger asteroids can be brought under control. A new paper suggests that a centrifugal spinner be landed on the surface of an asteroid, harvesting local regolith and then using solar electricity to spin it up and off into space.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576523005593#:~:text=Instead%20of%20relying%20on%20this,the%20trajectory%20away%20from%20Earth.

joshsusser,

@fraser Neat. Newton's Third Law ftw. Makes me wonder if anyone has looked at using solar power to heat regolith enough to off-gas propellant for an ion engine, but I probably read too much sci-fi.

avdi, to random
@avdi@hachyderm.io avatar

If there's one thing that's more and more clear to me over the course of my career is how much of developer culture is dedicated to making ourselves complicit in our own exploitation. Witness the absolute mindless doublespeak that passes for engagement on LinkedIn.

joshsusser,

@avdi The career path for developers always seems to end in becoming a manager. I assume this makes it hard to convince developers to support the idea of unions. They think of themselves as future managers, the same way most poor Americans think of themselves as temporarily embarassed millionaires.

kitoconnell, to random
@kitoconnell@kolektiva.social avatar

I watched HBomberguy's massive video on and found it fascinating. Also his side video about Blair/Illuminaughti (however she spells it). I listened to her videos as background noise for a while, I believe mostly during 2021 and 2022, and had no clue how much she was stealing. I had to quit listening to her because her mispronunciations and errors were sometimes so jarring and obvious they would take me out of whatever I was doing, which defeated the purpose of having her on as background noise. It always struck me as weird that someone with a team as big as hers wouldn't catch and fix those, but I guess such are the never-ending demands of the YouTube content mill.

As an aside, I went back and watched the Roblox Oof video too, and it makes a great sidebar to the plagiarism video.

joshsusser,

@kitoconnell Don't miss ToddintheShadows' video about Somerton being a liar, too. https://youtu.be/A6_LW1PkmnY

kellan, to random
@kellan@fiasco.social avatar

Where is the content talking about contemporary software development issues? Like "How to migrate away from GraphQL?", "Maintaining software that was written by a team twice this size", "HTML and CSS for React Engineers", etc?

joshsusser,

@kellan "How to build useful software in an organization where important technical decisions are routinely overridden by a manager because the investors said so."

theautisticcoach, to actuallyautistic

What would my comrades like their friends & family to know?

@actuallyautistic

joshsusser,

@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic Let's start with the Double Empathy Problem and how maybe they could do some of the work to bridge the gap instead of everything always being on their terms and us doing all the work to adapt.

GrimmReality, to random
@GrimmReality@beige.party avatar

FRIDAY NIGHT WORDNERD FUN: Ref-verbs

OK so the other day the inimitable and brilliant Maura Quint used Kool-Aid Man as a verb, something like "I just Kool-Aid Manned my way into the conversation."

I love - fucking LOVE - cultural refs turned into funny awkward verbs (or alternately maybe modifiers, too?) and I'm trying to think of others, but I've only come up with a couple, which I'll cite.

Leroy Jenkins - I'm pretty sure it was Jamie from The British History Podcast who referred to someone Leroy Jenkinsing into some fraught or violent circumstance (which is a bit like Kool-Aid Manning, but just consider that a coincidence).

Genesis Device - wherein I cite [ahem] MYSELF, who used it in ref to a particular football program, which is said just needed to "just be Genesis Deviced so they can start over."

I realize this is a bit deep-in-the-weeds but just if you see this and it sparks a ref you have seen, let's say, enverbed, or have so-enverbed yourself, let me know!

joshsusser,

@GrimmReality I worked in a research department where every group's goals were too big for its budget, so the only way to get stuff done was to convince other groups to pitch in on your project, usually by convincing them you have shared goals. This was called Tom Sawyering a project.

fraser, to random
@fraser@m.universetoday.com avatar

Astronomers know of over 5,000 exoplanets, and it's assumed that many of them have moons. So far, however, only two of these worlds have candidate exomoons orbiting them. A new study published in Nature suggests that even those two examples are probably false positives. They found that transiting planets without moons would look identical to planets with moons, which means the previously discovered exomoon candidates don't have enough evidence.

https://www.mps.mpg.de/giant-doubts-about-giant-exomoons

joshsusser,

@fraser My heart goes out to David Kipping 😢

Fragglemuppet, to StarTrek

Sorry if this is a repeat question.

Picard had archaeology, Dickson Hill, and his flute playing. Sisko had cooking and baseball. Janeway was, understandably, very into crew morale, and seemed to involve herself in whatever group activities the crew were doing on the holodeck. She was also into science. Archer had water polo. If you were a Starfleet captain, what would your passtime be? If there were an episode where you weren't busy captaining, what would we see you doing?

joshsusser,

@Fragglemuppet Probably just watching episodes of Star Trek on the holodeck.

Shkshkshk, to Help
@Shkshkshk@dice.camp avatar

I was administed a really difficult questionnaire at work. to find the correct answers

@actuallyautistic

joshsusser,

@Shkshkshk What kind of Secret Santa thing includes revealing who someone's secret Santa is? And "we may share these lists with families if they ask about you" sounds like a threat. This is a recipe for resentment. Since participation is optional, I would opt out. But is it really optional? Or will opting out get you on some "not a team player" list? If I really had to fill that out at my job, I'd get a coworker to fill it out for me. Just keep in mind: The point isn't to make a list so you get a gift you will like. The point is to play the office holiday social game correctly so everyone else feels good about having included you in the event.

ScottSoCal, to actuallyautistic
@ScottSoCal@computerfairi.es avatar

@actuallyautistic

Wondering if this is an autism thing, or a me thing:

When they cast an actor in a movie, in a speaking part, but then have someone else sing and the actor just lipsyncs it. It's jarring, it throws me out of the movie and all I can think is "that's not his/her voice, how am I supposed to go along with this?"
We're watching a musical. And an actor is lipsyncing to someone else singing.

joshsusser,

@ScottSoCal @actuallyautistic This is basically the whole movie Singin' In The Rain. And why I don't really like West Side Story, cause Natalie Wood didn't sing her own songs. It's a musical. How do you cast someone who can't sing when there are hundreds of comparable actors who can?

joshsusser,

@punishmenthurts @ScottSoCal @actuallyautistic Yep. You don't have to be able to sing well to sing your own songs. Richard Harris in Camelot mostly spoke rhythmically and that was enough.

joshsusser, to Autism

How do we get someone like Rebecca Watson to debunk and expose the billion dollar industry based on junk science psychology that abuses kids until they conform to neurotypical social norms at the cost of their own mental health and well-being?

ABA tldr: ABA is and is gay conversion therapy for . That's not just a metaphor - they are the very same thing used for different socially unacceptable "conditions". Both ABA and conversion therapy were created by the same person, Ivar Lovass, and use the same methods. Those training methods are so terrible they are literally not legal to use on dogs, and conversion therapy itself is illegal in many countries and US states. If any reasonable standards were applied, ABA would also be illegal.

I have tried to get journalists of all stripes interested in doing an ABA exposé, but even the ones who get interested never seem to be able to make it a priority. It's easy to deprioritize ABA reporting when there's no market for it, and even stories about routine physical abuse and electric shock torture of autistic kids at don't break through, so I get why journalists don't bother. But we desperately need reporting on ABA that debunks the current mythology that it is helpful and justifies it being the only therapy for autistic kids that medical insurance will cover.

An ABA exposé segment by John Oliver could change everything, but he'll never do it because he's buddies with Jon Stewart who is a supporter of ABA and raises millions of dollars for ABA promoters like AutismSpeaks. (Surprise, Jon Stewart has an autistic son. It's often the autism parents who drink the ABA kool-aid because it lets them get their kids under control, and they don't know any better. Which is why we need reporting on it.)

We have four months until April, the dreaded Autism Awareness Month. Wouldn't it be nice if next year the month was about banning ABA instead of raising money for it? Anyone know anyone with a platform who is up for helping millions of autistic kids avoid a childhood of medically-approved abuse?

@actuallyautistic

joshsusser,

@mensrea @rebeccawatson @actuallyautistic I have tried to get her attention on autism topics before and been ignored. She was great tearing down Sabine Hossenfelder over her anti-trans junk science, but nothing on Hossenfelder's anti-autism junk science, though I did try to get her attention on it. I dunno, maybe she can't hear me unless I pay for her Patreon - that sort of filtering is fairly common these days.

GrimmReality, (edited ) to random
@GrimmReality@beige.party avatar

Submitted for reader participation:

If

A) The night before Thanksgiving is, according my ex, the biggest drinking night of the year and my ex is a former all-world NYC bartender and went on to play Hammerhead in Doom Patrol and T'veen in Picard, yet

B) I am dogsitting out in the middle of fucknuts Up North nowhere all alone except the dog, who does not drink beer (well),

C) Should I drink a bunch of beers?

joshsusser,

@GrimmReality @grissallia May the Cosmic Koala make it so!

joshsusser, to Astronomy

should adopt the word disasteroid to talk about those apocalyptic impactors.

joshsusser,

@spaceflight something like "The age of the dinosaurs ended when a disasteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago."

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