I don't think you can know what unwrap does and assume it is safe. Plus warnings about unwrap are very common in the Rust community, I even remember articles saying to never use it.
I have always been critical of the Rust hype but unwrap is completely fine. Is an escape hatch has legitimate uses. Some code is fine to just fail.
It is easy to spot during code review. I have never programmed Rust professional and even I would have asked about the unwrap in the cloudfare code if I had reviewed that. You can even enforce to not use unwrap at all through automatic tooling.
The diagnosis criteria are written by and for neurotypical people. Autistic people are likely to dismiss them as not fitting because they are reading them too literally.
Also we tend to underestimate our own symptoms. As a ADHD person it took me a long time to understand that many of my struggles were not things everyone experienced. I still find it hard to really grasp that most people don't suffer from executive dysfunction and can just do things, even things they are not interested in.
Honestly if you relate to autistic people chances are high that you have some form of neurodivergence. It might be worth trying to get a diagnosis, even just to be sure.
This is the third article in a row that I am seeing on hacker news that is spreading misinformation about autism.
This seems to be targeted campaign. I urge people to not be fooled by ill-researched blog posts. Listen to autistic people. Listen to researchers that represent the scientific consensus.
Any diagnosis for autism will first consider whether the symptoms can be explained better by another diagnosis. This is why you fill out a lot of questionnaires and the like when you get your diagnosis. This is the state of art.
Also women are systematically underdiagnosed when it comes to autism, they often get labeled with boderline and the like. The idea that someone is labeling everything as autism is silly.
If you have met one person with autism you have met one person with autism.
This is true for anything else and no argument against the current diagnosis.
There are people with Covid that ended up in the hospital and people with Covid who barely had any symptoms. Both have Covid.
Autism doesn't work from "little autism" to "a lot of autism". One person can have strong sensory issues but decent social skills. Another bad social skills but not sensory issues at all. And care needs can change over your life, they are not fixed.
The crucial difference is that we know the etiology of COVID and so are justified in treating those two people as having the same disease. Autism is much more complicated because we don't have a thing to define it other than a bunch of disparate symptoms.
It might turn out like if we treated the cold, COVID, tuberculosis and lung cancer as the same thing because they all involve coughing.
Furthermore we employ differential diagnostic and check whether your symptoms could be better explained by another condition. You don't just diagnose people with autism because they have a few symptoms.
Furthermore autistic people can generally relate to each other. Even if two autistic people show very different symptoms there is often a feeling of belonging together.
It is always possible that we will learn more in the future and maybe we will have other diagnosis criteria or discover some people currently diagnosed under autistism would fit better under something else.
However the current diagnostic criteria for ASD is the current state of our scientific knowledge. A lot of clinical research is baked into it.
> It might turn out like if we treated the cold, COVID, tuberculosis and lung cancer as the same thing because they all involve coughing.
Well there are 200 different viruses that cause the common cold. We lump them together because they all involve coughing.
Basically all cancers are unique, even for the same type of cancer. Again, these are lumped due to shared symptoms.
Tuberculosis is caused by 9 different species of bacteria, but these are at least related species.
Covid is basically exactly the same disease as SARS, just caused by a particular strain of coronavirus, though that strain divereged into multiple ones that now produce quite different symptoms. In addition to SARS, other coronaviruses are among those 200 that cause the common cold.
Diseases are historical groupings that someone at some point thought would be useful, nothing more.
Autism or well any form of neurodivergence are about how you work on the inside. It is not possible to observe how a person behaves and just diagnose someone. That is why getting a diagnosis is a whole process involving a trained professional.
Your colleague is full of shit. Generally, neurodivergence is for everyone who regularly experiences that the way their brain works causes them trouble.
Self diagnosis is surprisingly accurate but people also tend to under estimate the severity of their symptoms.
> The main argument in favor of treating it as a single condition tends to come from the advocacy side, rather than from the diagnostic side.
Seeing it as one single conditions is established scientific consensus not some advocacy thing.
The diagnosis "Asperger's" was invented by Hans Asperger, a Nazi scientist that was responsible for the murder of many autistic children. It was never about science. It was invented because he thought that some autistic children might have a potential to become scientist and the like and therefore useful to Nazi Germany and some might not.
Hans Asperger decided which autistic children should be murdered and which one to be spared purely based on ideology.
Autism is something you are born with but support needs can change over your life depending on many factors like you environment, if you are diagnosed early and so on. They are not fixed.
> The diagnosis "Asperger's" was invented by Hans Asperger
No, it wasn't. The diagnosis of “autistic psychopathy”, which loosely corresponds to much of the range of the modern diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder was invented by Hans Asperger (Asperger does not seem to be the first to have described the condition, though he invented that name; a Societ doctor seems to have recognized a similar condition a couple decades earlier.) The distinct separate diagnoses of “Asperger’s syndrome” was invented later (the term seems to have first been used in 1976), and roughly corresponded to the “higher-functioning” individuals within his diagnosis of “autistic psychopathy” that Asperger described as potentially socially useful.
> I have serious doubts that an autistic advocate with low support needs, as opposed to 'neurotypicals' or impacted parents, are meaningfully more qualified to represent the needs of autistics with high support needs
You think a parent without any autism is more qualified to speak than someone who has autism but a different cluster of symptoms? Because being a parent makes you an expert on what exactly?
The is a video of the spokesperson of autism speaks. Her autistic child is in the room and can hear everything. She talks about how bad it is for her to have an autistic child. How she wanted to kill herself by driving down a cliff. Again, while her autistic child is in the room. She is acting like her child is not even a person.
Autism Speaks is a hate group of abusive parents.
Those advocates with low support needs are the ones that are actually making an attempt to give those high support needs a voice. Not by speaking for them but by taking down barriers so that they can advocate for themselves. Because guess what? High Support needs autistic people are still people.
Just because someone is non-verbal does not mean they can not communicate in other forms. They can advocate for themselves if given the tools.
Support needs are multi dimensional, one person might have sensory issues, another no sensory issues at all but more social issues. Who has more support needs? They are different. And they can change. You can learn better coping skills, you can need more or less support as you age.
The parents you talk about just seem like assholes.
> Those advocates with low support needs are the ones that are actually making an attempt to give those high support needs a voice.
Having low-support-needs autism is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good voice for others. In fact, it can be a very bad thing, if they imply that the problems they face are similar to problems faced by high-support-needs folks. The focus in the media on low-support-needs individuals gives people the wrong impression of the autism spectrum's individual experience and broader societal impact.
I think a better form of advocacy is the YouTube channel "Special Books by Special Kids," which doesn't make a point of the channel's author having a disability (no clue whether he does), but rather just introduces viewers to a broad variety of people.
1. I am not claiming that low support-need autists cannot advocate for hight support need autists. I am saying that I have encountered little evidence to support the idea that low support-needs autists have more insight into the needs and interests of someone who is nonverbal, intellectually disabled, and has severe self-injurious behaviors than others, including those who know and support those individuals daily.
2. Sometime being non-verbal is about trouble with expressive communication. But for others, it is an all encompassing impairment and communication, if much at all, has huge subjective/interpretative component by the observer. fMRI in these indivuals show near absence of activation differences for contrasts between passively listened to language and random noise. They absolutely cannot advocate for themselves, and to not understand this, which occurs in 10-20% of autism, suggests a blindness to the full spectrum, because those people are not seen, they are not on Twitter, they are at home with their loving and hardworking caregivers who should have a seat at the table.
I'm pretty sure, that parents, that have autistic kids have not only autistic genes, but also some autistic behaviour. My mother is not diagnosed and she is quite unhinged female and sometimes also very logical. And she also have been talking about me crap with other people, so it perfectly describes autistic parent.
Unfortunately, but the main issue is that people, that are trying to take control of talking space are acting like humans do and in autistic circles they are most efficient at taking over... also, the obsession levels in activity is quite high, as that is topic that they are interested in.
> Autism Speaks is a hate group of abusive parents.
It's an indicator of the current state of affairs in the social media autism space that the only organization focusing on reducing the suffering of individuals with higher levels of dysfunction (i.e. requires lifelong support for basic needs) is demonized to this degree. Though it also makes sense as the most disabled autistic individuals do not post online.
It’s understandable that people with a milder form of autism would find it reprehensible that people want to “fix” them rather than simply accept a different type of person exists, but this really just ignores people at the harshest end of the spectrum who might be able to live an independent life if a cure were developed.
That’s kinda the whole argument behind more subgroups. Mild autists don’t need a cure. A subgrouping would help explain this.
There are plenty of conditions which are just “part of who you are” that still probably should be cured if possible, if for no other reason than to improve their quality of life.
This is a complete lie. Autistic advocacy group care a lot about people with higher needs.
Meanwhile autism speaks spends money for anti-scientific research to find out whether vaccines cause autism and how to find a "cure" for autism. Such a cure can not exist. Autism is something you are born with and that is part of you.
If you knew anything about autism then you would know that we speak about levels of care needs, not "low/high functioning". So either you are ignorant or did choose to use hurtful language.
> Such a cure can not exist. Autism is something you are born with and that is part of you.
Signs of autism generally show up in early childhood, but it has not been proven that it is something a person is born with. Vaccines have been studied enough to rule them out, but there are still a zillion other things that babies today are exposed to that could be a factor, from antibiotics to endocrine disrupting chemicals to microplastics to viruses or even something we're not even considering medically today.
Also, tons of birth defects and inborn diseases can be cured. We cure cleft palates and spina bifida routinely. We manage diabetes and Phenylketonuria effectively enough that patients can live regular lives. Here's a paper published in the prestigious Cell journal covering 700 different genetic disorders which can be treated today: https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00110-7
It's possible that in the future autism will have a cure, a preventative measure or a highly effective treatment.
The more correct way is to think about it as a prisms. It is multi dimensional.
Also it is for autistic people. It grinds my gears when people say "everyone is on the spectrum", no, just no. Again it is only for autistic people and you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird.
And no, just because someone is verbal and seems to be very articulate does not mean the person has low support needs or vice versa.
I find this take quite challenging, although I know it is one shared by a lot of autistic people.
I understand that if a person has no support needs, they cannot be diagnosed with autism. But that person may still be neurodivergent, and therefore to me it seems to follow that you have folks who are autistic with high support needs, and folks who are autistic with low support needs. Then, you have neurodivergent folks with no support needs. But this seems to me like a difference in degree, rather than category, and which would mean that the “spectrum” analogy works quite well.
With a clear understanding that I am not trying to minimise the struggles autistic people face, a sincere desire to learn, and an open mind, would you mind trying to help me understand?
Autism is something you are born with. It is simply who you are.
Support needs can change over time. You can need less help because you learn better coping strategies and have a stable environment or you can need more as you get older. It is not fixed.
Support needs are denoted in level because that is what system like schools and the like need. They don't really map to reality. Like for example a autistic person can have really bad sensory issues, being really sensitive to sounds, restricted diet and the like but decent social skill. Another autistic person might not have any sensory issues but really struggle with social stuff. Who needs more help? They need different kinds of help.
Thanks for replying! This above fits in much better with my previous mental model of autism: it’s intrinsic, it describes a “difference” in someone’s way of experiencing the world.
I’m still struggling to understand how this meshes with what you said above about only being autistic if you have support needs.
I don’t understand what implications that would have for someone who (for example) develops enough coping strategies that they no longer have any support needs. As far as I understand it, there’s no way to “cure” autism, so those folks would still be autistic but without support needs, which doesn’t seem to fit?
I don't think having zero support needs is realistic. If you have for example sensory issues like being sensitive to bright light or having trouble eating certain food then this doesn't go away. And just living in a world made for neurotypical people will always be a bit distressing and cause social problems.
Yes, there is a bit of a contradiction in advocacy because on one hand we want to spread awareness about the natural diversity of how humans brains work and remove prejudices and celebrate that diversity but also we don't want to minimize that it is a disability and people do need help.
> you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird.
The problem is the people who actually have support needs are often not in a stable job with great insurance, and then they don't have access to the "get an official diagnosis" machinery. At which point you have to choose between respecting a self-diagnosis even if they're often wrong, or not respecting it even if they're often right.
It is still important to get a official diagnosis if one can but yeah the reality is that it can be a very long process and not in reach for some people.
The more helpful way to think about is that the neurotypical brain is like RGB(63.32, 12.3, 73.02) but with thousands or maybe millions of variables. If certain values are significantly lower or bigger it might cause you trouble.
Having Autism is one cluster of values you can have. So is having ADHD. So is having Trauma. And many more things. And you can and often have multiple things at once and their symptoms overlap.
Everyone is on the spectrum, but only some are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. So there’s a tipping point or dividing frequency in the spectrum that moves people into disorder.
Having Covid is a spectrum from having nearly no or even no symptoms to having really bad symptoms. Just because everyone experiences having a running nose from time to time, does not mean everyone has Covid.
Autism is not the only way your brain can be different from other people.
Wasn't that a copyright issue? I thought the point of contention is that Google allegedly copied Oracle's API design when they re-wrote Java for Android.
The license is Apache 2.0. With the trademark, they can tell everyone not to call their thing TypeScript but at this point, given the license, they can't tell them not to copy it and change it and distribute that new thing (assuming the new distributors do so under the correct conditions).
Even AI is throwing shades at wayland.
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