Yes! I have to understand how a process works before I can do it myself.

To all the people who just “give it a go” without knowing exactly what they’re doing - I cannot comprehend how you do that.

In my experience becoming non-verbal may also depend on who you’re with. It might be that your partner goes non-verbal with other people first and you last (since you are the most accepting of this).

If you’re able to speak for your partner in those situations (I suggest discussing how they should signal to you that this is needed, plus in what situations it would be appropriate) that can be a big help.

Also, as a couple of other commenters have mentioned, look into other forms of communication. Texting or email is often still possible if not too overwhelmed, so again discuss with your partner - perhaps there is a shorthand set of messages or emojis they can use when they’re struggling to communicate that will allow them to convey what’s happening and what they need.

I am glad to see this happening. Unfortunately a lot of the damage is already done, though - staff have been lost and may not be easily replaced, studies have been interrupted at critical points and cannot simply be resumed from where they left off, etc. At least this pushback from the courts may reduce the likelihood of further such cuts.

Yeah, that’s deliberate, intentional targeting of the journalist and/or camera crew.

That’s true, yes, but I suspect the variation across NTs is not as wide as the gap between NTs and neurodivergents.

As an analogy, everybody’s colour vision is slightly different. But most people are similar enough that they agree on colour, whereas somebody who is colour blind has a distinctly different experience. Most people don’t even think twice that what they are seeing is not what another person might be seeing (and without special software it’s basically impossible for people with regular vision to gain an understanding of what a colourblind person might see, whilst a colourblind person can only get an idea of what regular colour vision looks like if they have the right colourblindness profile for a pair specialised filtering glasses to work).

To state the obvious: predominantly because they are unaware that their experience of the world is not universal, but in some cases simply because it inconveniences them.

I partly agree and disagree with the description of executive dysfunction. I would also break it into two categories, but the first encompasses both aspects of the description by “overwhelmed”.

In this case, the anxiety or stress that impedes function is due to uncertainty around how to achieve the desired outcome. The degree of anxiety or stress is dependent on the cost of failure; e.g. something with no perceived stakes (or very low stakes) allows for a high degree of uncertainty and an imperfect or incomplete plan can be executed because the cost of it going wrong is negligible. However, as the stakes rise, the degree of uncertainty required to create a “barrier to entry” (i.e. a sufficient amount of anxiety or stress to prevent action) decreases. The uncertainty itself could simply be not knowing how to approach or break down a task as per the comment, but it is also often the uncertainty introduced by other people. If you know someone well, then you can have reasonable confidence in how they might respond to a particular topic. If not, though, and they are a key part of achieving said goal, then oh boy does that cause stress!

The other category is not directly due to anxiety/stress but instead a result of fatigue, burnout or being overwhelmed (i.e. near meltdown). The brain effectively goes “nope” and refuses to process the required information no matter how much you want it to or how important it is. The irony is that if the anxiety or stress from the previous category is high enough, it can actually create this overwhelmed state, but in my experience severe fatigue, too much sensory input or too many cognitive demands (i.e. being forced to juggle too many tasks/problems/interactions at once) will readily create this situation too.

Currently testing out Shiori. I have tried both it and Readeck on my Raspberry Pi 3B running 32-bit Raspbian ‘Bullseye’. From an installation and performance perspective, Shiori is easier: 32-bit binaries are available and its web interface is a bit more responsive. If you are not running a 64-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS, you have to build Readeck yourself (which I successfully did).

The main attraction of Shiori over Readeck is that it has both a readable and archive view. The main downside for me is it lacks the read/unread feature of Readeck and Pocket (although that’s apparently something planned for future and in the meantime, it’s possible to workaround using tags).

Both have a browser extension to enable capturing pages that contain Javascript and do not gracefully degrade. Both also have an export-to-ebook function that may suit your e-reader.

Bottom line: if you have an RPi4 or later, then Readeck is probably want you want. If you’re running an older Pi, though, Shiori may be a better option.

Definitely #1. I’ve encountered #2 with a very specific IDE and #4 and #5 on occasion.

He’s trying to normalise the idea of the US taking control of Canada. It’s utterly insane, but if he repeats it enough plenty of people will just switch off or subconscious accept that Canada “should” be part of the US.

Unfortunately if you’re high-masking they usually disagree with you and say you can’t possibly be autistic.

Burnout is a common experience for those of us with ASD. Autistic burnout in particular was only formally defined in 2019, even though the concept had existed for a couple of decades prior.

In your case I’m wondering if it’s the more classic occupational burnout since you’re feeling up to hobbies (which presumably you enjoy?) after just 48 hours away from work. My personal experience with autistic burnout is that it is really hard going and takes a long time to slowly climb out of.

I find it useful to distinguish between getting overwhelmed (which eventually will result in a meltdown) and burnout itself. Think of it this way: burnout drastically reduces the cognitive resources and energy you have available to deal with life. Effectively that means your available “bandwidth” to manage both sensory input and cognitively demanding situations is vastly reduced. That makes it much easier to get frustrated or overwhelmed. The reduction in cognitive resources also means that our ability to mask breaks down, so we more readily upset people (particularly NTs who don’t understand autistic behaviour).

On the work front, I can empathise with points #1 and #2 (not so much #3 as my interoception is apparently quite acute; if you struggle with determining your internal state then I recommended looking up some exercises to help with this, as you can improve it through practice). For years I was the single point of failure at my workplace so I was carrying a lot of stress. There were plenty of tasks that if I didn’t do them, nobody else could/would; there were also time-critical things that if I didn’t push myself to do in time, I would inevitably end up dealing with the clean-up. My manager did his best to work with me to reduce my workload (I even worked part-time for a while, much of work-from-home), but I was already too burnt out for this to enable me to recover. I eventually collapsed in a heap, prompting my employer to hire additional staff. My (very slow) staged return to work has started with just some knowledge-transfer and advice meetings so that they can continue working on the projects I’ve been involved with.

Determining when to return to work is not easy and it depends on how badly burnt out you are. If this is a repeated issue with your workplace, then I’d encourage you to talk to your manager/supervisor (if you can) to flag that the workload (and/or environment, if it provides high sensory input) is pushing you into burnout on a regular basis. It is in the interests of the business to avoid doing this, as it means you don’t work as effectively when you’re burning out and then have to take time off to recover. Usually employers can provide accommodations or restructure the work to some degree to help. The goal should be to avoid you burning out again, as not only is that the best for you and your health, but also gives your employer the best outcome (a productive, reliable employee).

You mention work-from-home, so that’s something to look into further - if your job allows (and your home environment is less demanding than your workplace), you could either try to get a regular WFH schedule or have a staged return to work starting with lots of WFH and slowly increasing the time in the office.

I don’t know if this applies to you, but I find meetings very draining and so avoiding back-to-back meetings is essential for me at the moment. If you have regular meetings, see if you can arrange with your colleagues to space them out a bit to give you time to recover inbetween.

On the home life front, prioritise your health. Sleep is crucial and anything that disrupts it must be addressed. After that focus on nutrition and exercise, but don’t push yourself - that only exacerabates burnout.

The toughest part of all of this is going to be learning to pace yourself. It takes time and practice to identify how much energy or bandwidth you have for a given day and how much you can realistically achieve without making the next day a write-off. Again, if you can look into some interoception exercises to help you better judge your internal state, I think it would help with this (and eventually help you prevent burning out again too).

This is very true. Several people who are close to me have mentioned feeling exactly this - that they had some personality defect, when in reality they were neurodivergent.

Unfortunately over the past 8+ years reality itself has demonstrated that it’s far too unbelievable to be a movie script.

Good to see sanity prevailing.

Next question is how the Trump administration will respond. My guess is that they’re not going to do anything about everyone they’ve deported illegally at this point.

It’s just British or Australian English.

The article itself notes that the mothers were not given adequate time and given the complexity of having children who are legally US citizens, it can be readily argued that due process was denied in these cases:

One of the US children removed from the country has “a rare form of metastatic cancer” and was deported without medication or medical consultations, the ACLU said.

Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project said the mothers weren’t given a fair opportunity to decide whether they wanted the children to remain in the United States. Willis said the 4-year-old and the 7-year-old were deported to Honduras within a day of being arrested with their mother.

The cruelty is the point.

If this gets to the courts and they determine that this was done illegally (which as far as I can tell it was), then I expect the Trump administration to refuse to do anything about it, just like they’re doing with Garcia.

Nice to meet you!

They’ve really doubled down on “evil is good and good is evil” (to paraphrase Isaiah 5:20).

The efforts to correct for historical systemic prejudice and provide actual equal opportunity (which is a step towards the meritocracy they claim to want) is painted as being evil, whilst a return to the “equal outcome” (for the rich and white, regardless of skill or effort) is represented as good. They have deliberately gotten the two scenarios backwards in that EO.