AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

I initially thought this might be AI generated because it looked a little bit odd to me, but nope, seems to be real!

Here’s some other ones from NASA:

https://images.nasa.gov/details/ARC-1989-AC89-0437-9

https://images.nasa.gov/details/ARC-1989-AC89-0437-20

This company is known for this. To clarify, I mean known for making deliberately inflammatory ads, then showing them as obtrusively or carelessly as possible, because it gets people to post about it.

The only reason their company got popular in the first place was when they put these ads everywhere to piss people off and generate engagement.

https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-clickbait-stop-hiring-humans-marketing-campaign-made-artisan-go-viral

“The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait”

This guerrilla marketing approach, combined with traditional media coverage and tactics, led to significant success. Artisan saw a remarkable +197% growth in brand search traffic, quickly establishing itself as the most well-known AI employee creator.

Per the article (thanks for posting it all!):

I actually didn’t post all of it! The full article was probably about 4-6 times as long as just the snippets I showed, if not more. I cut out a lot of either repetitive points, or stories that just didn’t really make a point and were more there just to illustrate this specific person’s life in general for emotional attachment.

Yeah, it’s a social construct in the sense that it’s just natural differences among humans, specifically differences that don’t as often square with societal/social norms as the average person. If society were comprised of all autistic people, you wouldn’t have the label “autism”, you’d just have “people that are the way people are.”

That said, unlike the article implies, autism is, of course, not just something everyone is choosing, making up, or using to justify not doing work.

I will note the article doesn’t technically say “everyone with autism is faking it and it’s not real”, it just implies that because a lot of people self-diagnose with it now, that must mean that the real numbers are way lower than they actually are, and that people who have autism, but don’t experience major social or productivity related issues from it, aren’t actually autistic and are just “introverted” or some other general term that could theoretically apply.

I managed to get past the paywall on the article somehow, so here’s the actually important stuff:

But for a community organized around social impairment, they maintained an astonishing number of social rules. Certain language and beliefs were treated as harmful, and activists policed them aggressively. Terms like high-functioning, low-functioning, severe, and profound were condemned as “ableist.” Again and again, I watched popular accounts direct their thousands of followers to comment sections so they could scold people for using the wrong language or expressing the wrong views about autism.

AKA “muh free speech”

Activists reserved particular contempt for anyone who upheld the medical understanding of autism spectrum disorder, targeting organizations, researchers, and universities that treated autism as a disorder and supported work on its causes, treatment, or cure. They compared that work to eugenics and tried to shut it down through petitions, harassment, and public pressure. Too often, they succeeded.

“We should ‘fix’ autistic people, why doesn’t everyone agree with me??? 😢”

when I began referring to myself with the term Asperger,

The response was fierce. Activists rejected the idea that there was any sort of hierarchy in the autism spectrum.

“Why don’t people like it when I use an outdated term, removed from the DSM-5, that is often used to imply low intelligence of autistic people and want me to use the more broadly accepted inclusive term instead???”

Then, my life changed. In 2022, after working for several years as an artist, I became a journalist. The career shift was spurred by my discovering the stories of detransitioners: mainly young women who had once identified as transgender and now no longer did, and whose experiences were largely ignored by mainstream media. I could relate to them; many of them, like me, had struggled deeply as teenagers and searched for a label that seemed to explain their suffering. As I learned more about their experiences, I was forced to think more critically about how activism and media shape cultural narratives around identity and diagnosis, and how perverse social incentives can lock those narratives into place.

“I saw people detransition and that means that means autism can be a social contagion and because I see it as debilitating I want a reason to believe I’m faking it”

I soon began taking on stories that required heavy reporting. As I spoke with sources, built rapport, asked sensitive questions, and earned their trust, I realized something that should have been obvious much earlier: I do not have a social communication deficit. Not only was I competent at socializing, I was good at it, and I improved the more I did it.

“I’m good at socializing therefore I don’t have autism”

Which forced me to ask: What else could have explained my social discomfort? In retrospect, the answer was more ordinary than I wanted it to be. I was a sensitive, introverted child who felt social mistakes intensely. Instead of responding to them by becoming more resilient, I chose to retreat into my interests, because they felt safer than people. Over time, that withdrawal hardened into a pattern.

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” but applied to emotions. If she’d just responded better to mistakes, she’d never have been diagnosted as autistic, guys!

My diagnosis unraveled further once I started questioning the other traits I had come to see as autistic. Introversion, high sensory sensitivity, intense interests, and social camouflaging are not exclusively the features of an autist; they are widely distributed across the general population. But using the female autism framework, I came to see them as a meaningful pattern.

“I have a ton of heavily correlated traits that are all often linked to autism, but if I look at them individually instead of recognizing the actual pattern, and say that non autistic people can have them too, that means I’m ‘normal!’”

This happened very swiftly, partially because an autism diagnosis is not especially difficult to obtain. The process, which has no objective medical test and relies primarily on self-reported traits interpreted by individual clinicians, leaves enormous room for confirmation bias and error. My own evaluation did not consider alternative explanations for my experiences, only that they had been present since childhood.

“We can’t do a DNA test for autism, therefore doctors must be just guessing and patients must be making it up”

Research shows that more and more people, especially young women, are over-identifying with psychiatric diagnoses, desperate for some sort of label to explain their struggles or abnormalities.

“More people are self-diagnosing, therefore trained medical professionals using actual diagnostic methods will also be diagnosing a ton of people with autism that don’t have it”

Losing the autism label allowed me to regain something more valuable than certainty: agency. My difficulties did not disappear, but they no longer defined the limits of who I could become. There is comfort in a story that shifts responsibility away from the self. Sometimes that comfort is almost irresistible. But in the end, it is better to believe in the possibility of change than to embrace a narrative that says you never had a choice at all.

“If you think you’re autistic, you’ll assume you have innate limits and stop trying hard enough.” AKA “Autism stops you from reaching your full potential and is a crutch”

Watches

Smart ones can be useful. It’s nice to be able to check which app a notification came from and get a short preview without having to take your phone out of your pocket, which can also help people who suffer from the classic case of “I picked up my phone to check a notification and now I’m on TikTok”

Light Bulbs

I agree these don’t usually need to be smart, but there’s also good reasons for them. Changing lights/rooms while you’re away so it looks like someone’s home, setting them to slowly dim throughout the evening so you more naturally get tired on schedule, and the colors can be nice if you need to theme a space. Good for people who often host parties.

Kitchen appliances

Yeah I got nothing here, make 'em all dumb again 🙏

There is still a lot of good uses of “smart” tech, it’s just you’ll find most companies would rather cram it in everywhere rather than just where it’s most useful. For example, it can be good to have smart appliances like your water heater, if you want it to be able to adjust when it pre-heats water based on when it gets used the most, adjust based on the current cost of energy from the grid and output from home solar, etc.

Can also be good to have in something like a thermostat, or electronically connected blinds. You can have them raise and lower automatically based on the angle of the sun to automatically adjust the temperature in your house before relying on a more costly appliance like a heat pump.

Not all smart tech is bad, it’s just that most of it is.

So you’re saying a bus, which on average can support a much larger volume of people than cars can, are running consistently on time, and the lanes are also providing routes that allow emergency responders (not just cops, remember that ambulances can use these lanes too) to get to where they’re going without having to wait in traffic as someone dies?

Not to mention that if the dedicated bus lanes didn’t exist, bus service could be slow/inconsistent enough that all the people riding the bus would just switch back to cars, and now you’ve got way more cars on the road clogging it up again.

Why would you think this is a problem?

She likely could afford a car since she has a mayor’s salary

Definitely couldn’t before though! Hence why her parents help her cover childcare expenses.

Plastic. Save the planet while getting fed!

Only if other reviews are missing major context.

If a product I bought a year ago breaks, but everyone else wrote their review the day after they got it and said it was great, I’m gonna write a review telling you it might not last as long as you think, for example.

Only when:

• The art isn’t significantly tied to the artist’s views/publicly spouted opinions/decisions/etc (e.g. if the artist is a Nazi, you can’t really separate an artwork they made with a swastika from the artist. If they painted a nice flower field 10 years ago, it’s hard to say that it is likely to carry any Nazi-adjacent themes, and is probably pretty distinct from whatever they’d make if they made art now)
• Consuming the art doesn’t financially support the artist (so in the case of J.K Rowling, you could pirate the books, or read a copy you already have, but you can’t buy new ones (or get them on loan from somewhere that could compensate her, like a library), pay to stream the movies, go to a theme park based on the work, or buy any licensed merchandise, assuming you want to not give her money and thus separate her from the work)
• Your consumption of the art won’t indirectly cause someone else to benefit the artist (e.g. you wear a shirt you already own with Harry Potter on it, and it reminds someone else of the series and they buy the books)