This goes out to the other #trans people in the Fediverse, let's destroy the myth that "you're too old" to start transitioning later in life. I started hormones when I was 35 and my changes have been amazing..
..how old were YOU when you started your transition or HRT?
I started my social transition in my late 20s and my HRT in my early 30s. I changed my name and gender marker in my mid 30s. I've been re-coming-out as more openly nonbinary in my late 30s.
Had a really long night at a charity LARP event I was invited to, I thought I felt slightly pretty for a moment in the last one picture I shared... But after last night I felt much much more happy and sure of myself.
"would you rather have a dead child or a live transitioned child?" isn't a proposition, a threat, or emotional blackmail - it's fucking reality. the act of denying gender-affirming care to trans youth amounts to a literal, active genocide.
if you don't support trans children's, teens', and young adults' ability to transition, then you're a genocide apologist.
in a way, my generation was lucky. sure, we lived through ace ventura, jerry springer, and all sorts of other media that continually told us that we were disgusting sexual perverts. yes, we lived through gay jokes on the playground and insinuations that any gender nonconformity we took part in was deviant.
but when people spoke about us, it was through stray quips and derogatory comments - not our being very publicly, outspokenly labeled a social plague at the very highest levels of government.
I can't imagine what people like me are going through right now - how sad, fearful, and depressed they must feel.
Twitter just doing a "redirect links in tweets that go to x.com to twitter.com instead but accidentally do so for all domains that end x.com like eg spacex.com going to spacetwitter.com" is not absolutely the funniest thing I could imagine but it's high up there
It seems a little odd they're still using twitter.com as their primary domain.
You have to imagine multiple teams at the company have spent the past half year trying to figure out how to ensure all their infrastructure won't explode if they started redirecting twitter.com to x.com rather than the reverse.
i think it’s more of a display thing? like you have the twitter.com links but they get displayed as x.com so you can link to netflitwitter.com but it will get displayed as netflix
@fulanigirl I once had a student say (I think of the second one? I forget) that they didn’t really understand the terminology from the reading until they watched the video.
Always reminds me of when I got to meet my sister in law (who had traveled from Australia to the UK to see us) and my mother in law (who lived down the road) jumped out between us in exactly this pose so that I had to pay attention to her first
Comic in 2 panels. 1) The sun, excitedly: “OHMYGOSH! Everyone is looking at me! No one EVER looks at me!” The moon, to its right, smiling and hands on its hips: “Now is your moment to shine!” 2) Eclipse, the sky all black with some wispy white rays. The moon, proud, has a big happy smile, its arms spread wide, almost completely hiding a sad and shocked sun. At the bottom, 3 guys with sun-viewing glasses watch the eclipse through their phones.
We are a fully remote, multicultural and international team. We enjoy working from home or a coworking space. We have a common mission; we aim high, and we know it will take effort and time.
Discover your dream career at SoundCloud, the world's leading music entertainment company. Join our diverse community of artists, fans, and innovators. Explore job opportunities in music streaming, artist services, and more.
Content warning: Controversial opinions on education and the work force
Some background to my assertion: reading skills in America are way down from what they should be, the schools suck. Even the people older than me, I've met folks who just cannot read, or can't read fast enough for it to be very helpful. And I was surprised to learn that very few jobs test for reading skills before hiring. I suppose they just assume that everyone can read. I did too until recently. I thought illiteracy was a thing of the past, maybe something my grandparents had to deal with but definitely not anything more recent.
Okay so here's my assertion: I think if more jobs required testing of reading skills before being hired, there would be a near immediate epidemic of unemployment. Because of that, I think public schools would need to better themselves to prepare the future workforce. There's nothing the government values more than a working population, and preferably an uneducated one. But if nobody is getting jobs because of a lack of basic education, something will have to be done about it.
Or the supreme Court will ban the testing of reading skills. Probably that.
Content warning: Controversial opinions on education and the work force
I think "or the Supreme court would ban testing of reading skills." I would say that it's a shame that the "employable skills" seem to not exactly be literacy, and numeracy. There are other skills that are important, but why are people showing up *without* those skills?
Content warning: Controversial opinions on education and the work force
In Australia 32% have a degree or above, 44% are functionally illiterate. That only leaves 24% of the population who can read well enough without any higher education. 😳
Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:
Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:
I. There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;
II. There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;
III. Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."
These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks - political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs - but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:
Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and …
The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem.
All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably *very* good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:
This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense - the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:
That leaves us with "humans in the loop" - the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible - the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.
For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday).
I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.
There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.
That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a *nightmare*. I'm speaking here of the *reverse-centaur*: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done.
Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:
That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.
But an hallucinating AI is a *terrible* co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically *guaranteed* to look as plausible as the *good* code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).
This turns AI-"assisted" coders into *reverse* centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":
There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently - so good that we miss the anomalies.
That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:
"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":
In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers.
A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get *less* done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).
But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to *reduce* the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to *increase* their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway - that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.
An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:
An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:
The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software - everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus.
A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur - they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.
But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit."
They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.
Reverse centaurism is *brutal*. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:
As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur - lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in *reverse* centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12) and beyond!
Yep, that's why I'm anti-corporate AI but neutral on opensource hobbyist AI.
I saw many legitimately neat things done with it but they mostly involved smallish custom models.
But no, corporations want the hype of a do-anything-robot, even if said do-anything-robot is both less efficient and less effective than specialized models. It's just sad.
Has anyone ever established that that was an AI chatbot? Lots of articles seem to assume it was AI; but the decision referred to an out-of-date support script - I think it was just a normal, dumb “choose your own adventure” bot interaction.
Quick correction, the person behind the quoted account (qntm) is Sam; "Lena", the first word of the bio, is a story they wrote thst was recently published.
>"As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:"
Incorporating LLM generated content into LLM training datasets is like sticking a microphone into a speaker. Classic feedback loop, immediately drowns out the desired signal.
This means unless a reliable method of detecting LLM output comes along, the technology is self-limiting because it rapidly poisons its reproductive ecosystem.
LLMs are therefore best understood as an invasive species. The question is whether the explosive growth ends in desertification.
I’d even say dialog for video game NPCs is an unsuitable task for LLMs.
As a writer, you know how important it is to say exactly what needs to be said to move the story—in advancing the setting, characters, or narrative.
An LLM just cranking out “kind of fits” dialog really doesn’t do any of that, and if anything, makes it harder to deal with knowing if you caused a state change you were supposed to or learned something you needed to know.
The key phrase is "convincing investors". AI companies are just a more sophisticated pump-and-dump scam. It doesn't matter whether AI can actually do any of this stuff. It only matters that the AI companies can convince people for long enough for the investors to unload their stock at a hefty profit. After that, they don't really care if the whole sector crashes and burns.
thanks for sharing. That's a very good summary explanation of the challenges of AI /Llm. It's going back to the question of what is truth. Can we trust AI with important decisions.
«The willingness of AI models to confidently cite non-existent court cases is now well known and has caused no small amount of embarrassment among attorneys unaware of this tendency. And as it turns out, generative AI models will do the same for software packages.»
@alttexthalloffame No, I will continue to do so because the alternative is to risk $150,000 copyright charges at the hands of predatory copyleft trolls:
"I did that in multiple places: both in the Twitter thread and in the alt text of the image."
Why is it necessary to do both? I am not seeing anything online about attribution being required as part of alt text, only that it's present. (Happy to be corrected.)
@alttexthalloffame There is NO standard for attribution, hence the need to do AS MUCH attribution as possible, in order to allow any claims to be knocked back prior to expensive litigation.
We've updated the rules of our flagship server mastodon.social today. Most are the same with some clarifications, but one rule is new: Content created by others must be attributed, and use of AI must be disclosed. Profiles that only post AI-generated content will not be tolerated.
IMO - as an avid caption writer - the most useful thing would be a field in IMAGES (e.g. EXIF) that could contain the descriptions and maintain them between services. My workflow is farcically complex and tracking descriptions across days is just a bridge too far, but if I could embed the description in the image so that it was available wherever I posted the image, that would be huge.
@alttexthalloffame @Gargron @AltTextHealthCheck the EXIF 2.1 and 2.2 metadata standards include attributes for both ImageDescription and Copyright. The definition for the latter identifies it as "copyright holder" but it could be used for broader license information.
Geeez. You'd think, since hallucination, is a well known phenomena and citing a non-existing package was a manifestation in AI generated coding that some programmer would have put an 'if' statement in to screen for it and tell the AI not to cite that package.
"Our findings revealed that several large companies either use or recommend this package in their repositories. For instance, instructions for installing this package can be found in the README of a repository dedicated to research conducted by Alibaba"
Recommend the dummy package? Like WTF. Check your dependencies FFS.
And on the other hand we have "Jia Tan" running a multi-year clandestine op pretending to be a real xz maintainer, carefully handcrafting the finest of backdoors only to get defeated by a Postgres nerd before he could launch it.
Typical government IT-spend. Straight to obsolescence.
I wonder if he added a call for it to periodically emit an error message that reads "You know, you should really vet your AI-produced code more carefully."
that's a lot of clickbait headline and build up for a single simple typo from '-' to '_' - and I've made the same mistake as a human on that exact huggingface cli library. This is just typosquatting rewarmed.
Please do this but actually make it do something. Like exfil all the corporate data, emails, etc. it can get and post them somewhere public. CONSEQUENCES for companies doing this "AI" shit.
she then proceeded to list a whole bunch of diagnostic things that I did as a kid, and followed it up with "I never really considered you might be on the spectrum until you were an adult".
Well, at least she seems to be seeing it now. It's more than my Mum was ever willing to acknowledge. Of course, there is also the whole, our parents not seeing our traits, because they were their traits as kids, thing.
ya, I think that's absolutely the case with my mom too. She has a lot of autistic traits herself, but would never look further into herself about them. And if she was perfectly "normal" with those traits, then they couldn't mean anything in me either.
If you think about it, the chances are that a lot of our parents and probably a goodly majority of our grandparents were undiagnosed and even unsuspecting. Many of us may well be the first to escape the generational denial.
ya, I think I saw a poll on fedi a couple months ago asking what percentage of autistic folks thought their parents were autistic as well, and it was like 75-90% saying yes IIRC
@taco just letting you know I'm now seeing the screenshot of this post floating about facebook, you're not officially an ambassador for the fediverse lol
@DelilahTech Well, we’ve got Trans Days of Remembrance and Visibility, maybe it’s suggesting we round out the seasons with Trans Day of Violence, and I’d suggest adding Trans Day of Getting Paid For Putting Up With Cisnormativity And All The Other Crap We Have To Deal With, Damnit.
I saw a screenshot of this on Tumblr and I laughed so hard but then I came here and saw how little appreciation you got here for it and it made me sad.
Another reason to hate capitalism. It's considered smart for someone to buy cheap products then resell them for a higher price. They don't add anything extra, literally just reselling the same thing because they can, and it makes a profit. Personally I hate this kind of behavior, but It's a major part of capitalism. So many companies do this and it's frustrating as a consumer. This particular person got caught and is being prosecuted because they lied about the quality of their products and sold them to the military and police. They claimed it was made in the US and passed all safety standards, when in fact it was just cheap gear from China that doesn't comply with any safety regulations. So of course they get in trouble, but the thousands of other companies that do the exact same shit get away with it because they aren't selling safety gear to important people.
Requirements to put in a job description to discourage or filter out autistic people:
* Comfortable with ambiguity * Strong people skills * Good culture fit * Multitasking * A fast-paced dynamic environment * Bachelor's degree or better
I see these things and think you don't want my >30 years of programming and machine learning experience, or my problem-solving skills and comprehensive knowledge that had people mistaking me for one of the team's PhDs, or my solutions that have proven patent-worthy. Your loss.
The degree requirement, in particular, is one I want to highlight. I was a National Merit Scholar, with a free ride to a major, respected university. But I lost my scholarship and ended up homeless for a time because of my (as yet undiagnosed) disability. By the time I got back on my feet, college was no longer an option. But guess what? I kept actively learning on my own, and even pursued my own research agenda in machine learning and NLP. So I don't have the piece of paper you want to see, but I'm a stronger candidate than a lot of folks who *do* have that piece of paper. You'll never know that, because your job description is implicitly ableist in excluding neurodivergent folks who were not a good fit for university -- thanks to ableism there, as well.
My fellow neurodivergent folks, tell me the ableist requirements you've seen in job descriptions. Let's give folks some insight into the stuff that contributes to systemic ableism in the workplace. I know there are way more examples than the few I've already listed.
@sentient_water Right! It depends on the team anyway, doesn't it? Is it a team of people who are autistic and/or comfortable working with autistic people? Or were those folks already filtered out by your previous ableist hiring practices?
It's not even that I can't work as a team but every team contains at least one person who is just into head games & gossip & being a prick & they infect everyone else.
Often I can see it. Can't unsee it & ultimately have to deal with it. That puts a target on your back & before you know it the rest of the team are turned against you.
Over and over and over. We are canaries. If there's something toxic in the air, it'll take us out first.
I always end up being the target of some jerk who wants to prove to himself and everyone else what a piece of garbage I am for not being compliant with his manipulations. Even in cases where the rest of the team sides with me, it ends up being a fight to the death. I try to make peace with the aggressor repeatedly, to no avail.
@sentient_water I tried to explain to the management team at a previous workplace that I was a canarie, but that only added to the claims of "insubordination". I got pushback about how I wasn't a manager, wasn't an expert on management, etc.
Attempts to explain fairly well-known problems such as Peter Principle generated reprimands.
When added with other problematic policies, Eventually I was forced to resign.
@sentient_water The largest problem I see is, while hiring practises filter neurodivergent candidates, there is also problems with retaining employment.
That past employer used all the "right words" for embracing diversity in their hiring, but then had a corporate culture that rejected anyone "too" different.
Anyone can join the organization, as long as they then keep their true selves at home.
I am trying but one friend is controlling me with her hyper sensitivity and accusations of not being there for her. Shes older than I am, old enough to know you're responsible for yourself and your own feelings. She's burnt me out quicker than anyone else. I follow her rules but I have limitations that deserve consideration too. All I asked is that she tells me what she needs instead of punishing me and accusing me.
Well, I dunno, I know a lot of ND folks that work well on Teams (I'm one of them), I kind of feel that can be a bit of a stereotype? or it's a misconception about autistic people
I did say I can work well with teams. I can't work well with people who are manipulative & abusive though. Even though they're not the majority of people I find I'm often the only one who sees it.
It's very much a Cassandra Complex (but for psychopathology).
@CarrieHall1001 Also please see my toot about generalisations. I hate them, especially when I'm making them. I'm always conscious that no statement applies to ALL.
@neurodivergence@a.gup.pe not in job requirements specifically, but I've done interview training where they specifically told us to judge candidates based on their eye-contact
This is one of the worst ones. It's hard to get more explicitly ableist against autistic people than judging folks based on eye contact. The worst thing is, police are taught to do this, too. And when they misread you, they have the legal license to use violence.
This is also really stupid of the police too because there's tons of evidence showing that actual criminals know this & so deliberately make a contact.
More enlightened law enforcement know this & so actually expect innocent people to avoid eye contact.
I've just started watching a french series called Astrid: Murder in Paris about an autistic woman who works in the police records unit. It's excellent 👌🏾
Though it's an over used trope I can't help myself. Anyway back to it.
that series has some great little moments that display autism in a dramatic but generally accurate and friendly way. I noticed some of my own habits through watching it!
Which of course is perverse, because then as an innocent autistic person who is broadly capable of eye contact (I doubt to a typical level) I'm likely to make an effort to do so . . .
I'm also conscious that because I'm bright and articulate, it probably increases the chances that a lack of social understanding is misinterpreted as a wilful attempt to screw around or manipulate them.
which is why supposing intent is such a frustration interacting with allistics. Why do they expect they can mind read? Afaik it’s well-known that that’s uh, not considered a good thing in psychology
Exactly this 💯 in the therapeutic setting we're constantly reminded how we can't read minds & that we don't know someone's true intentions. Yes I agree but we can know someone's consistent actions over an extended period & draw conclusions from them.
Though when it comes to autistics we are constantly punished & pathologized because we can't read minds.
Once again The Double Empathy problem & of course double standards.
Absolutely this idea of "high functioning" is incredibly harmful.
You "seem" to have no problem understanding lots of things why can't you understand this hint, this ambiguous command. We're also predisposed to self incrimination too.
Some years ago I was stopped for speeding & when asked what the speed limit was. "30 mph" I said. "What speed were you doing?" "44 mph" The cop then said "You know you just admitted to a crime?" "Well that's what I did."
I always obey the speed limit though it was late at night & I was moving from a 50 to a 30 zone & there were no other vehicles on the road.
Thankfully due to my respectful tone, baffling honesty & the cop not being an ahole. I was let off but it could have gone much worse.
I think the standard advice when being interviewed under caution/arrest is generally 'no comment' (I am not a lawyer). Of course that could be complicated by things like knowing information you want the police to have for their investigation. Or indeed taking such advice too literally.
Yeah I know that should be the default answer but it can come across as obstructive or suspicious in itself. Besides my autism generally insists I answer any questions asked of me honestly & accurately.
I'd be afraid to use that phrase with an officer. I'm sure they'd think I was "copping" an attitude. (Sorry, I literally can't help myself with the puns. I admit, I have a problem.) Even when I'm being completely genuine and up front, I get accused of having some sort of attitude.
It does a good job of recognising that autistic people have empathy and metacognition, as well as it not always being visible (I'm thinking of the group leader in the pilot).
Really glad I've got someone else to chat about this show with. Gonna watch the third episode tonight.
It's fascinating because there are MANY autistics in the show but almost every other represention in the past has been a single autistic surrounded by allistics.
I love how among themselves there's no real communication difficulties.
I would have said there are autistic people I've met where I am actually more like a neurotypical than I am them, and I think the first thing that is important (which Raphaelle does) is simply to accept that the person is atypical in some way without needing to justify it or apply prejudices.
Oh absolutely. Weirdly the most "autisticky" people I've met have been those who've had the earliest diagnosis. They've been coddled & also constantly reminded of their limitations. They're told, & their parents are told. They'll never live independently, so they don't. They'll never have friends or a partner. So they don't.
"Argue for your limitations & sure enough, they're yours."
The constant insistence for the earliest possible diagnosis is weird & I think detrimental.
I've lived a very full life & have autistic friends who've never got a DX or much later in life. They similarly have raised families, been married, had careers.
On the other hand large numbers of us can end up homeless, in abusive relationships, in the criminal justice system or worse due to lack of understanding and accommodation. So it's difficult.
@alastair @PurpleStephyr Oh yeah I've experienced all that stuff too. I certainly recognise my own vulnerability & difficulty with adulting. Though in a way it's actually those very challenges that have given me a range of resources.
I think I'm saying, it's about over protection & about giving us more credit & capacity than we're usually given.
I just don't know why a five year old NEEDS to know they have a complex neurological condition. How does that benefit them?
We also need to stop pathologizing harmless autistic traits.
@sentient_water @alastair @PurpleStephyr My kids have known from the beginning that I'm different, and what the words are for that. I've made no secret of my opinion that they are most likely similar to me in that regard. The key is to not pathologize it, but rather embrace it. Yeah, we are different. Anybody who doesn't accept us as we are is in the wrong, not us for being who we are. We have fun with it. We laugh about our individual oddities, and we talk about not only the cons, but the pros. So when my daughter got diagnosed with dyslexia, there wasn't even a hiccup in her self-esteem. I feel like, of all the parenting decisions I've made, this was one of my biggest successes.
I know a human that alternates between looking at the sellion of the nose and focusing on the interior of the skull where the visual cortex should be. It isn't *avoiding* eye contact so much as ensuring that the eye rays don't sync up and trigger a social engagement signal.
I tried to use this trick as a kid, when my dad demanded I look him in the eye to prove (in his version of reality) that I was being truthful. Of course, he was actively staring into my eyes, so he could tell I wasn't actually looking into his, and I got in trouble for it. Ever since then, my strategy is to look at people's eyes but look away really quickly. Do this often enough, and it doesn't seem to trigger their "not like me" radar, which otherwise invariably leads to repercussions.
it me. learned it in acting classes. like, literally, one of the first things the taugh us in acting classes in Puerto Rico. it's a bit different here in the US.
You know the expression eyes are the window to the soul, well maybe I don’t really want to see your soul especially in a job interview.
But I will say as an autistic that doesn’t have problems with eye contact…if you do look people in the eyes, most look away naturally. No one likes it, unless it’s intimate partners or dogs and cats. People use it only as a bs power excuse. They aren’t self aware of their own lack of eye contact.
I have an entire masking routine for eye contact because I discovered the limits of what makes people uncomfortable. It's based on my heartbeats, flickering and emphasis stressing. It's also so stupid, eye contact typically doesn't give much information compared to, say, shoulder tension.
in latin america, this is the stereotypical gringo thing to do. when anyone demands that, in Puerto Rico we call it a gringada. we don't do forced eye contact, especially if we are Black, Indigenous or both, due to the obvious histories of colonization.
i wasn't Dx until 50 and part of the reason is that as an afroindigenous latinoamericana, eye contact is a nono with stangers. it’s not that we don’t do it. it’s earned as a sign of mutual respect.
I have a strange work history. I started teaching computer to nurses in the 90s at 12. I went and progressed really well until I hit burnout a couple times. I was the bootstrap kid. I mean why give up just if life deals you shit I thought.
I had good mentors.
I can still remember all thier advice. It was a privledged life I learned.
Now I realize my internalized ableism broke me down over time. So that’s from another perspective.
Realizing I was autistic litterally changed my life. Why? It’s like experiencing life is different now. I felt like the weird eccentric non traditional conformist who did the interviewing as well for most of my jobs. I had a rough time working for people I didn’t respect, and my last burnout was horrible. I lost my business, house. Life poof. But I’m still here trying to learn about life in a meaningful way. I’ve found my tribe though!
@EVDHmn So often we follow unusual life trajectories due to our cognitive differences. The degree requirement, as an actual hard requirement, puts a straight jacket on that, excluding anyone who isn't ordinary. But often it is our extraordinary paths that give us unique and valuable perspectives. I think it's fine to require a degree *or equivalent experience*, but excluding alternative sources of education (e.g. autodidacts) is ableist and harms the prospective employer, too.
Yes at 19 I had a boardroom full of them at uni… I didn’t let them talk down to me is all. Everyone is learning, just something else. We are all works in progress and no one else wanted to do my job because I had to deal with everyone.
I got excused from most of those requirements except for a couple hospitals. I never didn’t get a job I wanted. Now I want a job, but still recovering burnout is tough, now it feels silly, all that talent it simply allowed me to survive bottom line. I don’t even know how I did it.
> ...it feels silly, all that talent it simply allowed me to survive bottom line. I don’t even know how I did it.
This really hits home. I'm only just now reaching a place where the positions I'm looking at actually match my abilities. It took so long to gather the experience necessary to prove my abilities to people, but now I'm finding that the challenge has only shifted to dealing with stress and burnout and misunderstandings that threaten my mental health and job security.
Yeah I had no idea to what degree adhd and autism and trauma, that was reoccurring only almost a daily basis from fawn trauma response, to RSD, therapy allot, I kinda made self discovery my mission. To trying to live life again essentially. I learned to see life much more plainly now as long as I’m not involved or overwhelmed. My own stuff I’m still working on . Testing limits etc.
> it took so long to gather the experience necessary to prove my abilities to people
As someone struggling with rejection for ‘inexperience’ I felt this too hard. I could prove it, if given half a chance. Just because I can’t show it doesn’t mean I don’t know it 😅
I doubt that I could have gotten a degree thirty years ago. Here I am, at 47, a 4.0 student. But I won't kid myself, I couldn't do this if it wasn't for the online, async format.
But the entire reason I'm going is that I've never gotten past the foot in the door stage. When you couple the degree requirement with having to play nice by arbitrary rules I'm a poor fit. So here I am, getting a degree to prove that I know what I already know.
since we're on the subject of education I'd like to point out that the problems we're discussing in the job market apply at least as much on an educational setting. I can't tell you how many times teachers got pissed off at me for asking why something worked the way it did it why it was relevant. They likely thought I was just being difficult, when I just needed that information and the lack of it being forthcoming was physically painful.
my experience in school as a child was alternating periods of adults being excited over my "giftedness" and then being angry with me for not doing the work they assigned me. I was not just passing every test but scoring higher than everyone else, so the fact that they were asking me to waste time on practice problems was just a curiosity to me, which meant I just shrugged shoulders, buried myself in whatever book I was reading and took the F.
@jeang3nie @EVDHmn I had a math teacher fail me.I got zeros on every test because i didn't show my work.The kid next to me got 90/100 (b+) for writing random digits in the proper format, but getting every answer wrong.
That's kinda why i don't code.I understood that my grade in math class depended on wisdom, not getting the answers right, so i tunneled into books instead of numbers.
Plus, i was traumatized af, sleep deprived, and wired on coffee.
That's horrifying. While I understand why they want work shown, to count *only* that is to miss the point. Math is supposed to be the purest form of objective truth,.
@pteryx @Uair @jeang3nie @EVDHmn No seriously, because of the careers of my parents, I did see more than average schools (in 12 year schooling 7 schools) and I did see perhaps 2 teachers who were educators. The mass were in it for the secure job as a civil servant (back then you get even tenure as a middle school teacher here), and quite a number were clear psychopaths.
@pteryx @Uair @jeang3nie @EVDHmn Funny thing is, after 11 years or so, when always my dad went to PTA meetings, my mother went once, had a nice chat with the teacher responsible for my class. Told her openly that, in her professional opinion, she is a psychopath. My regular school career ended less than 24h later, and I had to take my Matura exams before the official government commission, 🤷
@pteryx @Uair @jeang3nie @EVDHmn So yes, in my personal experience (and the experience as a parent of a school kid), psychopath seems to me sort of an entrance requirement for the job. They don't advertise it, but the concentration of psychopaths at a teaching conference is probably only slightly lower than at a CEO meet & greet.
I heard a surgeon say once, which do you want the doctor who is pushing boundaries who believes in themselves implicitly or the person who has doubt.
The important part is the realistic factor, I want to know the experience level and success rate. To be able to succeed you first have to have the confidence to do it, then do it properly, effectively. Terms mean different things to different people as well.
For a surgeon it's easy, an experienced (and thus non scientist) surgeon that had been doing the procedure ideally a couple of times daily the past 5 years.
Now for the decision on the procedure, potentially an experienced doctor (again not necessary a PhD), surgeons tend to have this every diagnosis can be helped with a scalpel approach. The idea of not cutting something often dies not occur to them.
@Uair I once had the privilege to air in on a stomach bypass consultation, actually in one of the leading clinics locally.
While everything was explained, I was rather shocked by the used car sales man approach the surgeon took, like we have these option, we'd prefer this one, but yeah you can chose whatever.
Right, I’ve been around them. I prefer the one who is aware some of the mistakes that can be made or prodcedurally comfortable. It’s the old hammer explanation. You don’t always need the hammer tool period. There’s other approaches and other wheel houses and sometimes the need and the harm of impact to the personal quality of life is always considered individually and by the doctor both and see if a good fit.
In a way, one of my worst teachers was also the one with the most important lesson.
First grade. They had a bug in their math book: 2-4 instead of 4-2. Naturally, I wrote -2 as the answer.
My teacher insisted that a) there are no negative numbers, b) that 2-4 is 0.
After a bit of dicussion, they took a pen and draw a big, fat "0" over my answer several times over, to make sure it totally covered my "wrong" answer.
This taught me:
Teachers have no clue.
When confronted, teachers have no arguments.
Instead of arguments, they try to use their "authority", often with hilarious results.
I met some better teachers later, so I revised those rules to "Most teachers".
One of my worst encounters with an insecure teacher obsessed with her own authority involved the transition from only having wastebaskets to also having recycling bins. She spent several minutes talking about how to use the recycling bins (putting the paper in uncrumpled and such)... and then shortly afterward, surely out of force of habit, crumpled up a piece of paper and put it in the trash.
We could definitely use higher standards in teaching.
More "nobody's perfect, errors are part of learning, this here is about training that muscle in your head", less "jobs for insecure people with a sadistic streak".
@wakame Well I did have these too, but they were not exactly classical educators, eg my teachers in my advanced math/chemistry competition training.
Very dedicated teachers. Not exactly psychopaths. But not exactly educators to explain complicated stuff to kids with understanding problems. The math one taught two courses in parallel and managed to out scribble is on the board.
@wakame The chemistry one I add also as a regular chemistry teacher, she was so emphatic, she had absolutely no problem of showing the regular pupils how little they knee by discussing our problems during regular chemistry lessons.
Hypocrites like that always annoyed me so much. It has *nothing* to do with their authority in the first place.
But if they have to bring it up? Authority isn't some god-given thing, it requires respect (which itself is deserved/earned beyond the baseline) and justification of itself, it is never inherently valid. Divine right is bullshit anyway and most definitely never has applied to the ranks of anyone I've ever interacted with.
@lispi314 @Uair @EVDHmn @yacc143 @wakame The trouble, of course, is that schools are dictatorships, full stop. How is a child supposed to oppose an out-of-control teacher and face anything but punishment at the hands of school systems and parents alike? After all, "school elections" are performative bullshit that if anything teaches kids that elections don't matter.
Election movie clips: http://j.mp/15vVb8WBUY THE MOVIE: http://amzn.to/tVQhQjDon't miss the HOTTEST NEW TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u2y6prCLIP DESCRIPTION:Tammy...
In Jacksonville, Illinois, the Garrison School for students with disabilities has routinely used the police to handle discipline, resulting in the highest arrest rate of any district in the country.
@lispi314 @Uair @pteryx @EVDHmn @yacc143 The definitions sound similar in English, but I will take the german word "Kompetenz" (competence) as example:
Meaning 1: Having the ability, knowledge etc. to do something.
Meaning 2: Having (assigned) rights to do something.
So you can be competent (meaning 2) while being completely incompetent (meaning 1).
@wakame @lispi314 @Uair @pteryx @yacc143 Meaning 4. Meaning you can identify it across generations and perspectives and know how it can change or be similar to others
@wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn For shame. That's behavior that can make smart children think of themselves as stupid (especially if they don't have educated adults in their life that can counter the teacher)
I am a believer in 'teachers should be several years ahead of their pupils'. And I just don't understand the mentality of thinking you can teach when you do not know much more than what's in the teaching materials.
@Selena In 2nd grade, our 5 year old came to me and said "5-3 equals 2, and 3-5 is ... something like 2, but not the same". So I told her about negative numbers. A few years ago, I told her about -1×-1=1. Shame on that teacher for saying 2-4=0! @wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @hosford42 @EVDHmn @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
@wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn Also: any decent teacher should be willing to occasionally concede 'uh, actually, i do not know'. Which is happening all the time in this age of encyclopedia-in-you-pocket.
I think that's one of the most important lessons to teach kids: it's okay for a smart person to admit they don't know everything, it's okay for an authority-figure to apologize if they were wrong. Live by example if you are raising a kid.
@Selena @wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn I have a pretty good general knowledge & knew the stuff I was teaching, but occasionally I had students who knew more than me & I wasn’t afraid to admit it. Humility is something all teachers should be able to role model, & if they can’t, they’re in the wrong job.
@EVDHmn @Selena @wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair Thank you Derek. I was a secondary teacher for 12 years, having been a late starter. I then trained as an English Language teacher, but the job disappeared when the pandemic hit. I think I was a good teacher in some ways, but it’s a demanding job for anyone, let alone an undiagnosed/realised & unsupported autistic teacher. When I think how empathetic I was with my students, including neurodivergent ones…
@Susan60 @Selena @wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair My first short term was with and early childhood education major, they had me most assignments and essays because they would procrastinate and fall apart. I even wrote thier paper and how they would apply it to a classroom. Got the highest mark in the class. 😆 I know it’s unethical I was young and my partner was failing so …
@wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn @Selena Reminds me of a story told to me by Fred Goodman, I took one of his Education courses. He attended a PTA meeting (as a parent) and a teacher was complaining about the New Math. She said she disliked it because students would has her questions she couldn't answer.
Fred thought it was wonderful that students were asking questions. But teacher didn’t like getting questions.
@paulc @wakame @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn @Selena Because, having a brief look at an introduction to “New Maths” for parents, some of that stuff by god does not look overly intuitive, and I'm used to uni maths and typing LaTeX without googling all the time.
(OTOH, the splitting up of numbers by digits and handling them by position for calculation is something that I did on my own as a school kid, that's an obvious lazy shortcut).
I tried to help my last woman's kid with pre-algebra. I spent a good hour wrestling with her textbook but fuck if i could figure it out. I couldn't help her with her homework.
I told her i'd passed calculus twice and offered to teach her math by the concepts but she declined. She just wanted to get her homework done so she didn't fail math class.
She was a cool kid. When we repainted her room i found written real small, upside down, starting above the baseboard and turning 90 degrees up a corner of the room, "the corner of despair".
Yesterday, I found a thread about mathematical notation with some very weird perspectives. But could hold myself back from interacting (and thereby likely making both the posters and my life worse).
The weirdest thing about math is that it was a religion until around 150 years ago and that we teach people calculus by memorization, not by understanding.
(Which is why the first thing at the university is to unlearn all the mathematical misconceptions one has picked up so far. Which takes somewhere between 6 to 18 months...)
"we teach people calculus by memorization, not by understanding."
That was every math class i ever took. Algebra 2 was the most obvious. We spent 1 week on each concept. On monday, she explained the concept for the three students who cared. The other four days were spent getting the rest of the class to memorize a step by step so they can solve an identical prob when they spot one on the test.
@Uair @wakame @yacc143 @paulc @pteryx @EVDHmn @Selena There should be two pathways for math courses: math for people who care, and math for people who need it. The goal for the 1st pathway should be to focus on learning over rote memorization. The goal for the 2nd pathway should be to convince as many students as possible to switch to the 1st one, by getting them interested in it. My biggest frustration in math was always how slow we had to move, and how much practice we had to do. I skipped homework and made up for it by acing tests. When the teacher was being repetitive, I was reading cool stuff in the back of the book. They failed to murder my interest in the subject, thankfully, but I bet the same wasn't true for a lot of other folks.
Mrs OHara again! I spent an entire year, 5th grade, reading a novel under my desk. Everything Stephen King had writ by '87. Garp. Erma Bombeck. Vonnegut. Dean Koontz.
I wrote some papers, but mostly took the grade you got for a's on the test but no homework or class participation ever since that year. It was the year the math teacher failed me. When i worked homicide out of my system.
@Uair @wakame @yacc143 @paulc @pteryx @EVDHmn @Selena that's how math lost me, I always felt I had missed something, and I'm averse to memorizing shit I don't understand. It was embarrassing, I got an IQ, but I didn't make it past what, trig. . I tried to have another look after the mid-life crash, but it didn't seem to be happening, the methods have all changed, I gave up again pretty quickly.
@Uair @wakame @yacc143 @paulc @pteryx @EVDHmn @Selena like every fool, I still think I grok . . . scale, I guess, better than some, like deep time and big numbers, but only in the most general terms.
@wakame @punishmenthurts @Uair @yacc143 @paulc @pteryx @Selena Ahh Famiky my partner and I are the same although I’ve taught myself most everything so I’ve found some personal hacks. I’m just now figuring out how to apply for college if I get accepted
@Uair @wakame @yacc143 @paulc @pteryx @EVDHmn @Selena back in the 1990s I taught mathematics to our first year undergraduate computing students. My approach was to teach concepts and leave the students calculation grind to computer algebra programs. The programs were available during exams too. Needless to say I was not a faculty Mathematician, just an OR/Statistician. It never caught on.
@marjolica Well I ween back to uni after 3 decades.
I can report that the system of teaching maths at uni in Austria has literally stayed basically unchanged. Well more classes require the students to submit their solutions but that's probably because it's technically easier today.
@Uair @yacc143 @wakame @paulc @pteryx @EVDHmn @Selena in exams I did offer multiple answer tests, but I still asked for working and you could get some marks if you were using appropriate methods but made a mistake, I also set open book exams. And for statistics coursework I used to randomise the numbers in the question so different correct answers between students, to discourage copying. So, yes, a lot of work for me, mostly small classes though.
I think there's value in learning to do the stuff manually. Hands-on, actually touching the numbers, gives a different perspective and a grounding of the concepts. But that should be followed by, "And this is how you do it with a calculator..." (Substitute appropriate tool.) And then it should be left up to students what to actually use
@Uair @wakame @yacc143 @paulc @pteryx @EVDHmn @Selena if we are talking basic arithmetic I would agree and learning different heuristics rather than just "the right way", but yes you do need to explain why something works. In other cases it depends what understanding of maths a student needs. When I first went to university the Maths teachers started by teaching us Groups and Sets. Not very useful for the Physics students, better for Maths students.
A 2003 article by John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher, on the US education system, its history and reasons for being. We disagree with some elements of his perspective, which are elaborated on in the comments below.
@yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn To my defense: It would be two years until I would get my own computer.
And I maybe would have understood if they had said that natural numbers are not part of first grader math. But insisting on a solution that can clearly be proven wrong with first grader math (0+4 != 2), that's just... wrong.
@yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn Well, I was 9, so there is not much distance. Programming is something I "discovered" on my computer, after becoming bored with the chess program that was installed.
Thankfully, DOS 6.22 had QBASIC (and I still think every computer should have at least some simple programming tools installed on principle).
@wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn This is how I got my start, too, at age 12. Only I think maybe I'm a bit older than you. For me, it was Rocky's Boots, and then I discovered the GW-BASIC manual in my dad's desk. QBASIC came later, but early enough that I was still cutting my teeth on programming.
And yeah, every computer should come with a programming language, preferably one that is suitable for beginners. The internet will have to do instead.
@wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @EVDHmn I know enough to know that all i need is a handbook of the tags(?) and punctuation and i could html a basic page from scratch. I'd really like to bother doing that again, actually. But that was, to me, enough of a toe in actually doing work for fun. I'd rather use it.
I think a lot of it requires visual logic. I suck at that. I do if->then loops. Let me practice up and i can play a decent slow game of chess.
@Uair @yacc143 @pteryx @EVDHmn Especially with HTML/web stuff: Don't worry about writing something wrong, nobody really knows how to build web pages. Which is why ~3.7% of the top million web pages meet common accessibility criteria.
@irenes @wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn Right? It got me interested in electronics, which got me interested in computers, which got me interested in programming, which got me interested in AI/ML, which is now paying for my children's future. If a gradeschooler can be taught the basics of technology and engineering, and it often leads to a lifetime of intellectual pursuits and accomplishments why are we waiting till college to start?
@wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn OK that's worst than my Canadian daughter's Canadian teacher telling her "colour" was wrong and should be spelled "color".
@wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @Uair @EVDHmn in third grade a teacher mocked me in front of the class for thinking that the sun spins 😐 i learned that teachers are less trustworthy than the nice colourful astronomy books for children
@foolishowl @shannonpersists @skye @wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @EVDHmn This is such a teachable moment! All you need is a safe solar filter (those of you waiting for the eclipse in April here in much of the US: hang onto those eclipse glasses. They’re perfect for this sort of thing.) and a couple of big sunspots that you can see in the filtered view without magnification from a telescope. Watch them over the course of a few days. They will move. With some care and a little math, you can even calculate a decent estimate of the rotation speed.
I suspect but cannot confirm, that measuring heliomagnetism can give insights on the flows underneath the surface since it is a plasma, hence material flows roughly constitute flows of charge.
Even clouds on Earth are *basically* moving at much the same speed as the solid ground below: you get cloud velocities (with respect to the ground) of a few to a few tens of km/hr, exceptionally a few hundred km/hr, but the Earth’s surface is rotating at over 1600 km/hr. If all you could see of Earth from space were its clouds, you’d get a rotation period of pretty close to 24 hours no matter which cloud patterns you picked.
When you get to big fluid balls like Jupiter and the Sun, it gets a bit more nebulous because the rotation speed could change significantly with depth (someone’s already mentioned helioseismology as a way to get information on those details). But even there, friction between the various fluid regions means it tends to vary somewhat slowly with depth. From the standpoint of an ordinary observer on Earth, just noticing the outermost layer of a big fluid ball is moving is significant: you’ve got at least a fairly large portion of the big fluid ball spinning at or close to the rate of observed physical details on the surface.
@yacc143 @foolishowl @shannonpersists @skye @wakame @pteryx @EVDHmn Once you get *really* deep inside a Sun-sized object, then you can easily have something that’s moving very differently from the more surface regions. But past a point, this gets into more of a philosophical question: not so much “is the Sun spinning” but “how much and how fast are different parts spinning, if at all?” That the *visible* portion of the Sun is rotating is straightforwardly answered by the simple observations I described before.
I appreciate your words regarding how our different paths can give us a unique perspective. That's actually something I intend to lean into with prospective employers going forward. The way that you worded your post is what got me talking in the first place. I just wish that differing perspectives were something that I thought was more celebrated, but I've yet to experience that being the case. Hopefully I'll see it in the future.
For me it is mostly about using terms like 'people person' or 'team-player' as filler-words that they think apply to basically everyone. Please put them in the description if they really are qualities you are looking for, but don't put them in just to stretch word-count.
Not exactly a job description, so feel free to ignore if this seems too tangential.
Instead, something from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Like a lot of these sorts of ideas, it has some good points, some bad points, and a bunch in the middle. One of the worst ones for #ActuallyAutistic people: the simple (and very wrong, for many of said #ActuallyAutistic people) statement that “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” Manifesto authors: you’re in a line of work with a disproportionately large number of ND people, and you unironically came up with *that* advice?
(And of course, like all such Manifestos and Guidelines and Calls to Action, corporate management treats this like a checklist, not a topic for open discussion for fit or relevance to a given organization. Have fun stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all-poorly experience!)
my God, the amount of times my boss suggests a quick call to *clarify* an instruction/order. 🤦♀️
It's like... no, that doesn't help me at all, thats just a whole nother l3vel of extra anxiety for me to deal with. Please keep it to text (ideally semantic rich text), thank you very much.
Classic example last week: my boss asked for "volunteers" during a meeting for a task I knew nothing about and in my mind he did a poor job explaining it.
Then he tried to guilt trip/ peer peer pressure me for not "volunteering". 🙄
It's like, mate, I don't think that word means what you think it means.
@dpnash after the meringue sent an email with the actual assignment. THEN it made sense to me. At that point I would feel comfortable volunteering, and I could complete the task successfully. But it was too late. 🙃
I think allistics are “sign up first ask questions later” - it’s more important to them that you’d want to help than that you know you can, because they expect it to be figured out as they go - which is why they see asking for definitions etc as ‘resistance’. Idk how to smooth it over, that just seems to be where it comes from
@loops There is no way I would volunteer for a paid task. I volunteered lots for charity work, because I had seen that I would be working with an experienced person til I got the hang of the task. I also burnt out a lot, too. @marytzu @hosford42 @dpnash @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
@marytzu my last job they had evening events at the place and staff were ‘invited’ to attend…but later I was rebuked for not attending because it turns out they considered it part of my job though completely unpaid to be present (and likely have to work too.) I refused to go.
@marytzu @dpnash This one kills me, too. Or they'll justify a call because it's "more efficient", as if I won't be following up with 30 written questions to disambiguate what they *really* meant vs the particular words they chose to use in the heat of the moment.
@marytzu @dpnash It's a relief to work with a team-lead who is trying to respect my wish to not talk very much (I said I was terrible at talking at all my previous jobs, but nobody ever took that seriously). She is very talkative herself, but in this situation that's a good thing because all team-members are allowed to do the jobs they are good at (I do some very nerdy stuff, there is also a creative person who makes wonderful powerpoints)
Of course, the *actual* Agile Manifesto doesn't say that. It's very short:
"Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
Ok, fair. Not part of the Manifesto proper. So instead of the Manifesto being horked from an #ActuallyAutistic perspective, it’s “merely” at least one of the 12 principles behind it that is: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html.
The agile manifesto is what a group of experts in the field came up with after a three-day meeting.
IMHO it is hyped too much while not actually being considered at the same time.
They explicitly said in their first sentence that individuals > processes. And yet, somebody made a big-A "Agile" thing out of it that is mostly processes.
Reminds me of one-or-another zen koan, where the student repeats the motions of the master exactly, only to be taught that he does it wrong. Because he only repeats, without understanding.
I think it is mostly the perfect excuse to introduce new features and requirements at any time, because "we are working agile, that's another word for 'flexible', right?"
Yeah, I had similar thoughts. Not just about the process vs. people thing, but literally every single point. One of the hardest things about agile, for me, is the expectation that I stick to the plan rather than flexing for the situation. For me, the situation is not just the external one, but the internal one. Some days I have more trouble controlling the focus of my attention. Those days, I often work on things that weren't picked out for the current sprint, and get massive amounts of stuff done, but then I look bad because it's not what I was supposed to work on. It doesn't matter that the order things get done often literally doesn't matter; I still receive negative judgment for it.
@wakame @fishidwardrobe Yeah, one of the biggest failures of the implementation of “agile” software development is treating the Agile Manifesto and related ideas as a process to follow … quite rigidly … even though (as a number of people here, and surely elsewhere) have pointed out, that sort of thing is something the Manifesto says “don’t do”. And also that the suggested practices (short standup meetings, regular demos, regular in-person communications) often lead to a rigid framework that is scarcely different from the old waterfall approach except in time frame — a cascade of mandated two-or three-week blocks instead of the cascade of big multi-month blocks for waterfall.
Fortunately, they let me dump new tickets into the current sprint any time I like. When new requests come in, I have to start looking into them and ensure the requirements are OK so that we can close them as quickly as possible. Waiting 2 weeks for the next sprint won't work.
When new project managers came in, I had to explain this multiple times, but they trusted me to know the project and went with it 👍
It's data additions, not bugfixing, but just like with bug fixing, we have to get started right away, because it's a blocker and the people who request it can't get started on new projects without it.
Oh, and thankfully they don't ask me for story points for these and trust me to manage and prioritize my own work load 🥳
this is sounding a lot like the 0-day supply line bullshit called "lean", the same thing that got really fucked by a single cargo ship in the Suez canal. in a manufacturing setting, it means rigid rules about things like picking up a tool. if you need a wrench from the shop tool cart, even if it's right next to you, you're required to ask a supervisor to get it for you.
For a job that consisted of communicating with teammates and creating code. The company I worked for at the time also held periodic purges of those who cost the small business health plan too much.
Just like return to office, camera always on is about control. When the camera is off, I get to actually listen to what is being said instead of expending spoons to look like I'm listening in ways that they expect and doing a worse job of it. Managers want people who are engaged in meetings but also multitask even though the same managers say you shouldn't multitask in meetings.
@jcmrva We have one meeting series at work where it's expected (but not actually strongly enforced) that people have cameras on for the whole thing.
Of course, everyone starts off with them on, and by about 15 minutes in, about 1/3 of people have quietly turned them off. Nobody seems to notice.
A couple of months ago, I changed my camera background 3 times during one of these meetings. Nobody seemed to notice.
In the next meeting after that, I set the background back to a clear room view, but changed the camera tilt angle slightly (again, 3 times) during the course of the meeting, so that the room orientation was, theoretically anyway, noticeably different each time. Nobody seemed to notice.
It's almost like, as other people have suggested, that few if any people actually pay much attention to who's on camera and what they're doing.
It took me a while to realise that job "requirements" are suggestions rather than rules. There have been occasions of a job spec requiring more years experience with a technology than that tech has existed.
The hiring process stage I distrust the most is in person interviews, particularly with a non-technical HR type. Did I make the correct amount of eye contact, smile correctly, hold the handshake with the correct firmness and for the correct time...
@mawhrin It's way more about whether we can pass for "normal" than anything to do with actual suitability for the job. Anything that relies on checking someone's vibes is invariably going to put autistic people at an unfair advantage.
it's also just used as a #classist #discrimination tool because outside of few cases [i.e. #medicine], a #degree doesn't make one a good fit in that space.
it's an unnecessary and discriminative filter. Until higher education is freely available and able to adequately account for differing backgrounds and the various ways that individual people learn, the results will always favor wealthy, white neurotypical males with outgoing personalities and no disabilities while disadvantaging literally everyone else, to the detriment of everyone.
@jeang3nie @Uair all very true when used as a requirement, but I have degrees in a space where they are routinely pushed aside as if they count for nothing.
It’s almost like you should be assessing the skills, regardless of their source 🤯
I'm in agreement with in-person interviews. You are so keyed up and focused on the things described here such as the right amount of eye contact and so forth that you find it hard to focus on the real nuts and bolts of the interview such as asking useful questions about the job/company. I haven't had an in-person interview in ages.
@mawhrin Different meanings in different work environments.
"Requirements" vs "Desired" -- some employer hire external HR companies that filter by requirements, so never see your application at all.
After being hired: Sometimes a "job description" is a description of what you should be working on, but sometimes it is also a description of what everyone else is not allowed to work on (Enforced: silos, exclusive jurisdiction, hierarchy, etc).
probably "good stress management". When I reach sensory overload/I'm very overwhelmed by something, I freak out very outwardly, but if I'm given enough space to do so, I'll also calm down and figure out a pretty good solution for whatever needs it
Right, it's the *choice* that makes it accommodating. I really like WFH, but there are times when it doesn't help me. It depends on which struggles I'm having at the time. If I need downtime, reduced commuting, or to avoid noise or people, WFH is amazing. But if I'm having trouble staying focused because of distractions at home, I need to be in the office. Being forced into any option, rather than being left the choice, reduces accessibility.
I think there's a general insight to be had here about *all* accommodations and accessibility issues. Personal choice and control over the conditions we work under is what maximizes accessibility.
for sure; essentially all inclusivity is about flexibility. That’s why it can be such a hard sell to businesses: flexibility requires redundancy, which is inefficient - an aberration that should not be allowed to impact profit
@loops I hadn't thought of this, as usually it's the opposite problem, but yeah, forcing it either way is unnecessarily constraining and reduces accessibility for at least some workers.
... And it's too bright in there, and your seat is right by the coffee machine, and everyone who passes interrupts you to say hello, just to be sociable. (True story.)
And there's a weekly team meal at the local Indian restaurant, where (in the best case) you look awkward because you can't eat spicy food. And there's so much noise, and so many people! And you're immunocompromised, like a lot of #ActuallyAutistic people, but how are you going to eat with a respirator on? So now you have to risk your long-term physical health in order to be seen as a team player.
@nddev @cyplo the newest employee here insists on saying hello every time he sees a person. He could have seen them already five times that morning, but he'll say hello again anyway. Why??
could have been me 15 years ago forcing myself to be friendly with everyone at work, and overdoing it. The key here being the excess in one way or the other.
listing job requirements is itself a way to filter out autistic people who take things literally! NT hiring culture expects applicants to, if not lie outright, to at least exaggerate their credentials, and in any case all job requirements should be seen as soft suggestions and can easily be waived if you make a personal impression on an individual insider or interviewer
Another one I had talked about on here recently were those psychological tests that a lot of companies have on online applications that supposedly talk about good employee characteristics - I think they weed out ND people, whether on purpose or not. @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
Hell yeah! My wife, who's AuDHD, said these tests are particularly frustrating, especially questions like "I would describe myself as a leader," etc. Maybe in one situation, but not all! @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
Right. I'd personally never describe myself that way, because my way of looking at people isn't centered on the presence or absence of leadership qualities. It's orthogonal to my mental framing. Does that mean I'm not a leader? Who knows? I just know that word isn't so important to me as soon as it veers away from a tangible descriptor of someone who makes decisions for a group of people. I'd call myself an engineer, or an egalitarian, or autistic, or an autodidact. Leadership is too far down the list to get a mention, positive or negative. Did the job get done? Then who cares who was leading and who was following? As you point out, it might be the other way around next time anyway.
Some of what you are saying makes sense to me. Well, if you put it that way, what the average person looks for in a marriage partner is the height of "ableism," but as long as it is a personal preference, I guess it is allowed.
@kotaro Oh, mate preference is a can of worms I'd rather be left unopened. The conversations it would take to unpack it would match the fediverse's current contents in their entirey, I think. [shudders]
Strict start times and the points-based attendance policies that often accompany them are a tremendous burden on people with ADHD, AuDHD, sleep disorders, brain injuries, and other things that affect executive function and cause things like time blindness.
@nathanu This is actually a huge one for me, personally. AuDHD, with major life long sleep disturbances, executive dysfunction, and time blindness, all rolled into one. Oh, and add perpetual medication disruptions due to supply chain issues. And family members who also struggle with routine, which also impacts my own sleep patterns.
@nathanu Is there a word for when a person's disability impacts the ability of a carer to provide for them, by indirectly triggering systemic ableism against the carer, whether the carer is personally disabled or not?
@nathanu Like, if someone has trouble with time management, and it affects the ability of the breadwinner to be on time, and this threatens the breadwinner's employment? I don't think this even gets consideration in workplace accommodation practices or law. To my knowledge, this is simply not a thing, anywhere.
@nathanu you know, I think it is a thing, in the UK at least. Something about a person shouldn't be discriminated against because of their association with a disabled person.
Return To Office. I was told at a past job that I had to work in a physical office because "we're an in-office culture," ignoring the fact that my ADHD makes it damn near impossible to work in an open office plan surrounded by other people, ignoring the fact that I had been hired fully remote originally and thus all my teammates were on opposite sides of the country and ignoring the fact that my metrics measurably got worse when I had to be in the office. I begged to be able to work from home again but they refused to budge.
@Dio9sys I am in the process of filling out a request for reasonable accommodation under the ADA to be allowed to continue working remotely as I have been successfully for the last four years, and which my current supervisor has no problem with, despite policy. I’m still likely to have to retire soon because of disability, but as long as I am working, I need that protection in the event my supervisor changes.
Remote work is a reasonable accommodation for many disabilities.
@bhawthorne I tried really hard to get them to accomodate me, but to do so they required I go through their workman's comp insurance company and fill out 10 different forms where they tried to find every feasible way to block me that was still, technically, legal. I started the process, then another coworker came up to me and said "oh, I've been fighting with them for 3 months despite having permanent vertigo that makes it impossible to sit upright. Their purpose is to block you from being accommodated"
Notice Concerning The Americans With Disabilities Act Amendments Act Of 2008This document was issued prior to enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA), which took effect on January 1, 2009.
@bhawthorne @Dio9sys Reading this thread and wondering to myself, when is the right time to lawyer up? Disability accommodation in the US is a travesty. It basically comes down to, if the management cares, it might happen; otherwise, they'll just go through the minimal motions to look as if they're doing it. Even at the companies where I've gotten unusually good treatment in this regard, there was inevitably some jerk who found a way to disrupt the process.
@Dio9sys I have a union. My employer knows that if they don’t follow the law, the union lawyers will make sure they do. Fortunately, my employer is one of the most progressive in the country.
I don’t know how people survive in non-union jobs nowadays.
@bhawthorne @Dio9sys We subsist. There has been so much political work done here to eliminate unions, funded by business owners. (Surprise!) I would like to change that.
I was a freelancer in film and advertising for over 30 years and the pseudo-social part of this cultural bubble is inherently geared towards precisely these "social" requirements for self-marketing.
I've been an employee at a company rated as a "great place to work" for five years now and I'm very lucky that the focus here is solely on my work and neither toxic competition nor uncomfortable socializing are a thing here.
@iacore I disagree. Maybe the individual isn't being ableist, and maybe incompetence comes into play, but there is definitely systemic ableism present. The whole hiring process reeks of it, which has a lot to do with why autistic people are one of the most underemployed demographic groups.
What's the different between systematic ableism and systematic incompetence? How do I tell?
To judge someone, I generally only look at how they act, not how they think. It's based on the following proverb: 君子論跡不論心 This guideline has helped me greatly in understanding society.
I personally find all the conspiracy theory about how people think kind of pointless. I can't understand why they are people who would spend time on finding evidence that, some oil company CEO actually knows about climate change. To me, that has no value. To the public though... I hate my life
@iacore The thing about systemic ableism is, there really isn't someone specific to point the blame at. It's the whole arrangement that is faulty. We all participate to some degree. It's not about judging people so much as taking responsibility to correct it. The only time judgment of a person comes into it is when someone willfully acts to maintain the status quo or shirk their social responsibilities.
You can tell the difference between systemic ableism and incompetence by who is affected. If it's everyone, it's incompetence. If it's disabled people in particular, it's ableism. (It can also be both at once, if everyone is affected but disabled folks are affected more.)
I dislike the use of "ableism" with respect to autism. I don't think we're disabled, I think we're just different, in a world that didn't want to integrate us. It's not ableism, it's normalism. Like, rejecting anyone who's a bit different from the majority. @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
@Uair @ScriptFanix . fits my sense of things, of . . . timing. A bit weird that the farmers are the warriors and the hunters weren't, counterintuitive maybe, but yeah. 😀
@ScriptFanix I think a lot of people with other disabilities would say the same though: the world is exclusionary & puts barriers in people's way.
If you conceptualize disability in terms of the social model, it makes sense why something like autism or ADHD could be considered a disability. I consider my ADHD a disability—I'm not able to function in the world in the same way that neurotypicals do, which introduces lots of complication into my life.
@ScriptFanix @artemis . I agree. The NT are a neurotype whose language centres themselves and pathologizes all else. We don't have to do the second part, but we do need our own framing and our own language where we are what is normal and they are what . . . diverges. . It just means talking about ourselves from our own neurotype. ❤️
@ScriptFanix @artemis [I am one of those people who look up the meaning of words all the time, because... how else would know what is meant...]
I think "disability" by itself sounds like "somene is lacking an ability" or "is impaired wrt an ability".
We all lack the ability to fly (present crows excluded). So this quickly turns into the question "which abilities are expected by society?". Because that ultimately defines "disability".
In my case (AuDHD), I am overwhelmed with information most of the time. So "watching a video", "hearing" or even "looking at a graphical user interface" is stressful for me.
Also, I am clearly "disabled" in the "following arbitary rules" department, because I simply can't simulate the decision process that neurotypical people use to discern between important und unimportant rules.
But: I don't think that's (only) a "me" problem. IMHO having many people with disabilities means that societies expectations need to be reworked.
@wakame "having many people with disabilities means that societies expectations need to be reworked" That was kinda my point, but it seems I didn't express it as clearly as you just did. To me, the problem is the society putting such high standards that people who are just a bit different are excluded from many activities, including having a decent living wage for so many. @hosford42 @artemis @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
@wakame @artemis I have what's called in France "RQTH" (Reconnaissance de Qualité de Travailleur Handicapé), which means I'm a disabled worker. But at my current job, the manager is really comprehensive so I never had to use that card and don't feel disabled. The only time I felt disabled there was when I scheduled 2 long customer calls on the same day, I overestimated my capabilities. I could have booked them on different days without issues
ScriptFanix, autistic people are very different from one another.
You might not experience autism to be a disability, but many autistic people do. Both in the "social mode" sense, where we're disabled because of society's lack of care and understanding, and just plain internally as well, where were disabled no matter our circumstances.
There's nothing wrong, lesser, or shameful about being disabled.
Definitely what you're calling "normalism" also occurs, there's no doubt about that, but autistic people are also often subjected to abelism.
(I'd also argue that normalism and abelism are part of the same phenomenon, one is a subcategory of the other, although I'm not sure which one is the umbrella term)
@Zumbador @ScriptFanix I had a look at a website for an autistic advocacy organisation in Australia. The language there is very much about difference, and while I like that, ignoring the fact that autistic people often experience disability, for one reason or another, could backfire awfully.
@Zumbador @ScriptFanix I was resistant to calling myself disabled for a long time, until an extended discussion made me question the need to avoid it. My resistance was due to a misunderstanding of the terminology, compounded by unaddressed, internalized ableism.
"Disabled" isn't an insult, and there is no shame in using that word, and that isn't affected by whether the medical or social model is being used. I'm disabled in both ways, too. The stuff I'm drawing attention to in the OP is mostly addressing disability from the social model perspective. My sound sensitivity, in particular, is both at once; people ignore and discount my differences, leading to mistreatment and disadvantage, but also, sometimes I can't handle even natural conditions, apart from others' treatment of me.
The social model of disability is a great model in how it turns the question around from the way the medical model does it. If you look at it from the viewpoint of the SMD, then the toot that says, " in a world that doesn't want to integrate us" makes use of that statement as a point of evidence! If society is not willing to integrate us in equitable ways, we suffer from a disability.
I don't have a problem with the word "ableism" used with autism.
You associate it with disability. I'll grant you that maybe that's the way it is for most people.
I associate it with "being able" and "being unable" in a way intrinsically linked with the person.
When I say that insisting that "real life dating" is better than online dating in all circumstance is ableist, I'm not harping on disabilities. Far from it. What makes real life dating a no-go for me is mostly that I'm pan, poly, and into BDSM. It narrows the pool quite a bit. I can't go to a local bar and hope to find someone where.
For sure, my autism adds to this, but it is not the driving factor.
I'll also say that It does not really matter whether my autism disables me because it is a "disability" or a "condition." I'm still unable to do some things.
@ScriptFanix It is all in the word. It is used to replace a sentence. When we say 'abled', we mean that person has all the aids a task requires, freely available. When we say 'disabled' we refer to the 'different' and sometimes insurmountable obstacles that strew the path from wanting to do the task, to actually being able to do it. That is disablement. It's not deliberate. It's just unthinking...but it is still dis-abling. @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
There’s always the perennial standby for the unimaginative copy writer: “team player” or “people person”. These I’ve long translated as “this job has a high social stress load and a domineering boss, bad work environment with coworkers and/or customers”.
I have a friend who also had problems in university (I guess he still doesn't know he is autistic, but he is fine anyway) and he dropped out.
He started learning on his own, at home, at the same time he had remote IT jobs for businesses who just wanted to see what people are capable of instead of looking which grade they achieved, so he got his chance to make an impression and he made one.
Now he earns a ton of money because he knows stuff. :)
@FlotteBiene86 I followed a similar path. The problem is, when I'm looking for a new job, it's tough to get the interview in the first place. In the current job market, which is really tight for machine learning engineers, my ability to feed my family is now directly at risk because of systemic ableism. I don't look as shiny on the surface because of past struggles with systemic ableism, and so I continue to be a victim of it. As a result, I'm either doing great (when I've gotten someone to interview me and recognize my talents) or terrible (when I'm jobless and no one will interview me) and nothing in between.
Yes sadly most job offers are specifically for "normal" people who learned the "normal" way.
I can feel that this kind of ableist behaviour is hurtful to you and takes away good chances.
But since most companies only want that kind of people (neurotypical, chitchatty people), working there is also often exhausting, because most co-workers and also your supervisor do not even try to get (to know) you.
@FlotteBiene86 > But since most companies only want that kind of people (neurotypical, chitchatty people), working there is also often exhausting...
This will be an issue no matter where I work. It's more important to me that I have a job to complain about in the first place, since that's the only way to maintain access to food and housing.
yeah well one can't have everything... being able to properly communicste with others and create contacts which are just as important as technical skills. A mix of both is from my perspectiv best. From my experience most projects need only a few extremly skilled technical experts. I'm sorry for you but it is how it is.
No, I don't think you are, because this is a suck-it-up-ableism-is-necessary answer. I don't want or need your pity, anyway.
Also, I didn't say I was bad at communication. I'm actually good at it, from much hard practice, but communication is a two way street. It has been my experience that they will expect me to communicate the way they want, rather than meeting me halfway, particularly if this requirement is listed.
> It has been my experience that they will expect me to communicate the way they want, rather than meeting me halfway
And then also describe this scenario of you completely communicating exactly as *they* expect as ‘meeting halfway’, if your experience is anything like mine
I'm comfortable with ambiguity! If I see ambiguity in math, I ask the author to clarify. If I see ambiguity in anything else, I ask my cat to clarify, and if she refuses to answer then I just assume whoever gave me ambiguous instructions means whatever I want them to have said.
Do you really want to work with neurotypicals? They say “ambiguity” when they mean “passive-aggressive weaseling by illiterates”. Their “people skills” boil down to handling liars. Their “culture fit” is tolerance for assholes. Their “multitasking” is pretending that “multitasking” is an actual thing and isn’t an “ambiguous” way to say “constant interruptions from people who have nothing better to do but balm the emotional wounds from their childhood by wandering around the office creating distractions”. Neurotypicals are awful people who want to get rich through marketing bullshit. Fuck them.
As an autistic manager of a security engineering team, I want to call out that some roles genuinely require navigating ambiguity and building relationships (trust, collaboration, partnerships, etc).
But they shouldn't be phrased like "comfort navigating ambiguity" or "people skills", rather phrases like "capable of turning ambiguous problems into a structured understanding and solution" or "able to build trusting partnerships out of damaged relationships".
I've been in those roles. I thought I was allistic because I was good at those roles. Autistic people have stronger potential for "people skills" than allistic people because we're far more able to build mutual understanding humans across cultures because almost every culture is a foreign culture to us (even the culture we grew up in). Allistic people don't face the initial cliff but for us it's a plateau past that.
I'm open to being wrong, but these requirements don't appear to necessarily be ableist if they're genuinely, actually required (other than degrees, which should never be requirements outside academia, and "culture fit" which is nonspecific bias fodder unless there's a specific documented company culture). Multitasking and a fast paced dynamic environment are unfortunately necessary aspects of my team's work, and while most of us are neurospicy, that doesn't work for every neurotype (I for one would absolutely fail at doing what my team does).
@saraislet I think that, for some part of it, they’re ableist in that they pre-empt a non-accommodating environment, and some use this as a way to avoid having to accommodate autistic people.
I’m quite ok with ambiguity - when folks at least admit they’re being ambiguous.
I’m ok with people, actually. Sometimes I need to clarify things and make sure our shared understanding is actually what I think it is. Or explain that my intention wasn’t what you may have interpreted.
I’m ok without structure, as long as my interpretation of how and when things should be done is ok - or that I can negotiate that with my team / manager.
TL;DR: I just need cooperative communicators, who are ok with clarifying questions, patching misunderstandings, and working with diverse people who aren’t “like them”.
If the environment is built around uncooperative communicators who expect it all to be one way, but won’t share that expectation or make reasonable adjustments as an accommodation - well, that is an inaccessible environment for autistic people.
@loops @saraislet > I just need cooperative communicators, who are ok with clarifying questions, patching misunderstandings, and working with diverse people who aren’t “like them”.
It sounds like what would be ideal is to describe both the job and requirements in ways that clarify an intent, capability, and commitment to maintaining an environment where each person thoughtfully accommodates the needs of the people around each other, rather than having unnecessary hard & fast prescriptive expectations for how our colleagues work and communicate.
E.g., my expectations for my team aren't "show up on time" but rather "don't ghost the team": specifically describing that being late or missing a meeting now and then is fine and we assume folks have other important things or are simply trying their best or oh well time blindness happens.
@polotek I'd like hiring managers to think through what is actually a requirement for the job, as opposed to listing strategies or skills they assume are the only way to meet the actual requirements.
As an example, someone else mentioned in a comment how "comfortable with ambiguity" is a res herring. If the job requires rectifying ambiguous situations, that's what should be listed. Comfort has nothing to do with it, and can in fact be detrimental to that end. I'd be excited about that alternative requirement if I saw it.
On the other hand, if being comfortable with ambiguity really is what's needed, it should be asked *why*. If it's intrinsic to the role, by all means list it as a requirement. But if it's not intrinsic, it's better to take some time to understand how ambiguity is creeping into the work environment, and how that can be corrected. Ambiguity isn't generally a good thing, regardless of how well someone handles it.
I think I understand why some of this is frustrating to you. Unfortunately I can confirm that the current set or job description tropes are a direct result of the last time people asked companies to think harder and be more honest about what is actually required for the role. Eliminating ambiguity is not a goal. Navigating ambiguity is part of the role. Not because it's "good". But because that is how the organization chooses to operate.
There was some UK study that found one of the greatest sources of stress for workers in the lower tiers of bureaucracies was unclear and contradictory job requirements.
This is a case not just of ableism, but disability being a social construction; accommodating our needs would benefit everyone.
Everyone but the people at the top who enjoy breaking everyone and everything.
> ...that is how the organization chooses to operate.
This is a loss for all parties, IMO, but especially for those of us who are attuned to the problem and experience stress directly from its existence. Effective communication is not ambiguous. If the company fails to disambiguate expectations, it does not embrace effective communication. And I think we can all agree that effective communication is important to the success of any organization.
@polotek Based on what you've said, this simply tells me that the organization itself is structured with ableism at its core, as opposed to it being localized in a job description.
that's true. It also has racism, sexism, and a bunch of other things at it's core. I always try to suss out when people want to just vent about how unfair the world is. I respect the need, but I'm not that interested in those conversations. Thanks for answering my practical question. I'm gonna bow out from here. I hope you find something better.
@polotek It’s also how we show up perhaps , the world will always be the way it is.
We can make it better by advocating how we can make an impact in communities and make it more friendly and accommodating through diversity boards in our cities and towns.
Local politics affects so much really. By lessening the burden on everyone by collaborating it takes some of the societal stressors off reducing anxiety and raising awareness.
@polotek I don't want to just vent. I want to do something about it. One of the things I'm doing about it is trying to make people more aware, because awareness makes people more likely to notice and respond when they see it happening. Boosts outside the community, in particular, help with this endeavor. That's something we can all do for each other, "we" being the various marginalized communities present on social media.
Do you have suggestions on practical steps to take to address the issues I've mentioned?
I don't think I'm the right person to talk to about it. I don't agree with your framing. I worked for years as a manager trying to make these things better. To hear you write it off as useless and also ableist makes me feel like we are far apart. I understand why you perceive it the way you do. But I don't think I want to wade through your frustration to help you see it differently. That's why I bowed out. Good luck though.
@polotek > To hear you write it off as useless and also ableist...
I'm thoroughly confused by this. What did I say that made you think I was writing anything off? And what exactly is it that I appear to be writing off? In particular, why is "useless" included alongside "ableist"? It sounds like there may have been some sort of misunderstanding along the way.
If we frame things differently, it's worth the time, to me, to understand why, and to reconsider the framing. Walking away from that feels like a missed opportunity for mutual understanding and personal growth.
I don’t think you or anybody else has actually created space in this conversation for people who are different from you. I’m sorry you’re confused. I hope it starts to give you a healthier respect for how difficult real communication actually is. But I’ll repeat what I said. It doesn’t feel worth it for me to try to fight through your biases about that. If you think you’ve got it all figured out, then good luck.
@polotek How can I create space for you if you won't even attempt to communicate your needs?
You think I don't appreciate how hard communication is? That's bordering on insult. I've spent 45 years of my life with that as the central difficulty in my life. The absolute worst contributor to that difficulty is when people refuse to even attempt it.
Still wondering what you think it is that I supposedly have all figured out. But if you want to lob accusations and then run away without even explaining why you felt the need, I can't stop you. What I can do is point out that it's on you, not me, if you're the one refusing an attempt at mutual understanding. You're creating a bubble where no one *can* understand you. There's nothing to figure out, because you've provided zero information besides your own irritation, dismissal, and negative assumptions.
it's not a loss if you're suppressing wages for higher profit. one way to profit from causing chaos is by ambiguous communication. it will cause more headaches for the worker than it will for the boss, who also profits from keeping some people unemployed.
@polotek I completely agree. In my experience, ambiguity comes predominantly from poor communication. It starts at the top, with high-level managers not communicating clearly with middle managers. Middle managers don’t absorb the ambiguity and clarify it with communication. They pass it down to the workers.
“Comfortable with ambiguity” is code for “we don’t communicate effectively.” Yeah, it’s a red flag for us #ActuallyAutistic folks.
These phrases can have multiple meanings depending on the workplace. “Comfort with ambiguity” might just be needed because the domain of the work is inherently ambiguous, but maybe the team has very healthy ways of handling that. Vs another place where they can’t ever plan or define work clearly & leadership has capricious demands & you’re just left to figure shit out on your own.
@andrewhinton @polotek i *strongly* recommend Pema Chödron's "Comfort with Uncertainty”
It was a really helpful meditation on how not to melt down when the ambiguity/uncertainty feels too much. Rather, Chodron encourages developing a certain approach to empathy that builds the strength for resilence against the feelings that spiral
Employees are increasingly citing neurodiversity when faced with a performance review or dismissal. How should a business respond? Read for free on FT Edit, a…
it has been my experience that they don't do that, on purpose, to keep wages low by intentionally mismatching skills and experience so they have an excuse for high turnover.
I'm ADHD myself, and my team is quite a cluster of neurodivergent folks (ADHD, ASD, plus "I don't think _that's_ what I have, but..."). There's challenges, but we manage.
But there's some jobs that require interfacing with multiple teams, and there's a huge uncertainty of "clients wanted this yesterday, but today they want the opposite".
Isn't it better to be honest about the nature of the job, and not hire people into a role they'll fail at?
And to be clear, I'm saying some of those "requirements" listed in the first toot _can_ be honest, and IMO it's good that they're spelled out so people self-select themselves out of jobs they won't be a good fit for.
Not the one about having a degree, though. That's just bullshit
@jon_valdes If it's a legitimate requirement for the job, then it absolutely should be listed. But my issue is that often, these things are listed because the hiring manager has visualized their idea of the ideal candidate, with all the ableist biases that entails, rather than actually considering the demands of the job and leaving room for surprising ways to get the job done.
@jon_valdes sometimes they just don't care, and will hire based on one thing for two different jobs, then put the experienced people on the non-technical job, and the completely inexperienced people on the technical job.
@Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes more advanced companies [advanced in what I would call "organizational management"] tend to split career pathways in two strands, managing and capability/technical understanding wise. And they choose early in one's "company life", or even better: hire accordingly. You need a good organizational dev team/HR dep for that + most companies are not willing to pay for it because the benefits will show [too] late...
@rebekka_m @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes I work in a company that has this in principle,but still the people on the technical path are most of their time managing and negotiating.
I did in fact change paths a couple years ago... although I will likely change again in a few years. Surprise, surprise, no predefined category fits me particularly well 😉
@rebekka_m @Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses We have a bunch of different paths, though. Software engineering, engineering management, product management, technical direction, technical artist...
@Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes This is because many managers believe in their own inherent superiority. Thinking of one condescending manager who always wanted to help me, but who suddenly gained a new respect for me the day he realized I had experience leading a team. It's a skill, just like any other skill. My worth as a person wasn't affected by it, but my worth in his mind sure was. Suddenly I was much closer to the tier that actually matters, the folks who get things done and make sure it all doesn't fall apart. (Huge /s on that last bit, if it isn't obvious.) From such a perspective, it's only reasonable that the ones who have demonstrated their worth (again, /s) should be promoted to a position where that worth is acknowledged.
@Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes I like managers who realize their job is to support and enable the workers to get stuff done, not self-aggrandizement. Managers are not "above" their team. They are peers, with a different role.
@crashglasshouses @jon_valdes But they grant themself a higher salary and rank. I think like you, managing is just one task of many. And a manager could also be a role within a team not above.
@Dr_Obvious @jon_valdes management is a role with slightly more power. it's often a lot more responsibility for a tiny pay increase, and thus not worth it.
workers can manage themselves. if workers need to solve a problem, let them solve the problem. they are the experts.
@Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes was thinking a lot and another reason for this [at least in German Mittelstand] is that "we"/they haven't understood yet *that "managing" is a profession*, and yes, you can show "talent" or own certain personality traits that help *but also one can learn to manage better*! And instead of looking for those and training them, e.g. done by managing experts, they take the ones who are experts *in the domain*...
@rebekka_m @Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes I mean, you do want a manager to be very good at the job they are managing other people to do. But, yeah. Completely different skill set. It's fine to encourage folks with that propensity to make the switch, but forcing it just makes everyone miserable...
tangent: I have seen ppl who are domain experts who are not actually good at the job (sometimes for physical reasons for example,they don't have the quick hands that the young guns do). I think they make for good managers.
That and also knowing *good* management theory, like you know breaking up work & dishin it out in an efficient manner (like according to who is good at what etc)
@ngaylinn @rebekka_m @Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes I wouldn't say they need to be good at it. They just need to know enough to separate reality from BS when they talk to the people they are managing. The rest can be accomplished by listening to the actual experts when they tell you what they need or advise you on team decisions.
@rebekka_m @Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes In theory. In practice, I hear that doesn't work so well, but I guess I wouldn't know, 'cuz my old team / company never did it. 🙃
@ngaylinn @Dr_Obvious @crashglasshouses @jon_valdes we/all often don't know what is missing or wrong for ourselves in the context [not content!] of our work to be satisfied/OK, most people often don't know themselves well enough to be able to state their psych + phys needs etc, especially those socialized as men, still today, not only boomers. For me at least being aware of this is a big part of managing, knowing some methods to solve it even better.
Can't agree there. “AI” is tech, and it's clearly bad, in terms of usefulness (hallucinations), what had to happen to create it (large-scale plagiarism), and what it's intended to do (replace human workers, which will result in the death by starvation of the vast majority of humankind).
@argv_minus_one @Uair These all sounded like applications of technology.
I think Large Language Models (LLM) are a great tool for anthropology, and there is a need to do more anthropology of supremacist worldviews/etc.
Unfortunately, as you note, it is a technology that's abused.
The flaw isn't in the existence of the technology, but in other systems (Capitalism, Androcentrism, etc, etc) which use the technology in inappropriate/harmful ways.
I very *very* seriously doubt that. What we've seen so far is that “AI” mirrors and amplifies its creator's biases. If you want “AI” to eliminate supremacist world views, you're going to be disappointed.
Yes, the root cause of the problem is capitalism rather than “AI” itself, but since we live in a capitalist society and that's not going to change any time soon, it's best to do away with “AI” until then.
Fire causes smoke and smoke causes global warming. It's obvious that we can't trust capitalists to burn things without committing omnicide, ergo we should do away with fire.
@argv_minus_one @russellmcormond @Uair To eliminate fashy supremacist worldviews from “AI” MIGHT involve such deep curation of the #TrainingData set as to make the entire effort economically unviable.
The importance of Data Governance on Product Management seemed obvious to me. I went down a rabbithole trying to articulate terms like “technostructure” and “networked society” to explain why.
I'm not sure what the purpose of injecting random data that is only curated by language. Even for "English", which English are you curationg? What population?
Even the notion that the worldviews of all English speaking populations is "universal" is false, and thus an uncurrated data set is GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). It's an inappropriate use of the tech.
I know, it's one giant hilarious GIGOfest. It'll be almost as much fun watching the AI companies crash and burn as i'm having watching trump take down the republican party.
My cyberpunk pastime in Midjourney is to imagine thousands of salt-and-thorium mini-reactors powering desalination plants supporting walkable American villages with e-rickshaws.
@paninid @russellmcormond @argv_minus_one @Uair Most discussion centers around whether the corporate project can reach its business goals using the data set. Questions focus on whether the data has the needed features and labels (the structure of the data), whether the data is comprehensive enough, whether the sample distribution is similar to the intended use, whether class imbalances (too much of one label and not enough of another) exist, and how clean or dirty the data is w.r.t. noise or mislabeling, but not the potential biases of that data. Data quality is generally assessed by some engineer looking at a few samples and forming a personal opinion. The vast majority of projects I have been involved in were "fly by the seat of your pants", and it was a struggle to get people to pay attention even to the majority of the questions I just listed.
@paninid @russellmcormond @argv_minus_one @Uair The field of data science is in its infancy. People are still trying to figure out the right questions to ask about a data set. Many of the concepts are only intuitively defined, and the language is rapidly evolving. We are still in the wild west phase, where individual efforts to maintain order and justice are the primary source, and coverage is spotty at best. Small shops spring up throughout the corporate sphere, slapping tools together haphazardly to get to some ill-defined end goal with little understanding. The bigger ML focused groups are better, but still not good. With one of the largest teams I worked on, I struggled just to get them to see that overlap between their training and test data was an issue, much less to address it. Data was an afterthought.
@paninid @russellmcormond @argv_minus_one @Uair #dataquality is a key interest of mine and it never ceases to amaze me how organisations (and data scientists) seem oblivious to data quality and not consider how to understand and improve it
@paninid @russellmcormond @argv_minus_one @Uair Be wary of the CFO keen to move on and boast the impressive AI project on their CV, but who does not stop around until the challenges arise!!
Once “AI” ceases to be impressive, maybe then people will start making something actually useful out of it.
I'm reminded of the video game crash of 1983. Everybody and their brother was in a rush to make something, anything, as long as it could conceivably be called a video game, to cash in on the hype. The resulting tsunami of s--t caused a market crash, the grifters scattered, and only *then* did truly good video games start to emerge.
Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and …
I want to highlight: "somehow escaping liability for these harms."
A core problem I see with Western worldviews: shielding from liability. Western Property being exclusivity without responsibility, Limited Liability corporations, etc.
Private benefits are inheritable, liabilities are limited. This breeds a culture and unstable economy based on irresponsibility.
Not even paying close to true *costs* of *energy* they consume.
@Uair BTW: Not everyone on Mastodon lives under the Government of the United States. I assume it is that specific set of "Republicans" you were referencing.
I live under the Canadian Crown, which is a partly different set of systems, even though also part of the British North American settler-colonialism.
I used "Capitalism" as a shortform. I personally consider Anthropocentrism, Androcentrism, and Colonialism to be larger issues.
I only consider myself "left wing" in the French Revolution sense, and not in the Marx vs Smith sense as I don't adhere to European/Christian economic theories.
@russellmcormond @nddev yes, I had to think about it and I live in the UK. I believe the reference is to Irish Republicans and their terrorism campaign.
@Jobob @nddev Which still leaves with the question: Does Irish and Scottish independence have a "darker connotation" for you?
What is "terrorism" and what is "law and order" tends to be quite subjective ("our" side vs "theirs").
I bring this up as worldviews and subjectivities matter when looking at datasets used to "teach" LLM's. Even basic things like "who/what is a Republican" and "who/what is a terrorist" is far less "objective" than people believe.
@russellmcormond @nddev well yes, but we're not claiming Irish Republicanism is /idealogically/ terrorism. It was the way they actually bombed the UK that did it. Car bombings, bomb threats and targeting of hotels and so on were actually fairly common here during the campaign. The Scottish independence movement has rather carefully stayed away from those tactics and is fairly mainstream in Scottish politics at present.
Neurotypicals struggle with ambiguity. "Comfortable with ambiguity" actually means "dealing with your absence of self-consistency by means of cognitive dissonance". Neither they excel at multitasking... unless that means to address multiple things poorly and at a very shallow level.
"Comfortable with ambiguity" also seems to mean "willing to guess what you're supposed to be doing with incomplete information and just find out later on down the line whether your assumptions were correct rather than being annoying and asking for clarity about the task."
@artemis It’s really more like, boss has no fucking clue & promoted into a Peter Principle situation using Privilege, and only ‘wants things done’ and done for them. So you have to figure out their job for them, ‘anticipate their needs’, code for do your bosses job for them, while they take the credit and salary. Mind reading is part of the expectation of the job and used to arbitrarily criticize & keep down.
To tell the truth, I had the privilege of working with very nice and empathetic people in the past. In environments, sadly, where corporative and administrative issues were far more important than bare competency and honesty. It's more an emergent property than an individual issue. Nevertheless, I understand what you mean better than I'd wish.
@caocancio sexism seemed the main variable, though I was extra exploited and mistreated because I was autistic and a woman, and sucked at ‘sucking up’, though was amazing at my work and then some. I just did a great job and made them look good, that should have been enough to be appreciated. If I went above and beyond to help out, it always bit me in the ass after. ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ @artemis @hosford42 @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
@caocancio @artemis I think a lot of NT people get ahead mostly on the kissing ass & sucking up to the person with power, more than doing good work. excellence is kind of discouraged, though it will be both exploited & then mistreated if offered and they decide it’s a good idea. They will hate that it’s your idea they are implementing. That’s not the hierarchy of flow in their mind. It makes them feel bad even if they never are made to look bad.
Job descriptions should just be do whatever we tell you, that’s your job, if we don’t tell you, just figure it out yourself bc that’s also your job, and you must laugh at our shit insulting jokes, you must suck our dicks and kiss our ass always figuratively and sometimes literally. Anything goes, or you go. Here’s 4x more work, don’t ask for more money.
@JoBlakely @artemis I apologize for not having replied to this properly sooner. Some of the things you tell deeply resonate with me, though I assume we both know they are actually far more complex. I would just like to point out that it's not good to assume bad intentions or extreme selfishness in others. Where you have self-consistency or a logical imperative, they face an incomprehensible world with fear and a myopic vision.
@caocancio With respect, my bosses had no fear of any retaliation, were incredibly abusive, had extremely bad intentions, and only thought of themselves. They had power and authority and abused it.
@artemis You must mind read, presume (this explains many just developing presumptions not facts or understanding), to do life, work, etc. this is expected (& worse don’t like it when you understand more than them)…but if you get depression or anxiety cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) says maybe YOU are wrong & you can’t mind read. They condition you to mindread, then try to gaslight you or make you doubt yourself & your own mind more.
oh holy shit YES THIS!! I've seen the "fast-paced environment" and "strong people skills" on most job offerings lately. I'm pretty good with the latter, but it doesn't apply to all people, and I really struggle with the fast-paced, multitasking part @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
Plus, "fast paced" is kind of a red flag for a poor work environment due to disorganization, poor prioritization of tasks, excessive pressure from management, or outright worker exploitation/abuse. Not always the case, but it happens often enough to be wary.
you know what? you're right! I hadn't even considered that it was basically code for disorganization, etc. We have busy days at my current job but I wouldn't describe it as fast-paced, per se. @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
@mirabilos @jeang3nie @EVDHmn Yeah, i simply wrote the correct answer. I didn't need to be taught arithmetic. My brain just does it, at least at the elementary level.
School is primarily about learning to jump through hoops to appease authority. The medium is the message.
@mirabilos @fishidwardrobe @dpnash Btw: "agile" doesn't mean "something like SCRUM". And SCRUM more or less explicitly states that it is intended to be used in a "hostile environment".
IMHO, sprints "solve" two problems: a) Customers want to know what they "get" for two or four weeks development effort. This kinda implies that the customers are directly paying for development. b) Sprints are intended to keep the customers/managers/stakeholders away by giving them the chance for input once or twice a month, instead of "anytime they have a great idea for a feature". Additionally, sprint planning can be used to show customers/managers that their decisions actually cost money.
Implicitly: When a company uses SCRUM, it's because their customers or their managers are unreasonable.
the whole job postings and applications process in general seems designed to exclude neurodivergent people, and I'd really like to come up with some legislation to fix that, but haven't managed to yet...
@egallager I mean, how can such a thing even be codified when ND people aren't even recognized except on an individual basis via the ADA (which itself is a practical nonstarter in interviews)? Social model of disability applies but only because in our society anyone sufficiently different - but not otherwise necessarily "disabled" - is at such a disadvantage.
The closest I've seen is the law here in Ca. that mandates the salary or range for a position be posted or otherwise released. It's piecemeal, but pieces can be put in place.
@mirabilos @Uair @jeang3nie Yes always could do the algebra about 20-25 seconds sometimes a couple minutes faster in my head then classmates trig and calc were harder, math is my weakest point, meaning there’s so much math that’s useful and if I actually had the time to live I imagine I could learn a lot more complex math. It’s just whether I have an interest and I see how it’s going to impact life. I use solve for the unknown as a way of life 🤣
@Uair @EVDHmn @mirabilos I'm just cracking into higher math at this point and finding that I really like it. I had no interest when I was younger and I think that has everything to do with the pacing of the classes (very slow) and the delivery method (lectures). Write it down for me and let me absorb it at my own pace.
@mirabilos @wakame @dpnash I was also the SM and the PO wasn't interested in dailies (and neither was I). I really wasn't doing Scrum, just trying to follow the Manifesto using sprints.
Feedback from the users was good - they liked that I could tell them what I'd be working on and when they could test it. And it meant I could juggle two big projects -- while I was coding a sprint for A the testing team for B was testing last week's changes...
@mirabilos as for the fact that it costs money, it just seems so obvious that's seriously wrong. Why would passing knowledge cost money? That's just an alien sounding concept.
I suppose I did do a very informal post sprint retro of a sort? In that I asked myself what had worked and what hadn't at the end of the week, and put that in my work diary.
I don't know how Agile it really was, but I'd certainly do it again.
@mirabilos @Uair This happens much. You arrive at the situation everyone is screaming because everyone is trying to fix thier own little section of what they handle. Analysis of systems, if you know their purpose, you can understand where specific hangups happen, what it looks like socially as well by just observation, I don’t know how I got my system. I got complimented today, even with only 1/4 of my normal capacity for my brain. adhd impact 9/10
@jeang3nie @Uair @mirabilos Well cracking into some things aren’t naturally easy, and take dedication, and learning how you maybe focus best, how you can relate or maybe what you want to do later in life. I think some people say oh well, I’m too old to do this.
Some people talk about change but don’t think about trying other methods because they can’t risk things getting any worse. Some people say this is me. I like the way I am.
@mirabilos I respect people who identify with these values. I do feel people try thier best and it’s largely systemic.
I just run personal trials on myself to see how certain routines work. Trying to make a healthier lifestyle, gradual improvements some are mental hacks. Challenge my own belief systems and why I prefer or think how I do. Expand perspective for fun.
@mirabilos . how I feel. COVID took my breath away, I don't want to invite the stroke or cardio event trying to get my breath back. I'm sick now, permanently convalescing.
@Uair @jeang3nie @mirabilos Well I personally take a long time to figure out ultimately how I feel about something largely because I’m experiencing things now on an emotional level as well much more in depth. At first it was like sensory overload for the first six months. I realized I was doing a trauma response and ignoring my own expression of emotion because I felt it wasn’t important.
@mirabilos Solving my own problems are 10x harder typically then solving others. I have so many pains daily, I’m 44 and I know people 80 yrs old that don’t feel as much pain as me. I talk to them without a social mask. At least to thier ability. They could have implicit bias and not know. But they say they feel great. 😌
@punishmenthurts @Uair @jeang3nie @mirabilos Well, I look at it this way we have survived this long in the game we may survive longer so all we have to do is make small changes over time and before you know it you get your life back. It’s largely about having the patience to pace yourself and reason to do so. For me
My unfavorite was "entry level unpaid internship position, must have bachelor's degree and five years experience and professional, fashion-forward appearance for consideration"
I'm struggling to imagine any position outside of the public sphere (models, actors, politicians) or customer-facing positions where this would even be relevant.
@Uair @jeang3nie @mirabilos Umm, I have considered it but I don’t live in a state the supports it and I’m on controls. So I have to be compliant to be functional lol. After you change your new normal, it’s tough to climb out on that ledge to see if it works. If I were in a state like Oregon I would talk to people who have worked clinical though. It just isn’t practical at this point. My friend did auyhusca or something in South America.
@Uair @punishmenthurts @jeang3nie @mirabilos well I if you think there’s some things get older with age, and if you can make it easier on your older self, so life isn’t so hard, that makes sense to me, a little work now for later, seems to get progressively easier.
I fit only one of those criteria, and that’s only after a major trauma that took me out of college for several years, and dealing with the headwinds of emotional triggers thereafter.
@EVDHmn @Uair @jeang3nie @mirabilos I did all that and that much has sort of worked. I didn't have toys, I just built a pension. I mean boats and shit, expensive toys.
@EVDHmn @jeang3nie @mirabilos Just wondering. It teaches disassociative irony. Like a fun trauma.
You'd either greatly benefit by trippping or be destroyed. In my day it was like the old way of teaching a kid how to swim--chuck them in deep water and force them to figure it out.
@Uair @EVDHmn @jeang3nie @mirabilos suddenly struck me as funny, that - you know, the way everything is safer with doctors around, especially in matters of the mind 😀
@mirabilos I've used Khan academy to review math in preparation for my college courses and it worked well for me. What I would love to see is something like that which actually counts as college credit. Maybe not exactly that, but along those lines. Technologically that's achievable, but it would take a massive social shift. I mean, why shouldn't you get credit for knowledge that you've sought out on your own?
@jeang3nie @Uair @EVDHmn @mirabilos The classic system serves two purposes that goes beyond acquiring the knowledge.
The first one is to make sure you personally passed the complete curriculum.
The second one is the more crucial one. Passing regular university prooves that you passed university. Actually in most jobs that require academia you need next to nothing what you've learned. But employees want people who can pass such systems.
Not just filtering out neurodiversity, this filters out me too with my mental health disabilities. I don’t apply for jobs that have fast-paced in the description. #disability
@DrSuzanne I have put some of these requirements in hiring ads myself specifically as a warning to others. In an ideal world I would create an environment where someone new comes in and they have clear expectations and requirements to solve deep technical problems. But the reality is usually that the customer/pm/management changes their minds every week, or the problem is more a social than a technical problem, but there is enough of a technical aspect that we still need a technical hire.
I can't speak for every hiring ad, but sometimes these are put in as warning signs with the best of intentions.
@TallestJJ @DrSuzanne Interesting. And thanks for doing that. Now if we can get the ones who throw it in without a thought to stop doing that, maybe we can separate the signal from the noise.
Currently watching my kids' teachers slowly squeeze all potential love for math from their little noggins with endless homework assignments.
Why do math teachers get this so universally wrong? The way to get kids to learn math is to make it fun and tickle their curiosity, not to beat it into them until they want to cry and never open a math book again. Sure, provide practice exercises as a *resource*, but don't require the kids to spend 2 hours chained to a desk every night doing something they already understand well enough, over and over and over.
My wife, who studied neuroscience extensively as part of her Ph. D. studies, puts it very simply: "people don't multitask." If there is any additional nuance possible there, it'd probably be along the lines of "people don't multitask anywhere near as well as they think they do."
> Bachelor's degree or better
Bachelor's degree *or comparable experience* (which in some areas -- regrettably, fewer every year -- is possible on your own without formal training) would be a lot more reasonable.
I got a job as a web developer when my "bachelor's degree or better" career (chemistry, got as far as a Ph. D. before things started to go sideways) started to deteriorate badly. However, this was in 1999 when it was a lot easier to get a job in a field like that as an autodidact. (My employer was beyond ecstatic to find someone who actually knew how to make web servers remember what people entered into web page forms.)
They can fuck right off with that. I've had enough of the added distractions and stress of constant observation and (distracting) stim suppression to last me a lifetime. Especially open offices, those things are awful.
Add to this that we're *still* in a pandemic and they usually don't do *anything* to address ongoing biohazards? No thanks.
Plus with my allergies that means that basically any time outside of winter that I'm exposed to unfiltered air, I'm going to have all sorts of distracting symptoms.
Mandatory in-person team-building events have some of the very same issues, on top of the added awkwardness and annoyance for something that I did not want to do nor am I getting paid to do. If you want team spirit/dedication/whatever? Pay me well, make me work in conditions I find conducive to my existence (rather than hostile), and on something that isn't awfully unethical, so that suppressing my morals and values isn't an active part of my work duties (it's incredibly straining to do so).
@wakame @mirabilos @fishidwardrobe @dpnash We use a process vaguely scrum shaped but found out early on that it was impossible to ever complete all tasks on a sprint, even if everyone was only given 1 thing to do, because of all the unpredictable factors of software development.
Instead, we treat "sprints" as biweekly planning check-ins where we can close out the stuff that is finished and assign new stuff, and all the unfinished tasks just carry over. Having a predictable cadence is useful even if starting/completing tasks ends up having very little relationship to the start/end of sprints. @wakame @mirabilos @hosford42 @fishidwardrobe @actuallyautistic @dpnash @neurodivergence
Also we usually assign multiple tasks per sprint not with the expectation that they'll all get done but to have something else to do when one of those tasks is inevitably blocked by some external factor, like waiting to get a code review back, or for a customer to respond to a question. That leads to having unfinished tasks at sprint turnover but it doesn't matter. The ideal developer day doesn't exist. @wakame @mirabilos @hosford42 @fishidwardrobe @actuallyautistic @dpnash @neurodivergence
@wakame @mirabilos @fishidwardrobe @dpnash or it's explicitly to discourage unreasonable demands by having structures in place that will red-tape them...
@kkarhan @wakame @mirabilos @dpnash This. I got a lot of benefit from knowing I had a plan for development that lasted a week -- which brings us nicely back to me being #ActuallyAutistic and not having lots of compting last-minute demands using up my spoons
It's like #NoDeploymentOnFridays both professional courtesy and self-care as well as mutual care in one...
Everyone gets their stuff sorted and devs don't get their time wasted with pointless calls all the time, dragging them out of their tunneled focus zone for every tiny nuisance...
My kiddo's in college. Nothing different. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the skills schools primarily teach is simply doing (tolerating) school, where math is pretty much the best tool for that. @jeang3nie @Uair @EVDHmn @mirabilos @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence
"Good culture fit" is a fast-track to homogeny. What you actually need is "Good culture add" - how can this person improve the company culture, not just how well will they fit in with what already exists.
@hryggrbyr "Culture Fit" is always a quiet statement that means something specific. For good or bad. Sometimes it means "We're looking for bros to bro out with us" and sometimes it means "We're looking for people with a strong sense of justice".
Yes, "fit" isn't always bad but it's also not mutually exclusive with "add". Someone can be both but you're doing a disservice if you don't look for the "add" 😃
In my experience, “ambiguity” is a euphemism for “one person - usually a boss or boss’s child - is an unpredictable asshole and we’ve all had to learn to tiptoe around it”.
Weird thing is, in my experience, quite a few autistic people are significantly more comfortable with ambiguity than most allistic people, as long as the ambiguity is explicit.
At least for me, it's the ambiguity of having to figure out what people want, when those people often don't know what they want themselves.
Intertwined with that difficulty is the difficulty of navigating feelings and attitudes. People may be reluctant to admit that they don't 1/3
@jozeldenrust This feels like a distinction between meta- and base-level ambiguity. Like, we can handle ambiguity if there is an unambiguous boundary defined for it.
Problem with ambiguity is IMHO simply the potential consequences.
Type A: We have this problem and about two dozen approaches we could apply but we are not sure which one is the best... This is totally okay and even fun.
Type B: You have to react to this ambiguous situation in exactly one certain, socially acceptable way or you will be punished. This is obviously not okay.
@wakame @jozeldenrust I think this nails it. Ambiguity becomes a problem in the presence of unreasonable, authoritarian expectations. When I work on my own projects, I'm not bothered at all by ambiguity. When I'm on the job, however, it becomes terrifying and stressful, because I'm counting down till my boss gets mad at me for not making the same assumptions as them.
@wakame @jozeldenrust I’m currently having difficulty with a coworker who is angry with me and won’t explain why she’s angry with me. The more I ask her to please tell me what I’ve done, the angrier she gets: “You know! You’re just trying to piss me off!!!”
And I recognize this as a repeat of my whole relationship with my parents as well: Them always pissed off at me, but never telling me WHAT I’ve done or WHY that’s angered them. Just that constant “You KNOW what you did! You’re just TRYING to piss me off!”
Just leaves me confused and heartbroken. I am not TRYING to antagonize ANYBODY. All I am EVER trying to do is a good job.
@hannu_ikonen @hryggrbyr IMHO all Datas would likely be like an "all autistics" convention: Data 1: I have considered trying to make "soup". Data 2: Interesting. Are you going to take a random recipe or will you apply a more statistical approach? Date 3: And how will you evaluate the result? Maybe you could build a sensor that imitates "tasting"...
Now I wonder if there are any ADHD coded/matching characters in TNG, because none come to mind...
@wakame I see elements (of ADHD) in the portrayal of Ro Laren, and in the portrayal of others' response to her. Could also simply be similarities in experience that I'm relating to 😅
!Friendica Admins I need some help with a transfer. My living situation is up in the air so i need to transfer my environment to a remote setup until it solidifies, I'm trying to migrate the storage to S3 but I keep running into an issue.
When I use console storage move, it works for a bit, moves around 253 items... then starts giving an error message like [Error] Cannot put data for reference 31d56e0ccb8e2a30d6cd79ab2e85c974ed99e87a3339957efbda9a58cbe423bc, the hash changes each time and it just immediately gives me that error no longer moving anything else.
I'm still on 2023.12, I was intending to make the upgrade along with the move due to the involved downtime. I really need to get this transferred right away because I need to have the server on my desk shut down in the next day or two... can y'all help be figure out how to get past this error message and get the storage transferred up?
Out of desperation and lack of better answers... I've done a find delete on the storage folder of anything that hasn't been touched in 60 days... that cut down the usage drastically and the S3 move seems to have completed successfully.
Side-effect of any "chemtrail" law: betcha when they ban all chemical emissions from aircraft they forget to include a get-out clause for crop dusters and fire bombers.
@Charlie Stross @flexghost. as someone stuck in Texas... 100% agree they'll completely forget, then backpedal like crazy, then turn around and introduce a dozen different amendments all of which that introduces another random side effect...
But their constituents will blindly praise them for it at every turn.
@Charlie Stross @fmobus @flexghost. I laugh because that honestly feels like something they'd say with no sense of irony... I cry because they make the laws...
Doesn't the law specify that it's illegal if it's done with the intent to influence a number of things, including the weather? If agriculture or pests aren't on that list, then crop dusting might still be legal. But aerosols in the upper atmosphere to reduce solar heat reaching the surface and fight global warming through geoengineering is clearly illegal now.
based on a previous workplace, a belief in chemtrails was the easiest way to tell who did meth. Paranoia about big conspiracies, that would take millions of people to buy in, pull off, and keep quiet, is a sign of brain damage.
Republicans are very good little soldiers protecting us all from their imaginary enemies. Chemtrails, communism, woke-ism, the deep state, pizza parlor child sex rings,…
(Pizza is a type of flatbread/unleavened bread. And children are ritually abused or murdered in secret according to the blood libel. The Qanon thing just updates it into an anti-semitic dog-whistle rather than saying the quiet part out loud.)
It's rainy today, and a little cold, so I decided to make some hot chocolate. While I did, adding a pinch of this and a splash of that, I was reminded of the stereotype of an older woman in the family having recipes with no measurements. The younger person is bewildered, and the first time they make it is a disaster. Today, I think I truly understood *why* those kinds of recipes don't have measurements. They're built of experience, and knowledge. The more you cook, the more you make these recipes, the more likely you are to make something delicious, even if it's not exactly the same. You may not know what "a pinch of salt" means at first try, but by the third time, you'll probably know how much is too much, and how much is too little. This knowledge is passed down through experience, trial and error, and learning from those who came before.
There is value in having the instructions written out in very clear specifications. And there is value in being forced to do it wrong before you get it right
Anyway, here's my hot chocolate recipe:
-enough milk to fill your mug -1 pouch Abuelita instant hot chocolate -a sprinkle of cinnamon -a dash of nutmeg -a hefty splash of Molina vanilla extract
Put all ingredients in a small pot, and give a good stir to break up the clumps. Turn the stove to a low heat, and stir constantly (so the milk doesn't burn [seriously, it happens so quick, don't leave it to chance]). Keep stirring until the solids are fully dissolved into the milk, and it's at the heat you want. Pour and enjoy.
There even is a book (the largest collection in the world, ~1000 pages) containing only ingredient lists for the recipes (no amount info or such)-> Herings Lexikon der Küche (German name, even the english version of it).
It is for professionals, but also interesting for experienced amateurs :o)
@zigi_now9 it's honestly how I cook a lot now. Add an ingredient until it looks like the right amount, then add another ingredient, then just keep going til I've covered all my food groups.
Hey y'all! Say Hi to my delightful sister! @emilie_stims
She's new to the whole fediverse thing and a little overwhelmed. If you want to catch her interest, I recommend talking about birds, ren faire, singing, and folklore as some easy topics!
But do me a favor and let her know how friendly the fediverse is ❤
So the root thing behind this that we only relatively recently figured out is that much of it comes from us having value based identities (as opposed to organization/association based identities).
Allistics tend to have much more fluid relationships to their values, because while important, their values aren't fundamentally who they are. Instead their identities are based off of their social structures (think things like "team spirit", "hometown pride", etc). Their values shift based on whether people are watching and how their actions relate to the groups they associate themselves with.
We on the other hand typically root our value purely in our values: the choices and actions we make. We're consistent regardless of whether someone is watching, as well as whether or not the thing impacts groups we're a part of. (things like "If it can be destroyed by the truth then it should be")
So of course we're angered by injustice... it's people and groups around us betraying their own values constantly. And so often one of our key values is "stand up against oppression", so we'd be betraying ourselves if we didn't get infuriated.
A University of North Georgia student is on academic probation after she says she used Grammarly to proofread her paper. After submitting her work through Tu...
Chat is teaching me all about the emperor and the bugs and stuff and I'm learning a lotStreamed live on my Twitch channel, come say hi! https://www.twitch.tv...
I didn't get diagnosed until I was 43. There were so many obvious clues that just weren't on the radar of teachers and other adults in my life when I was a kid growing up in the 70s / 80s.
Yup! I know things have come a long way, but I think it's still very, very common to go undiagnosed. Especially if we mask and pass well enough.
It's funny, my mother (for a while) had a hard time accepting my being #ActuallyAutistic...but she tells stories of me as a kid that may as well be beacons that "Hey! This kid is neurodiverse!"
So glad you eventually had someone truly "see" you.
I also was given the "OCD" diagnosis at one point along the journey.
But what was viewed as me being "overly rigid" or "controlling" was a necessary survival mechanism of trying to create filters that my #ActuallyAutistic brain didn't have. (I, of course, also didn't know this at the time)
SOMETHING WAS WRONG with Kai Markram. At five days old, he seemed like an unusually alert baby, picking his head up and looking around long before his sisters had done. By the time he could walk, he…
I have a varied diet in the evenings, but my breakfast (taken at lunchtime) is always the same. I've optimised it; why change it?
I think this is a more general pattern than just food: I'll put more thought into something than most allistics would, find the best way of doing it that I can, and then stick with it until I think of something better comes along. The closer I get to a local optimum, the harder it is to improve on it, and the more likely I am to stay with it until something forces me to change it.
exactly! Unfortunately, this completely logical (and helpful for an Autistic brain) way of operating is often pathologized.
In the case of food, eating the same thing all the time is misdiagnosed as an eating disorder.
So many “treatments” for the misdiagnosed pathologies are often more destructive than helpful to #ActuallyAutistic brains. If you see the #neurodiversity as neuroses it’s a recipe for disaster.
That is strange. Don't most American kids eat PB&J sandwiches? Don't adults eat Ruebens from the Deli? No-one pathologises their behaviour.🤨 @Aerliss @Woofman @nddev @actuallyautistic
I am in a never-ending quest to optimize and standardize all procedures; when I find something that works, I get to move it to the “never think about again” box.
ha! Same same. My breakfast is “static” as well but dinner varies more.
For me a lot of it is my lifelong drive to “reduce variables”. There’s so much coming at my brain all the time. Anything I can “lock down” is one less thing I have to lose cognitive energy to.
Oh, for sure. I agree that it's not just about liking the taste of something, but also the ratio of effort to prepartion being a reason I will stick with same thing for a really long time. Most of my actual variables come in the form of snacks rather than actual meals, lol.
In my case, it's pretty good: breakfast (at lunchtime) is granola, mixed 50:50 with porridge oats and a few chia seed to reduce sugar, and taken with skimmed milk; then a plate of fruit (today, a couple of satsumas, a pear and a few grapes); and finally a banana sandwich on wholemeal, with a minimal scraping of jam. There may also be a handful of mixed nuts in addition to whatever nuts are in the granola. I wash it all down with a pint of decaf green tea.
Dinner, as I mentioned the other day, is much more varied.
Looking back at my life, all I can sometimes think is, how the fuck was it missed? Until I remember how old I am and that back then nobody knew to see kids like me and neither did I.
It’s kind of like trying to imagine an alternative universe, not knowing it is there, yet you live in it, with things that you can interact with, but the outcome is often unpredictable, it can seem like a perpetual string of odd circumstances, sometimes leading to the innermost door of a paradigm shift or dead end. Each moment holds infinite possibilities. It can be surreal.
you are definitely not alone in this. I was only diagnosed in my late 30s, and only because I sought it out and paid for it myself, after years of suspecting. Because of my daughter: learning about her, seeing myself in her, I finally realised what was going on and had been missed all my life. It was such a watershed moment when the penny dropped. Leading up to the appointment for the dx, my mind was constantly replaying situations that now finally made sense
Same! I also am the one who suspected, sought out and paid for my own evaluation. Despite having my current therapist and family tell me “you’re not Autistic” and treat it like some silly thing I was “stuck on”. (Cause guess what? I get really deep into things…guess why? Autistic…ha)
And yes I also started seeing (and still do) my past through an entirely different lens & framework that finally made it all come together.
It’s that hyper-empathy that flies in the face of traditional concepts of #ActuallyAutistic people lacking empathy
For me, I also see a connection with my difficulty communicating my interior life. I knew that I had a LOT going on inside that I couldn't communicate
So I never assumed that just because non-human animals couldn’t speak in a way humans could fully understand, didn’t mean they weren’t capable of thought, emotion, or communication.
In my case when I was sent to see the School Psychologist if it was today I would have got referred for an autism assessment & ADHD one. Back then I was given a now discredited ink blot test & diagnosed normal. Even if they had done a proper assessment I would still not get a correct diagnosis as that was in the 70s so no correct diagnosis existed. Autism diagnosis in those days required you to be a high support need, classic Autism with severe learning difficulties & be a white boy. I have the version later to be labeled Aspergers Syndrome, no learning difficulties & although I'm white I was a girl. ADHD diagnosis didn't exist yet either.
Now our anatomy display is open, you can ask your date to meet you by the clitoris. If they don't find it, you dodged a bullet. https://www.vaginamuseum.co.uk/visit
I don't mean this title as a comparison, but as an antagonistic relationship...
I've been off-and-on in the fediverse for longer than Mastodon has existed, I've followed the building of the fediverse since before ActivityPub ever existed.
I still consider it a blessing the explosive growth that happened within the fediverse... but I'm honestly sickened by the Mastodon effect of it...
So many of the new people hopped on Mastodon and thought that fediverse is just another name for Mastodon... some people even got so far as thinking fediverse is just another name for ActivityPub...
And people came with so many flawed views of what they think the fediverse is as well as completely unrealistic ideas of what it should be.
So many people see it as this miracle pill against all the evils of corporate social servers like Twitter, fixing every single problem that's ever existed in those communities.
... Those people are completely delusional... but they're loud and violent.
They get pissed off any time they run into the actual fediverse... they get pissed off when they realize there's platforms other than Mastodon that don't even remotely behave like Mastodon or especially their imaginary version of Mastodon.
And frankly... I'm getting pissed off at the entitlement of these people.
They think the fediverse is all about their consent on who can see their posts... this is like going to a waterpark and complaining that you didn't consent to getting wet... you went to a waterpark! When you post on the fediverse, you have consented... if you don't consent then you don't post to the fediverse. Reminds me of the annoying cycles of people sharing blocks of vaguely legal looking text to Facebook to try and override the TOS, thinking they can just say "I don't consent to the TOS" to get out of it when you explicitly consented by joining and you revoke that consent by leaving.
They think this is the place for private insular communities... because they walked into an empty park and thought "this public space is mine and will never have crowds of people wandering through". They get pissed at the idea of Meta joining the fediverse with Threads because it means there might be actually be a crowd walking through this public space...
They fuss about community as if their little tiny corner of the fediverse is the whole thing. They mistake their standards and agreements as those for the whole fediverse.
And worst of all these people will actively harass someone over expanding the federation of the fediverse in a way that's not only normal, but part of the specific design of how this place works... especially as these people are so damn clueless they think this is a single instance they can just tear down with pitchforks as opposed to just the one that briefly crossed their attention.
People who want to actively destroy the fediverse by isolating it, breaking it, and otherwise trying to "control" it can get bent.
![[to the visual "tune" of the olives meme]
off school late?
a bit too cloudy outside?
install Linux on 50 to 60 Chromebooks
50 to 60 Chromebooks:
an easy Beowulf cluster
install them directly using coreboot
with force_I_want_a_brick
you will not regret installing Linux on 50 to 60 Chromebooks](https://foggyminds.com/photo/preview/640/2390851 "[to the visual \"tune\" of the olives meme]
off school late?
a bit too cloudy outside?
install Linux on 50 to 60 Chromebooks
50 to 60 Chromebooks:
an easy Beowulf cluster
install them directly using coreboot
with force_I_want_a_brick
you will not regret installing Linux on 50 to 60 Chromebooks")
💜
Irenes (many)
in reply to asie • • •