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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

    We don’t have a natural ability to infer emotions from body language, for a start. We have to learn to actively pay attention to it. Replacing natural instinct that a neurotypical person has with an active thought process is tiring, for a start.

    Add to that most ASD people have trouble with emotional control, need to actively think about their own facial expressions, and often have social quirks that are unacceptable like nail biting which must be actively repressed… and being around others for hours on end is exhausting.

    On top of this, most ASD people also have ADHD, and in the modern open office environment between the social aspect and never ending barrage of distraction, and the workplace is hostile, actively hostile to folks with ASD.

    This combination of factors leads to having no where to unmask and relax until they get home. When they do, they are so exhausted from being something they are not for 10 hours (commute has to be included as its all public space) that when they get home they just shut down. They don’t call family or friends usually, they don’t get things around the house done. They have to turn off and try to re-energize themselves for doing it all again tomorrow.

    I know all this as I am ASD and ADHD

    Being able to work from home has brought actual balance to our lives as we can unmask the moment the camera goes off, we have rooms at home where we can close the door and remove distractions (well except mandatory work chats, but its a matter of muting that for focus) and at the end of the day we still have energy for our actual lives. In other words, this is the true work-life balance that I had always heard of but never truly felt I had.









  • Windows XP. I worked MSN tech support the year Blaster hit. I remember droning through the same repair steps every 15 minutes with caller after caller in a neverending stream that lasted for weeks.

    After a couple of weeks of this, my coworkers and I had a weekend off together and we planned to party it up and blow off some steam with a LAN Party with Freelancer and beers. I had my comp all prepped and ready, it was freshly reinstalled and the game had been tested and benchmarked.

    I came home from a long shift to find the one of the new Blaster variants, which used a new vulnerability that had not been patched until I had been at work that day. It had triggered so many reboots while I was at work it triggered NTFS corruption somehow. I had to reinstall… And I had done nothing to deserve that.

    That virus fucking broke me. I went to work after that weekend and went to the Linux guru in Tier 3, and said “Teach me”.

    I have never looked back with the exception of having to install it for a specific reason, and I’m usually appalled at the state of it. I just had to install Win 11 for a Google Cloud certification exam (DaFuq!?!?!) and with all the issues I encountered it took about 6 hours to get it ready for the exam. Win11 doesn’t come with network drivers anymore? Two NICs and a WiFi card in my machine, and none of them had drivers in the install. Nice to see we’ve gone full cycle back to Windows ME, except the OEM bloatware is a core part of the OS.

    When my wife finally dropped Windows a month ago between the ads and recall, it marked the death of daily users of Windows in our house. I’m raising my kid on Linux.


  • Sometimes when you get UI experts and users and engineers in the same room they iterate to similar outcomes because its the logical conclusion. Apples design in this case isn’t ground breaking or even original.

    If multiple species of jumping spider can independently evolve the ability to see red from different branches of their family tree, multiple dev teams can come to the same conclusion about what is more comfortable for reaching with consideration for left and right handed people on various types of screens.

    The problem is so scoped these days, its fairly logical for UIs to come to the same outcome.