I have a background as a technical specialist and consultant, but not in software. Is the best way to transition through a re-education? Or are there other steps to try out the industry before committing years of school?

Also, how is the career prospects within the current mass IT layoffs?

So happy for you! The world is better off for your empathy and care <3

Thank you for letting me help, and hope you both have a better life from your encounter!

I’ve also done the 'sup head jerk with cats around the neighborhood, they start in surprise the first few times, then do it back.

It’s apparently an acknowledgement/greeting between cats.

And yes, heed the advice to “ignore” cats until they approach. Sit calmly, do your thing, let eachother know you’re there, and then wait. Often doesn’t take more than 15 minutes.

Getting a cat to come to you is easy, you give it food and pets, and then stay calm when it’s eating/enjoying.

Repeat until you’ve built trust, a sick or hurt cat will typically take longer to trust. Count on several days of repeating this without hitches (no sudden loud noise while you’re doing it, etc).

Sometimes cats are desperate and everything turns up in a magical, calm way without bloodshed. But more commonly the next part is trickier, the cat will resist you picking it up (especially if hurt) or shutting it in.

Trick here is to be decisive and clear in your body language. Prepare a cat carry box with hard sides, feel free to prepare it with some textile smelling of you, be mindful that it will almost certainly be pissed on. Also bring a towel.

You will have to, in a calm manner, put the folded towel over the cat, and with it lift the cat into the carry. The towel is to trap legs so you won’t be scratched, and if you manage to have it snugly around the cat, there’s also a way to calm cats by gently pressing them down.

If you are unsure, slow, nervous, or hesitate in your movement, the cat will bolt. If you’re too fast, loud, or big in movements, it will as well. Relax and do it in a deliberate motion.

If you release the cat from the carry, it will take considerable time to rebuild trust. Consider either going with it to the vet at once, or let it out in a quiet spare room with food, water, and litter box, and giving it a day or three to get accustomed to the room before letting it explore the rest of the place.

Don’t get scratched by the cat, they can have some pretty nasty stuff on the paws, and some transmittable pathogens if anything draws blood or gets in your face/eyes.

Good luck!

I’ve used Spotify with subscription on android for years and never had any issue with it. The Web and desktop apps have also worked well for the last decade or so.

Deezer, Newpipe, YouTube have all had their places, but Spotify does it’s thing the best.

A conceivable way could be to disrupt the nuclear force of the target atoms, maybe like an anti-Pion/Gluon ray that self-propagates the reaction through the released energy.

(As we might remember, splitting the atom yields a bunch of energy, and uncontrolled such reactions go Hiroshima)

It might be controlled by sub-particle lensing, probably some kind of magnetic field, to be active at a specific distance.

For the reaction to be contained, either there’s a radially limiting component (air is not particle dense enough to propagate the reaction, or atoms not energy dense enough) or it’s a cascade triggered by the beam which stops when the beam stops (or the reaction gets too far away from it)

As I believe Pions and Gluons are their own anti-particles, I don’t know how we would go about doing this, but hey, that’s for Science!™ to solve.

What is this thread but people yelling at clouds?

Board games have been nearly ruined by kickstarter.

Instead of buying a well reviewed and recommended game from a store, you have to back a hyped up sales pitch, and then wait 4 months for delivery, if the producers don’t just bail with your money or go “oops, we couldn’t finish what we promised, and we already spent all your money…”.

And if you don’t back it to later read the reviews, the game is out of print and still waiting for the first wave of deliveries, meaning a second print is still at least a year off.

Also, the ratings are heavily skewed by people rating on the hype or early/review copies, meaning the rankings are heavily amazonified.

EtA: Also games are heavily bloated with social media candy: heavy and fragile minis, box stands, blingy crap periferals (branded dice holding toucan) and still needing organisers, player aids and mods from third parties who’ve gotten review copies to make said supplements…

Oh, and the stretch goal extras (get another 150 vanity minis/3D printed scoring tokens) for only $150 and an 18 month wait!

I use Newpipe, it’s not as good as Vanced, but better than reVanced. And good enough that I recoil in horror at the stock app.

Assuming the same density, about three times as much gravity.

Gravity scales linearly with volume which scales with the cube of the width, (3/2)³ is about 3,4.

Um, what?

I’m just reminding you of basic defence against information warfare, something that’s much too easy to forget.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the framework, ASU has a convenient summary.

It’s a decent way to stay sane® on the internet, and a good way to not aid the enemy in their misinformation campaigns.

Then you should probably revise where you get your information from. Seems reality doesn’t conform to your beliefs.

If you read the article it says that the data is from FBI

Is this US specific?

Such a classy kitty, bringing style to any encounter

Other than that, the autists I know all enjoy a wide variety of activities, although intensity and dosage will differ.

Some love martial arts, some are foodies, some enjoy hiking/sailing/outdoorsmanship, some are into tantra/burning man/hippie stuff, some love organising events, some are into animals, and almost all overlap into many different hobbies. Just like allistic people.

What they do need however is for the activity to be adaptable to the energy levels they have that day. If you’ve had an overwhelming day at work, it’s gonna be a whole different beast to go to a concert or interactive art exhibit.

If your social battery is at 4% before the event, it’s gonna be tough to mingle for an unspecified length of time. Make space for social recovery, or to pace themselves, or to vary the intensity, or to recover afterwards, and you’ll all be better off.

As many have said, it depends quite a bit on the individuals.

What I’ve tried is to give as much pertinent information as possible beforehand, and try to limit things that are commonly difficult.

A staple is a schedule/itinerary with times to endure each activity/block, when recovery is possible, and preferably with some description of what can be expected socially and stimulation wise so the participants can prepare and/or pace themselves.

You should also make sure to offer periods and spaces for limited stimuli, or even recovery. And be prepared to answer follow up questions, most questions aren’t posed to ruin surprises, but to alleviate anxiety, and I find the anxiety is almost never worth the surprise.

Can be something like:

17:00-20:00 Facilitated painting exercise.

An art therapist will talk shortly about how art is used in therapy, before inviting us to paint an exercise. The exercise is based on an emotional prompt that we’ll be painting individually for about an hour before having a walking gallery tour in the shared art hall.

20:00-22:00

Pot luck dinner in the cafeteria. We share a meal and some camaraderie after a painting well done. The cafeteria is furnished with small tables and we encourage you to find at least one person you haven’t talked with much to accompany for dinner.

During the painting exercise, the cafeteria will also be open for refreshments and breaks, and the booths offer a bit of solitude if you wish to contemplate something that came up during the exercise.

So the scientific claim is “adult participants have gotten moderately better at the d2 attention task” but the article says “people are paying more attention”. To me that seems like clickbait from what is otherwise a reasonable meta analysis.

Agreed, and unfortunately almost all science “reporting” has this problem.

Which is why we don’t listen to people who haven’t at least read the source material, and ideally have read and understood enough about the field and methods to be able to evaluate if they are reasonable for the task.

A quick read of the first paragraphs of the article also shows that it’s not the IQ tests that are the measure for concentration.

How lucky we have trained professionals employed to check if it actually is!

That way they can check on it, and you can just read their report when they’re done.

They take on all the hard work, and you can simply read if and how they figured out it’s a serious measure. What a time to be alive!