As a diagnosed autistic, I think I would ask -- does ticking these boxes make you feel like, "oh shit, this could explain some difficulties..." or just go, "huh, interesting?"

I tend to invite people to think about how their lives have been impacted. For example, I experience anxiety at late invites to events I'd enjoy. I panic and decline them because I'm experiencing a highly irrational anger fear response to changing schedules. This causes me to miss events I would otherwise enjoy, and then I feel guilty. Having to process all those feelings takes a lot of energy, and it's really draining. That has significant impact on my life.

Compare to a friend of mine who just prefers quiet evenings. She declines things all the time but never gives it a second thought.

Disability vs preference. It's ok if it's either! Neither of us are wrong, we just experience different impacts in our lives.

You could add "I'm a HN regular" as a diagnostic criterium.

The HN crowd is surely over-represented in ASD, which makes sense for people enjoying debating nerdy topics and pedantry.

And "I like Lisp" should be an automatic qualifier.

I used to be an educator, and many of my students had an autism diagnosis. I would get to know them and often eventually decide that they were "just like" me, except that whatever their problems were, I had it worse.

So then I would look at these autism checklists and say, "yep, that's me," but when I actually looked at the strict diagnostic criteria, it wasn't that clear.

Looking at this article, I get it. There are other, more focused criteria that can be more appropriate. But those diagnoses don't trigger the special services, so they don't get used often enough.

What is my takeaway? People often don't conform to a model of average human behavior. Being unusual isn't necessarily a grave character flaw (which is what my mother had me believe) but merely an expression of the great variety of human intellect and behavior. It gives me license, without official diagnosis, to enjoy being who I am without shame or embarrassment.