vibinya

I very much go through this. It can be hard looking at all the niche things around my house which I spent so much energy pursuing - specialized photography rigs, magic cards, jewelry making tools+storage, exercise gear, crazy keyboard setups for multiboxing, etc. With all of those came the community aspect. I feel so guilty just disappearing after gaining so much attention and recognition in various areas. I can confidently say I’m paralyzed with some type of fear to get into new things- I know they’ll consume me, but then one day I’ll wake up and just see it as a source of stress and drop it. If I had infinite money and loved socializing, I’d not be too stuck, but I just can’t afford to keep cycling through interests right now. The things which tend to interest me always demand a financial sink.

Started working for my current company as tech support. No degree, in a homeless shelter, just good with tech and helping people. It bothered me not understanding how things I supported worked, so I started to teach myself to code and offer ideas for potential fixes when submitting tickets. Ended up being approached and hired by the head of development who allowed me to continue learning on my own. I’ve been with them for 12 years now, and in the first few years hobbled together the product/feature which became their flagship. Find people who are eager and excited to learn and they’ll thrive.

That’s been an issue for me as well. DDG is my default search engine, but the majority of the time I have to add the !g as it struggles with context. It’ll find plenty of results matching the words I type in, but not quite understand that how those words are arranged matter.

It’s odd where people draw the line. It’s pretty much the same as previous generations fawning over radio personalities and all the Oprah’s and such. To me, modern influences are equivalent to radio/TV hosts - personalities which are paid to promote and market products and lifestyles. Just because there’s now more and more specific niches for them, doesn’t make them any less valuable in the people’s lives who enjoy them and their content.

My favorite has been locally hosting Automatic1111’s UI. The setup process was super easy and you can get great checkpoints and models on Civitai. This gives me complete control over the models and the generation process. I think it’s an expectation thing as well. Learning how to write the correct prompt, adjust the right settings for the loaded checkpoint, and running enough iterations to get what you’re looking for can take a bit of patience and time. It may be worth learning how the AI actually ‘draws’ things to adjust how you’re interacting with it and writing prompts. There’s actually A LOT of control you gain by locally hosting - controlNet, LORA, checkpoint merging, etc. Definitely look up guides on prompt writing and learn about weights, order, and how negative prompts actually influence generation.

This is great. Article explains the method and sample size. This could be a great tool, and I hope it can be applied to any age. Many people who are on the spectrum and are high functioning can go most of their lives without a diagnosis while struggling to understand why the world feels so different to them.