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How do you get along with fellow autistic people?
  • I get along with Autistics better, but mainly because we cope with social situations in a similar way.

    In my case, we play a lot of board games and video games. We can socialize without requiring smalltalk or eye contact. If there is no such activity planned, we don't get together, and nobody is offended.

  • I wrote a guide on how to teach Root! (or at least how I teach it)
  • This is really cool! My teach is usually a very similar order to what you list, but its nice to have something like this written down. I will probably steal this.

    For the Woodland Alliance, I usually deacribe them as "playing Pandemic, as the disease". You are spreading around everywhere, and can pop up suddenly to devastate someone's clearing if they aren't keeping you in check.

  • Looking for something new to read after The Expanse
  • For sci-fi, one I haven't seen mentioned here yet is Red Rising.

    Kind of an Enders Game meets Hunger Games in the first book, but quickly expands into a solar-system wide war with lots of intrigue, star-wars-like tech, and amazing characters.

  • Watch a 13-year-old become the first person to ever beat Classic Tetris
  • Tetris doesn't really have an end. It just keeps going. So this is a very specific crash where if you get far enough into the game, it can't keep up with the player any more. You "beat" Tetris by playing so well you make the game break.

    This is similar to getting pacman to crash by beating level 255 at which point incrementing the level goes past what can be stored and the data gets corrupted.

  • How is academia for autistic people?
  • I got my PhD in engineering just fine. Had to push myself to make a few connections and meet regularly with my advisor, etc., but doing research was really well-suited to my hyper-focus tendencies.

    However the opportunities I had tutoring/teaching did not appeal to me at all. I pulled it off, and I enjoyed sharing my knowledge and being the "expert" in a room full of freshman students, but I would be highly stressed all morning in anticipation, and then out of commission for the rest of the day.

    So, I opted to move into industry mainly to remove the expectation of teaching regular courses and the dependency on networking to successfully claim grant funding and collaborate with other academics. (Also money)

    Several autistic-spectrum friends also left academia but stayed in research in some form, and are doing really well. A couple stayed in academia. One is doing great, and the other basically destroyed his marriage due to the stress.

    Probably depends a lot on the specific responsibilities of your chosen academic field as well as your individual point on the spectrum.

  • Could we add alternativeto.net to the sidebar?
  • I am really dumb. The link you shared doesn't show any table like you describe, and no links to the other "parts" out of 13. Can you help me figure this out? The part I can see is pretty helpful!

  • Former religious lemmings, what made you quit religion or stop being a believer?
  • Pretty recently.

    When the majority of people I grew up respecting decided to use their religion as an excuse to participate in or support a terrorist attack, a lot of things started unraveling pretty quickly. Turns out none of them actually cared about what Jesus wanted, but rather what that news station said.

    With so many of my old friends and church leaders telling me hate was the answer, the cognitive dissonance didn't have any ground to stand on anymore.

  • Any FOSS todo lists with time-blocking calendar feature?

    I like todo lists, and I like time blocking so I can schedule out specific hours to work on each task. However I have yet to find an app that combines these cleanly.

    Features I am looking for:

    • Todo list that allows nested lists, and adding details to each item (due date, more detailed instructions, etc.)
    • Seamless integration with a calendar, so I can assign a given todo item to a date and time
    • Adjustable time durations. Not every task is exactly 1 hour.
    • Accessible and syncable across PC and Android,
    • Freeee....?

    Nice to have:

    • Sync with Google Calendar/Tasks
    • Color-coding tasks
    5
    Combined todo list with calendar for time blocking

    I like todo lists, and I like time blocking so I can schedule out specific hours to work on each task. However I have yet to find an app that combines these cleanly.

    Features I am looking for:

    • Todo list that allows nested lists, and adding details to each item (due date, more detailed instructions, etc.)
    • Seamless integration with a calendar, so I can assign a given todo item to a date and time
    • Adjustable time durations. Not every task is exactly 1 hour.
    • Accessible and syncable across PC and Android,
    • Freeee....?

    Nice to have:

    • Sync with Google Calendar/Tasks
    • Color-coding tasks
    0
    App to combine similar photos and choose the best parts from each

    Windows Live Gallery had a great Photo Fuse feature that allowed you to select multiple similar photos and be able to select which faces from each photo would be used in the final composite image. This was great for group photos where in every photo someone isn’t looking at the camera or blinking etc, as you can combine them all and select all the faces that are looking in the right direction. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Zy4mLkEL4

    Unfortunately, Windows Live Gallery is now unsupported and unavailable for download. Is there any software that has similar functionality (offline/online)? Preferably on Android so I can directly clean up my picture collection as I take the photos.

    I know I could do this manually in something like photoshop, but that's not what I'm looking for.

    0
    App to combine similar photos by choosing best parts from each

    Windows Live Gallery had a great Photo Fuse feature that allowed you to select multiple similar photos and be able to select which faces from each photo would be used in the final composite image. This was great for group photos where in every photo someone isn't looking at the camera or blinking etc, as you can combine them all and select all the faces that are looking in the right direction. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Zy4mLkEL4

    Unfortunately, Windows Live Gallery is now unsupported and unavailable for download. Is there any FOSS software that has similar functionality (offline/online)? Preferably on Android so I can directly clean up my picture collection as I take the photos.

    8
    Bounty system for FOSS Github projects?

    Hoping this is on-topic. If not I can delete.

    I own a couple of FOSS projects on Github, and have been toying with the idea of adding some kind of bounty to a few issues, since I do get a (small) amount of income via Patreon from which I'm happy to use to encourage contributions.

    I'd rather keep things visible inside Github itself rather than hosting issues on yet another third-party site I would need to administer. I know there have been services like this in the past, but they seem to eventually stop paying out bounties and just disappear.

    I've seen "boss.dev" showing up in my Google results and it looks to do what I want, but I'm skeptical since there seems to be no reviews or community around that tool.

    6
    Good STL/3D model archival software?

    I've collected quite a number of STL files for 3D printing, and realized I need some better way to catalogue them, because the default Windows explorer is starting to become burdensome. I'm looking for something that:

    • Shows a 3D preview I can rotate around to see the model
    • Allows me to sort into folders
    • Allows tagging with keywords for later searching
    • Snappy search

    Maybe Windows already does this and I'm just not seeing it, but I feel like my collection is at the point where I need something dedicated, similar to a photo cataloguing tool (e.g. Google Photos) or a reference manager (e.g. Zotero/Mendeley).

    Any good FOSS tool that does something like this? Or a generic "better file explorer"?

    8
    How to avoid/handle meltdowns in public

    I am married and have a couple young kids. Recently late diagnosed at 31 years.

    Surprise! Turns out the loud noises and random chaos that comes with kids sometimes leads me to a meltdown.

    Usually, I can feel it coming on and go "hide" for 5 minutes in a dark room to reset myself and go back to being a helpful parent. Wife is very understanding and supportive.

    The problem comes when we are out in public. I'm not always with my wife. Last week I took the kids on an outing, and wife was taking the opportunity to shop (fortunately nearby, but out of sight or earshot) while I played with the kids. One thing led to another and I pretty quickly found myself melting down with no way to stop it, and became basically paralyzed and barely able to keep the kids from getting lost, much less destroying everything in the store.

    Luckily my wife answered her phone and was close enough to come help (about 15 minutes because she was in line to buy things), but with my kids I couldn't just abandon them and go "hide". But it took me a good hour to come back to reality without any good hiding place to reset myself.

    I know this is a potentially dangerous situation for my kids, and quite unfair for my wife to have to come save me all the time, but unavoidable sometimes. Any tips to prevent/delay a meltdown in critical situations like this? I can't use earbuds in this case like I usually would because I need to be able to hear my kids.

    Edit: I had no idea I might be on the spectrum until after having kids. I suspect growing up in a very mellow family and then living mostly alone afterward isolated me enough from triggering situations and social interactions in general I just didn't connect the dots.

    8
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)CA
    calculuschild @lemm.ee
    Posts 7
    Comments 51