I'm seeing a lot of people with kneejerk reactions, so I want to highlight a points: ADHD is very easy to diagnose. Unlike autism, which requires a whole day of screening and thousands of dollars, ADHD can be diagnosed in an hour. However, when this happens, parents are usually very receptive to medication because it's both an easy fix and they're probably struggling at home for any number of reasons. If you're slammed, working two jobs, stressed out, barely able to pay the bills, and a pill that promises to make your kid be able to get through their math homework without crying comes along, you'll take it. The alternatives like therapy and parent coaching and stuff are difficult to get, unfortunately, and while schools are technically supposed to provide support, that's an issue. The other issue is that a lot of kids that may be autistic are getting ADHD labels- you've got a kid that gets distracted in class? It's entirely possible that they are autistic and struggling with sensory overwhelm so it's hard for them to think clearly, but ADHD is a convenient dx. Finally, there's long been a real push for pharmaceuticals to be prescribed at a young age, with drug reps targeting both teachers and pediatricians. While providing meds to help, unfortunately for them to work out in the long term it's critical that kids get therapy to help them manage their ADHD, and more and more, that's just not available, so it just becomes a band aid the kids become dependent on, then as their bodies and brains acclimate to it, they have less and less ability to function, so you end up with serious issues in young adulthood. So, unfortunately, a lot of kids get screwed because they aren't getting the essential therapies they need to be able to balance meds with an ADHD toolkit.

At the end of the day, most people can get a lot of their work done far more efficiently from home, and have time to rest, take care of chores/kids, and also explore things that might actually make them even more productive. Flexible schedules help even more- Being able to take a morning off, but log on to check in with a team on the other side of the planet at 11pm can make you way more effective, rather than having to do daily emails. It's also helpful for disabled or neurodivergent folks who struggle with social situations, AND not commuting lowers your stress and is better for the planet. But, middle managers are feeling sad that they have nothing to do, so there's these stupid think pieces like this, when it's abundantly clear that WFH is just good. But it reeks of ableism and pushing out parents.

Bots and people who accidentally clicked out of Instagram.

Been putting this off for too long, but tbh Google has completely wrecked the Android experience. I'll be switching to linux for my desktop this year to avoid win 11, and I guess I'll be using custom roms for mobile.

This is absolutely reminiscent of when Wheatley got control of Aperture Science in Portal 2. Good job, AI companies, you're cracked the moron problem.

This is peak enshittification- ads for most people are annoying at best, absolutely jarring at worst, especially for people who are neurodivergent and just want to listen to an ambient soundscape or the same song on loop for 20 minutes. Hopefully adblocking tech keeps up, as otherwise, it's just unusable. (Or other video sharing platforms will start cropping up. Or, you know, we all go back to bittorrent for our media.)

I mean at the end of the day, 'nothing personal' still feels bloody personal when it's a fundamentally exclusionary practice, and in alignment with this administration's massively anti-autism bent. When RFK goes out and says that autistic people will never have jobs, it emboldens businesses to stop accommodating autistic employees' needs. IT is one of the few lucrative careers neurodivergent people actually tend to do really well at, and blocking them out of it is just a step in the wrong direction. When I worked in IT, I made six figures. Now that I'm out, only place I could find that'd actually accommodate me was a nonprofit, and the wages there are a pittance. My mental health's great, but I'm poor.

I'm an autistic adult who's done both the office thing and the wfh thing, and honestly, the best is WFH for a lot of reasons. First off, there's no stupid, pointless conversations that just serve to completely derail me. (I remember there was a secretary who would pop by my desk several times a day just to make chit chat, drove my insane as I'd be neck deep in complex work and it takes a long time for me to retrace my thoughts) While Zoom meetings can be exhausting, I'd take them any day over in person meetings where I feel there's this constant need to make eye contact and be 'normal' even as my skin feels like it's crawling. I have a lot more control over my sensory environment at home, so I can actually focus. I don't have to go play peacemaker between neurotypical employees who are playing BS politics, or deal with petty drama. Working from home, I go at my own pace, which usually looks like 2-3 hours of really concentrated, hyperfocused work, then a few hours of relaxing, then back to 2-3 hours of hyperfocus- often getting the same amount of work done that my non-autistic employees would do in the office (or hell, sometimes outpacing them and getting all my tasks done by Tuesday.) I think there's going to be a big push to show that autism is a deficit, and that autistic people fail in work, and removing the ability to WFH is a guaranteed way to show that's true. We can get the work done great, but working in the office drives us insane.

Just because there isn't a culture of punch down humor like on X, doesn't mean there's no comedy. Although I will say the feel is that of a digital refugee camp- A lot of people there are folks who are pissed off at what's happening to the country, so there's less humorous content, and more news discussion. Will say the engagement on Bluesky feels a lot more like old Twitter- fewer bots, lot faster follower count (I'm about to hit 7k), and more people actually wanting to talk instead of just spewing content or self promotion.

I've been in the FOSS and DIY scene on and off for 20 years, and there's always been some core group of DIY people doing cool stuff, whether it's custom ROMs, FOSS stuff, or just hosting their own servers and mesh nets. I know a few people dabbling with building their own AIs- A buddy of mine built a LMM to handle citywide policy analysis (he works as a civil servant). Kinda surreal to see this AI that literally sits in his basement. But I think the democratization of AI will happen when more people start getting into it and realizing, screw it, I can make my own. It's happening, but slowly.

No AI. It brings absolutely nothing of value, and likely will never. It serves to consume while only removing the ability to have any type of digital or information literacy. One of the most rewarding things about the internet was that it rewarded curiosity, problem solving, and research skills. AI removes all of these things by giving you bad information (while sucking up your personal data.) Ads are also bad, as they are not sensory friendly- they exist to make your internet experience a jumbled, dangerous cluster-f of garbage. If you've got people with sensory issues, they're gonna be overwhelmed. I use adblock because using a normal browser, it gives me a headache- More and more ads are coming for our personal environments, whether that be our desktop PCs, our TVs, or even our dashboards, and it's dangerous and awful. I have a practice of, if I see an ad, NEVER purchasing that brand. Ever.

In high school, there were a handful of computers in the library connected to the internet, and I was one of the few that actually took the time to take the training to be allowed on the internet, which landed me a little sticker on my ID that said 'INTERNET.' I remember it making my life so much easier right off the bat as far as writing papers and stuff went, amazed other people weren't using it. But, it was a nerdy thing back then. I vaguely miss those days, when the internet wasn't this oppressive force.

Disability advocate who focuses most of my work on studying neurodivergence and quality of life here. Few things.

There was a study some time ago that found that autistics have a similar shortened lifespan of roughly 5-7 years off, although the good news is that's lower than it was 10 years ago, where it was something like 19 years shorter. There were some interesting biological pieces, including that autistics tend to develop more neurological conditions as they age, so that contributed to mortality.

However, it's important to look at quality of life when you're looking at aging. A lot of people with ADHD have a harder time holding down steady work, finding partners that support them, steady housing, and often times are dealing with a much higher level of residual stress and often maldaptive coping mechanisms. (Same is seen with autistics.) These things add up. That's why, within the autism community at least, there's a lot of interest in autistic elders, and figuring out how they have good aging. A lot of it comes down to a supportive job and home environment.

This will result in an internet that is optimized to bring even more ads, to the point where search has *nothing* to do with any reality, and is just nothing but an AI pushing junk. Thanks Microsoft, Google, AI.

So I was brought over to a fortune 500 after an acquisition, where the fortune 500 promptly killed the product through poor integration into their system. But, they kept me on to EoL it, then put me on a team where I was in essence a backup engineer, doing pretty much an hour a day of work, maybe. (Not including the pointless meetings.) Honestly, the biggest fault was on management not actually talking to me and figuring out what I could bring to the table, so instead I just sort of became a background fixture and picked up a fat paycheck for a while. Eventually they RIF'd me and I went into mental health crisis/intensive care, which was where I actually wanted to be, and was suddenly quite busy.