I’m probably doing some kind of “this solution worked for me, so it should work for everyone!” thing, but it does seem that our understanding of autism has improved in recent years. Even if all you can see is some variant of mild autism (autism spectrum disorder) a professional might see other related things. Like in my case, where my problems were being amplified by constant anxiety … they might find something chemical they can treat, or something that counseling can train you to mitigate or moderate.

I wish you the best.

I’m genuinely scared I could do damage if I explain this badly. I’ll try my best. And bear in mind, mild autism, I communicate things strangely sometimes.

In a general sense, diagnoses are predictive statements, not just labels for communicating about a condition. There’s often sets of related behaviors and common kinds of advice or treatment. Think of it as peer reviewed science, instead of an algorithm, saying “struggling with this? You might also be struggling with this and that, and here’s how we can help with all of those.”

Also, diagnoses unlock access to medication. In my case I’ve also struggled with generalized anxiety disorder. Anxiety meds are having a profound and positive effect on my life. I do so much stupid shit when my brain is constantly making small worries into thought-destroying anxiety and fear. I was really resistant to the idea, thinking medication just avoids problems instead of letting you learn how to deal with them. I was very wrong.

And since I’m in the US where health insurance is a profit making industry, I had to go the route of counseling (“yeah I’m recommending you get tested”), then testing, and then with a diagnosis in hand, psychiatrist for possible medication. (It can take a long time to get meds dialed in. I was lucky, the first thing he prescribed worked great and we’ve just been slowly ramping the dosage, starting at half the usual starting dose in January and going up slowly every month.)

I don’t know if this was persuasive but I hope it at least made sense.

This is going to sound like an insult or snappy comment, but I genuinely mean this as something that might be helpful because I relate to this and think it’s affected me my whole life.

I think you’re describing mild autism. I got my own diagnosis a few months ago, at age 47, and I wish I had known so much sooner. Some of the things you describe were part of what the psychologist who diagnosed me talked to me about.

No worries. I hope things get better.

That’s got to be a nightmare. I’m really sorry to hear that, and I appreciate you sharing.

I can’t think of any ways to rephrase that, that don’t sound empty or performative. You sent my thoughts towards my own parents. I’m sorry for your pain.

Thank you. I stole that from Philip (I think) in Off To Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer. He was describing that book’s antagonist but I’ve taken it to describe people who casually break rules to get ahead.

And I think that’s kind of what they’re doing, flooding social media with stories of how they broke rules in ways that make me go “foul! That’s a foul! Why is the ref doing nothing? This breaks my brain and I have no idea how to respond to this!”

No I know you’re being genuine.

So this is going to sound really weird, because I think you’re talking about the experience of debating troll farm accounts - understandably really frustrating - but I’m talking about the people, the voters, the weird family members you can’t talk about politics with any longer. (I have some of those - they’re in rural Illinois while I’m in blue-dot Omaha, I love them very much, and I absolutely hate that we can’t talk politics any more.)

But I think you need to give them more sympathy. (The IRL humans, not the online trolls.) The worst of them grew up in a system where they only see minorities as risks, because (a) brains look for patterns, for free, factory firmware, and (b) they don’t realize evil people set things up long ago so that minorities had things on Hard Mode. And maybe © fighting against your factory defaults takes work and practice.

Like, because TLOU is back on TV I’ll share something uncomfortable. S01E03 was really uncomfortable for me to watch. I was a nerdy kid, teased for being gay in high school when I was not and am not gay. So I have some homophobia I haven’t gotten rid of yet. I’m trying. But I still look away whenever men kiss. My wife doesn’t love that part about me, but she still loves me.

Do you give up on me because my journey isn’t complete there? Am I to be hated because I look away, lumped in with the people who vote against gay rights? Clearly not. Mostly because I’m clearly making an effort.

Some people who voted for Trump don’t wear red hats. They were on the fence and they went one way and not the other. And I promise they’re not the people you’re tired of debating. They deserve your positive thoughts. Don’t let the troll farms steal those thoughts. Please.

Which “They”? The voters or the politicians?

(Apologies to parent, this is something I’ve been itching to say, but the parent isn’t the problem I’m discussing.)

They will clap because it makes them feel good. It makes them feel good because they think we don’t respect them, that we celebrate their losses (in the Laslow’s Hierarchy sense, not the political sense) and that we don’t want to lift them up with us.

So yeah, we have differences. (Stay with me for a bit.) They think a foul in basketball is something you’re allowed to do a certain number of times and then you have to stop. We think a foul in basketball is something you Should Not Do.

Is the solution more hate for the people who got duped by Trump’s team? Yeah they got played. Yeah they have cognitive dissonance. Yeah they’re on Facebook too much, fed poison by an algorithm that optimizes for engagement (you know, happy, horny, angry, anything except writing letters or volunteering or registering to vote). That’s no reason to hate them.

Help them. Love them. Even if there’s no internet points in it for you. (Certainly none for me because I’m usually a crappy communicator.)

Yeah same, I make noise to be less “I’m being sneaky” because I’m not trying to be. It never occurred to me this could be taken as “I’m trying to start a conversation, while not being in your field of view at all and also not saying any words.” I don’t do this when walking with my wife.

I think this might be hypocritical of me, but in one sense I think I prefer that outcome. Let those existing trained models become the most vile and untouchable of copyright infringing works. Send those ill-gotten corporate gains back to the rights holders.

What, me? Of course I’ve erased all my copies of those evil, evil models. There’s no way I’m keeping my own copies to run, illicitly, on my own hardware.

(This probably has terrible consequences I haven’t thought far enough ahead on.)

I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.

This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.

This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.

. . .

But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.

(I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)

I feel like innovations that improve moderation should be celebrated. (And then immediately cloned from new-Digg into new Fediverse features.)

I, too, think humans become incapable of learning from their mistakes when they become wealthy. That’s what keeps them wealthy of course.

More seriously, it makes sense that this could become a good thing. If it’s true that Kevin failed the first time by lacking the confidence to stand up for his ideals, why are we judging what we haven’t seen yet? Give him a chance.

(Is that true? I’m open to being wrong.)

If they ran ads asking Reddit moderators to catalogue their frustrations, it feels reasonable that he could be bankrolling solutions to address those weaknesses and problems.

I’m excited to see what amazing new Fediverse features will be inspired by what he pays his teams to build for Digg.

(I need some hope for the future, damnit. Do NOT take this away from me.)

Is moderation difficult? What makes it difficult?

What happens to the “spirit of discovery and genuine community” when moderation fails?

It’s ok to fear that someone else could get rich through trickery.

It’s also ok to have hope that people learn from past mistakes and try to build something good.

AI can generate slop, but it can also understand, categorize, filter, moderate. It can also be slow to adapt to new attacks, or be analyzed and manipulated.

I can’t offer much help to people who need to decide right now if it’s good or bad. Predicting the future is a messy thing. But I choose to be cautiously optimistic.

Companies share info about their customers sometimes. That shared info gets added to data products for marketing. Sometimes spammers buy or steal those data products.

I’m a professional C# developer, and I switched to iPhone in 2020. Mostly I wanted a more controlled, curated App Store for increased confidence in a safe execution environment. I’ll pay the $100/yr for a developer account if I really need to build and run my own code.

The lack of ad block options bugs me. I also don’t use iCloud.

I have doubts about whether this question is asking or proselytizing.

I don’t like this. Everything you’re saying is true, but this argument isn’t persuasive, it’s dehumanizing. Making people feel bad for disagreeing doesn’t convince them to stop disagreeing.

A more enlightened perspective might be “this might be true or it might not be, so I’m keeping an open mind and waiting for more evidence to arrive in the future.”

Judges can act.