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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • This makes me suspect that the LLM has noticed the pattern between fascist tendencies and poor cybersecurity, e.g. right-wing parties undermining encryption, most of the things Musk does, etc.

    Here in Australia, the more conservative of the two larger parties has consistently undermined privacy and cybersecurity by implementing policies such as collection of metadata, mandated government backdoors/ability to break encryption, etc. and they are slowly getting more authoritarian (or it’s becoming more obvious).

    Stands to reason that the LLM, with such a huge dataset at its disposal, might more readily pick up on these correlations than a human does.









  • At the core, my Trello system works like this:

    • I have a template Trello card for a generic week. This has a checklist for each day with the tasks that I don’t do by default (e.g. in my case eating breakfast/lunch/dinner isn’t on it because my sense of hunger and thirst works really well!). It’s typically things like doing my exercises (which I will often forget if I am busy), checking whether the cat litter tray needs cleaning before bed (at the end of the day I am tired and can miss things that should be done, so this serves as a useful reminder) or regular things that don’t happen every day (like watering my indoor plants on Tuesdays and Fridays).
    • I also have a Task Pool card where I note down all the things I need/should/want/would like to do. I’m currently working with an OT to help improve how I prioritise and select what to work on (this is where energy accounting comes in if you use it), but the idea so far (which mostly works) is that on Friday evening (when my wife and I discuss the weekend and the following week), I create the next week’s card from the weekly template and grab any items I need/want to do that week from the Task Pool.

    For more irregular activities, like holidays/trips, I also have a template card. It makes it much easier to prepare for a trip; I have checklists on that template card for:

    • Things I need to do before leaving
    • Things I need to take that aren’t regular packing
    • Normal packing list (e.g. clothes, medication, toiletries, etc.)

    When I know a trip is coming up, I then create a card from the template specific to that trip and start adding things as I think of them. For example, I might be planning to visit family for a birthday or other event, so “birthday present” would go on the non-regular packing list.


  • A slew of organisational tools to help me keep track of things and prevent overwhelm:

    • ClickUp is really good for big projects. I can break them down into smaller pieces, set dependencies and priorities, etc. so that only the next relevant steps are shown and I don’t get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work involved in a large project.
    • Trello I find really handy for day-to-day stuff. I have a weekly template card with a checklist for each day and the regular activities on it. This reduces the amount of bandwidth I need to plan my day or week, as I already have a rough structure in place to build upon.
    • Google Calendar (although really any calendar app should do). Use repeating events and take advantage of the email reminder options. If it’s something important that I need to prepare for, I can set a reminder email a day or two (or even a week) in advance so that it doesn’t sneak up on me.

    Beyond that, I find it very important to keep my space organised, neat and tidy. Too much visual clutter is overwhelming. Making sure everything has its own place and is readily accessible takes a lot of hassle out of anything I have to do, whether it be day-to-day stuff or one-off tasks.





  • Thanks for the detailed reply. You can have ADHD and/or ASD and still be very academically talented (often in ADHD it shows up as rushing to cram for assignments the night before). If your sister has ADHD, then that significantly increases the odds that one (or both) of your parents has it and that you are neurodiverse too. Attention regulation is actually affected in both ADHD and ASD (hyperfocus is found in both), although the triggers/causes are a little different. For ASD, the monotropic attention model seems to be a pretty good explanation of the intense (but narrowly focused) interests we have, as well as (partly) explaining why too many things happening at once more readily overwhelms us.

    Interesting that you mention 5-HTP. To me, that’s a point in favour of an ASD diagnosis, as ASD is effectively a dysfunction of the serotonergic system. The full central nervous system (CNS) serotonin pathway is:

    L-Tryptophan (large amino acid) -> 5-HTP -> 5HT (serotonin) -> N-Acetylserotonin (NAS) -> melatonin

    There is a known issue with CNS serotonin synthesis in autism as well as the conversion of NAS to melatonin (more than half of the people with ASD have a significant breakdown in the process at this step, with much levels of NAS and lower levels of melatonin compared with neurotypicals; this is one of the key factors in why sleep problems are common with ASD). 5-HTP is a good way to supplement that but care must be taken if paired with an SSRI antidepressant (the SSRI acts as an amplifier and you can get serotonin syndrome, which can be fatal).

    Sorry, got sidetracked with a special interest there…

    Your comments about being James Bond sound a lot like masking to me. That’s one of the challenges with being diagnosed as an adult; often by that point the individual has learnt how to mask their ASD behaviours and “act normal”. It can be quite exhausting, though, and eventually leads to autistic burnout. Psychologists generally take high-level masking into account during diagnosis now, which is where childhood behaviour is an important factor.

    Try to be a bit kinder to yourself and do a bit more reading on ADHD and ASD experiences. I strongly recommend having a look at Dr. Neff’s posts and information sheets on her website, Neurodivergent Insights: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/

    And if you want to work on your socialising, please feel free to post specific questions or a scenario you’re struggling with! Social interaction can be quite complex and if you don’t intuitively have the rules (oh how I envy those people) then it can take a while to learn.


  • I don’t think you’re evil, but have you considered researching ADHD? The hyperfocus (e.g. your crush), the getting into trouble with the law, talking all the time, etc. all could be indicators.

    Self-diagnosis is also acceptable and typically accepted by many in the online community. I spent over a decade being fully aware that I was almost certainly on the spectrum before I decided to get an official diagnosis to confirm it (due to certain things that were happening in life). If you want to get a feel for whether you are likely to be on the spectrum, the AQ test is a reasonable (but not foolproof) indicator: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/

    As for your parents not suspecting anything, both ADHD and ASD are strongly related genetically (there’s an estimated 60-80% overlap and it’s now suspected that a person is more likely to have both - AuDHD - than just pure ASD or ADHD) and also highly inheritable (for ADHD it’s about an 80% chance, IIRC). So your family probably don’t see your behaviour as too unusual because they will share many of the same traits/experiences and may even think that your difficulties with social interaction a normal part of growing up because that’s what they went through.