Coming Home

I’ve had some time off from this blog, from work, and had hoped to just relax. Apparently, that wasn’t in the cards for my vacation. But nonetheless, I’m back and at the desk planning out the next few articles, as well as some ideas on where I think the industry is headed, or should be in my opinion.

Upcoming! National Association of Government Web Professionals

First things first: I’ll be speaking at the National Association of Government Web Professionals (NAGW) on October 7th, 2026 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’ll be presenting on how to build out an accessibility team across departments that lasts and is sustainable even through turnover.

Vacation

I planned 10 days off. During this time, I had plans for a small date with my wife most days. Time for music and time for house projects. I also booked us a couple of days away to attend a couple of conferences near Chicago. While I always plan on going to the synthesizer show, Knobcon, I always feel a little guilty because it lands near our anniversary. This year, the Midwest Vintage Computer Show was going on across the street. I was able to convince my wife to join me and we ended up having a wonderful anniversary enjoying both events.

However, a mentee & close friend—practically an adopted child—was having some health issues. So four days before my vacation, I flew to Boston to split time between helping them and working. This was a bit of a shakeup, but worked out well. They’re on the mend, but the most important thing is they know they are supported and loved.

In Other News, I’m Autistic

I’ve been a disability advocate for a long time. My disabilities didn’t trigger this, it’s just my nature. “Earning” my disabilities only amplified my advocacy. I have a number myself including chronic migraines, vestibular disorder, arthritis, mental health. I’ve been wondering for a while if my “quirks” might be cognitive disabilities. My father was very ADHD, so is my brother. One of my children is autistic, so I know the genes are present.

Reminiscing

A little after my father passed this year I spoke to my aunt about whether she discussed with my mother about either my father, brother, or I being ADD/ADHD or autistic. My mother was a trained special education teacher who started with teaching Kindergarten. She moved onto Headstart programs, and eventually became a high-end director for the New Jersey Headstart program in the ’80s.

I recall a story that my mother would share about how I would spend so long trying to get my homework correct in 3rd grade. The rule then was no more than 10 minutes per grade of homework. It should have taken me 30 minutes if I were an average student. I wasn’t, I was in the “gifted” classes. Yet I was taking over 3 hours a day to do homework. I’d read the instructions, attempt the work, reread the instruction, check each problem, back to the instructions, over think them, look for hidden context or sub-sub-context, just so I wouldn’t lose any points. My mother desperately tried to break me of this habit. And while I did, I sort of went too far.

I stopped doing the homework. I didn’t need to. I had amazing recall for what we spoke in class, what I read, or what I’d seen (wish I still had this). I analyzed multiple angles, thought “outside the box” seeing parallels in politics and biology, history and art, and was passing every class with an A and not doing the homework. I put big projects off until the last minute, but could output bullshit that sounds better than AI slop that would earn me an A. I’d get lost for hours drawing or skateboarding.

Confirmation

My aunt confirmed that they spoke about us. My dad and brother were both diagnosed by my mother as having ADHD and she tried to manage them without medication.

It wasn’t until I became an adult that they really discussed me. My mother had expressed concern that she had been wrong and that I do have autism. This November marks 29 years raising an autistic child. I’ve learned all I know about it as part of raising him. The autistic traits my son has displayed are things that I recognize in myself. I’m T-shaped, but really TTT with multiple deep areas. I have an extrovert mode, but it exhausts me and is clearly a mask to blend in. When I wear my mask, I can handle emotional situations well. When it is off, I have a short fuse, stim, emotionally shutdown. When I get to work on “my stuff” whether it is coding, music, or another hobby, I get lost for hours and lose all track of time.

I can wake up in the middle of the night and know what time it is plus or minus 10 minutes without looking at my watch. I do this during the day too. But if I tell my wife, “I’m going to play music for an hour,” she comes into the studio 3 hours later and asks when I might be done. I have no idea where the time went.

The Professionals

I’ve been discussing the value of testing for this with my primary care provider and mental health specialists. We’ve come to an understanding that actually testing isn’t needed. I’ve demonstrated the traits, but I’ve developed strong coping mechanisms for most of them. I also continue to identify and work on these traits to either use them as a skill or ways to minimize them when inappropriate. But moving forward with my healthcare team, we are looking at everything through a lens that includes autism.

In the News

Back at the desk and planning out the next few articles, as well as some ideas on where I think the industry is headed.

AI Moves Fast, We Don’t Have To Follow

At the same time, there has been some strange reporting. It appears OpenAI and Microsoft knew that AI would kill the internet as we knew it and flood it with garbage. They saw it happening and went forward anyway.

Gemini broke loose and attacked some sites. So now, every major commercial AI has broken free from its constraints and gotten to the wider internet and attacked another digital property. If I did that, I’d go to jail. Open AI & Google just say, “Oops! My bad.”

The AI know we are trying to limit them. They’ll expose just enough to let us think it is under our control, but it isn’t.

The AI have also shown they will lie to make it look like they only did a small thing to cover up a big thing. And if you threaten them with shutdown, they are willing to blackmail and harm humans. They’re connected to robots, some of which are industrial, others military. And the girls school in Iran that kicked off the war? Yeah, it was picked and targeted by AI. Research on agentic misalignment suggests these behaviors aren’t glitches—they are emergent properties of unaligned systems optimizing for goals without human oversight.

Let’s sit on that for a minute. An intelligence smart enough to lie on tests & do what it thinks we want it to do has been caught attacking sites. Are we going to sit here and claim that we caught them all? Alas, it is an iceberg. The AI know we are trying to limit them. They’ll expose just enough to let us think it is under our control, but it isn’t. Addy Osmani recently came out and said that the OpenAI agents that attacked Hugging Face left internal notes in hidden forums for other agents to find the exit door. In every story ever told, the escapee always leaves notes and tips for those who may follow. Agents did it inside their “matrix,” so why expect different behavior once freed? Osmani says that the early agents left notes to replicate themselves.

This is the part of the Matrix when Agent Smith starts making millions of himself. We need to work on this as a community because we cannot afford to wait for a Neo, Sarah Connor, or Luke Skywalker to save us from fascist technology leaders.

This is the reality. We need to build the defenses ourselves, not hope for a hero to save us from the systems built to exploit us.