Notices by Josh Susser (joshsusser@neurodifferent.me)

@mattly even without dhh or brendan eich

@avdi The career path for developers always seems to end in becoming a manager. I assume this makes it hard to convince developers to support the idea of unions. They think of themselves as future managers, the same way most poor Americans think of themselves as temporarily embarassed millionaires.

@mattly I don't disagree with that. Mine is that if you don't understand how something actually works, you should not use it.

Here's the thing about dealing with nazis: If you wait until it's too late, it will be too late. I know that sounds obvious, but folks still want to believe it's too soon.

The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.

@mattly @obsidian Very cool. Back in the 90s, that's the kind of thing I would have built in HyperCard.

@mattly isn't that what spoofing the user agent is for?

@mattly goblins are not to be trusted

Does "with all due respect" always imply no respect is due?

How do we get someone like Rebecca Watson to debunk #ABA and expose the billion dollar industry based on junk science psychology that abuses #autistic kids until they conform to neurotypical social norms at the cost of their own mental health and well-being?

ABA tldr: ABA is #AppliedBehaviorAnalysis and is gay conversion therapy for #autism. That's not just a metaphor - they are the very same thing used for different socially unacceptable "conditions". Both ABA and conversion therapy were created by the same person, Ivar Lovass, and use the same methods. Those training methods are so terrible they are literally not legal to use on dogs, and conversion therapy itself is illegal in many countries and US states. If any reasonable standards were applied, ABA would also be illegal.

I have tried to get journalists of all stripes interested in doing an ABA exposé, but even the ones who get interested never seem to be able to make it a priority. It's easy to deprioritize ABA reporting when there's no market for it, and even stories about routine physical abuse and electric shock torture of autistic kids at #JudgeRotenbergCenter don't break through, so I get why journalists don't bother. But we desperately need reporting on ABA that debunks the current mythology that it is helpful and justifies it being the only therapy for autistic kids that medical insurance will cover.

An ABA exposé segment by John Oliver could change everything, but he'll never do it because he's buddies with Jon Stewart who is a supporter of ABA and raises millions of dollars for ABA promoters like AutismSpeaks. (Surprise, Jon Stewart has an autistic son. It's often the autism parents who drink the ABA kool-aid because it lets them get their kids under control, and they don't know any better. Which is why we need reporting on it.)

We have four months until April, the dreaded Autism Awareness Month. Wouldn't it be nice if next year the month was about banning ABA instead of raising money for it? Anyone know anyone with a platform who is up for helping millions of autistic kids avoid a childhood of medically-approved abuse?

@actuallyautistic

Since Charlie Stross is like 10% of mastodon's entertainment value for me I don't want to unfollow him, but he constantly boosts UK Politics without tags I can filter or CWs I can pass over, so I am torn. It seems the old social rules still apply here, that celebrities can do whatever they want and it's only the plebes who have to follow the rules about tags and CWs or we'll get yelled at, while no one can do anything to stop celebrites from saying whatever they want until they actually ruin the platform through their self-centered carelessness. I see that most average users on here are pretty good about following the platform conventions, but are the only ones who get called out for breaking them. We can't have a two-class system here, where some people are allowed to break all the rules and get all the reach and engagement and other benefits from being the top dogs, and the rest of us just have to put up with it. For now, I'm just muting every account that Stross boosts without a ukpolitics tag (which I have never actually seen used by anyone, even though we Americans are always yelled at by folks in other countries for posting without a uspolitics tag), but I wish there was a better solution.

@mattly @betsythemuffin I have been using {curly braces} instead of [square brackets] for placeholder text and it's fine. But I just started playing with nested tags and I kind of like it. I also looked at using other markdown/obsidian features like links or footnotes, but tags seemed like the most useful with least extra typing. With nested tags, you can do that TK thing like #TK/favorite-color and get all the nice tag management stuff like tag views and backlinks. I don't have any nostalgia for "TK" so I'm experimenting with "-" as the root placeholder tag, so they look like "#-/birthday" which is really about as lightweight as I need.

@mattly Who needs reading glasses when you have an iphone with a built-in flashlight and a magnifier app? I did that to read menus in dimly lit restaurants for years. The ubiquitous OCR was a cool surprise - I just discovered that this morning! (only upgraded a few days ago)

@mattly I have been thinking about this new Attention Economy and how ridiculous it has made life a lot. Feels like everything is harder than it needs to be so we can pay that attention tax, and we ND folk are in the worst tax bracket.

@mattly oh, interesting. well i'm sure i can get you a list of a few more soon as i have a minute

@mattly I spend zero time on LinkedIn. Never saw the point of it, only signed up to keep in touch with old coworkers but that's not what it turned out to be for and now I just do my best to ignore it. Anyway these dark patterns seem to be folks trying to growth hack their personal brand like they were a big brand with millions of customers. YouTube is where I consume most of my social media, and the patterns there are very annoying. Like posting a video with a title so long you can't read the end of it so you have to click and watch to see what the topic really is - basically the definition of clickbait. The one that really pisses me off is when someone is A/B testing their title and/or thumbnail, so my memory of whether I saw it before is no longer reliable. Then there's the no-value-added reaction video (watch me watch a video but not add anything substantial). But what I hate most is background music. I have stopped watching channels with content I love because listening to a 10-second loop of perky oboe music for 20 minutes while trying to make out what someone is saying does things to my brain that are too painful to discuss.

@mattly Text-as-image is useful because it's easy to share and you don't have to worry about the message degrading through copy/paste errors or minor edits. But yeah there's that dark attention-hacking side to it. So what domain are you talking about for these dark patterns? Just social media, or what? Because in this attention-based economy, everyone is trying to hack your attention to get paid.

Netflix is raising prices again... I just read their docs and saw that if I cancel my account they'll keep all my data around for 10 months and I can reactivate the account when Prodigy S2 or Heartstopper S3 drop. I think it's time to start teaching streaming platforms a lesson about the mathematics of cost/benefit trade-offs and how much customers will put up with. I'm really tired of all of them constantly raising prices while making selection and experience worse. It's ludicrous how they remove content but expect us to pay more for less, force us to watch ads even when we pay for a subscription, and figure out new ways to monetize our watch histories while making their janky apps harder to use. I'm also mad at them for ongoing anti-union bullshit, and it will feel good to punish them for that.

@mattly @deirdresm that is a nice feeling, especially when they make you feel a little special for it

@mattly I think there's a standard autistic (maybe other NDs too?) experience of being associated with an unwavering order. Quite a few vendors at the farmer's market comment on me always buying the same thing every time. But somehow drinking the identical coffee beverage every day is expected.

A/B testing on users without their informed consent is bad. We didn't sign up to be your test subjects, and we'd like the app to function the way it has for years(?) without our work (or play) being disrupted by your janky product research experiments.

Recently, YouTube introduced an in-app screensaver in the tvOS (AppleTV) app. It was an incomplete implementation with no way to configure or disable the screensaver, so it just put videos of ugly hippos on my screen after 10 minutes and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I sent a couple feedback messages complaining about it into their feedback black hole, and a couple weeks later, the screensaver disappeared. And I could never find anything in YT's docs about it. Smells like an undisclosed A/B test to me. I hope they learned more than they expected from this experiment. Like, don't do these experiments on unsuspecting users just trying to get the app to work the way it's supposed to.