thrackys-infodump

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Nobody I know personally actually follows me here but I'm considering posting this on really the only social media platform I actually use. In that context, I've been pretty conflicted on whether to post it there or not but since it's Men's health month, I figure it's as good a time as any to share some things and it feels good to write about it and put it out into the ether.

I've been MIA for a while on basically any comms platform mostly because I've been going through several rather shitty things all at once in my personal life and still continue to do so. One of the biggest challenges through all this has been dealing with a deep, lifelong feeling of self-loathing that has made it nearly impossible to believe that anyone would ever want to talk to me let alone be friends with me. As a result when I am so overwhelmed with problems that it's all I'd want to talk about, I simply don't reach out to people to initiate conversations. When people initiate conversations with me I strictly stick to whatever the conversation is supposed to be about and try to give the appearance that everything is fine because I don't want to be a burden.

As a part of starting to deal with the self-hatred, I've reached the point where I realize that shutting everyone out has been the worst possible thing I could do for my own well being. I feel a lot of shame for basically ghosting everyone in my life but thanks to a lot of therapy and Devon Price's new book "Unlearning Shame" (which I am still working my way through) I realize that I need to be much more forgiving with myself and accept that my view of myself is rather distorted. I now realize that sharing tough things with people builds bonds, and that I can do it in a consensual way without just trauma dumping on someone who isn't in a position to handle it at that moment.

I have never been terribly close to my family and I genuinely don't have much family left, but I've avoided talking to them more than a couple messages per year for far too long, especially my only sister and my nephew, who is now a teenager and who I have not seen in several years. My sister and I have always gotten along very well, and our conversations when we do see each other always feel like we just pick up right where we left off last time. I plan on remedying the disconnect soon with a visit to see them and have already reconnected with my sister, even if it has been as a result of something negative.

I've never had a lot of friends either, but I've completely retreated away from the few people I would definitely call friends. I've been stuck in my own head, playing out hypothetical scenarios of everyone ignoring me and abandoning me for being "too much". I've taken away everyone else's ability to participate in relationships with me and made the decision to not talk to me on their behalf. It's not going to be easy for me to ignore the part of me that hates myself. But I'm hoping over the next weeks and months to reconnect with the people that have never given me any actual reason to doubt their friendship, and I have a nervous excitement about feeling like I have some friends again. I am especially nervous about sharing more about the things I've been going through with them, but I now know that is a nervousness entirely concocted in my brain and not based in objective reality.

Thank you for reading.

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Then the ADHD part of me kicks in like “there is no yesterday there is no tomorrow there is only right now and holy shit look at all these spoons. LET’S USE THEM ALL BEFORE NOON” 🙃

But still, this is good advice and something for me to try and keep in mind.

Me: *to my therapist* I had the spoons, so I did heaps of stuff and now I'm so exhausted I feel sick.

My Therapist: This is where you got to treat spoons like cash. Just because you have them, you need to figure out if you have enough to spend, or else you're going to be in debt. Remember, you're autistic, so you regain those spoons slowly and use them quickly. Everything, good and bad, uses that cash for you. You may enjoy the activity but it's going to exhaust you just as much as a bad activity if you're not careful.

Me: Goddamnit....

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potentially triggering but ultimately harm reductionist statement about how people treat those with suicide ideation below, just a warning!

it's pretty fuckin rich that people tell suicidal people that they're "being selfish" by wanting to die, because it could not be more selfish to expect someone to just continue suffering through a life they do not want simply because their death would make them sad.

the people who say that kind of thing never want to offer any genuine help to the suicidal person that will change their life circumstances in a lasting way. they never want to house them, get them medical care, pay off their debts, introduce them to new friends, nurse them through a years-long trauma recovery process, get them a pet, drive them to a support group every week, buy them their groceries, clean their house, listen to them talk about their tough feelings for the millionth time.

lasting healing within a dramatically different and better life is never what they want for the suicidal person. they just want the person to not do anything that would make them sad. and not look too sad when they are around them, either, because even if they do white-knuckle their way through a painful existence, they are expected to also make it look easy.

but it's funny, isn't it, that by pushing away all thoughts of sadness, all thoughts of suicide, the person who says such a dismissive thing to the suicidal person is revealing how much they are on the brink of despair themselves. if, when faced with a suicidal person, your number one goal is to prevent their suicide for the sake of your own emotions rather than to improve circumstances for the suicidal person themselves, well, your own emotional grip on reality must be quite tenuous indeed. if you think the most important emotionally reality about a suicide is how it impacts you and not the person that has done it, well, you really must think that it's normal to expect other people to just constantly silently suffer for one another.

there's almost a bit of sick envy that i sometimes hear when people claim that they suicidal are "selfish." the statement almost seems to betray that everybody thinks of suicide at one point or another, that everyone has been in enough pain before that they've wished for it to end, but that since they have endured, they expect everyone else to endure the same for them, so that they don't slip into despair again as well.

it's so offensive because it is such a deeply missed opportunity. instead of batting away the statements of a suicidal person as if they were the greatest, most evil taboo, a person could really sit with them in their despair and say hey, I have felt that way too.

If only we lived in a world where acknowledgement of suicide ideation was not so taboo. Even psychologists and psychiatrists treat it as this untouchable thing, they freak out and jump into action and rob you of your body autonomy if you are willing to voice that you have thought of it. but virtually everyone has thought of it at one point or another, and some live with thoughts of it all the time forever but still have basically decent lives that they experience as worthwhile.

the legal apparatus that exists to prevent suicides at all costs have made it too risky for any kind of healthcare professional to allow the frank acknowledgement of suicide ideation to happen. hell, even the protections that have evolved online to supposedly "protect" suicidal people by filtering out content about suicide and redirecting those browsing for information about it to suicide prevention resourcse has, counterproductively, served to make the state of suicidality even more unspeakable. it cannot be spoken about, cannot be posted about, cannot be acknowledged, is not permitted, is never allowed to just be.

and that harms suicidal people so much.

we are so deeply selfish and cowardly in how we approach suicide and suicidal people.

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Knowledge is empowering

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Why bother arguing in support of trans people if you’re not trans?

very simple concept called believing in human rights

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Part way through this essay I hit a paragraph that reminded me, yet again, how much I appreciate Devon Price’s deep insight into his own experiences. I so often hit a description of some feeling or experience that is so shockingly relatable because it’s a perfect articulation of something I knew was going on with myself but couldn’t find the words to describe.

I have almost no energy to move or to think. My eyes hurt. My head hurts. I’m constantly on the verge of puking. The room is spinning. Normally bouncing off the walls with the desire to exercise, try new things, and socialize, all I want to do is sit silently in the dark. I am incapacitated, in an inescapable way, by the demands of full-time work. I had forgotten for a while that I am so profoundly disabled, because I have been able to build a life around my natural rhythms and my inarguable sensitivities. But for just one week, I’ve been thrust back into approximating something of a “normal” working life, and I can’t handle it. Not even remotely. If I were to live by this schedule all of the time, if necessity forced me to work an actual full-time job with real, in-person, full-time hours, I would have zero energy for meal preparation, physical fitness, social outings, on-the-ground activism, or any of the random adventures that make life so worthwhile. In my schedule I’d scarcely find the time for doctor’s visits, tooth cleanings, trips to the DMV, birthday parties, conferences, runs to the post office, or any of the other small journeys that make it possible for supposedly “independent” adult life to run. My health, my relationships, my community, and my grounding in reality would dramatically collapse.

Working full-time is a sickness. And not just for especially sensitive people like me. The friends I know with full-time jobs are tired nearly all the time, and have had to give up on so many of their passions and fulfilling pursuits. Over the years some full-time workers I know have become a bit dull-eyed and distant, no passion in their voice, a ghost of their younger selves. They assume it is because they are growing “old,” but I’m older than many of them, and many people older than me are similarly able to bounce off the walls. We have energy if we get enough sleep, if we eat robustly and eagerly, and if life is filled with shared wanderings that we can look forward to. We need repetition, and comfort, and rest, but also ample space to dream, and the power to bring some of those dreams into reality. So many people under capitalism lack all of those things. Their jobs are a chronic illness they must cradle, manage, and make endless sacrifices for every single day. There is so much they can’t do. They don’t go on dates with their spouses because they’re falling asleep at 8pm. They’re behind on doctor’s appointments and haven’t visited their siblings for years. They’re too weak and weary to travel, to volunteer, to meet anybody new. All they have it in them to do at the end of the day is collapse in front of something familiar on the TV. And it is so normal that nobody even considers it a sickness.

The full essay is free to read or have narrated to you at drdevonprice.substack.com.

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Politico article https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/21/biden-hostage-israel-hamas-war-00128351

Tweet source

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I think part of the issue is conflating cognitive and emotional empathy, and I’ll admit up until somewhat recently I didn’t really understand the difference myself, but here is my current understanding, which might still be wrong!

Autism tends to affect cognitive empathy, basically impairing our ability to understand why someone feels a certain way. However, once we actually understand the reasons behind someone’s feelings we can typically feel those same feelings *deeply*, a product of emotional empathy. When alexithymia gets thrown in the mix (which I have) that reduces our emotional empathy as well, but alexithymia is not specific to autism and is (apparently) treatable.

I get the sense that when people talk about hyper empathy in the context of autism, it’s about the intensity of their emotional empathy not necessarily how often they actually understand why someone feels a certain way, which then “activates” the emotional empathy.

Another thing I found really interesting in the tons of info given to me as part of my diagnosis is the difference between cognitive/emotional empathy and “empathetic accuracy”, which tends to be high with Autistic people and matches with my experience of being rather good at “reading people”, at least when it comes to negative things. Y’know, being the person that others frequently go to for a 3rd party vibe check. But that is not the same as understanding why a person feels a certain way or actually feeling something similar.

Obviously we’re all very different but I think there’s also a lot of miscommunication and misunderstandings that make it hard to know when people are talking about two sides of the same coin.

kinda irked by a post i saw the other day that made some good points about autism and hyperempathy but like,,,,implied that all autistic people have hyperempathy and that low empathy isn’t an actual autism symptom? which really rubbed me the wrong way as a low-empathy autistic

like yeah it’s important people are aware that autistic people can often be hyperempathetic but also uhh,,,,that shouldn’t be used to act like low empathy autistics aren’t. real? like…we can both exist. we Do both exist

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Friendly reminder to install your windows updates today.

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One of my favourite diversions during a lengthy reverse engineering type task is trying to reason why a particular cursed thing was designed that way. Once in a while it leads to some fun and/or extra cursed surprises.

FOONE WHY HAVEN'T YOU HACKED THE COMPRESSION ON WHEEL OF FORTUNE FOR THE WII (2010)?

AND WHILE I'M YELLING AT YOU:

PROFESSOR LAYTON AND THE CURIOUS VILLAGE

FIRE EMBLEM

CLASH AT DEMONHEAD

ALL THESE SHOULD BE IN THE GENERATOR ALREADY! WHY AREN'T THEY?

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Alright this is gonna be long and include a rough history lesson. It is not meant as an excuse or justification for ignoring accessibility in the context of MFA but mostly just to try and explain how challenging this whole problem is from a cybersecurity perspective.

So I’m a cybersecurity researcher (and Autistic w/ADHD) and will be the first to tell you that absolutely nobody has a good solution to “the authentication problem” thanks in part to the decades long game of cat and mouse between defenders and attackers, as well as the capitalist incentives that drive the tech world.

Before I dive in, think about how you would want to protect access to your bank account or email so only you or people you allow could access it? How might someone get past that without your permission? What happens if there’s an exceptional circumstance?

So when we talk authentication these are the sorts of things to consider. At the core what we’re really asking is: How do you get someone to prove they are the rightful account holder or should be permitted access under “normal” circumstances? Same question for exceptional circumstances. Let’s look at how that’s evolved (roughly, I’m not a historian 😅)

First we had passwords, but then they were too easy to guess and trivial for an attacker to gain access so we added requirements like length and later complexity. This of course created all sorts of challenges with passwords being forgotten more frequently, and naturally people use the same password everywhere they can. Occasionally this would bite someone in the ass if they were individually targeted but password reuse wasn’t that big of a deal.

Then came the data breaches.

In the earlier days a data breach might have meant just your account on that service was compromised, but pretty quickly we began accumulating accounts all over the place, using the same login identifier (email address for example) and password everywhere. At that point it didn’t take long to realize that storing all the account passwords in plain text is a bad idea so the industry (eventually) moved to using a complex mathematical transformation on the passwords that only works one direction. You can check if a password matches by putting the password attempt through the transformation but you can’t recover the password from the transformed value. Ok great. Problem solved!

Except the attackers came up with methods to quickly test a large number of guesses, on the condition they were able to steal the password database in the first place. The response was to use more complicated transformations that took longer for the computer to test, but the limitation became apparent quite quickly: if a password is “common” in its composition, the chances of it being cracked quickly are still rather high regardless of the method used to secure it. So, scores of people who used the same login and password continued to have multiple accounts hacked due to a breach at one unrelated company.

So fast forward a bit and we get two factor authentication: something you know (password), and something you have. So even if someone knows your password, if they don’t have “the thing”, they can’t get in.

High security businesses like banks had 2 factor authentication for quite a while. You had a little physical keychain that displayed a number that changed every 60 seconds. But of course things happen. Keychains get lost and damaged and people still need to work, so the IT department has processes to deal with that. The scale is not so big it’s unmanageable.

The problems begin when your ratio of users to support staff starts to get waaaaaay out of control like when you force every customer to use it. Many tech companies simply can’t be in business without this huge customer to staff ratio. That’s the business model, and the problems surrounding it are especially prevalent in the context of content moderation as well. And really It means that the ability to handle exceptional circumstances is extremely poor and this extends to the ability or even desire to provide different solutions for people that may require them.

On top of that, the tech world sees the authentication problem as yet another way to make money. There are numerous big players that all claim to have the perfect solution, but at the moment they’re all basically variations on the same themes and far from being any sort of simple, universally accessible standard. And they all cost a pretty penny to implement their service, usually on a cost per user per month basis. The only way for something to become “standard” in this sort of highly competitive, sales-first environment is that we wind up with a monopoly and the standard is forced upon us whether it is any good or not. Basically, if you can’t make money from it, it likely won’t get any traction. There are cooperative “working groups” to develop tech standards but it’s generally more about creating standards for organizations to use in their products than creating functional solutions to big problems.

So at the moment there is genuinely no good solution beyond MFA because the problem exists well outside the sphere of “a company securing its login system”. The problem is that we use the same “things” to authenticate to many different places, AND THIS INCLUDES OUR DEVICES. If someone has your password and full access to your phone, they have access to every service where you use that password and the phone for MFA. So MFA exists to try and solve (mostly, but not exclusively) password reuse, but only because it’s considered more difficult for an attacker to obtain than a password due to the physical constraints.

We simply don’t have a better way of authenticating someone than a login and password without relying on a specific tech company and MFA is basically putting a bandaid on the fact that passwords can be leaked, shared, reused, etc. A proper solution would need to be technically sound and universally accessible and frankly I don’t think the tech world is capable of this while they’re busy chasing their next round of VC funding or trying to make money off some stupid ape JPGs.

resharing this oldie because i just got a new laptop and the number of times i am being required to login to things, login to a DIFFERENT app/program/password manager/authenticator, provide a number, and then login again is making me fucking INSANE