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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • I understand. I assume you paid them well for fair work hours under good conditions, provided for all the safety precautions, worker’s compensation, proper healthcare and all the good things a decent employer would do? Paid taxes on your income to fund the infrastructure you’re using?

    In that case, yes, you’re a good samaritan and got shafted by an unfair system.

    Doesn’t change the fact that scientific data suggests all those Covid measures had some impact, but I’ll take back my cheap labor comment then.




  • all not of legal status

    Ah, you used cheap labour from undocumented workers and it came back to bite you? There goes my sympathy.

    As for the science, there are studies to suggest measures like shelter-in-place had an impact, and the fact that literally every form of mask reduces risk of transmission at least slightly has been established long before the nature of viral infections was understood. You could easily find these things online or through a university library, given how scientifically versed you are. But I suspect you’d cherry-pick the ones you like anyway, so why bother?







  • Agreed. The more we argue about the “how” of the protests, the more we’re distracted from what they’re actually protesting about. The most effective way of stopping people complaining about something isn’t to shut them up, but to fix the thing.

    If someone’s poor and can’t afford to buy food, no amount of fines or jail time will prevent them from going back to stealing food the second they get out because - guess what - they’re still fucking poor. There’s a food bank near where I lived a while ago that notoriously had long lines. Slowly shuffling forward in a queue that screams “I’m poor” must be uncomfortable, but they’re still not stealing food while they have an alternative.

    If you want people to stop vandalising shit in their outrage over exploitation and greed, fucking do something about the exploitation and greed. I’m sure those people could have thought of more pleasant ways to spend their time than creating their cornflour pigment, driving out there and getting arrested to make a point without leaving lasting damage.







  • Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

    I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.




  • As a low support / “high functioning” (which feels like a toxic phrase for “good at masking and compensating”) autist, it’s easy for me say “I’m just different” and blame my disadvantages on a society that fails to accomodate for that divergence. I often stay away from spaces where I know I won’t be comfortable, I miss out on events I fear may overwhelm me, I retreat when I don’t feel like I can handle navigating the minefield of social interaction. I’m excluding myself from things, because I know (or fear) those things won’t cater to my differences, but I’m not universally unable to participate, so it feels less like a disability to me (more on that later).

    That most certainly doesn’t hold for people whose “functioning” is more severely impaired. If you respond to unexpected changes with anxiety attacks because you can’t adjust quickly, that certainly presents a disability in the literal sense and a challenge in dealing with everyday occurrences.

    I feel like the shift away from calling it a disability is partially due to the stigma of treating people with disabilities as lesser, partially because it’s not always a visible physical disability and I’ve seen people argue that it’s not a real disability. Both of those are bad, but instead of engaging them, It’s sometimes easier to sidestep. Instead of arguing whether I’m disabled or not, I’ll call it a neurodivergence, because my brain being different is something that’s beyond argument.

    There is also the opposite to disdain or dismissal: Pity or praise. Instead of treating me as defective or overdramatic, some people have responded with some form of “oh you poor thing, that must be hard” or “you’re so strong, making your way through life despite those challenges”.
    The first one may be half-right, but it just feels like something you’d say when you don’t know what’s appropriate and are trying to play it safe with the empathy angle.

    The second feels hollow, because I don’t feel stronger. I struggle far more than I could even express, because expressing thoughts in itself is a struggle. I spent forever writing this comment. To consider myself stronger than others would require me to somehow quantify my difficulties and weigh them up against theirs. I don’t think that’s productive. I think it will lead to some form of “suffering olympics”, which is a mindset I’d like to avoid.
    And really, what else would I do? Sit in a corner and cry about the injustice of the universe? Might as well curse the sun for being hot, it doesn’t change anything. Better to look for shade instead of dwelling on the problem.

    I don’t want people to treat me like I’m subhuman, nor like I’m superhuman. I don’t want people to invalidate my difficulties, nor make a point of dwelling on them. I want people to acknowledge that this is how I work, to understand if I’m doing something “wrong” or have difficulties, possibly help me if it’s reasonable.
    I don’t need a lot of accommodation, just some patience, understanding when I express myself poorly or do things a certain way that suits me more and maybe someone to handle difficult communication on my behalf. So I wouldn’t describe myself as disabled, whether or not that would be accurate, because of the social baggage that word carries. I’d rather leave the relevant help resources for those that need it more.

    That’s not to discount anyone else’s self-description. If you feel like “disability” fits your condition, I’m not going to invalidate that. You know your experience better than anyone else. In fact, I can see an argument that my self-exclusion as response to my difficulties presents some degree of disability to participate.

    I’m still fighting my own preconceptions on that, and it probably is part of the reason I don’t feel like disabled is an accurate description for msyelf. I’ve grown up with a certain set of convictions and prejudice that I’ve deeply internalised. I’ve mostly managed to expunge them when it comes to others, occasionally still catching myself in some judgmental train of thought and then consciously derailing it, but I have difficulties accurately and productively reflecting on my own self-perception. In a way, it’s both the least outwardly toxic, yet most self-destructive form of hypocrisy, and I don’t know how to deal with it.


    As for the romanticisation, I feel like that might be the result of efforts to fight the stigma having overshot their goal due to survivorship bias. Yes, people with ASD may have unique talents too. Yes, we’re not all entirely disadvantaged. Yes, ASD doesn’t automatically make us strictly less capable.

    But most of us aren’t some insane genius. You just wouldn’t make a big deal out of the average, so the media report on the extraordinary instead. And if someone’s only contact with the topic is through media that show the savants, it’s easy to forget that what they see isn’t representative.


  • Sure, but the common consensus seems to be that you shouldn’t be annoyed at the constant updates when that’s an explicit feature of that system. Maybe that’s just a misreading, but I assume the expected reaction would be “Not now” rather than “Not again”.

    (I’m not taking a position, as I’ve never worked with a rolling distro and can’t really comment on either stance, just trying to navigate the confusion here)