Notatheist

The vast majority of latin dance events are social gatherings first, dance events second. Tango doesn't have that draw.

I want to put extra emphasis on how technically demanding salsa is and how appealing it can be to autists (and how many of them you'll find at the average social/class). Your body, the music, and the people are all puzzles you could spend lifetimes learning to solve. I think about salsa almost as much as I think about software. How to make a lead work, how to improve my alignment, how to interpret instruments.

Highly recommend.

In my early days someone told me generating roads is a non-trivial problem and I thought that was bollocks so I spent 4 months smashing my head against a wall to prove them wrong!

>A clothoid gradually increases curvature over distance.

This seems complete overkill? I remember smoothing between tangents of two circles to mostly solve roundabouts. I had to cheat for 3+ lane roundabouts but it worked for any semi-realistic road.

>Just simple rules stacking on each other that result in beautiful patterns. I can’t explain why, but seeing those structures always felt good.

I think in 2026 it's safe to blame your autism. I do. Nobody likes Factorio because it's a good game. We're here for the lines and grids.

It has been a while since I read Nietzsche but what exactly does trekking off into the unknown or even certain death have to do with nihilism? Maybe active nihilism but even that would be a stretch, not to mention it would make the penguin inspiring rather than depressing.

>Question is, do people think a certain artist or song is important enough to pay $5/month to individually? My sense is no, but perhaps...

Abso-fucking-lutely! I pay $3.50 a month to listen to a madman with a mohawk rant about Formula 1. I doubt there's anyone who wouldn't pay their favorite artists $5 a month. On the flip side I would get to listen to three artists and every other artist would lose me as a listener. I don't feel anybody wins in that scenario.

>and the reviews on the whole seem excellent

I detest this take because Adam would have probably reviewed the interactions that lead to his death as excellent. Getting what you want isn't always a good thing. That's why therapy is so uncomfortable. You're told things you don't want to hear. To do things you don't want to do. ChatGPT was built to do the opposite and this is the inevitable outcome.

I cannot agree. Getting a Quake game up in the early 2000s could take hours worth of sitting in IRC pickup channels, if it happened at all. I don't feel publishers are at fault here. I figure the vast majority of players would pick an instant game with potential cheaters over an hour wait for a 50% chance at a game.

I too prefered the text-davinci-001 from a storytelling perspective. Felt timid and small. Very Metamorphosis-y. GPT-5 seems like it's trying to impress me.

I've recently gotten back into math and I'm really struggling with your approach. I find it particularly difficult to get an accurate view of how well I'm doing and where I am. Most concepts I ingest easily, and I demolish any exercises in the books I read, find on the internet, ask AI for, or scribble down myself randomly. I repeat them a couple of times to make sure. All is well. Cute green checkmarks abound. Categories marked as mastered. Pride bordering on arrogance. I move on. A week later I'm handed new concepts. The house of cards collapses. I haven't mastered any of the things. There are gaping holes in the information I was given and I wasn't knowledgeable enough to notice.

The author doesn't seem to share my difficulties either. His are of motivation and those seem to maybe be addressed by the resource he used and specifically sharing his progress with other users. For $50 I expect more than polished KhanAcademy, promises like "accelerates the learning process at 4X the speed of a traditional math class" (if anything I want to slow down), and a progress tracker to post pictures of on X. If I wanted to be told I'm amazing, how long my streak is, and to learn nothing I'd use duolingo.

The first site I clicked on a focaccia recipe and had to skip to the bottom of the page, past 7 paragraphs, 10 images and a video to find the actual list of ingredients. The second one had a pop-up from the guardian begging me to subscribe that covers literally half the screen and pops back up with every page load.

If you want to explore connecting with people I can highly recommend social dancing.

>People hate small talk because it avoids this

I don't believe that. You can connect with someone before you've exchanged names, and you can fail to connect with someone you've shared your life's story with. This is the same mistake autists at my dance school make (including myself). They believe connection demands a rational exchange of valuable information. In dance that would be the technical complexity of whatever you're leading and the grace and mastery you lead it with. In language it would be sharing hopes and fears.

Small talk robs you of all that. It's a true measure of someone's ability to connect.

There is a significant distinction between a user mangled by a table saw without a riving knife and a user mangled by a table saw that came with a riving knife that the user removed.

I would have preferred if the author reasoned through why a filmmaker might make these decisions and/or offer feasible solutions. "This is wrong" does not seem helpful to an audience. That proper roman battle looks an order of magnitude more expensive to shoot, Decimus Meridius Maximus doesn't flow off the tongue as well, and there are plenty of composition arguments to be made for why the fortifications and formations look like they do.

Kind of a pointless stance when trying to build that support infrastructure walks you into the same NIMBY-wall.

Wasn't it Feynman who said we will never be impressed with a computer that can do things better than a human can unless that computer does it the same way a human being does?

AI could trounce experts as a conversational partner and/or educator in every imaginable field and we'd still be trying to proclaim humanity's superiority because technically the silicon can't 'think' and therefore it can't be 'intelligent' or 'smart'. Checkmate, machines!