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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • All software is political, riddled with biases and potential security risks. Most of the time we ignore the policy of the software, because we either agree with that policy, or are conditioned not to clock it as a “policy”, because “this is just Common Sense™”.

    I suspect, if the author would have been more honest with themselves, they’d write something along the lines of “turns out, software is a platform for political action, and it scares me” - an opinion that is very valid, valuable and thought-provoking.


  • The future’s wasteland will be covered by bodies of web stalkers who were naive enough to get tricked by mid-2010s shitposts.

    “Turns out they never used this to make their metal cutlery darker - who would have thought the ancients were so casually cruel?”

    “After months of research we have concluded, that despite all their technical achievements, the ancients never figured out, what does the fox say”

    “Today prof. Drobyshevsky is going to tell us about their newest work in XXI cent. anthropology - what is ‘streamer dent’ and why do we have such long heads 2300 years later?”

    “Ass, coochie and the rich - dietary practices of homo sapiens in the age of over-production”




  • Thank you!

    I was only recently diagnosed, and I am into my thirties now, which means I am a “high masking” individual. I am learning very slowly how to communicate what I actually feel and think, instead of saying what “would be appropriate to hear from someone who fits in”. It can be very challenging.

    I have family and friends now who are supportive, and they do a lot of things that help: we normalized non-verbal communication (texts, gestures, etc, - I have read about communication cards as well). Also, it is ok to be unable to say anything at all sometimes, especially during an intense moment.

    Something I have noticed about myself which is also fairly typical (AFAIK) for people with ASD is that our attention and focus work differently than in most people. I seem to be unable to divide my attention up between things: I am either hyper-focused on something singular, or relaxed. So when I am focused, and something distracts me, it is distressing. Imagine someone you know suddenly startling you as you exit your home bathroom as a prank - getting pulled out of the focus feels sorta like that, minus the fear. When that happens, the frustration can be tough to control. If I suddenly snap at someone when they’re trying to reach out - that is the reason most of the time.

    I wish I could help you more - but I am only learning these things myself now. I used to really struggle with communication as a kid, and it turns out I just didn’t have access to the support I needed.

    When it comes to bullying, I think the most effective way to get rid of it is to start deliberately calling it out. This may be tougher than it sounds: sometimes we have to overcome a lot of bias and fear to call out a bully. Once I nail that, I’ll think about a way to teach it to a kid.


  • Hello, yes. All eleven years. Yelling, picking, fighting, name-calling, stealing, stalking - never understood why, until I was diagnosed with ASD not long ago. I guess I really was that different.

    At one point in middle school I remember being so sick of one guy in particular, - he always kicked and pushed me during PE. Sometimes he would steal my things and throw them in the girls changing room to lock me there when I go to get them (I am a man). One time he pulled my pants down so the other guy could snap a photo of my bare behind on his phone. When I asked them to delete the photo, he punched me in the face.

    I had a crush on a girl once. Came clean about it, we even went on a small date. This one time she waited for me after school with two girl friends - they pushed me to the ground, kicked me in my stomach, my back and between my legs, laughed at my pain and threw snow at my head. We were 10 at the time, and I was a lot smaller than the girls. I never told anyone, didnt want them to laugh at a boy who is being picked on by girls.

    In middle school I got in a fight with one of my bullies during PE. He kicked me, I caught his foot with my hands and lifted it up - he fell on his wrist and broke it. The entire school started treating me like a plague. No one talked to me for several days, aside from the occasional “maniac” or “break my arm too, I wanna stay home”.

    There were several kids like me in our school. Teachers did nothing - for them I was a weird quiet kid, and quiet kid always get picked on. Parents did nothing, because nobody knew I’m autistic - they thought I’m just “lazy and weird”.

    I don’t know what is there to learn besides “don’t raise bullies”.






  • It’s not that native UIs are lagging behind, there is a whole set of reasons.

    TL;DR: browsers, as opposed to desktop apps, are stardartized - because they were originally designed to display and deliver text documents. We were never supposed to build complex application UIs on a web stack.

    First, there is no standard way of making native UI on a desktop. Every OS uses it’s own solution, while Linux offers several different ones. Browsers rely on a set of open standards developed specifically for the web, and even there not everything works exactly the same.

    Second, browsers are designed to draw a very specific kind of UI through a very specific rendering mode - they run an immutable hierarchy of elements through layouting and painting engines. It works great for documents, but it becomes extremely unweildy for most other things, which is why we have an entire zoo of different UI implementations (crutches, most of them) for browsers.

    On the desktop we often make a choice of what UI technology would fit best our purpose. For a game engine I would use an immediate-mode UI solution like ImGUI, for the ease of prototyping, integration and fast iterations.

    For consumer software I might choose between something like QT or GTK for robust functionality, reliable performance, acessibility and community support. Mobile platforms come with their own native UI solutions.

    For data-intensive UIs and heavy editors (e.g. CAD, video and music production, games) I might need to designan entirely new rendering pipeline to comply with users requirements for ergonomics, speed, latency etc.

    It is also easy to notice that as a team or employer, it is often much easier to hire someone for web stack, than for native development. Simply put, more people can effectively code in JS, so we get more JS and tech like Electron enables that.

    If you are interested in a single solution that will get you nice results in general, no matter the platform - you might see some success with projects like Flutter or OrbTK.

    UI rendering in general is a deep and very rewarding rabbit hole. If you are in the mood, this article by Raph Levien gives a good overview of existing architectures: https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/05/07/ui-architecture.html