My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)
The online editor is extremely useful for quick projects with other people where real-time editing works better than git, and where people don't want to download tools.
If you're from a well off family, you can be oblivious to everything and still have what you need to live so in my experience things were a lot easier. For me once I became self-aware, it turned into a tradeoff of outgrowing sensory issues (i.e. fire drills being pure hell) and weird speech issues and learning social skills, with worse executive functioning and anxiety and energy and still not being socially proficient enough to not be some level of offputting, and now the social skills matter much more so it's a bigger obstacle even though I'm a lot better at them.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
I can relate to this in that I barely have any energy in the mornings to do anything no matter how early I set my alarm, then end up skipping everything except the bare minimum to function, or maybe less depending on if I happen to have more energy that day.
Autism has become a culturally dominant force that's displaced other kinds of neurodiversity almost completely. All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.
The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
I understand where you're coming from, and I would even agree with the denotation of every sentence in your first paragraph, but I think you're missing a lot.
Being "culturally dominant" is not a good thing for autistic people: it's not autistic voices that dominate, but mostly eugenics groups, with the occasional well-meaning (but usually uninformed) activist group trying to oppose the narrative. If you're familiar with the kind of "anti-racist" corporate training that's mostly just white guilt with a few racial stereotypes thrown in, then you know how far "well-meaning" can take you.
While we can draw many analogies to autistic masking, autistic masking is qualitatively different to the examples you've listed. We have other words for the other things (e.g. "talking white" is a special-case of "situational code-switching", and "staying closeted" is a special-case of something that I don't know a name for). You're skirting (and, I think, crossing) the line between analogy and appropriation in your first paragraph. (See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440873, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441925)
I'm not really sure what you mean by your "actually does the opposite" remark in the second paragraph, unless you're automatically treating this interactive description of autism made with care, by someone with personal experience of being autistic, as the kind of rubbish that's made by "well-meaning" ignorants for low-quality corporate training.
People with other flavours of neurodivergence have produced similar "simulators" (a kind of RPG, really). You might be familiar with Spoon Theory, originally devised to describe the psychological burden of living with lupus? That simulator is a TTRPG. I suspect that this simulator was made by someone who'd be classified as neurodivergent in respects not classified as autism.
I don't think masking is necessarily the right word, but when people start self-diagnosing themselves they often miss the correct problem in favor of what's popular on their social media feeds.
Right now, Autism and/or ADHD are the two that are most prevalent on social media. Many people, especially younger people who spend a lot of time on Reddit, TikTok, or other sites, see these diagnoses trend with vague descriptions about what they entail. When they encounter struggles, they recall those vague descriptions, make a connection, and assume their life problems are due to the diagnosis.
It's not uncommon to read accounts of people who describe their symptoms as textbook social anxiety or depression who will nevertheless insist they have "AuDHD" as self-diagnosed via their social media consumption.
It can actually be hard to break them out of one preferred diagnosis and get them going down the right path to address the problem.
An example: Someone develops an eating disorder, but they read on Reddit that forgetting to eat and having low energy for schoolwork can be a symptoms of ADHD. They self-diagnose as ADHD and avoid addressing their very obvious eating disorder problem. They might even get insulted when someone suggests they have an eating disorder, insisting that the other person must not understand ADHD.
This pattern isn't unique to autism or ADHD. It's common to all trending internet diagnoses. You will find communities where everyone convinces themselves they have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. Doctors who treat those two conditions are currently rejecting referrals at a high rate due to extreme self-diagnosis via TikTok. The people self-diagnosing with those conditions usually do have something wrong, but they've latched on to one explanation that doesn't fit and they won't let go because they think it explains everything about them.
I, personally, just really really hate how many people use "neurodiverse" as a synonym for "autistic". I am not neurotypical but am very much not autistic, and I'm far from the only one.
Indeed using the term "neurodiverse" only makes sense if you also want to include, for example, psychopaths (another form of neurodiversity) in the group that you want to describe.
> All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.
The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
Why do you feel this way? Do you not think having to do those things is tiring and exhausting for the affected people? Do you think the simulator’s author would disagree? If someone wrote a simulator for trying to code switch as a Black person or an Asian person and didn’t include all the ways that autistic people have to mask, would you feel they were also not promoting empathy?
I’m not sure what accusation you’re referring to? I think you may have read me inversely from how I intended to be read. Based on what the poster is saying, I assume he would disagree with my statement strongly, but at the same time what he says seems to imply it. I find that seeming contradiction interesting. I think it is interesting to me because in the past I had similar opinions to the poster but I eventually noticed the contradictions and updated my worldview, as perhaps he could consider as well. Non-contradictory world views seem to make better future predictions.
"It almost sounds like you're implying X would be easier..." looks like a claim that they want to reach situation X. With some uncertainty thrown on top.
In the case of "cultural and ethnically homogeneous society", there are two ways to get there: Either slowly melting pot over hundreds of years minimum, or drastic bad actions that destroy people's lives and strip culture instead of sharing it.
And since anyone alive today will be long dead by the time the first one possibly happens, it looks like a claim that they would be in favor of the second one.
So yeah, that would cause strong disagreement. It's a revolting thing to be associated with.
But it's not because the literal thing you said is wrong. The literal thing you said is correct. It is easier to not have to worry about those differences.
And there's no contradiction in any of that. What specific opinions are you calling contradictory?
Ya, I'm curious about this as well. I'm not a morning person, and certainly am always just-scraping-by until about 1 pm. But is this some mild autism? Or is this just how I am? Or is there even a sensible distinction between those two phrases?
Everyone seems to self-diagnose as slightly autistic these days. “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I think this is maybe related to imposter syndrome. “There are people who can easily do this thing that I struggle with. Maybe I’m not qualified./Maybe I’m autistic.”. This thought process assumes others aren’t struggling and also tends to look to those who excel rather than the average so it’s biased anyway.
Ya, I tend to agree. In fact, even if I _do_ have something, I think I'd rather not know. Whatever it is, it isn't too severe, so a diagnosis would mostly be helpful for getting medication. I have my own coping strategies and am able to navigate through life pretty much like everyone else, imperfectly but still making it. Having a diagnosis would not help me in this situation. I know some people feel that having a diagnosis can make a difference, and perhaps it is more important if you have something in an extreme form. But idk if I have something, and even if I do, I don't think the label would help me
> “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I would love to live in a society in which everyone is allowed to have personal quirks and their own personal stuff to deal with without being judged for it and without needing a label like “autism” to excuse it.
I have a friend who was diagnosed as an adult with Autism. 40 ish years into their life and they finally got a name to attach to their “quirks”. And the thing that they found most frustrating (and which I find sympathy for feeling that frustration) is the number of people who now treat them completely differently and with much more grace and respect.
On the one hand, of course we extend extra grace and accommodations to a person with a given disability because we expect people without the disability to behave differently. On the other hand, they didn’t just magically get the disability when they got diagnosed. They’ve had it their entire life, and needed that grace and accommodation their entire life. But only it’s only now, half way through their life with their shiny new diagnosis that people give them that grace and accommodation. Is it then any wonder that people who haven’t been able to get that official diagnosis are still trying to at least get people to accept an unofficial diagnosis? If we were better at not needing the labels in order to accommodate, maybe we wouldn’t also have so many “self diagnosed” people. Or ironically maybe we’d have more officially diagnosed people because we wouldn’t be having a moral panic over fakes.
There's no doubt that internet-connected devices are distracting and can cause all sorts of health issues (and as a college student, my frequently browsing various communities on my laptop is something that is constantly getting in the way of my productivity when I do homework). But people are acting like making kids and teens listen to somebody talk for 7 hours per day in a classroom is the solution, and as someone with an aggressively hands-on learning style, I couldn't disagree more.
During high school, I would frequently tune out during lectures (and this was with phone bans in classrooms) and overall learned next to nothing from them. I got my knowledge from studying notes I copied from the whiteboard, studying the lecture PPTs, reading the textbook, using Khan Academy, completing homework, and utilizing the internet when needed. And I graduated with straight A's taking the most rigorous classes my school offered. Currently I'm in college now, and at some point I decided lectures were wasting my time and stopped attending them so I could sleep in or do homework instead, and it hasn't hurt my academic performance at all (and probably improved it).
Along with the importance of lectures being vastly overstated, a lot of the content from them isn't even particularly useful in real life. Basically all of my tech skills came from family connections, Reddit, HN, YouTube, random blogs and documentation, and having the time to work on projects (and one of my biggest concerns about the push to keep kids off of social media is depriving them of this sort of information and community). Lectures and homework take time away from learning these sort of skills and make people instead learn things much more inefficiently and that are often of questionable value (i.e. studying old poems, learning scattered facts about history but not analyzing why they happened and leaving many of the most important bits out, having the same things be taught multiple times in K-12 then having to take the class yet another time in college).
With this in mind, I wish people would focus more on making the school system more efficient, engaging, and applicable and not a waste of time instead of acting like banning phones is going to fix everyone's problems.
I know people personally who recently graduated high school and went down the 4chan rabbithole because they wanted to be "edgy", then they got comfortable with the extremely racist attitudes they were promoting
For the free versions, they are pretty similar, except ProtonMail supports PGP which works with people who don't use ProtonMail, whereas Tutanota uses its own encryption which only works with Tutanota users. Neither of them support third party clients (although ProtonMail has an IMAP bridge for desktop for their paid version), so I would say ProtonMail is better for that reason. Both of them are much better than Gmail though privacy-wise.
However, one thing to be careful of is that unlike Gmail, neither of them support email forwarding, which might become a problem if you want to switch email providers again. A workaround for that is to buy your own domain and use the paid version of whichever service you choose so you can change services without changing your email address. For that feature, Tutanota costs significantly less than ProtonMail does.
If you want an email provider that is more focused on features like Gmail but doesn't sell your data, you can also look at FastMail (Australia) or Mailbox.org (Germany). FastMail (what I use) has a better UI, but it is based in a country with anti-encryption laws. While ProtonMail/Tutanota are trying to be government proof by end-to-end encrypting your emails at the expense of features, FastMail/Mailbox.org are more focused on productivity without making money off of your data. To me, FastMail/Mailbox.org have good enough privacy since I use Signal for most personal communications I want private, but if a government is after you for some reason, ProtonMail/Tutanota would definitely be a better option.
Fastmail is the opposite of the ProtonMail and Tutanota in terms of privacy and security. I wonder if it’s much different from the paid version of the Google’s email (where, I suppose, users’ data is not commercialized either).
Protonmail uses OpenPGP, so it better interfaces with other services.
I'm not sure how paid Gmail handles data, but at least Fastmail is not from a giant ad company that wants to basically DRM the internet with WEI and generally has an incentive to collect as much data as possible and show ads everywhere. Privacy (against corporations) is one of Fastmail's main marketing points, and considering how it's a smaller paid-only service where being discovered lying about its claims could basically destroy its business, I would trust it more than paid Gmail which will continue to exist despite Google's unethical behavior. It's not end-to-end encrypted though, so it's not perfect privacy-wise, and worse than ProtonMail/Tutanota in that regard.
However, after looking some things up, I just saw that Mailbox.org has a feature called "Encrypted Mailbox" that automatically encrypts incoming emails before storing them (which I somehow didn't see when I was using it since I thought it was similar to FastMail but based in a different country), similar to how ProtonMail/Tutanota work, and I'm not seeing anything similar for FastMail. However, Mailbox.org also supports third party clients and features that FastMail has like email forwarding, unlike ProtonMail/Tutanota, so Mailbox.org actually looks like a better option than any of the others (assuming you trust that they're not secretly storing your emails as they arrive somewhere unencrypted, although they might if forced to by the government).
