I like learning languages so with that in mind: German, Dutch, French, Swedish, Estonian, Russian, Afrikaans, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, Irish and Latin. I don’t speak all of them thought.

That’s some dedication. You checked all the actuators, but did you check the sensors as well? A speculation might be that, if one of them is busted, the controller stalls in error. I’m not sure what the story is with minicom reporting the serial being unavailable but if you have another microcontroller on which you could enable serial, you might be able to see more details. From my own experience, I would wire up a Raspberry Pi Pico, let it run Micropython REPL via USB to see if it catches anything at all. This way you are monitoring the serial before it goes through USB and the OS.

Narcissists don’t seek treatment as this would imply they’re imperfect, however destructive their lives are. On the other hand we don’t force treatment on people unless they are an immediate physical threat to someone or themselves. Another aspect, you alluded to, is culture. In the west, especially the US there is a reverence toward these types of behaviour that are in line of the traits seen with overt narcissists. Kind of a positive feedback loop wherein these types filter towards the top of whatever organisation. I believe Musk is narcissistic aswell, and I doubt he is truly autistic. (I think he is self diagnosed, and normally I refrain from gatekeeping, however, I believe he is self aware enough to figure something is different about him and he mistakenly attributed these aberrations in his personality for autism instead of narcissism - I might be wrong though.) Having these two characters in power does not bode well for our civilisation. It makes me nauseous to think that they themselves are unable to recognise the destruction they are bringing onto the world.

It gets even weirder: a narcissists sense of reality checking is impaired such that they are unable to accept facts that contradict their viewpoint. If their statements/opinions collide with reality, they dismiss it as they hold themselves above reality. They don’t / can’t learn as this would imply there are gaps in their knowledge and whoever is the messenger of such contradicting facts will incur wrath to allow them to heal, no matter how tactful this is brought to them. Narcissists don’t lie (in their mind) and this is akin to something like psychosis or delusion. This is different from psychopaths who are aware of their lies but the motivation differs in that a psychopath does it for external gain (to obtain a goal) whereas narcissists do this for internal gains (so called narcissists supply - feeding the ego). One could speculate that a narcissistic autocrat and his followers (Trump and MAGAs) suffer from shared psychosis.

Hard to say, but if the 5V natively to the machine is shot, I’d expect the unit to not work as its systems would depend on it. I assume you measured 5V in reference to the machines GND. Double check your meter against a known good 5V supply (your adapter).

If they both are power supplied, and have ground connected then what would you need the 5V connection for? Some devices that externally supply power can come with a protection diode to prevent looping power back to prevent the scenario you described but looks like that’s not needed. You would have to know the protocol used such as baudrate, bitlength, stopbits and parity. If you don’t have that info try common baudrates (115200), 8 bits, 1 stop, no parity.

Don’t remember the movie or show but on aired in Korea I saw they would blur out parts such as cigarettes as well as arm pits (male actor) and a chef’s knife (prop was being held with the actors intention to defend herself).

Freshly cut Ytong blocks. Ink of ballpoint pens.

One day he was going on about Kiki, how she does things in a certain way and I kept him going by say how interesting it was. He then turned to me and asked “You know that Kiki isn’t real, right, I made her up?”. He doesn’t like lying or being lied to, so within that frame I guess he wanted me to confirm that it was just play.

Our child has one. Her name is Kiki and she lives on a farm where she drives her tractors in a village called Plamplams. She speaks also an imaginary language. It seems like she represents experience he lives through vicariously expressing some image he has on how he fits in this world. We as his parents have always encouraged him; it is wonderful how he develops such creative images.

From your writing it seems you have a lot of insight and are very self aware. Use this as your strength. Not sure how you’re faring in regards to alexithymia but this tends to be a blindspot for folks with trauma and autism spectrum condition. Matching your needs with your internal states (vis a vis your emotions) will go a long way to manage your life so it’s worth living. Don’t get hung up on labels too much but they are useful as a shortcut to learn from others and their similar experiences.