So many memories… Thanks !

Wikipedia defines snack as a small portion of food that is eaten between meals. The way I think about it, that is the only distinction between a meal and a snack. That “in between meals”.

This, as far as weight goes, carries with it an inherent quality that makes regulating weight harder. If not impossible, depending on your sleep patterns (the etymology of the term breakfast indicates exactly how this is relevant to what I am saying here). It’s nearly impossible to find snacks that have zero insulin response in your body. Insulin not only promotes energy storage, but it also prevents the body from using energy already stored. Making a habit of doing that, even when you don’t face weight problems (which are related to health issues), is essentially making a habit of preventing your metabolism of using energy already stored from previous meals.

This is also probably the most important reason why people speak highly of intermittent fasting or low carb diets. Most of them, through these two approaches, regardless of the other positive/negative aspects, completely eliminate the habit of constantly spiking their insulin levels, effectively allowing the body to regulate energy levels through both the energy still available from a meal and the energy stored from previous meals.

As someone who grew up with a (quite) younger sibling in the most disabling end of the spectrum, witnessing all the development from infancy to adulthood, I am very reluctant to recommend for/against any specific approach, because I think that what matters most is the people who actually practice it. So, I absolutely agree with the last sentence of your comment.

The negative aspects of ABA are not entirely in the past. I am not in a position to verify the information I will quote, but this is mentioned in the third of the linked articles:

Mandell says ABA needs to renounce that history — especially the early reliance on punishments like yelling, hitting, and most controversially electroshocks, which are still used in a notorious residential school in Massachusetts called the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center.

To be clear: I am not arguing with your experience here. Rather, I am pointing out how important is the kind of practice of whatever theory and what the focus of the practice actually is. It’s really very difficult to find professionals who are actually both able and willing to care properly for autistic people. At least in the place I live.

Beyond that, I have to say that there are many things that now have positive effects on people’s lives that weren’t exactly positive in their original forms.

Hey have you ever been to https://www.neocities.org? It’s reminiscent of geocities and kind of cool.

No, haven’t even realised that Sheldon Brown’s site was hosted there. I used to have a website up on geocities when I was a kid, browsing neocities brings back so many happy memories… Thanks!

Sorry if I sounded disagreeable, I didn’t mean to be. I was just taking a trip down memory lane.

No worries. Felt exactly like that. That’s why my mind went to how I felt when altavista’s babelfish appeared, I did the same thing for a few minutes before responding :-)

Well, I guess not everyone had the same experience. Maybe I should have spoken only for myself. It’s not that I didn’t use search engines before google appeared or that I don’t do it now. Just the fact, at least in my experience, that I would get to know way more and way better web locations, related to what interested me, through discussions with other people with similar interests, than I would through search engines. Even when discussions are not possible (like in magazines) or are too massive to follow, it is often, especially in technology-related subjects, preferable to have them archived (through subscriptions) and search directly those archives when I need something specific. It was true for me back when engines didn’t have as good indexes, it is true for me now that their role as businesses is becoming obvious. I guess it also depends on what someone considers interesting.

I did love how altavista translation service was called though, really liked the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy :-)

There was a time before google’s search engine, when all the previous attempts had not managed to become the dominant entry point for the web. During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests. Then, google came, and for a time it was good (read like The Second Renaissance Part I story from animatrix). Ads and SEO were not everywhere yet, content mattered more than those two. So, while I came here to suggest what @[email protected] commented, when I read your post text I thought that maybe, at least for what we tend to constantly look for news, articles and discussions, we shouldn’t constantly rely on search engines. For example, most technologies have news letters, weekly/monthly magazines, mailing lists, community boards or other forms of group communication through which you can gradually discover better content sources (individuals or groups) on what interests you. Without the search engine service and its cost (direct or indirect) between you and the content.