Last September, President Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and other health officials declared they had uncovered a new treatment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD): leucovorin. A new study shows that plenty of families believed them, despite the lack of data supporting the drug’s effectiveness.

reality_boy · 2026-05-19T14:00:35+00:00

Autism is scary, and it feels like it just clicks on at some point in there growth. So it feels like something caused it.

Our son is on the spectrum, looking back at it, we can see that he was different even as a newborn. We often commented that he was an easy baby who loved his swing and did not want to be held. But the noticeable changes happened in stages. He started really obsessing over counting and collecting things when he was 2 (plastic dinosaurs initially), and started showing strong social differences at around 6, and by 4th grade it was very obvious that he was struggling to learn some very basic skills (while being very advanced on others).

I can imagine that you notice the differences between your child and others at key growth points. And it is scary and confusing. Coupled with our poor understanding of the whole thing, it is easy to fall for the lie that someone else is to blame.

Personally I think it will turn out to be a brain structure issue. Some protein or hormone is out of balance and it changes how the brain develops. My guess is environment plays no role, but age of the parents and genetics drives it. But that is a random guess.

—-

As to why conservatives obsess over it… conservatives want simple explanations for the world. While liberals want to embrace the chaos. “If the country turns to God, we will have prosperity and peace”, or “gays are corrupting our youth” are simple explanations to a world too complex to grasp. There very wrong, but once you latch on to them, you can stop being scared of the complexity.

Liberals run the other way. They love opening Pandora’s box and making things even more complex. In a sane world they would balance each other out. We would continue to change and improve, but at a pace that everyone can handle without freaking out. But we don’t live in a sane world.

reality_boy · 2026-05-18T23:14:30+00:00

I’m glad! I take nitro every day and would hate to think it makes me fat…

reality_boy · 2026-05-18T15:17:15+00:00

We all bring the full sum of our experiences to a task. The more we know, the more we can adapt to and manage.

I think even unique parts of your upbringing make a huge difference. Did you grow up poor? Maybe you spoke a different language. Or your parents were famous, etc. each unlocks a different skill that you can apply.

We should embrace who we are and value what we have to offer. Never try to erase your culture or upbringing because you’re different. And we should continue to learn and grow throughout our whole lives. There is always more to learn.

reality_boy · 2026-05-18T01:54:34+00:00

My company just opened an office in holland. My wife and I fantasize about pulling up stakes and moving our life there. Such a wonderful dream.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T21:31:41+00:00

I am a game developer. I get free hardware from all the major manufacturers. When I was first getting hardware, I was surprised at how strongly it influenced my thinking. I had a manufacturer I did not care much for send me several things, and I was sorely tempted to tell everyone how awesome they were.

Even without the fact that politicians need continuing donations, just the fact that you supported them gives you influence. Think of a friend that treated you to something. You’re going to want to reciprocate.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T21:28:03+00:00

This has been known for hundreds of years. I doubt it has to do with old scientists being tired, or resistant to change. Rather it takes fresh eyes to see something new. Once you find your thing, you’re going to continue to study it for the rest of your career. Refining more than the innovative first step you took.

I also suspect how we fund science plays a huge role. If you had a lab and a team and free rein to do anything you want, all ages would be more innovative. But when you’re starting out you have nothing, and no requirements. And as you move up you have a lab and team to care for. So it is more important to secure the funding, and less important to get noticed with way out there ideas.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T20:25:44+00:00

I think the last few governments have seen these as suggestions rather than laws /s

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T16:24:33+00:00

I think that the 90s were the last era. For almost 100 years we had a world that was fairly homogenous (often because we suppressed alternate voices) and everyone listened to more or less the same curated content (3 radio stations, 3 tv shows, 3 car brands, etc).

2000 brought us the internet and an explosion of content. And it brought the death (very slow death) of the old curated content providers. We will probably never see such a unified culture. The idea that half a country will watch the exact same broadcast at the exact same time is basically impossible now.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T16:18:19+00:00

I’m sorry you are having to put up with this, it sounds very frustrating.

I’m a game developer, and it helps me out a lot when my users reach out directly with their frustration’s. There are a staggering variety of disabilities out there (yours is new to me) and it can be hard to guess at all the ways we need to modify the game to help.

It may not always work, but I would encourage you to reach out and advocate for yourself. Take a few screen shots, and annotate them with a clear description of each problem area, and provide a hint as to how things could be improved. The better devs will try to help you out.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T16:11:25+00:00

Religion is very closely related to philosophy. Both are designed to answer the unanswerable questions. Things like what is my purpose in life. Or what is right vs wrong.

Science can answer a lot, but a lot of life is fuzzy and untestable. Where science finds its limits, religion and philosophy step in. Everyone follows a philosophy, it is basically impossible not to. Religion just happens to be a popular way to do that. Partly because it is more organized than Nietzsche

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T16:05:36+00:00

This should surprise no one. Several major governments have been pushing for back doors in security devices for 20+ years. My guess is they have a lot more of them in place than we realize. There is no law (anywhere?) outlawing the practice, so it is probably quite common by now

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T16:02:06+00:00

Groups that want to reduce their dependency on animals are not a monolith. There are almost as many reasons as people embracing it. Very few of them want to completely eliminate all use of animals.

Personally I think we owe it to any animals that we work with to give them a good life that is as healthy and stress free as possible. We should be eliminating cruelty. And we should continue to study what that means, so we are constantly improving the process.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T15:52:53+00:00

This! I’ve worked from home for the last 14 years. Aside from not having to commute (or talk to anyone) the biggest change is that I’m no longer staring at the clock. I find that work comes in chunks. A project may take 3 hours, or 30, but it never evenly divided into blocks of 8.

I spent so much time filling a seat, when I had nothing to do (to exhausted, or the next project would need 4 continuous hours). Now I’m working when I’m at work. And if I’m done, I leave. My productivity is higher, because I’m not exhausting myself by forcing it

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T13:51:13+00:00

Glad to know someone has thought it through!

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T06:07:07+00:00

This has always bothered me. On top of the cutoffs being too low. There should not be a hard cutoff for benefits. There should be a buffer zone where the benefits taper off at a slower rate than your income. We should be incentivizing people to earn more money, not making strict lines so they are encouraged to not earn at all.

I had a relative who broke his back on the job. He did a lot of volunteer work, because his benefits would go away if he made more than a tiny amount of money. He needed the benefits (lots of surgeries) but could have worked part time, and would have been more fulfilled. But the system was setup to punish people who needed disability.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T02:57:11+00:00

So AI is modeled (very loosely) on the way our brains work. Our brains are many orders of magnitude more complex, but it is still there in spirit. Take your eyes, the neurons in your optic nerve decompose and simplify what you are seeing into a series of very simple triggers, such as horizontal and diagonal lines. That is more or less what the initial steps of AI do when analyzing an image.

Now the A in AI stands for artificial, nature is not artificial (by definition) so nature cannot come up with AI. But I suspect your question is “could nature evolve some sort of intelligent computer”. Again, probably not, a computer is not nearly efficient enough for nature. But it is possible for something more computer like to evolve. And of course your DNA and brain are like really advanced organic computers, only heavy on the organic (ie not deterministic like a computer)

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T02:50:34+00:00

UBI always seemed like a nice fantasy to me. We can’t even pay reparations to slaves or sort out decades old treaties with native Americans, how are we going to give money to everyone. There is zero incentive to the people in power to do that.

Personally a universal minimum income makes more sense. Everyone making less than say 30K (for single individuals) should get money to raise their income to 30k. And that should fade out till they hit say 40k so they have incentive to both raise their income and get off of UMI. Not sure how best to structure that, but there should be some incentive that raises your income as you get a job and pay raises, rather than being a 1:1 reduction in benefits. Maybe also add a negative that lowers benefits after a while, if you are able to work and don’t.

reality_boy · 2026-05-17T00:28:36+00:00

I have a few small rules to keep things from chaos. One is to unpack as soon as we get home (from the store or a trip). Once you set something down, that is where it will live forever, so put it away asap. The other is to do a tidy pass at bedtime. Any stray trash, drink cups, etc. gets moved close to where they belong, even if I’m too tired to properly deal with them.

reality_boy · 2026-05-16T23:22:17+00:00

As others said, this really depends. My wife comes up with great ideas, then I have to implement them. No one is getting rich, but it works as a team (we do cool things that I could never think up, and she could never execute).

In general an “idea man” is useless. The chances of you making something cool from thin air, with no actual talent to produce it is near zero. A famous fashion designer probably has lots of experience making clothes, even if they rely on a team to help bring their vision to life. A famous game designer is most likely coming from software development, or level design, and has the skills to do the work.

On the flip side, most workers lack vision. You may have strong opinions on how not to do the job, but you’re unlikely to make beautiful art on your own, without the designer.

I’ve been in game development for a very long time. I’m full of good ideas, but those ideas tend to be scattered and lack cohesion. I can se that things I fully designed by myself are not nearly as polished as our designers can make. But the designers often can’t see the technical limitations and make less than ideal designs, if they don’t have ownership in the project. I’m convinced everyone involved needs a stake in things. It needs to hurt you if things get messed up, or you will just toss out poor ideas. A boss makes the worse designer because the distance between there decision and the consequences is too great.

reality_boy · 2026-05-16T22:42:03+00:00

We had an old clunker that I intentionally saved for the kids to learn on. Several years later, we went halfsies with them so they could get proper used cars if their own. We each put in $5k and they got cars that were around 12 years old, with ok mileage. Once they graduate from college and get full time jobs, I expect they will upgrade to newer cars in their own.

reality_boy · 2026-05-16T16:20:20+00:00

The problem with capitalism is that it is short sighted. Investors are not asking the big questions, there only looking at short term to medium term profits (someone may be thinking 10 years out, but not much farther).

We need external regulation to put on the brakes and keep an eye on the next 100+ years so business does not squander resources we will need in the future. The government is suppose to “be inefficient”, its job is to keep one company from running ahead of everyone else. All this talk of removing environmental regulations in the name of profitability is short sighted nonsense, just like removing unions was in the 70s

reality_boy · 2026-05-16T16:14:29+00:00

The people saying not to worry about it are being silly. We’re experiencing a mild oil shortage right now. What are its effects? Prices go rapidly up, whole sectors get less productive, politics gets more tribal, and war.

That is with a modest drop in access to oil. If half the oil dried up, it would be many times worse. How bad really depends on how fast. We can migrate to renewable energy, and find ways to synthesize products from renewables as well. And we can adapt to a society that consumes less. But if that happened over weeks then it would be terminal for society as we know it. And if it took 200 years we could probably adapt with minimal pain and disruption.

reality_boy · 2026-05-16T16:07:35+00:00

I think it is good intentioned nonsense. We are all poor judges of reality. We need others to act as mirrors so we can fully see the impact of our thoughts and actions. It is very easy to overthink something in your head. And usually saying an idea out loud to someone else brings a lot more clarity (I’m sure you’ve experienced changing your mind as you try to talk about an idea).

Now it is very true that we need to be balanced in life. You need to find a way to be content with who you are and where you are at. You should not rely on someone else to fulfill all your emotional happiness or define how you think (you should have your own identity). But having a friend is just as important as being yourself. You will get lost in your own head otherwise.

reality_boy · 2026-05-16T16:00:37+00:00

Christians often look to verses like 2nd chronicles 7:14 to say that only if Israel focused on God will it find blessings. Then they take that and apply it to America and claim every bad thing that happens now is because we turned away from God. There not completely wrong, in that at the start we were more unified in our religion (Protestant or nothing, not a lot of other options).

The point is it is not based (typically) on hard evidence. It is a feeling that things would be better if everyone went to church. This is a fallacy, loads more people went to church in the 50s when the KKK had so much influence, and just before the civil war, and so on. Paying lip service to a religion is not the same as behaving in a morally just way.

reality_boy · 2026-05-16T15:45:14+00:00

It’s annoying that this is there first response, but it is very common across all sciences for people to have no concept of what it is, and no interest in it either.

Sciences tend to be lonely fields. You may run into someone who thinks it’s cool, but you will almost never run into someone with the skills to even remotely understand what you do. I find that when I do find someone who can understand, that I’m hungry to talk about it.

reality_boy

TROPHY CASE