Jul (they/she)

Yep, I didn’t realize I was AuDHD but my friends had assumed I knew. Most of them are some form of neurodivergent.

It was promising for a while, better quality streams, better payments to artists, etc. But they never ended up implementing stuff they promised like better integration with devices or improving their catalog.

It would reduce their short term revenue, but would improve their long-term revenue. Netflix used to have a great product, but they fiddled with it to make people watch only certain content that brings them more revenue. Same with Spotify. This then reduces the number of people willing to pay for the service and since there are few competitors that are better and/or have as much content they “piracy” is the only way to get the content you want for a reasonable price, with a good user experience.

So short term these things improve revenue, but not as much as the revenue lost in the long term as people start to dislike the the poor experience or are unable to afford the higher prices. And people don’t want multiple services to have to check for new content all the time all with different poor Ux.

All valuable data should be backed up off site in “cold storage” type places. It’s not that expensive compared to the production storage.

I have some leftover small plastic cubby shelves you can rearrange that sit next to my laundry. There were enough parts to make 2 cubbies. Works great for me.

I always think in what you labeled as “bad day”. So everything seems harder than it is and takes more spoons. That’s why I need Adderal and coffee every day.

It’s been used as an excuse to lay off people, but not the real reason. They were looking at ways to short term boost stock prices since stock buy backs caused their stock prices to increase, but that boost is fading, they needed another artificial boost to profit to maintain those stock prices.

I was undiagnosed as a kid. Right now I have a formal ADHD diagnosis, but I’m 99% sure there’s also autism in there. It runs in my family and my psyc and therapist definitely agree, just it’s very hard to diagnose as an adult and the few doctors who could always have long wait lists. And maybe that’s for the best in case I need to flee the US (I’m trans) and resident visa processes don’t usually take kindly to disabled people. I take Adderal for my ADHD, and that gives me the spoons to deal with the anxiety much more. So I’m more able to mask in public. And I have a friend group that I don’t gave to mask much with.

Point being, I had the opposite treatment. My parents just threw me to the wolves so to speak. I would get panic attacks being force to go to the store myself, especially if I was doing something I knew was wrong, like my step-grandmother would always try to get me to pick up cigarettes for her when I was a child/preteen. Breaking rules always was difficult for me. Or being locked out of the house and told no dinner and no coming back inside until I learned how to ride the bike they got for me. Meeting new people, driving, etc., same issue.

Anyway, although I see the disadvantages to coddling, I think I would have preferred that extreme to the opposite extreme.

I mean that applies yo a lot large corporations. They’ve mostly stopped innovating and started cutting costs in order to squeeze out some money from the company before it dies. And I’m sure she knows that. It’s likely that she’s there specifically to destroy the remainder of the company. After all, true information is bad for fascism. Gotta keep the people in a constant state of poverty and lack of services, and then blame all of that on some other small, vulnerable group, so their followers will stay distracted and one-issue voters will vote for things that are bad for them as long as were torturing ,murdering, and/or deporting the people they think are the cause of their problems rather than the ones they voted for.

Yep, I used to get panic attacks, and I think the reason I used to hit my head on the wall when I was toddler age was likely related to Autism and ADHD. But it took until my early 40s to figure out that I had ADHD. And likely Autism as well though I didn’t want that on my records if I decide to emigrate or something that is biased against it. And there’s not really treatment available for adults with Autism anyway, but I don’t really care to get rid of Autism. It’s a big part of who I am. Just hard to find friends and jobs that will accommodate your needs or at least be accepting.

When they absorbed their only real competition and instead of using their advantages, just got rid of them, I knew it was the end of good subs and dubs very soon. I don’t want literal translations I’m subs without explanations or AI voiced dubs with poor acting ability or plain monotonous speech like they used to be a few decades ago. I want people to be there translating more than just j individual words.

Yeah I will say the hormones are easier here. I had thought the clinics also helped them coordinate surgery, but I don’t really know well, just going off of something I read and it’s possible that it was just one clinic that happened to offer that service, too.

For hormones here the hardest part is finding a therapist and/or psychiatrist to write the letters and in some places, finding a doctor willing to prescribe and monitor and fill out a support letter and all the paperwork to get prior authorization for the off-label-use dosage since you need more than a cis-woman which is often all that’s covered by default and often isn’t covered at all by default if your birth gender marker is M. When my plan changed this year I had to start getting the prior auth every 6 months because I exceed the max covered dosage by 3x.

I was lucky to have a primary care doctor that was experienced, though she moved on now. And I found a list of therapists willing to write the support (gate-keeping) letters with only a single, virtual appointment, though I had to pay cash and needed 2 of them (one at least PhD level and one at least MA level) for the surgery. For me the hormones only required one and could be MA level, though. I was on waiting lists for both therapists and psychiatrists at the time, so that list saved me. There’s a shortage of mental health providers around here, too.

And the letters technically are supposed to require the mental health providers to know you well, but a lot of providers know that’s just gate-keeping. And, some insurance still requires the even older WPATH recommendations that you get one that does and one that doesn’t know you. My insurance is only one version behind, though, using version 7, but some use 6 or even 5 still.

It’s not much better in the US and there isn’t a unified “gender clinic” to coordinate things. And travel for surgery and recovery is expensive, especially when most insurance doesn’t pay for that and things are so spread out in the US, so most have no option or if near a major city are stuck with the one or two overbooked options close enough to them that they can get a ride to.

I had to travel to another major city to even get on a waiting list for my first surgery since in the major city where I live, the one clinic that has a surgeon was totally unresponsive on how long their waiting list was after taking my doctor’s referral.

And I had to pay around $4,000 for a month at an AirBnB plus flights, food, and necessities we couldn’t fit in the now strict 50lb weight limits on luggage for me and a care person. I couldn’t bring a carry-on since I wouldn’t be able to carry it on the way home and you can’t put the heavier liquids in there anyway like soaps, shampoos, hair products, lotions, etc. And paid several thousand out of pocket to cover deductibles and coinsurance despite having the most expensive health plan my company offers which costs about $400 every other week from each paycheck despite the fact I work for said insurance company. And that was only one surgery.

Next surgery is a 1 year wait for a consult and no clue how many years before surgery and another one is at least a 3 year wait for consult and at least 4 year wait for surgery after the consult. I can’t afford to travel again for those. Had to take out a home equity loan for the first one. And I still have to pay for the mental heath visits for the gatekeeping WPATH letters each time both for the consult and again for the surgery since they each expire after a year. I really wish there was someone to help coordinate it all. For example, if I end up with the waiting lists ending too close to each other I’ll have to go back on the beginning of the list assuming the surgeon is still scheduling new surgeries because you can’t get too many too close to each other and they’re totally separate offices.

And traveling internationally is too dangerous right now with my passport being forced to be my birth gender and my genitals not matching for the x-ray, so unless things improve it is likely I’ll be too old to get most of the surgeries by the time I get through the lists. I’m already starting later in life due to lack of care. Plus I need other small surgeries for some unrelated issues which I can’t find providers for in my insurance network taking new patients and can’t afford to schedule too far out, just in case I get to the top of the gender care surgery wait lists.

Probably just to try to make Garmin’s product less useful in the short term while the case drags out. Or as a way to get Garmin to acquire them. Strava basically seems to have bought up some competitors that were failing and they have been on the way downhill. So at this stage usually these companies start cost cutting and using any means necessary to increase their perceived value for sale. This gives Garmin an incentive to buy them as that would end the lawsuit and they’d then acquire some additional defensive patents.

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Yeah, software patents in the US especially, have become a way for companies to either kill competition, or make buying up ridiculous patents and suing for infringement their primary source of income.

Primary issue is the patent office has few officers that are technical enough to understand the overlap of the specific industry and software. So, they tend to just allow anything, especially from larger companies that they’re told to assume have the expertise if they don’t since their load is too large to have time to learn new stuff and truly research if something is obvious or not.

YouTube did make some changes to their terms primarily for creators that get paid for content. They added some new LLM-based scanning of content to find stuff that is too repetitive or didn’t contain enough original content. Assuming the creators you looked at have mostly original content rather than remixing of content which may be misinterpreted by LLMs as not being “original enough”, they could be falling victim to overaggressive hits if they use a consistent format in their content since LLMs don’t really understand context, only patterns.

I’d be interested to find out if the creators got any notification from YouTube on the reason for removal of the content.

Same. I have had a few types of headache issues most of my life and no one believed the pain was that bad because I don’t express it the way people expect when in severe pain. So, I always thought I had a low tolerance until a doctor freaked out at some severe tibial stress fractures that I was still being asked to run on them. And it took faking a painful yell when the doctor was manipulating it in the first visit to get the bone scan ordered to get to that freak out. I just don’t uncontrollably verbalize severe pain or fully shut down or things like that like neurotypicals.

Fortunately, I’ve also got autism… That’s fortunate, right?

Yeah, I have an X on my ID so even though it’s technically valid for air travel, I brought my passport instead which has my AGAB and wore really loose fitting clothes. Fortunately I didn’t have to go through the x-ray that would give away that my body parts don’t match my passport.

I wiped all of my devices in case I was detained, not that I have anything to hide, but I don’t want to out any of my friends as trans for them to get targeted.

And I’ve been staying away from public bathrooms despite having a hard time holding my bladder due to some medical issues retaining salt and water. Considering getting a catheter or something for when I’m in public for more than a few hours because dehydrating myself all the time isn’t good for my health.

It’s really scary right now even living in a fairly progressive leaning state. I won’t even think about traveling to my hometown to visit family where it’s more conservative. I’m really hoping on the flight back I’m able to slip through security again. It’s going to be a lot of paperwork to get my birth certificate changed to what isn’t actually my gender since that’s not an option, but more closely matches my body parts.

It’s sad that just existing means you are classified as a terrorist and have to avoid interacting with society to survive.

Stay away from the US if you can if you are trans, intersex, non-binary, or even cis if you just have some facial traits that make you look a little less like your AGAB. It’s only getting worse every day.