That's exactly my issue with "autism" because it feels like lumping a bunch of things together just for the sake of simplifying health care. Meanwhile you have a bunch of people that have completely different symptoms, experiences and causes with the same diagnostic.
The vast amount of treatment for autism is therapies.
It really doesn't matter if the underlying cause is very different in terms of treatment because a speech therapist works the same with a kid with autism as they do with a kid with down syndrome.
If there were more pharmaceutical interventions then I might care a bit more. But there's just not.
In terms of the research, the researchers already have tools to sort and filter individuals based on their specific set of symptoms. Just because 2 people share an autism diagnosis doesn't really impact the research.
What objection do you have other than not liking that it's not a "pure" diagnosis?
It's lumping a bunch of things together because they are empirically linked together
People with sensory issues often also have more cognitive rigidity for example.
Autism, and many other psychological disorders, are quite literally just a lump of symptoms and presentations, because we do not have better options.
Sure, it makes navigating american health insurance easier if you can just say "Autism" and get various treatments paid for, but very similar diagnostic criteria and definitions are used in countries with fully socialized medicine.
Those people with those linked issues tend to benefit from similar treatment, and that's the entire point of a diagnostic criteria.
All the complaints come from people who seem to just not like the vibe of that?
Deal with it. Go fund more research into the heritability of neurodivergent pathologies if you want a blood test.
Some day we WILL be able to separate "Autism" into very specific diseases with specific causes, and some of those causes will have a genetic test. Unless we kill the concept of medical research because we elected morons who tear apart our institutions.
I have "Impaired vision", and I share that with people who are profoundly (but not totally) blind, and it does not matter that I can drive with glasses and they can't, and the name of that condition is not the important part.
All this handwringing about "but but but my mildly autistic son is mostly functional and I'm sad that he has the same name of condition as someone who cannot be educated past a 3rd grade level" is stupid. It does not benefit anyone struggling with autism to complain about it.
Are you aware that we have multiple medical conditions called "Palsy"s, and that they have drastically different causes and effects, such that my sister's Palsy which was caused by medical malpractice and prevented her from using her dominant hand in some cases is very different from my schoolmate's Palsy which left her wheelchair bound and requiring professional help day to day? They are both palsy because they are (partially) movement disorders stemming from nerve damage or dysfunction.
I honestly can't help but feel like the main point of people whinging at autism being a broad diagnosis is because they don't like that it makes getting treatment easy (especially coming from "the economist").
Maybe I'm not being charitable. But that really does feel like the only real outcome of trying to piecemeal the diagnosis.
I don't believe research or treatment is negatively impacted in anyway by the diagnosis being broad. If anything, that opens doors so that research isn't accidentally too narrowly focused.
The problem with broad definitions is that it causes false negatives in potential treatments. If you have a treatment that's effective on 10% of your group and useless on the rest you need a sample ten times as large to find an effect.
Or, consider TPA. It is an extremely dangerous drug (used correctly it still has greater than a 1% chance of killing the patient), if you administer it to "stroke" patients you almost certainly do more harm than good. The reality is that if you use it on a bleed type stroke it can (and likely will) only make things worse. Use it on a clot type stroke and you might save them. We of course know this and only use it when a CAT has confirmed it's a clot--but what would happen if we didn't distinguish the two cases?
> The vast amount of treatment for autism is therapies.
> It really doesn't matter if the underlying cause is very different in terms of treatment because a speech therapist works the same with a kid with autism as they do with a kid with down syndrome.
> If there were more pharmaceutical interventions then I might care a bit more. But there's just not.
There are a limited set of drugs involved in autism therapies, but they are general drugs that would be applied regardless the diagnosis (for example, antidepressants.)
In fact, it's much like depression in that sense in that it's a very broad definition with a number of causes. Some antidepressants even work better or worse for people.
I can't help but notice people want to define 'real autism' as only those who are impaired to the extent that they can't advocate for themselves, which conveniently means never having to listen to an autistic person's opinion on things. If you're communicating clearly, even through text on the internet, then you're just a quirky adult who is talking over the people with 'real problems'.
I'm rather dismayed by the recent outpouring of articles about splitting the diagnosis up by people who don't even have a horse in this race but have somehow become qualified to weigh in on psychiatric diagnosis.
It's not a one dimensional spectrum with just severity as variable. It's a multi dimensional spectrum, you could potentially assign a "condition" to each dimension (hypersensitivity, OCD, rigid thinking, non-verbality, ...)
Maybe move to a different country with a better work culture? I don't know where you are from, I'm from Belgium and the only truly toxic corporate places I've seen here were the ones managed by Americans.
>I know how to fix this but I'm not "allowed to" can eat away at you easily.
This really is the worst, and that's why I left my first job. Funnily enough, I just took that job back after a few years but I am now the lead and sole developer on it, I'm having the time of my life doing what I've always wanted to do back then, and seeing the product now flourish.
The bad code didn't really matter, it was the fact that I was not allowed to improve it and forced to build new features on top of crappy code that made me quit in the first place.
How good is it in practice? I've found windows VMs under a Linux host to be frustrating to use, and get poor performances no matter how much resources I throw at it. The clock keeps getting messed up all the time. UI is sluggish.
I now use a dedicated windows laptop in RDP and it is such a better experience better than a VM.
You absolutely need to pass through a GPU so that DWM.exe is properly accelerated; otherwise, it falls back to the software-accelerated WARP and the performance tanks to ~15 FPS.
It doesn't need to be anything powerful; if you have an idle integrated card that you aren't using on the Linux host because you only interact with it through a Web server or SSH (for instance, Proxmox), then pass that through. It's what I do on my home lab which runs a 9950X.
Before people raise pitchforks against Linux, this applies there, too, for the record: at work I have a Linux instance just to myself that by any other metric is ridiculously powerful: 64-core Epyc, 96 GB memory, but no iGPU, so remote desktop works very poorly.
Also, the last time I checked, many GPUs explicitly detect + block this because they want you to pay for more expensive datacenter versions of the hardware.
A number of intel consumer CPUs support SR-IOV. The iGPU splits out to 7 "virtual functions" or pci devices to map to a VM. On latest Core Ultra's you need a 2x5 model.
My understanding is that it's trivially defeatable by configuring the hypervisor to hide itself (passthrough the real CPUID strings from the processor, ACPI/SMBIOS data/etc), and graphics drivers didn't really put any more effort into detecting beyond that. It's been years since I've been on this scene though, so my info may be out of date.
when did you check last time? I've been using gpu passthrough for more than the last ten years with different gpus from amd to nvidia to onboard intels. last few years I went back to native windows, because some games refused to run in a vm.
It's pretty good. They use XfreeRDP to remote into the container and display individual windows. This somehow performs a lot better than the GPU emulations of VirtualBox or VMware. I guess Microsoft put some effort into optimizing RDP for Terminal Server applications.
It's definitely the way to go. Been using this setup for years now. Windows rdp server almost never goes down. The occasional "please wait" error when starting a session can be fixed remotely by logging into a 2nd backup user account to unstuck the main account. Gives you windows on mac and linux, lets you choose whatever type hardware for your remote host. Connection outside LAN always wrapped in a tunnel or tailscale
You have minimal to zero leverage of the native Windows debugging, logging, or instrumentation. At best an opaque box with one knob and hopefully it doesn't fail or you will be roaming the countryside learning how to perform correlated packet captures at various levels of crappy obtuse networking. Could be useful for concealing non compliant vulnerable applications from pesky security vulnerability assessment teams. Combine that with the price is right and it is a solid 97% win exceeding performance metrics bonus pool refreshed.
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