Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Don't Overthink It

    Many of us autistics have a habit of overthinking things. When I say overthinking, I'm referring to using thinking as a substitute for other things like socializing, feeling, and taking action.

    [...]

    For example, I used to avoid asking questions. Instead, I'd try to figure everything out on my own. If I didn't understand some part of a lecture, I wouldn't raise my hand in class or ask my study group. I'd go back and read the textbook, or research it by myself. If I didn't understand how to do a work task, I'd try to deduce it instead of asking my boss or coworkers.

    I think it was partly a masking thing. Sometimes when I ask questions, people tell me nobody else has ever asked them that. Also, I sometimes ask very basic questions whose answers are obvious to neurotypicals from context that I don't pick up on. So to not stand out, I used to avoid asking questions.

    Another part was social. Sometimes the person I'm talking to either doesn't have the answer or doesn't understand why I'm asking. If they don't know the answer, it can make them feel bad, which isn't my goal. And when they don't understand why I'm asking, they provide me with what they think I want to know rather than what I asked for literally.

  • Snow White Syndrome, The Autism Version

    This journal entry is supplements a previous entry I wrote titled "Why Autistic People Are Targets of Manipulation and How to Avoid Becoming a Victim¹". In it, I wrote about a common autistic trait that makes us vulnerable to manipulation. First, I'll explore that trait and its consequences more deeply, then I'll share some advice for autistics on how to avoid being manipulated.

    Please keep in mind that my writing in this entry comes from my own personal experience as a low-support-needs² autistic person. Other autistic people may have different experiences.

  • Now the glossary is actually readable (by ~sfelicio)

    After some running, some good tarte tatin and some bad wine, I'm back on the keyboard. Time to make that glossary actually readable.

    Okay, so glossary entries have more structure than I said before. They are mainly composed of definitions which have paragraphs, but inside the paragraphs there may be emphasis markers, example quotes, links to other glossary entries and so on. In addition, entries may have pronunciation, etymology, things like that. My previous code just bulldozes over that stuff, using .itertext() to forget all the markup.

  • Ween Part Two: The Stallion

    Now, it's time to get into The Pod. This is a capsule that will travel into the deep innerspace! The Boognish isn't here to guide us. We will have lots of food and rough self-talk, though.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Structural navigation

    Sometimes my mind goes back to text editing and text editors. I have a love/hate relationship with ed(1). I kind of like the deliberate mindset I need to bring. But I also don’t like to think in terms of lines. Maybe if each sentence is a line, that’s better. But I often think about better semantic addressing.

    Example: `p` prints a range of line(s) is the standard. What I would also like is "print a range of paragraph", "print a range of sentences", "print a range of words". There's a hierarchy, here. So once there's a "current" paragraph, you can list its sentences or its words. My hope is that this is more useful than working on lines.

  • "To write or not to write, that's not the question"

    On the one hand, I can't trust electronic devices anymore, so I can't trust writing or drawing digitally.

    I still have the laptop and it's Linux and it feels very obedient to my commands. It's very nice, very fast, seemingly reliable.

    But it also feels like its hardware is going to fail anytime soon. My HDD is old, really old (decades old), and there are no brand-new 2.5" HDDs out there (at least no trustworthy pitch supposedly selling a brand-new 2.5" HDD), just SSDs.

    And SSDs are funny: in a nutshell, they try to "hold" electrons inside... despite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle stating how electrons are pretty agitated, insofar they can be cheering and jumping anywhere across the cosmos!

  • Bug fixing as an avoidance behaviour 🐛

    In stressful times, bug fixing can take your mind of things. Having been very stressed in the last few days, I found solace this weekend in fixing bugs that were many years old. One was a dialog where the first button press was ignored. As probably the only user, I knew to press twice, but I would sometimes forget. I didn't really fix it, but I found it was related to a particular widget losing focus, so the fix wss to put the focus somewere else to begin with. The other bug was a case where file copies failed silently. There was missing/inadequate error handling, now fixed. But again, I am the only user.