oh interesting. I've had a pet theory for awhile now re: trans/autism comorbidity that they're better thought of as symptoms (among others! op's link notes higher incidence of every surveyed mental disorder) of some underlying brain abnormality, rather than being tangled up in some causal relationship with each other. had not heard of gender incoherence theory before
The point in which autism moves from "neuro-diversity" to "disorder that affects quality of life" is a difficult and controversial discussion. In general we try to use sensitive language, and respect the spectrum.
Many of the genes that control brain development are also linked to sex differentiation, and so it not surprising to me that in the presence of greater number of mutations (technical term) in these genes, the more sexual development will be differentially regulated, and will follow a different trajectory. I suspect, but do not know how to model, that this would tend to result in less sexual differentiation, making the binary male/female extreme phenotypes less likely in ASD.
One thing I would respectfully suggest here is to use language like 'atypical' rather than 'abnormal', as it avoids some of the unpleasant subtext of the latter word. (At least so far - the euphemism treadmill makes for an unending race, but it's still worth putting in the effort.)
maybe it's an overly optimistic hill to die on but imo, the best thing we could do for divergent people is to normalize abnormality rather than codify softer language to avoid describing it as abnormal or creating 32 new checkboxes of 'normal'
You mean eliminate "abnormality" and "divergence" as a concept? Yes. Better to focus on needs difficulties and abilities, not irrelevant comparisons to population averages. And better to treat differences as something to accept appreciate, and not arbitrarily idealize the median.
"Normality" is a factor in estimating public health costs, not relevant to individual care.
definitely worth doing. would be a massive undertaking. I'm not webdev enough to comment intelligently on _how_ to do it, but I think the general _what_ to do is something like... a system that is simple and internally coherent, designed specifically to a) court devs to build on it instead, and b) enable all the optimizations that have eluded browser vendors so far because the existing standards are so absurdly complicated. "parallel layout engine" and "a tab doesn't use multiple gigs of ram" are good for starters
then you make a browser that is much faster for sites written in the new thing and build in blink for fallback. also make something in the same niche as electron, but only using the new thing. win devs over and try to cultivate another "this site best viewed in" phenomenon. gradually demote the existing paradigm to second-class status
the important thing is you probably need a well-heeled patron but you don't need to win over the existing browser vendors. (tbh I'm surprised facebook hasn't tried this yet, they'd benefit immensely from it even aside from being able to stick it to google)
make something better and people will gradually switch. reaching non-technical types isn't as hard as it's made out to be, there was a point where every early adopter geek type was going out of their way to install chrome (and firefox before that!) on their parents' and friends' computers for them. and if people switch, other browsers will have to follow
of course it's also likely that all the problems that necessitate a switch will come back even worse after. google made a js engine that was 1000x faster so people made sites that were 10000x slower. google sandboxed tabs so a bad site wouldn't crash the whole browser, and now complicated sites crash constantly because there's less consequences to it. but hey you have to imagine sisyphus happy after all
a lot of stuff in the twitter thread is eyerolling english undergrad turning everything into a literal symbol for essay points, sort of thing. but it is kinda true that the plot of movie is a morose depressed practically catatonic hacker guy feels trapped and cut off from authentic experience until a symbolic rebirth frees him to grow into the entity he was always meant to be
>The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person.
it depends what their goals are. having worked in-office and remote for the same company, it's way easier to get shit done in the office. at least if you're reasonably extroverted/persuasive/bold. there are so many times I was able to walk up to someone's desk and spend ten minutes to save multiple weeks of protocol and runaround. partly because it's easier to apply pressure, but also partly because communicating face-to-face is so much higher bandwidth. but if you're remote you're easier to ignore, and a lot of office workers are very good at ignoring people who want to create more work for them
but the flip side is it's way easier for remote workers to fade into the background and hardly do anything. a skilled developer can emulate a mediocre developer while working a fraction of the hours. a skilled manipulator can "work" a fraction of the hours managing expectations and barely produce much of anything. plenty of people will figure out how to automate their jobs and just never tell anyone
there's this idea that remote will benefit introvert/aspie types because it's so word-focused. you have few face-to-face conversations but you write tons and tons. but really, apsie types will produce reams of literal-minded descriptive and often very helpful documentation and discussion, while people-people types will manipulate their image to appear very legibly valuable and come out ahead more often than not
my honest opinion for awhile is that remote is going to a massive efficieny drain on big tech companies and startups doing stuff that's easy to phone in like webdev/saas/whatever, such that if you founded a small committed colo team you could probably outcompete them in whatever domain you want even without any special edge
> I was able to walk up to someone's desk and spend ten minutes to save multiple weeks of protocol and runaround. partly because it's easier to apply pressure, but also partly because communicating face-to-face is so much higher bandwidth
Let's ignore how you interrupting someone cost them potentially hours of productivity.
I agree face-to-face is higher bandwidth for easy/simple topics. "Bob, what's the mainframe password" is easier shouted than written, and the reply likewise (assuming Bob knows it by heart).
It gets tricky when the topic is complicated or when Bob is distracted and confused. You might get a half-assed dismissive and incomplete answer (which you may or may not notice), or it might take Bob much longer to figure the answer out than if you had messaged it to him.
The quality of your communication depends on many factors, and your perception may not necessarily match reality.
I don't mean asking technical questions, which I agree is often easier to do over text, not least because you can cite line numbers and include code snippets etc. I mean getting favors, demanding concessions, strategizing, comparing notes, etc. especially if you're running a project (as I was) and need buy-in and deliverables from people in different reporting lines (I was eng with an asterisk, depending heavily on people in qa and ops), the ability to walk up to their desk and convince them is priceless
there were more than a few times when the schedule slipped by months because someone outside the project delayed something by weeks. those kinds of issues I never had when I was in the office because I could get what we needed through force of personality. but outside, you have to go through process, and process is inefficient
seasoned remote workers might counter the org was dysfunctional (a charge I will not deny, hence why I left) but they don't have solutions other than more process. because remote depersonalizes work interactions, they have to layer on policies and documents. it's fundamentally a bureaucratizing force
It sounds like what you are saying is that it is easier to be either a bullying management type or a charismatic persusasive type. Both of which I have seen lead to some of the stupidest corporate decisions in my career. So while both of those types might have a much easier time in an office setting, I'm not convinced that is a competitive advantage for the company as a whole.
there won't be new developers if they don't move the language past its present state. there's no reason for anyone to learn perl except for a job maintaining legacy software at this point, but that could change if they manage to refashion it to attract new interest
that said I don't know what kind of "special training" you need to pick up a new language. I got hired for a perl job despite never having written it. the conversation went something like "can you write c?" "yep." "can you write shell scripts?" "yep." "ok, you can write perl." read what the sigils meant and could write it with minimal competence same day. expertise and nuance can come as you go
I think it makes sense. perl6 was a huge distraction that went on far too long, leaving perl5 to stagnate, and then it came out and hardly anyone had much use for it. now that perl6 isn't "perl" anymore, perl7 is basically a "second chance" at evolving perl5 after it was frozen in amber for over a decade
by loc I've probably written more perl than any other language, maintaining a massive legacy codebase at a previous job. I will probably never write perl again, and the idea of starting a new project in it is unthinkable to me. nevertheless I can see how it could find a new batch of users as a comfy expressive intuitive scripting language, if they can clear out some of the deadwood. it's certainly more suited for that role than python or js. and honestly I doubt it will break much given, as you said, no one running legacy perl ever updates their perl version anyway
the real reason why this is being done probably is that the maintainers love their language and want for it to continue to live rather than die a slow death. I wish them luck
medium had one killer insight, which was that if they dolled up blog posts to look like prestige news site articles, most people would mentally put them in the same category. at one point there was a wave of public figures using medium basically like they use/d the nyt oped section before and after
but they messed up their site chasing a business model, and nyt/wapo/etc basically turned into tech companies and fill the niche that medium wanted to. meanwhile substack mints prestige by emphatically not looking like a news site. medium doesn't really have a place on either end of that anymore
yea, it's actually surprising how heavy it is given it's all to provide a veneer of minimalism and simplicity. I run qutebrowser on musl, which is as you might guess not the most stable web experience, but one funny side effect is it makes me acutely aware of what sites are simple and what ones do too much. the three worst sites, that consistently 100% of the time freeze the tab they're opened in, are reddit wapo and medium
