People always point out that almost nobody needs to know all the pointless facts you learn in school in your daily life, but the reality is that school offers a lot of different chances to do all kinds of boring, tedious, pointless, and esoteric things- many of which you'll mirror in your adult lives. Sure, you might not need to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but being able to remember all the different types of purchasing orders that your company uses and the specific esoteric tagging system they have in the back end, being able to remember all that esoteric stuff is helpful. But AI really does change things, and I worry about human cognition, as all this stuff is ultimately trained. You get smarter by thinking about things and figuring stuff out, and if AI is doing that for you, you're robbed of that opportunity.

Kids lost two years of learning from the lockdowns. Don't blame laptops for a horrible pandemic that, for some reason, everyone forgets about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Deadlines exist, and workplace accommodations exist. It's why the ADA and section 504 exist. And honestly, if a boss isn't able to support his employee on having the time to complete the work, that's the boss's fault for failing to be flexible and understanding how to help their employee succeed. Accommodations exist to help employees be the best they can be, and the disability world is honestly flush with neurodivergent people talking about how they had an asshole boss who never accommodated them, and they went through a living hell, then quitting and finding a job with a boss who actually worked with them, and they're a top performer. I've been through that process a number of times. The realities of the job are absolutely the realities of the job, but more often than not, the issues people with disabilities have in the workplace are the fault of shitty ablest managers who can't or won't think outside the box, not with the constraints of the work.

So this is all a bunch of moral panic, and ablest bs for a number of reasons. A: Extra time on tests really isn't the end of the world that people make it out to be. If someone needs a bit longer to do their work, what is the issue? The point of schooling is that people understand the subject matter, so if someone needs a bit more time to get it right, what's the issue? I'd rather my doctor take a day extra with my test results to really think about them than give me a knee jerk reaction. B: I see a lot of people here who are really, really ill informed on disability which isn't surprising given that it's Slashdot, but right now we're in a time where autism and ADHD diagnoses are skyrocketing due to increased diagnostic clarity. The number of severely high needs individuals has stayed relatively static, but we're getting a lot better at screening for ADHD (there's literally an app that has an 80% success rate that can be used as a preliminary screener by any school nurse) especially in underrepresented populations. And given that a lot of the stigma around neurodivergence is going down (although it's starting to rise again) people are getting more comfortable disclosing that they have a learning disability, even if they've been able to be successful academically. It's kind of like identifying that you have asthma and need an inhaler and some accommodations to participate in PE- you can still participate and likely pass, but you will need some extra accommodation. But at the end of the day, providing accommodations like extra time on tests and other relatively benign things isn't the end of the world. The point of schooling is to show subject matter expertise, and someone can still show that if they have an extra hour to finish the test. and C: ADHD absolutely does exist. My wife's working on her chem degree with ADHD, and it's brutal- she needs about three times as much time to study as her peers because her mind literally won't focus, and the only pill that actually does any good is damn near impossible to get. I get so tired of people who act as armchair psychologists because they read some article.

There's a burgeoning therapeutic and social skills D&D market currently, and a load of research that shows all kinds of significant mental health, social, and personal wellbeing to having a regular gaming group. What's a bit frustrating is she didn't actually do any serious research with geriatric populations, who would likely benefit from a regular RPG group. There's a lady in Germany who ran a little house on the prairie RPG at a nursing home, and did some great work there, but outside that little has been done.

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.