Shienvien

The Prophecy

Tyah... I have used the word 'pedantic' to describe myself on occasion, especially in relation to language - things like insisting upon always using proper punctuation and capitalization in instant messengers, proofreading my posts and messages and correcting them after the fact, as well as being very particular about the meanings of words, and pretty much refusing to use them in ways which I perceive as wrong. I don't correct people as much, though, unless it's very obvious repeat mistake, or some kind of mistake that rubs me in the wrong way more than usual. (SSD drive? Solid state drive drive? - Even worse in Estonian, where people will occasionally say "SSD disk ... and SSDs don't have disks in them, as you might know. Virtual intelligence? *shudder* That latter actually will make me physically cringe. That might actually be my most intensely disliked misuse of term of them all, to the point that I would probably still get a reflexive tick from seeing it used correctly (as in virtualized intelligence), just from having it seen used completely inaccurately in all instances I've encountered it thus far. Also wrong capitalization, especially of species. Don't capitalize species, at least not when writing English.)
I'll also hand-align and clean up all code I come across... Though let's be fair, romping through badly structured code, especially if ambiguously named variables are also involved, can be a nightmare (I think it was in Clean Code, among others, where it was brought out how much time the average programmer spends just scrolling back and forth).
...But I'm probably pretty much like you when it comes to actual living space, including that note-scribbles thing. (I used to keep clothes on bed/chair mostly exactly because of keeping things in order ... with the exception of articles of clothing that hang from hangers, only things that come from the washing machine - or drying, rather - get put in the wardrobe.)
I recall people guessing that I keep things meticulously clear and in order, just from how I write. *took one look at three different mugs, a small pile of pieces of paper with notes/scribbles on them, a half-finished drawing with all that comes with the process, a laptop, a PC with two screens, about two-thirds of yet another computer, approximately a couple dozen meters of various cables, a row of tea containers, edible things, and different bottles, and other varia on my desk* Objectively wrong statement.
Eh, I still call it mostly ordered, even if it looks like random clutter. Things on desks are there because I use them there (it's not like there is ever any trash or stains on anything; I have stopped writing a post to clean my keyboard before). No point in spending extra time on combating entropy if I know I'd have to get up and bring those things back in about an hour, when I'll need them again...

As a sidenote, taking a plane in fifteen minutes.

(You can take a gun's telescope sight on board a plane, in hand luggage. You cannot take a slingshot.)

The Prophecy

Yep, Cave Johnson it was. (What exactly does constitute for "Too much Portal?" ...Cue flashback to Journalist reciting the entirety of GLaDOS' ending monologue from Portal 1 - I think it was actually before Portal 2 came out.)
...If only fixing all the mistakes of throwing science at walls was as simple and doable as using a scalpel.

But yeah, I spent last Friday and Monday installing deep-learning neural-network things that run on GPUs on three different cluster-computer nodes. These will be predominantly be used by language technologists, so maybe, someday, these will unite their computational prowess and write a really bad novel or something.
(GPUs are essentially just massively parallel variants of CPUs, so you can have them do calculations not too unlike you would with a regular CPU, with the bonus of said massive parallelism.)

On another note, there are a lot of parallels between the "undesirable" and "desirable" traits in humans. Read an article (one I've misplaced, admittedly) on it a while back. Being autistic is bad. But at the same time, we praise the kind of focus and dedication a fair number of those people manifest. Being uncaring in the face of human suffering and a kind of recklessness - your typical sociopathic traits - are bad. But at the same time, those are often the exact qualities needed for saving people. In the end, genius can be hard to tell from insanity, and the same kind of fearlessness and cold blood that is often seen in serial criminals is also what is needed to knowingly run into a burning building and not seize up and/or panic when trying to manage multiple injured, screaming people. (You might recall me mentioning that I get too emotionally invested to ever want to be a doctor of the kind where failure actually can cost someone a life. Never mind the "but I don't want to cut holes into people"-part. But sure, I'll intervene a knifefight barehanded all right...)
(Also, apparently there is just one enzyme that affects both memory and fearlessness, at least in mice... Old news, but something I just remembered, with what we've been talking about, and some inadvertent comparisons I made back in the day...)

Huh, and being pedantic, of all things, is also something you diagnose now? Well, my laptop's now a hat. I'm out.

The Prophecy

In regards to autistic people and looking at you - I've had several people on the autism spectrum admit that direct eye contact makes them very, very uncomfortable, and that they have been told/taught to force themselves to look others in the face against their natural instincts. So it might not be a forgetting thing as much as it is a "this makes me uncomfortable, so I subconsciously try to avoid it whenever possible" thing. Probably even more so with a person like I who does habitually watch people to pick up their reactions, and is fairly dominant atop of that...
I also reckon how (well) your senses work tends to also play into how you read people. I've noted before that I have very acute hearing (to the point where I can easily tell whether your regular 220V wire is live or not by hearing alone, and so forth) - which is mostly a good thing, but can be a bit annoying when I have to be in an environment with a consistent background of loud noise (the continuity-part is actually fairly important - thunderstorms are fine, someone just talking very loudly for a while might not be). My vision, though ... well, I have very high hue/light/contrast sensitivity (as has been discussed multiple times before), but I'm naturally also fairly shortsighted (as I have also mentioned before). Now, this is the kind of shortsightedness that is fairly easy to negate with lenses. Essentially, it means I can pretty much choose whether I have nigh perfect sight, or am shortsighted (and can read microscopic letters up close). Incidentally, it also makes the difference between being able to, and not being able to properly discern micro-expressions. And oh does it make a difference...
For the matter, it is fairly easy to consciously mask larger expressions, but not micro-expressions. You probably know what I mean ... the "mouth was smiling, eyes were not" sort of things. (Micromimics are also what makes facial expressions so annoying to draw ... you have face half the size of your screen, you alter ten pixels out of the literally eight hundred thousand the image consists of, and suddenly your brain decides that the person has a completely different mood.) Yeah. There are are a fair number of expressions people have only in very specific scenarios, to think of. I think I've mentioned how there is this one particular kind of smile which is at once polite, but also hostile. Think of the kind of smile many service people often have. My friend from high school has a very distinct dedicated "this is BS" expression; he generally obtained it whenever a presenter said something completely out of left field... Things like that.
((Since only sociopaths have a tendency towards indifference towards others' feelings, I'd say any sociopath would rank far higher on that particular probability scale than any only autistic person... Both of these traits maybe more so than only sociopath, though.))

As for the other topic ... no, by no means endemic to Denmark. The US might be the worst offender, but you see it here, too, and pretty much anywhere. Suffice to say, even leaving aside that the effects of those drugs tend to be highly noticeable (and hence very alarming to me), and the fact that I've heard a lot of rants from the psychiatrists I know (at least two of whom almost exclusively deal with the shortcomings of others in their profession) ... I no longer can count the people who have suffered permanent severe brain damage or died to professionally prescribed medical psychoactive drugs. This way, I've lost more people under 70 than I have lost for every other reason combined.
Following applies to mostly depression, anxiety and such. (Nor autism-spectrum, as while some people's reaction to it isn't exactly healthy, nor are some of the approaches to trying to "normalise" them, it luckily doesn't get treated by heavy drugs given modern medicine's standards.) ADD/ADHD, not so much, either, as much as I only know one person who took something for it - to rather nasty effects on his ability to function, granted. The friend of mine above was actually also diagnosed with that, but never took anything for it. Brilliant person, maybe even more proficient programmer than I am, if one with a bit different specialization. Gets bored somewhat easily, but generally for the lack of anything to do, not inability to focus... He told me how he managed to end up getting transferred to higher gride one time, just by doing everything but study and, when confronted about it, in full honesty, responding that he knows it all already. Said teacher then proceeded to tell him to give the lesson himself. And, well, he actually did get up and gave the lesson himself... The teacher was not happy. (He was also over a year younger than the next-youngest student in high school, as the direct result of going to school early and then skipping a grade on top of that.) ...I think most of that used to be called "being children," really - basically, if a person "grows out" of ADD/ADHD by the time they become an adult, they most likely never had it.
But I derailed. ...Prescribing things is easy, figuring out why is difficult. So most of the time, they just play medical Russian roulette until they (maybe) find something that kinda-sorta works, and then consider their jobs done. Cut to five years later, a neurologist is having a hard time figuring out why their patient has been becoming increasingly paralyzed, and finally pinpoints it to something she has been taking for depression for all these years (that is a specific example I know here, and by far not the worst I have seen second-hand).
So yeah. Medical industry, especially the mental health part of it, is too overburdened to spare everyone the attention they need. The research that goes into the drugs is pathetic to say the least, and for some we don't even know what they actually do, other than that they sort of seem to work for some people, on short term, for some reason. To my knowledge, they pretty much don't even test for things like chemical imbalances (don't have the means to, either, often enough) - it's fairly blind shooting, educated guesses at best.
For some people, there really is some chemical imbalance caused by their brains somehow ending up missing some gland to produce something, or oppositely making too much of something, or not having enough of some receptors, for absolutely no reason other than some manner of damage or a genetic fluke. (As opposed to not having enough of some chemicals simply because you decided cooking was too much effort and tried to sustain yourself on ramen noodles for two months. In which case, something-something about being what you eat.) For those specific people, a drug will most likely be the only correct solution. Kind of like insulin is for diabetics. But to get that right, we'd need better means for figuring out what is going on. And the exact right thing, not a kinda-sorta-works-we-don't-know-why thing. And in the right amount, and... And ... well, we have none of that, currently. Long way off, still.
Often enough, there is no chemical imbalance, only things people were never supposed to put up with on a daily basis to begin with. Like people who stay in severely abusive relationships and are treated for depression to cope with it rather than prioritize getting out of the harmful situation like they should (which is actually fairly common, from what I can tell). Or who have been putting up with inhumane working conditions for years on end, and finally worn thin, yet continue working under the same conditions because necessity or lack of acknowledgement towards how bad things are. So ... basically, like you said, ignoring the actual problem. (It's not broken if we duct tape it together, right?)

Err... Yeah. Grim themes indeed.

...

Did you know that you can use a regular graphics card for deep learning neural network processing?

The Prophecy

There were over half a dozen fish in the bucket, and I think this one was the only eelpout among those. So either it was the one he managed to get a hold of first at the time being, or he specifically chose it. Either way, still leaves the question of why on Earth did he think slapping me with it was a good idea...

Asperger's/high-functioning autism is one of the things which tends to make it harder to read people, yes. I know quite a few, both face-to-face and over the net, and I haven't really found them any harder to read - if anything, my impression is that they, quite oppositely, tend to be a bit more openly readable, and definitely more straightforward? (So there's less trying to figure out whether they're just attempting to be polite against their true feelings or actually having some manner of less-than-benevolent agenda for lying.) They tend to feel recognizably different to me, but not more difficult to sense properly.
Incidentally, I seem to be pretty decent at picking it up in people even based solely on how they write text - from how they process things and respond. I haven't really outright asked anyone, but surely enough, close to every person I've suspected to fall on the autism spectrum has thus far later mentioned somewhere along the way that they really do belong on it (with the only people I did not receive confirmation from never really touching the topic ... which is to say, I actually haven't gotten any false positives that I know of thus far).
Ehh... To be fair I consider Asperger's/high-functioning autism more of a ... character type? perhaps? than an actual disorder. Slightly different, sure, but not ... well, what the term "disorder" generally seems to imply to most people. (I often get the feeling that nowadays every little deviation, quirk, and whatnot warrants a diagnosis, and once someone has that, the thus-far harmless character traits become somehow stigmatized, and people suddenly start looking at the person differently based on solely that, as if there is now something fundamentally wrong with that person in spite of nothing changing in them, and then there will be at least someone who will start trying to "fix" (or at least insisting on "fixing") the person at all costs, and... Yeah. It never seems to stop at just, "Ah, well, this makes sense now; will try to keep in mind.") Most of the autism-spectrum people I know are fairly well-versed, caring people, after all.
I'd say you can clearly see the opposite in fair number of them - that being fairly bad at reading emotions doesn't mean a person does not care about others' feelings or isn't affected by them. Most autistic people I know substitute being intuitively pick up emotions in others with doing exactly that "just learn the patterns and try to actively interpret them" thing ... might work, might not even be in the same general region, but you certainly can't claim that they're indifferent, or won't be worried if they think something is wrong. I wouldn't say "oblivious" is exactly the right word ... it's more caring a fair deal and being very attentive, but at the same time just not necessarily being the most accurate in their assessments. ("No. Not angry. Just tired.") Then again, being on the autism spectrum is never the only thing to define a person by - just as there are autistic people who literally cannot bear to as much as look at a person crying without breaking down themselves, there probably exist some who are both sociopaths and autistic. (I have personally met examples of the first, but none of the latter.)
The far end of autism is a bit different where being able to go about in life is concerned - I know a woman who has an adopted child with the very severe variant of autism (she was adopted as an infant - said child is now in late teens). That will make a person less fit for making their own way in life, but it's also quite far removed from the Asperger's classification. (That can be said about most things ... what is fine in small amounts often isn't so in the fringe cases.)

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The Prophecy

Regrettably, I don't even know myself why the person thought it a good idea to slap me with an eelpout, so I'm afraid it'll forever remain a mystery.

The comment about sociopathy was mostly in response to a fragment of post a few back that seemed to imply that sociopaths specifically have to learn to read emotions, as opposed to being innately able to. There are a fair number of conditions that might make reading emotions more difficult to almost impossible (most without making it any more likely for someone to be a bad person - as I have noted before, sociopathy doesn't necessary mean one is more likely to be so, either, there are just fewer self-originating repercussions from the acts), but sociopathy is not one of them.

The Prophecy

I've actually been slapped with a fish ... or been on the receiving end of some variation of being hit in face with the tail end of one, anyway. It was an eelpout. A living one, I may add. Thusly, I consider it most fair that any further people shall also be slapped with eelpouts.
(I reckon flounders might be a bit more difficult to hold onto for a decent swing? Ehh...)

On another note, being a sociopath by no means means ("means means" ... silly English) reduced capacity for accurately reading people. Quite oppositely, a number of the more notorious ones are well-known for being extremely charismatic and always knowing what anyone feels or thinks. It's more than just they don't get the emotional responses a normal person, let alone a strongly empathic individual would get. Kind of how statistical face recognition systems are beginning to get fairly decent at mapping words referring to emotions to expressions without having any capacity to either feel or be moved by those emotions themselves.

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From Downfall ReRisen

The Lone Survivor

It appeared both of them had been raised with distinct "ideas," furthermore ones which seemed to include not questioning the order of things. Some things, it appeared, were the same in both places, despite the fact that his faction was fully militarized and hers ... not so much.
The main difference was the likelyhood of you receiving a bullet for opening your mouth at the wrong place and time. Probably, anyway. She would most likely have noticed if people were disappearing, especially with how small her faction apparently was. He had been moved around aplenty, from base to base, being given no true chance to form lasting bonds with the people he met, and he had figured it out. Not that he would ever be able to prove anything. People fell in battles all the time, and what you did not see not happening, you could not claim really did not happen... Especially if they just stuck to something that was a bit of both. Deliberately pick suspicious individuals for suicide missions - something they could either go along with or be trialed for treason if they refused. He suspected they did that kind of machinations, too.
In the and, did it really matter? He will have the chance to get acquainted with the life in Eighfour sooner or later, if things went as planned, and by the sound of it, it was not so much some unforgivable societal faux pas he had to be worried about, but his old faction, the Trenians, or who-knows-who rolling in and Eighfour exploding itself as the only form of retaliation they knew. Set everything flammable within twenty-five kilometers ablaze, she said...
None of this was helping. Not having his mind to get stuck on some singular track, anyway. It was as he had said - they would have to think. Check the place out. Check the people out. See who their neighbors were. Find out whether there ways to mask their presence or make them seem capable of hitting back, or whether there was a way to convince people to leave. (Who did he think he was? Some random guy who showed up and decided that being from a much bigger, more formidable faction gave him the right to order people around?) Active retaliation was pretty much out of question, as it seemed he would be the only soldier they had... Yeah. Standing here and making vague guesses about something he did not know what to expect from was getting him nowhere. To hell with it. Do not think of the elephant in the room. It would not fit out of the door, anyway, so there was nothing to be done about it there and then.
His new acquaintance was apparently fairly enthusiastic ofer what he had dubbed "hell-lasers". Awe-inspiring, certainly, but ultimately, his own enthusiasm had been greatly dampened by them being on the other side. Most things tended to lose their charm when they actively sought to get shot at you. Truly shoot at you at the first opportunity, with an intent to kill, rather than just aim at you. Out of the two of them, he was probably much more used to being aimed at. Security checks, he had long mostly gotten accustomed to. Knowing that first serious mistake would be the end ... not so much. There probably was no getting fully comfortable with that bit, just having enough self-control to be able to not do dumb mistakes or stay in hiding.
Letting her examine a "hell-laser" was probably not within his abilities, in any case...
Her reaction to him mentioning machine-humans did not go unnoticed - nor did the fact that her right eye was probably glass or something, indicated by the fact that she did not seem to even notice she was touching her eyeball. Most people had instinctive aversion to being poked in the eye, and would blink their eyes shut and flinch away just from seeing something get that close.
Either she had had contact with something like that, and they were at fault for her apparent ... injury? was that it? ... or there was something else she had not told him. It seemed unlikely the woman had had contact with the same people from upper plate he had been referring to... They had lost, and from what he knew, were no more. He guessed the woman was at least a handful of years older than he - which would have made encounters at least possible, if she had wandered up there ... seemed unlikely, though. She had given no indication of being contact with other entities, even when he had outright asked. His old suspicion reared itself - the thought that she was somehow one of them, like those people. Something to be figured out sooner rather than later.
At the very least, there was some food to be had, even if, for the time being, he would have to stick with looking like a half-drowned Anderekian. Ironically, the nature of the food she described meant that he would soon be both soaked and thirsty, unless she also carried something to drink (which, to be fair, was not at all unlikely). A part of him wondered how far would the woman's hospitality extend, but what he said was also quite accurate ... he really had not eaten since before the skirmish, and it was beginning to affect his ability to think on things other than the fact that he had not eaten for a while.
"Yeah. That will do. I suppose in half a day I'd be ready to test the edibility to those trees... I suspect the result would be in the realm of 'not very'."
He also could not help but notice she had not moved. Did she still expect him to reconsider and shoot her? For whatever she had in that cart of hers?
"Eh, and look, unless you try to shoot me in the back of my head, I'm not going to shoot at you, either. I need a permanent place to be, you want to try and save Eighfour, yes? Might be more effective if we don't also constantly feel the need to watch one another's hands while we're trying to sort those things out, yes?"
Would probably still need to relocate before they set up a picnic...
"Do you know a place we can go? Unless you'd rather head back see what your people think of my likes..." He sighed. "I haven't exactly earned much favor with opting out once it was clear everything was gone. Looks like it's not limited to humans. Do I have to formally sacrifice a herdbeast to rid myself of the status as the marked one? And how come I can't even see them?"