Wearing socks inside out is huge. Some socks are better right side out, but is rare. I also agree that Merino wool kind of solves this problem, but, as a general rule, “wear your socks inside out” should be in the autism handbook.

I remember years ago I saw a joke online that said something like, if there’s a difference between right and left socks, you’re autistic. I was like, that’s stupid, obviously there’s a right and left sock, and I’m not autistic. A few years later, BAM, autism diagnosis.

First of all, wearing tube socks inside out was revelatory for me. No seam problems, no texture problems, etc. AFAIK Hanes still makes mostly-cotton socks. Buy them in person, not online. Inside out socks is a general practice for me, not just around the house.

Secondly, I have opted for a pair of extremely comfortable indoor-only shoes. I got a pair of no-laces sketchers that go in and off with no hands. I got mine as a gift but if they’re expensive, the next best option is $10 “kung fu” slippers (like everyone wears in old Bruce Lee movies) — get rubber-soled ones if you have a lot of carpeting; cotton soles are better (more comfy, more breathable), but you’ll slip around on the carpet. And get them at least one size bigger, maybe 2.

The dynamic width thing is huge… so many notifications spend their precious initial width on boilerplate bs, I’ll give it a shot…

tho tbh all I really need is a full screen, undismissable thing for when my battery is dying… other notifications are very lovely but the number of times I’ve only realized I was low on battery when my computer starts shutting down is… a lot.

Looks great!

How do you like fnott? I assume you switched to it from mako — what made you switch? What are the pros and cons?

Dear Quexotic,

I’m writing you today to let you know that I, also, relate to the original poster. I appreciate that we have this in common.

Additionally, I wanted to express that, the thing that you have done here, I see it. While some might disagree, I found it pleasantly subtle, and, due to its nature, subtlety often doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

In this case, I felt this mode of expression would both build upon the humorous twist embedded in your message, but also afford the opportunity to pronounce my admiration for that cleverness, even though it may be a minor moment in both of our lives.

With my warmest regards,

Jeremy “JP” Parker

This. I didn’t work in hospitality for very long, and I wasn’t the most gracious or understanding undiagnosed autistic person out there, and even I didn’t really give a shit.

Side note: As a bus boy at a very fancy restaurant, I had a little “crumber” for scraping up crumbs, and I didn’t, like, want to marry the crumbs, but, the way the crumber glided across the white cotton tablecloth, which had that soft but firm feel that you can only achieve after a thousand washings…

Let’s just say, you can put up with a lot of shit when you know you got that glide in your future.

Omfg I feel personally attacked by several of these memes

I locked myself out of the house this morning. The weather app on my phone said it “felt like” -2 degrees, and I agree with it.

I had my coat and hat, but my legs were underprepared, I was wearing sweatpants without long underwear.

My wife was at work about a mile away and she didn’t see my texts for about a half hour. I could’ve walked to her work in that time, but I was so paralyzed by the situation that I couldn’t do it.

(We live in a big city, we walk or bike everywhere, or take trains when it’s far. Walking to her work is normal…but cold is cold.)

I have “a thing” about not wearing clothes like that outside, and I’ve only ever done it once or twice, I just went out to bring my kid to school a few blocks away… I have a lot of “things.” And I don’t deal with crises super well; my actions tend to be ok but my communication fails.

So anyway, I eventually got frustrated with my wife’s lack of response and I texted her in a frustrated tone. If the situation was reversed, I would’ve raced back home to save her, and if I had missed the texts, I would’ve been apologetic, and more than understanding if she was frustrated.

She said I should’ve called instead of texting, but I couldn’t talk. She called me and I tried to tell her I couldn’t talk but she insisted. I ended up hanging up on her, which is…not good. She wouldn’t listen, “I don’t want to text” she said. She’s very verbally oriented; she spends like half her time on the phone with her sister or her mother. I prefer being quiet, and I frequently just can’t.

I had immediately apologized for my frustrated tone and for hanging up; I learned to apologize a long time ago and I mean it when I do it.

It felt like she didn’t want to have to go out in the cold, take time out of work, and go through the effort of coming to help me. I get that, it was very cold, but…, idk, I guess sometimes you do it anyway? It felt like she was using my rudeness as an excuse to not help or to be mad about helping.

I had gone out to drop off my kid without my keys, but we have a garage door and a little keypad for it. I knew I didn’t have my keys but I also knew i had a fallback. The batteries in the keypad had been dying for a while, which made it not work in the cold; the problem was resolved — until today.

She called again, I think just to yell at me. She had already texted telling me she had left work and was headed home to help; she didn’t call to tell me that. She was furious on the phone. I hung up on her when she said she hated me. I think hanging up on her may be the most egregious offense; I try not to do it, I know she hates it, but idk, I guess sometimes you do it anyway?

I tried warming up the keypad with my hands; I alternated hands, one under my shirt on my bare stomach to warm up while the other hand exhausted its warmth on the keypad. Shockingly, it worked.

I told her immediately and tried to avoid communicating after that. I think we talked on the phone again? I don’t remember. I apologized several more times — not “I’m sorry but”, it was just “I’m sorry”, with a “I hope you can understand the situation I was in” afterwards.

Our “fight” has not yet been resolved and there next time I see her, or kids will be there and maybe also one of my parents, so we won’t be able to talk about it. Not that there’s anything to talk about. Either I will grovel and agree that I did everything awful and she was perfect, or we deal with a cloud over our heads for a few days until she/we eventually move on, and it just gets added to the vague cloud of indecipherable reasons why she should’ve married someone else.

Sorry to dump on the thread, I needed to vent and I don’t really have anywhere safe to do it.

For me the noise and over stimulation is a big part of it, but there’s also a much more complex web of expectations that I don’t understand, and my “over confidence” (read: my failure to have adequately absorbed the cultural suppression of self esteem) tends to put me into a social position that someone with me lack of skills should not have.

When I do a conference presentation (like I’m preparing for later this week), I can prepare a very scripted set of remarks, and that tends to go well, but off the cuff, I feel like a plate of spaghetti.

Bill Gates has made anti-knowledge sharing his lifelong legacy, from crushing OpenGL by bribing game developers not to build in it, to pushing the US gov’t to give away COVID vaccines to poor countries rather than making the data available so they could make their own. His influence in the industry towards proprietary and closed source code is unmatched. Like, we all love the nerd jumping over the computer with the goofy smile but that dude is a piece of shit.

My point was that if we (you!) were able to level the windows/Linux gaming playing field before he died, that would make him mad, and make me happy.

Please can we destroy Bill Gates’s open source legacy before he dies. I want him to see it die. I want him to be lying on his deathbed, reading an article in Ars Technica about gamers switching to Linux.

And by “please can we” obviously I mean “please can you,” I’m just a lowly full stack dev (aka a lamprey) who wears a Red Hat sweatshirt I got from a friend

I also get annoyed when people criticize when wealthy people support leftist causes. Like, yeah, Bernie Sanders (or whoever) has a lot of money, so the fact that he isn’t blinded to injustice by his own privilege is a good thing.

Where’s the button I can press to project this comment onto the moon

You seem very upset about this. I doubt this will help since it doesn’t seem like your reasoning is influenced by logic, but, the fact that there are fraudulent doctors and diagnoses doesn’t mean science isn’t real.

Things that are scientifically provable are valid.

If I can interject - I don’t think the OP is showing an unpopular opinion. The people they’re talking to aren’t mad. It looks to me like an opinion whose wisdom isn’t generally accepted - and there’s a difference.

Unpopular opinion: pedophilia is a mental disorder; child rape (including “statutory” rape) is an act of violence, cruelty, and power - or, in arguably the worst case, crimes of opportunity. Not all child rapists are pedophiles and not all pedophiles are child rapists. Pedophiles should be treated; child rapists should be imprisoned forever. (Those that are in the overlap can be treated in prison.)

This opinion is (I think) probably true, but if you go around talking about it, you will be unpopular.

Unaccepted opinion: well, there are a lot of them here, but this one - about teachers - could be tweaked into one: the only way we are going to see changes that would actually benefit our society and country, the things the news and politicians say are “luxury expenses” - aka health care, teachers’ salaries, rent and real estate regulation, etc - is with a general strike. The propaganda and gaslighting and victim blaming are so deeply entrenched that they have become the most profitable sectors of our economy.

This opinion is - again, in my opinion - probably true, and there are a lot of people who agree - but not enough. If the crowd in that picture represents a country of 350 million, then that one person represents maybe 0.5-1 million people? Which is way more than the supporters of a general strike.

Why did I say all that? Mostly because I’m bored - but I think it’s a neat distinction to make.

This whole open AI has Artificial General Intelligence but they’re keeping it secret! is like saying Microsoft had Chat GPT 20 years ago with Clippy.

Humans don’t even know what intelligence is, the thing we invented to try to measure who’s got the best brains - we literally don’t even have scientific definition of the word, much less the ability to test it - so we definitely can’t program it. We are a veeeeerry long way from even understanding how thoughts and memories work; and the thing we’re calling “general intelligence” ? We have no fucking idea what that even means; there’s no way a bunch of computer scientists can feed enough Internet to a ML algorithm to “invent” it. (No shade, those peepos are smart - but understanding wtf intelligence is isn’t going to come from them.)

One caveat tho: while I don’t think we’re close to AGI, I do think we’re very close to being able to fake it. Going from Chat GPT to something that we can pretend is actual AI is really just a matter of whether we, as humans, are willing to believe it.

It’s so easy for you young people. Back in my day, in order to hate Microsoft, we had to understand the virus risks of Windows, we hand to have needed to go into the registry to make some minor customization change; we had to know about Microsoft’s nefarious dealings bribing game dev companies to use Directx when they saw the threat of opengl. We had to know about Bill Gates’s dark side (which he did, really well - but we have Behind the Bastards now). We had to be mad about crap like how they locked down gui customization, killing litestep and bb4win. We had to deeply care about the deep innards of your computing experience (read: ricing) to understand why Microsoft sucked so bad.

Today, you kids have it so easy - they’re putting ads in the operating system, their core software is all subscription, they’re talking about making the OS itself subscription based. These days they make it so obvious that we’re not their priority, making good software isn’t their priority; their priority is getting our money.

(I feel like I made the joke already - Microsoft’s really easy to hate these days, you get it - but I’m having fun, so I’m going to keep going.)

They used to put freecell right on your computer - I’m telling you, we had to go seriously digging to find reasons to hate M$. Freecell, minesweeper, solitaire, that weird pinball game my dad liked - we had to be seriously ungrateful shits to head over to Ubuntu dot com.

And now, with one click installers, active discord help channels, eager, excited, and friendly people all over, just happy to see the FOSS community grow - engaging in a healthy relationship with computing has never been so easy - 3 or 4 clicks! Asserting your self respect and aligning your daily experience with your ethics was never like this when I was young.

We used to have to ask on the arch forums where 99% of the time we were told to rtfm (because we hadn’t); we had to be super careful not to let on that we were asking the arch forums about our Ubuntu issues. We had to search for random forum threads that inevitably ended with “nvm i fixed it” - if there was any follow-up at all. We had men whose back sweat trickled down through their unkempt back hair before disappearing into their plumber crack; you guys today have stunningly beautiful men and women who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be “developer advocates” - there are twitch streamers who are getting paid super well at their fancy Netflix jobs but still spend hours and hours of their day sharing their knowledge with newcomers - literally just because they enjoy helping people learn about computers.

Kidding aside Linux is pretty ok, I hope you enjoy it.