just an english enby living through the end times…

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2024

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  • Well, it’s made it difficult to find an industrial placement at uni. While many of my peers are going to be working for BlackRock, Leonardo, Boeing, or some AI-related company during third year, I’m probably going to be attending lectures. It’s also made my workflow tricky, as I have a thousand (hyperbole) reasons why I won’t use certain software or operating systems, which in turn means I have to reverse-engineer and self-teach slightly more of my degree than other students.

    Also, I’m not sure if this is the strong sense of justice, increased empathy, a subconscious inability to detect sarcasm, or a combination thereof, but I also can’t make jokes at people’s expense when they don’t deserve it (even if I know it would be okay). For example, I am a member of three student societies, one of which is a Formula Student team. There is wall-to-wall banter each time I go in and I always have a good laugh, but I feel as though I am physically incapable of making any jokes myself. I wouldn’t even have to worry about going too far: most of the society is also autistic to some degree (and therefore able to understand), and any particularly edgy humour is always perpetuated by the members it’s about (if that makes sense).

    However, I also believe I have benefited somewhat from my sense of justice. I refuse to use AI in any capacity (even when we would be allowed for our work), due to the environmental and social consequences. I would say that having to actually understand what I’m doing is far better than the alternative – meanwhile, most people I know are using Gemini to write their shellscripts.





  • Yes, and I’m afraid that I (LSN, self-Dx with high certainty, awaiting formal Dx since early 2023) been guilty of giving this advice until some time last year, when a user on this very platform informed me that what I was suggesting was masking.

    One major factor in this problem, I believe, is that a lot of the “raising awareness” stuff I’ve seen over the years tends to focus on just one part of our demographic (namely young, medium support needs boys), which is quite counter-productive. This is likely the main reason why none of my teachers ever thought to have me tested, and why I was 17 before I thought “Hmm, I can’t shut up about Linux, I have a bunch of autistic friends, and I just watched three solid hours of old PSAs. I wonder if there’s a reason for all that?”

    There are times when masking is a good idea, this potentially being one of them (I do not know the context); but on the whole, it really isn’t fair to do it all the time just to placate neurotypicals when they are more than capable of dealing with it without long-term psychological harm.