Someone plays music in the background during a meeting. They ask if it's bothering people. Neurotypical folks on the call quickly speak up and say it's fine.

The autistic person on the call (me):

1. has extreme difficulty participating in or even following the meeting due to the inability to separate foreground from background noise

2. experiences distress from sensory overload

3. spends the whole meeting stressing over how to bring it up in a side channel without taking the wrong tone and offending the person due to social communication difficulties

4. questions whether it should even be brought up, or if they're just being "too sensitive" due to a lifetime of conditioning to treat their own needs as invalid just because they're aren't "typical"

Meanwhile, no one on the call even realizes something is wrong or that the autistic person just got screwed over, completely by accident.

#Disability
#Accessibility
#AccessibilityMatters
#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic
@actuallyautistic

@actuallyautistic

Little things done to be respectful of others' needs have an outsized positive impact on other people's lives -- *especially* those of us who don't fit in as well, and have unusual needs that others overlook on a regular basis.

@actuallyautistic This isn't an occasional thing. This sort of silent sidelining of our needs happens literally every day, though the details vary. The end result is a feeling of being trapped and your own needs not mattering. There's also a massive load of stress from dealing with these situations, which results in perpetual fatigue & low energy, a weakened immune system, and often depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts. And then we are blamed for not paying attention or not being engaged enough. It's a perpetual snowball effect.

#MutualAid
#MutualAidRequest
#FoodInsecurity

Please boost for reach.

So, the latest news: I started a new position today! Thanks to a certain amazingly wonderful person from Germany who I've never met in person, we were able to eat and pay bills throughout December, which is why you haven't had to see me begging like this. (Thank you sooooo much, sir!) Now we are down to the last $15 of those funds, and I've got to figure out a way to feed my family for the next 2 weeks, and then move to the bay area in California (without them :( ) on the money I get from my first paycheck. Way less than ideal, and yet waaaay better than what we've been facing for the last 11 months. This is the home stretch!

Please help us out with food money if you can. Boosts help, too! Many thanks to all of you.

https://paypal.me/AaronHosford
https://venmo.com/u/Aaron-Hosford-42

#MutualAid
#MutualAidRequest
#FoodInsecurity

I'm in contact with a recruiter who is looking to fill 5 to 8 data science roles. If you're in the market, DM me, and I'll put you in contact with him. The pay is decent, and it's on-site in either Virginia or the San Francisco Bay area.

Oh, and please boost for reach. Jobs are hard to come by, and you might be saving someone's life.

#DataScience
#MachineLearning
#FediHire
#FediHired
#GetFediHired
#GetFediBHired
@datasciencejobs

I hate to do this, but I need to ask for help for me, my wife, and my two young daughters. We are desperate. When I wrote the post above, I was doing well and trying to stick up for people down on their luck, because I knew what it's like. Now things have flipped. I've been unemployed since February, and the gig work I was supporting my family with since then has dried up too.

I'm in the final stages of the interview process with a major tech company, which will fix everything, but I'm out of money *right now*. Our electricity will be cut off in 5 days. Our car will be repossessed in a week or 2. We have taxes we can't pay that will lead to our house being taken. That first paycheck won't come till after we lose everything and go hungry, assuming I even get the job. Please send us a few dollars if you can spare them. Every cent counts. Boost if you can't send money. Advice is welcome, too. Thanks, all, in advance. It means the world to us.

https://paypal.me/AaronHosford
https://venmo.com/u/Aaron-Hosford-42

#MutualAid

Interview questions like these might as well be *designed* to filter us out and trigger past traumas. You see, when you ask me about a difficult coworker, you probably think you're asking about someone who was a little stubborn, or argumentative, or liked to take credit. But what I think of as "difficult" are things like that manager who nicknamed me "autistic boy" and called me that in the office, loudly, or the manager who specifically put autistic traits down as his basis for a negative performance review and refused me a promotion for it, or the manager who watched me lead a major initiative and then gave credit to someone else on my team and none to me at a global corporate meeting with tens of thousands of attendees, or the manager who straight up lied and made things up on a performance review in an effort to get me fired, or... You get the idea. People in power, being abusive because I'm disabled.

#ActuallyAutistic
#DisabilityRights

Now, the reason this is on my mind right now is, I just finished a "behavioral" interview round with a major tech company. What do interviewers ask you about, no matter what kind of job you're looking for, if the interviewer is "properly" trained or coached? They ask you questions about experiences. Autobiographical questions. "Tell me about a time when you worked with a difficult coworker. How did you deal with the situation?" That sort of thing. *Exactly* the sort of question where an autistic person's memory is likely to skip over reporting anything the interviewer is interested in hearing, and put some horrible, traumatic, and irrelevant memory on infinite repeat, to the exclusion of all else.

#ActuallyAutistic

I read recently that episodic (aka autobiographical) memory is specifically impacted in autistic people. I had thought this was something specific to me, personally, not an autistic trait, so it was a big surprise to learn otherwise! I struggle significantly with intentional recall of personal experiences. My memory will spontaneously replay experiences from when I was a year old, or replay traumatic life events on infinite repeat, but if you ask me to remember what happened yesterday, or to pull up specific examples of a generic category, I often will struggle to answer. Meanwhile, I have encyclopedic recall for non-autobiographical information.

#ActuallyAutistic

So it's no surprise at all to also read that interviews are autistic people's Achilles' heel, and that unemployment has been estimated to be 85% -- higher than for any other disability. (No, I'm not making this up, and I'm not exaggerating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_of_autistic_people)

If you are an HR person, a hiring manager, or anyone else connected with or tangential to the interview and hiring practices of your organization, I urge you to consider the impacts your interview process has on autistic people. You might have no idea that your company's hiring practices are discriminatory, and they may be designed with the best intentions in mind, but that makes them no less discriminatory. It's easy to *accidentally* discriminate when it comes to disability, and autism in particular. You don't even have to hold any prejudices against autistic people; mild levels of ignorance are enough.

#ActuallyAutistic
#DisabilityRights
#Discrimination
#HR
#HiringPractices
#Interviews

I'm approaching the final interview for 2 different jobs, but I'm at best 3 weeks from my first paycheck. I didn't want to do this, but I'm begging for your help again. We made the money you gave us the first time last for weeks, but we are down to $12.98 total again. If you can help us out, even a few dollars, that can be enough to buy a ramen or a loaf of bread. You can also help out by boosting, if you're broke too. My wife and kids thank you, as do I.

Venmo & PayPal info below.

#MutualAid

I just made a #UBI calculator, to get a feel for how the actual impact on the finances of individual people might look with different UBI dividend levels, income levels, and household sizes. (I plan to open-source it eventually, and maybe make it into a web page too.) The results are...interesting.

You know how they paint it like the devil and ask how the heck we would pay for it? Well, that's not really much of an issue, it turns out.

[Apologies to everyone who had to watch me edit all that. I'm done now.]

What percentage of your income would you be willing to pay for the guarantee that you will never drop below the poverty level income-wise, no matter how much bad luck you might run into? As in, even if you somehow end up with no house, no car, no job, and can't get a loan to save your life, you'll still have a livable income that you can use to get back on your feet.

1/10

I suspect the fediverse is more than just a substitute for other social media. I see this as the beginning of a phase change in how we use the web. We are shifting from corporate control to community control. Fundamentally, the fediverse is a cooperative endeavor, instead of a competitive one. I look forward to the shift in mindset that this change brings about. Will there be a similar movement towards cooperative organizations in other areas of our lives? Once people have had a taste of this approach, will they not be eager to see it spread?

How does one go about begging for money from strangers online to feed your kids? I am out of options. The gig work I was using to keep us alive after being unemployed for 6 months has dried up. We are down to $20. My car will be repossessed soon. I'll lose my house in the spring when I can't pay the taxes. The electricity and water and phone will soon be cut off. I have never had so much trouble getting hired in my entire career. I don't understand it. I'm tremendously talented and have decades of experience, but all anyone wants is LLMs, the one thing I'm not experienced with. I'm worried I might not be alive much longer.

EDIT:
My PayPal link is https://paypal.me/AaronHosford

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help, whether it's a dollar or a boost. I don't have a target right now. Just trying to have food for dinner tomorrow. I'll make another post soon if I don't find a way to get some income first.

#MutualAid

I made a new gig on Fiverr.

https://fiverr.com/s/ljY5wlA

It's for machine learning services. I'm open to custom orders. Please boot for reach.

#MachineLearning
#GetFediHired

@pluralistic Lock-in also explains why employers treat employees like trash and underpay them. They are taking advantage of the fact that you *need* a job, not just to have nice things, but to survive. They don't need you as bad, because they can get someone else to replace you, and this power imbalance is where the rot comes from.

This is one of the biggest reasons to support a UBI. If your basic survival needs aren't dependent on employment, only your ability to have nice things, then the power balance is restored and employers can't get away with abusive practices.

I am so ready for this absurdly overblown LLM hype cycle to wrap up, so the adults can get back to the real work.

@paninid @russellmcormond @argv_minus_one @Uair The field of data science is in its infancy. People are still trying to figure out the right questions to ask about a data set. Many of the concepts are only intuitively defined, and the language is rapidly evolving. We are still in the wild west phase, where individual efforts to maintain order and justice are the primary source, and coverage is spotty at best. Small shops spring up throughout the corporate sphere, slapping tools together haphazardly to get to some ill-defined end goal with little understanding. The bigger ML focused groups are better, but still not good. With one of the largest teams I worked on, I struggled just to get them to see that overlap between their training and test data was an issue, much less to address it. Data was an afterthought.

@paninid @russellmcormond @argv_minus_one @Uair

> I have a feeling that uncurated #TrainingData sets are common

I work in this field and can confirm that this is the case. I have rarely seen discussion on the matter in the workplace, either.

@paninid @russellmcormond @argv_minus_one @Uair Most discussion centers around whether the corporate project can reach its business goals using the data set. Questions focus on whether the data has the needed features and labels (the structure of the data), whether the data is comprehensive enough, whether the sample distribution is similar to the intended use, whether class imbalances (too much of one label and not enough of another) exist, and how clean or dirty the data is w.r.t. noise or mislabeling, but not the potential biases of that data. Data quality is generally assessed by some engineer looking at a few samples and forming a personal opinion. The vast majority of projects I have been involved in were "fly by the seat of your pants", and it was a struggle to get people to pay attention even to the majority of the questions I just listed.