Autism as a defense works up to a point. I’m certainly sympathetic, being a narcoleptic. But I also plan my life carefully around those constraints. It’s why I only missed exactly one meeting due to oversleeping during my time at Groq.

Stallman appears to be aware of his condition, but takes no steps to actively counter his tendencies. This works well for building emacs. Perhaps it even works well for leading an open source software movement. But it’s mystifying that he seemed to be caught completely off guard by the entirely-predictable backlash.

To put it another way, is autism a reasonable defense for believing that obtaining CSAM harms no one? It’s unrelated to the question. Even if we’re extremely generous and set aside how CSAM was obtained, him being autistic wouldn’t be more than a footnote.

Being neurodivergent is hard. That’s why it’s called divergent. It’s why I don’t try to get a job in sales, despite being pretty good at it. Because that would require me to be a reliable 9am to 5pm person; I wasn’t born that way.

yeah he got called transphobic because he says "they" for singular is ambiguous and a new word instead would be clearer.