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!

the labor displacing effect of technology appears to be more than offset by compensating mechanisms that create or reinstate labor.

I don't buy into this at all:

Assuming AI will have an effect similar to 20th Century farm equipment’s on agriculture, why will that labor force behave differently to their 20th Century counterparts (and either refuse to or be prevented from finding new jobs)?

Because "farm equipment" can't also perform the jobs it creates. I'm assuming if/once AI can do most current jobs, it can also do most if not all the jobs it creates.

Yep. Humidity will tank to 25% here in winter. I have two humidifiers fighting the HRV continuously when it gets cold. As I understand it an ERV controls moisture as well, but such a module for my system costs over $4000.

Any community smaller than 200 people is going to have you typing !add in an mIRC channel and waiting 20 minutes during prime-time for a pickup game between 10 mismatched players. Any community larger than 200 people is going to be unmanageable cheat wise.

If I had the option of Quake 3 Arena-style "matchmaking" and no cheats, or 2024 matchmaking and cheats I'd choose option 2 every time.

Nearly half (46%) of hiring managers believe that college graduates should definitely take office etiquette training

...

63% of hiring managers surveyed believe that recent college graduates get offended too easily.

What would this etiquette training entail, exactly? How to endure being mistreated?

Recent college graduates interviewing for their first job should take the initiative to thoroughly research the company they are interviewing for. Doing the research and sharing your perspective in the interview shows that you have a genuine interest in the company and are committed to being a part of what they do.

I'm here to make money. I thoroughly research and have a genuine interest in companies that pay well. Market forces working as intended.

epicycles all the way down

I don't mind this idea at all! I'm the abyss staring into itself.

That said I don't think digging into skulls until we identify the neurons that cause the big sad or teaching people ways to cope with their awful lives is worth much. I want psychology to help me understand (a maybe terrible) existence, not to solve it. Something like overturning our intuitions is perfect. If tomorrow they make a flawless anti-depressant that will let me endure misery I argue we'll be worse off.

I'm a professional dancer and music and freestyle are the most demanding aspects of dance by far.

That said I'm also skeptical. Music and dance are being compared to "bicycle ergometers" and "training with equipment such as barbells and rubber bands". I'm pretty sure only one of these groups was having any fun. Unless the dance group were forced to social dance bachata in which case the misery probably evens out.

The article wasn't saying "do what makes you happy". It was saying "if you do this you will not be happy". If I end up happy you don't get to loop back and go "Well that was the goal! You agree with me!". The author also forgets that the author is their own audience. That audience is what one imagines others might be. The pursuit of that audience's approval is valuable.

A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.

Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good. You're working for an audience. You're disagreeing with the article without knowing it.

I'm skeptical that there's anything especially unhealthy about sitting at a desk even for long periods of time. What's more plausible to me is that back pain comes from having a weak back

I figure few habits will give you a weaker back than sitting at a desk for longer periods of time.

They've already overreached in the past.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2432715-inlichtingendiensten-moeten-g...

https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/tech/artikel/5294998/aftappen-aivd-...

I'm a technical artist not a security researcher so could someone here elaborate on the supposed threat? Assuming a genuine Russian/Chinese state hacker/outfit, what damage could they cause and how much of that damage would legislation such as this prevent?

Wait is that 180 he does at the end him suggesting the path one must take to achieve self-worth post-nihilism? Or does he believe we're not basing our self-worth on the opinions of others properly?

I feel the Mona Lisa's destruction would be more valuable to culture than its continued existence. Imagine the headlines, the people with stories of having seen it in person, the conspiracy theories...

“The tissue still has enough structure to hold together, but it is soft enough to allow the neurons to grow into each other and start talking to each other,”

While everyone's worried about sentient AI annihilating humanity, some guy with a PrusaBio Mk7+ accidentally prints a superintelligence in his basement.

An article so self-indulgent you find yourself longing for AI written ones.

Grainge sports an impressive pair of aural appendages that move up and down the sides of his head when he’s talking.

I mean come on. 13 paragraphs of this before AI is even mentioned.

The part where UMG's CEO is complaining about how "legitimate artists" deserve more revenue from streams was interesting. He's not actually complaining about AI here but about amateur artists getting as much money from streams as "legitimate artists". "Legitimate" meaning fame and a direct tie to UMG, as if those are the measures of a musician's worth.

vegan options such as nuts?

Yep! Trade them with uncontacted tribes in New Guinea!

Seriously though I think we can be upset about unhealthy food without need to offer up a solution to the problem of corporate accountability.