shiri

shiri , 3 months ago

@TheBreadmonkey @nikatjef @Alice @strayadult VESA! SVGA!

shiri , 3 months ago

@TheBreadmonkey @nikatjef @Alice @strayadult ASCII then? CGA?

shiri , 3 months ago

@TheBreadmonkey @nikatjef @Alice @strayadult
VGA, which you mentioned, is both a connector and display standard, often these days referring to the resolution 640x480 which is it's highest resolution (even then only at 16 colors)

So I replied with graphics standards:

VESA is actually a standards organization with a variety of display related standards, ranging from BIOS extensions to expand support of video standards and the Displayport video connector to a standard for wall mounting brackets.

SVGA, aka Super VGA is an extension of VGA that had a consistent max resolution of 800x600 (at 256 colors!) so is used as shorthand for that resolution. (higher resolutions were available on some cards)

You made the comment about it being "too advanced" so I jokingly replied with standards older than VGA

• ASCII is the old standard for the english alphabet in binary (now replaced by UTF, with UTF-8 being backwards compatible), basically referencing text based displays like DOS consoles
• CGA, aka Color Graphics Adapter, is a couple generations before VGA. In shorthand it refers to 320x200 (which it ran at a whopping 4 colors!)

Basically I was being a dork and picking on you in the nerdiest way possible, but in a way I hope was amusing.

shiri OP , 4 months ago

@bluegreenandfree @pluralistic The whole article points out that AI itself isn't useless, just that it's being used inefficiently.

Basically like having 20-30 people doing the job of 1 person just because it looks impressive to have that many people on the payroll.

It doesn't mean the 1 person job isn't any good, just that a lot of resources are being wasted that don't have to be.

shiri , 4 months ago

@stefan My biggest suggestion for encouraging alt-text:

Don't reply with complaints about lack of alt-text, don't bully over the lack of alt-text, unless you yourself are one of the screen reader users.

Instead if you see something without alt text, reply with: "Please add this to the alt-text: <write some alt text for them>".

There are accessibility issues with writing alt-text itself, so providing them with alt text can be a huge help. And if it's too much effort for you to provide them with the alt-text then why should you be judging them for not having it? (rhetorical you)

Also, doing this makes people less defensive when they're not aware and shows examples of how alt-text should look.

shiri , 4 months ago

@GOKUSHRM @fdroidorg oh lord that's a loaded suggestion...

Insisting a non-profit, donation based, open source project launch an entire hardware business and produce cheap hardware?

It would be astronomically expensive to set up, and the resulting phone would be a budget phone for flagship price... the opposite of what you want. (See the few Linux phone builders out there for reference... and those are companies with investors)

shiri , 4 months ago

@fdroidorg @trisschen to clarify how this affects F-Droid:

When implemented developers will be required to get their application signed by Google, regardless of whether it's distributed from the play store or not.

This comes about in large part because Google is being forced to allow third party app stores like F-Droid to get more elevated privileges and with it become easier and more accessible to use (among other things, I honestly haven't stayed entirely on top of it).

They're pitching it as a protective measure to prevent malicious sideloads, but the reality is it'll force side loaded apps to pay Google money as if they were on the play store anyways, as well as allow them to exert the same control over them as they do on the play store.

shiri , 4 months ago

@VileLasagna who the hell has a >2GB /boot? Like what the hell do you have in there?!

shiri , 5 months ago

@lamdba @pluralistic We're also taught that there's a "right way" to do all of these things, and doing it any other way is wrong and can only backfire on you.

And of course the "right way" involves things like strict rules on protests or unions that prevent them from having any real impact.

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles Honestly depends on the group doing the sneering, there's a lot of associations it could be connected to.

Right now there's a lot of rejection of things that are very clearly good. Like "woke" generally meaning progressive, more aware of the impacts of their actions, but nazis treat it as a derogatory term.

Fundamentally they believe everyone should be thinking and acting the same, so it wouldn't surprise me for some to consider "freethinker" something derogatory and "liberal".

There's also the fact that "freethinker" in general has a bad history of it's own, largely because it was most often heard from conspiracy theorists, or right-wingers claiming that everyone who had different opinions to them were "sheep" and being controlled/manipulated.

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles Sometimes I forget that I'm talking to people in other countries here, mostly because everywhere else my interactions are 99% US.

I do try and use more universally accurate labels... in large part because like many US leftists "liberal" is treated as basically a slur. (The joke being that the Nazis call us all sorts of things, but the one we find most offensive is the one they think is least offensive)

I can't speak as firmly on non-US norms, I know a certain degree of things is widespread like behaviors of conspiracy theorists and cults, both of which tend to tout freethinking as stepping in line with them.

I think ultimately "freethinker" isn't a great term anyways, it's very generic and always ultimately untrue because we're all constrained in our thought processes. We're a pile of biases and predispositions, and we can never be truly free of that. So most people calling themselves freethinkers usually come like the guys who pretend they don't have emotions and call their emotional judgements "rational".

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles Supporting free thinking is different from identifying as a free thinker. I used the example I did because it really is a lot like claiming to be "rational", nobody is free of emotional influence and prejudices... but we can support and encourage rationalism even if we can never truly reach it.

Also the "concept" of free thinker generally involves a lot of prejudices of it's own. For instance arguing it vs religion is accusing all religious people of being constrained, controlled, or manipulated... which means alot of assumptions about so many different religions (like how people often assume that all religions proselytize when it's a minority of religions, just the biggest ones that do so because that's how they got so big)

I scoff at the idea of "free from dogma and authority", because they can't be eliminated and the way you control them is by acknowledging and accepting them. When you know you've got biases and bigotry, you can start recognizing them and compensating.

@hatysa ... says a lot about my social circles that leftist doesn't get a negative reaction, but with how loud anarchists and anarcho-communists are and how often they demand ideological purity it doesn't really surprise me...

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles @hatysa I'd dispute the "alt-left" label, but it might be a difference in environment. Over here alt-right is practically synonymous with Nazi (literally the alt-right folk got pissy at a Wolfenstein ad thinking it was talking about them). It wasn't really "different" so much as it was more-extreme.

I'd say the equivalent on the left, and the reason you generally don't see the "alt-left" label is non-anarchism anarchists (I have to specify because most anarchists seem to struggle to understand that anarchist doesn't always mean anarchism), ie. the radicals calling for no-government at all.

As far as liberal and libertarian, as well as all the rest of the labels, and how they're used in the US. It's mostly a cursed history of broken political systems preventing proper diversity, so names get hijacked. And the lack of regulation and control results in massive amounts of corporate propaganda.

Republicans used to be left and Democrats used to be right, they swapped sides in iirc the 60s because some democrat leaders supported the civil rights movement, so all the racists jumped ship to the republican party.

Somewhere in that range was the adoption of neo-liberalism, which is what most US people are talking about when we say liberal. And it became synonymous with the Democratic Party in the same fashion that conservative became synonymous with the Republican Party.

Because we can only ever have 2 parties in our system, a lot of the political distinctions get muddled, and then the moving of the overton window does a lot of heavy lifting after that.

Around the 70s the Republican party realized, especially thanks to TV and radio that they could influence people by being louder and more confident rather than actually having better points. Basically if you shout a lie long enough and with enough confidence, alot of people start to believe it. They also realized that they could get more success in mostly ignoring the middle and focusing on the more extreme right people, which crystalized with the astro-turfed "Tea Party" movement.

So we ended up with the Democratic party still playing by the old rules even today, trying to appease the middle while the Republicans pull further and further to the extremes. Which meant they inevitably became more and more right leaning themselves.

Along with that many movements are rooted in dog whistles, the calls of "freedom" in the US are almost always hypocritical. During the civil rights movement a lot of racist leaders pushed the ideas of liberty and freedom as being central to their opposition to civil rights. Most popular being the claim that the civil war was over "States' Rights", and that them erecting confederate monuments left and right in the civil rights movement had absolutely nothing to do with intimidating black people.

So they built an entire framework of demanding freedom when the federal government does something they don't like, but insisting on absolute obedience when it's working in their favor.

Same as their argument of being more budget conscious because they love to cut social programs... but ignoring the fact that they always raise military spending and cut the income, making the budget exponentially worse.

Because of these forces moving everything toward fascism, in the US the "left" is basically center-right, the progressive movement within the democratic party is center-left... and anything left of that is leftist.

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles @hatysa As far as values: values don't really mean much without practicals. Valuing free thinking, calling yourself a free thinker (or rationalist) without talking about how to really achieve it is just self-aggrandizement.

Like I said before, recognizing our flaws is how we compensate for them. Believing they're no longer relevant to us is how we let them control us.

I wouldn't use the term free-thinker because the only things it can really say about you are negative, the same thing with calling yourself a rationalist.

If you want equivalents to what you're trying to convey: replace them with what you're doing to work towards those goals.

It's never as neat a label as "free thinker" but it's language that has meaning. For instance, I practice dialectical thinking to learn and examine my biases and prejudices... it gets me in alot of trouble with people because I rarely accept the simple answers that feel right to them. What do you do that makes you a free thinker? What do you do that makes you rational?

(Also relevant to your first post: being autistic makes us neither free thinkers or rational thinkers, just different. It's like saying the Y axis is free while the X axis is constrained... when they're just the same thing in different directions. It's a common mistake among many autistics, especially those clinging to the "Asperger's" label, to assume we're inherently rational... we're just surrounded by a world that's 90 degrees off from us and it makes all the irrational bits of it so much more obvious)

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles Thank you, that genuinely means a lot. It's been quite an effort piecing together that understanding given how none of it is in our education system and it's largely brushed under the rug.

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles @hatysa ... I should provide some context, especially when I'm infodumping like this:

Fellow autistic, special interest in "how people think and operate", which kinda scatters around psychology, neurology, sociology, and politics, among others.

No formal training in any of it, but I think we call get how special interests goes here.

What really made the difference for me was an existential crisis as an early teen that led me to developing Dialectical Thinking on my own (I didn't even know it was something they a word for, let alone classes on until decades later). Which if you're unfamiliar is a technique for holding and accepting two conflicting truths at the same time without being broken by the cognitive dissonance (crucial at that time because it allowed me to both accept God as real and not at the same time, allowing me to find religious guidance without sacrificing my rationality, eventually resulting in my conversion to Judaism).

shiri , 5 months ago

@triddles @hatysa @triddles @hatysa I wasn't so much saying values vs action, just practicals. As in how those values apply, in particular because without practicals the label doesn't mean a whole lot.

Like saying I value my faith doesn't say a whole lot until I describe my faith. Saying I value free thinking doesn't mean much until I describe it as valuing introspection and critical thinking (if you're unfamiliar, critical thinking is a specific practice)

And in regards to autism, you're describing something universal to autistics, outside of those deeply traumatized into complacency. It doesn't prevent us from being influenced, it just changes the way we're influenced.

Allistics identify themselves primarily off of their social standing and relationships. With that they prize conformity, and perceived authorities are extremely influential to them.

Autistics on the other hand identify ourselves primarily off of our values and put little weight into social standing. We don't feel any dissonance over non-conformity, which means we can't keep up with allistic groups. Likewise we aren't so influenced by tribalism or social authority figures.

We however struggle just as much as allistics in accepting that we're wrong, and it's even more complicated because a wrong value can have a large spiderweb of connections to so many other values. We can also be a lot more aggressively wrong than allistics, because their conformity also tames them.

Because our strong values only mean we feel right, not that we are right.

shiri , 5 months ago

@hosford42 This is usually why most of us script interactions constantly, it's usually better when there's a clean and clear structure to it.

Like how it's simple dealing with a cashier, they ask you simple questions with easy simple answers, 99% of the time you know the questions and answers before the conversation even starts and it's only a matter of which ones come up.

We've been judged and told so much of our lives that we said or did the wrong thing in interactions in ways that make no sense to us, so it's no surprise that we have anxiety around interactions where we don't know exactly what we're supposed to say and do.

shiri , 5 months ago

@hosford42 not strange at all, especially with performance.

Many of us are drawn to and excel at performance because it's so closely related to scripting and masking.

Performance often gives us a safer mask than we have otherwise, I remember how relaxing it was to go to ren faire as a cast member playing a villain. It was a safe feeling, that social fumbles that make me look rude can just be rolled into the character and accepted, where they would otherwise get me judged.

shiri , 6 months ago

@jupiter_rowland I'm confused as to what exactly this means for me as a Friendica user... I use abstract when making content-warnings, often make long rants... as far as I knew all of that showed up normally in mastodon?

Does this only apply when linking to something?

... am confused about what's different here...

shiri , 6 months ago

@feb @jupiter_rowland Not the options it gives in Friendica, but I suspect maybe it's because I rarely use titles?

shiri , 8 months ago

@jeffowski Ugh... a sibling is coming over tomorrow to help me with depression cleaning and that's like item one on the list...

Executive dysfunction + Chronic Pain + Depression make it so hard to drag the trash out... only reason I'm not drowning in regular trash is my apartment complex has trash valet (and no, they won't take the cardboard)

shiri , 9 months ago

@JessTheUnstill I believe that was what OpenID was all about... but most places don't support it because very very few users used it when they did.

Only place I know off the top of my head these days is Friendica servers all support it.

shiri , 10 months ago

@aeva that's the only recommendation you've seen? oof.

Fursona is valid, but if you want somethings less cringe

• Familiar (as in familiar spirit, this is the origin of the term "witch's familiar"... it wasn't just some random cat, it was a spirit taking the form of a cat), appropriate for something more specific you're close to (ie. dave in the example)
• Muse, for things that inspire you
• Patron (this would be the western term that roughly means the same intent as spirit animal, when you're using it properly to represent a guiding spirit), see also Guide or Daimon
• Inner Animal, for when you are saying that animal relates to your sense of self

shiri , 10 months ago

@randahl There's not a whole lot that can be done unfortunately on the admin end, any instance with open registration is going to be faced with waves of bot signups and having to catch up after the fact. Everything else is just setting up increased barriers to entry (from captcha systems which are easier said than done to registration questions which make it drastically less accessible to register).

Also from an admin perspective there's little to really note about these, a lot of people will sign up, not set up anything about their profile, and maybe follow from a list of suggestions... half the time they'll do this and then never touch the account ever again, so these may not even be bots.

@Gargron suggestion is probably the best place to start. After that there's not much you can do outside of migrating to an instance that blocks mastodon.social since they're never going to be able to provide the highest quality moderation, but that's more than a little extreme.

I'm not entirely certain the specifics of how those discovery routines work, but if you want to leave them on then moving to another instance might be a worthwhile step. Mastodon.social is kinda the big default for Mastodon, which means discovery on there is going to get you attention from every rando that signs up while other instances are a little more selective. And of course migrating is pretty easy between Mastodon instances (and to a short list of some others)

shiri , 10 months ago

@darrellpf Brace yourself talking about it, people come out of the woodwork to crap on anyone saying anything remotely positive about AI, even if it's being used for accessibility purposes (they refuse to believe it can actually do anything in the first place, and the rest of the time they're too reactively angry about it to think about the impact of their actions)

Also in before someone goes on some rant along those last lines, just be on the look out for hallucinations when using it for search or any sort of information (double check it's answers before you rely on them or spread it).

shiri , 10 months ago

@murdoc @darrellpf There's a few factors in the bad results people talk about.

The big elements are they usually are talking about their experiences with earlier models and without web search integration (ie. asking the original Chat GPT 3.5 questions). Newer models have more information and are a little better at catching themselves.

The other element is the big persistent one: LLMs struggle with saying "I don't know", the reality is that they're meant to mimic responses and the response to question is expected to be an answer, the best response being a correct answer... but they also optimize for efficient responses, and nothing is more efficient than answering everything with "I don't know"... so avoiding that means when it doesn't know it then it invents a plausible answer. (This is called a hallucination in the AI field)

And because they are looking for reasons to dismiss them, they also pull edge cases:

• Poorly configured AI systems like how Google's AI responses would often just take troll reddit posts for granted because Google just kinda shoved it in there without much consideration
• That it struggles with tasks... that are not part of it's logic and processing. (Think of it like the language center of the brain with the bare minimum of any other parts) For example that it can struggle with doing math, especially trick word problems. (They love to pull that out and claim that it can't possibly be AI because the language processing AI gets tripped up by tricky math)

shiri , 11 months ago

@SilverArrows huh... the term for that is face blindness, and I have a mild case but definitely not alexithymia... I wonder if it's common comorbidity or another variation of it?

shiri , 1 year ago

@neuralex it's more than projecting anger, it's that they're whole existence is based on hierarchical social cues, they're basically just expecting you to cry and act beaten about it.

They don't care about you owning the issue, they care that you show them the "proper" social deference and guilt.

shiri , 1 year ago

@neuralex that part is actually based on relatively recent research and discoveries and isn't meant as a judgement.

They've found some evidence that one of the defining differences in autistics vs most allistics is a difference in how we structure our identities. We build our identities off of our values while they build their identities off of associations and social connections.

More info here: neuroclastic.com/the-identity-…

This isn't to say that the behavior is okay or that they should all be expected to behave that way, just that that's the root of it. It's kinda like the difference between getting angry and punching someone vs getting angry and controlling yourself.

shiri , 1 year ago

@Susan60

The conversations of autistic people are usually values based, not identity based.

Small correction, our identities are value based, theirs are collective/social based

shiri , 1 year ago

@dramypsyd sadly not a short quote, but maybe helpful or maybe even a gem in there:

They mostly consider us rude because they operate on a social hierarchy as identity as opposed to us operating on values. When we refuse to participate in their various social jockeying behaviors it's interpreted as us perceiving them to be beneath us. They literally can't imagine that someone would refuse to engage in that way for any other reason than to be condescending and dismissive.

This is why we "struggle" with small talk, it's real purpose is to basically communicate, negotiate, and establish social positions. We struggle to even see value in 99% of this information, so even if we know what's going on it's a struggle to even feign interest let alone keep track of that nonsense for ourselves. So we respond directly and bluntly... which is interpreted by them as "I don't need to know anything about your social position because you are so far beneath me that I really don't care about your social position". (And if we do try to engage with this we'll be spending all our time tracking and building that structure and even then probably having to constantly defer to assholes who have no idea what they're doing as our "superiors" just because that's how it works in allistic land...)

shiri , 1 year ago

@dramypsyd plenty fine with me, if you're going to give a profile this is the one to give, thanks for asking first!

I just ask for a ping when the article goes out so I can see it (and expect random attention)

shiri , 1 year ago

@Susan60 @dramypsyd it hits so hard figuring it out, the biggest key was the community figuring out value-based identity vs social-based identity and how that cascades into so so many things in our lives and interactions...

shiri , 1 year ago

@Susan60 @dramypsyd I think that bit was my own insight piecing things together (won't discount cryptomnesia though).

I pieced it together especially with the concept of phatic communication and it just became one of those things that makes perfect sense once you have the pieces.

It's a complicated series of phatic expressions all dedicated to establishing social positions from what group identities you associate with, to what hierarchy position you have in those groups, all the way to how much you care about their hierarchy in that group even when you're not a part of it (for instance many christians expect you to hold their church identity in high regard and get offended when you don't defer to their righteousness, even though they're acting in awful ways because their righteousness isn't about values it's about social hierarchy in the church)

shiri , 1 year ago

@StarkRG Honestly that sounds like a very context based question, I'm autistic myself and struggling to think of where there might be a communication issue with that? I'm guessing they asked under a weird context?

shiri , 1 year ago

@StarkRG I would have just said (true to me) "I go through moods, why do you ask?"

They asked that way because it was an actual to-the-point question rather than evasiveness, they weren't asking "where should I put the tea?" because that requires you deciding where to put the tea, they didn't ask "should the tea be easily accessible?" because while it's precise, it's long and clumsy and invites you to think about the location which again puts cognitive load on you, so they asked the root question which is whether you drink a lot of tea because if you do then it'll be an ongoing frustration if it's not easily accessible and if not then it should just be someplace you can find it but other things should be prioritized.

This is absolutely a case of them asking a straight question and trying to polite by limiting how much decision making you have to do.

They weren't necessarily expecting you to magically know the details of what they were doing. Sure, it's a fair context guess that they could be unboxing the tea, but they could also be thinking about lunch, etc. They figured you'd answer plainly and they'd proceed, they probably were fully prepared to provide more context just weren't providing it unless asked and might have even responded to the straight answer with what their decision was so you could override if you wanted.

shiri , 1 year ago

@Aerliss @StarkRG absolutely this, especially since we tend to have trauma around communication on top of our normal differences in communication.

shiri , 1 year ago

@StarkRG @Aerliss the required context was y'all were unpacking, so everyone had the required context.

It's okay if you got confused by it, language is imprecise and these things happen. Our obsessive tendency toward precision in language is more about our own trauma than a failing of allistics (outside of the failing that caused the trauma in the first place).

shiri , 1 year ago

@ScriptFanix you know her better than any of the rest of us, so take it with a grain of salt, but I personally would recommend adding something like "I understand and appreciate the time we got to talk, I'd love to hear from you when you get better", just to offset the RSD

shiri , 1 year ago

@ScriptFanix entirely fair, and I figured paraphrase regardless, I just know a lot of my chosen family follows similar patterns.

We halve two half joking rules for our family:

1. No apologizing for existing (to clarify in case of mistranslation since it's a play on terms/concepts: don't apologize for taking up space or just being yourself)
2. No apologizing for not existing (no apologizing for disassociating, being distracted, or otherwise not being present)

The half-joking punishment is "aggressive affirmations"... but it's there to make sure they know they can be who they are and when they do inevitably have shutdowns, disassociation, or similar, that they don't have to worry about social awkwardness or guilt when coming back.

The punishment is half-joking because they all have self-esteem issues and compliments/affirmations make them all uncomfortable even if they appreciate them.

shiri , 1 year ago

@YellowPup @Daojoan critical thinking is a subset of critical analysis (basically critical thinking, critical reading, etc). It means not taking things as a given and analyzing/testing them.

Basically it means taking what you know and asking yourself where there could be bias and where you could be wrong (critical reading being where you're checking for bias and logical errors in something you're reading, like a news article).

shiri , 1 year ago

@YellowPup @Daojoan it's basically "critical" as in "like a critic", but it also is basically a skepticism about everything and understanding what to look for to know when it's twisting your perspective.

My favorite being "X% increase/decrease!".