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.
This is Nietzsche’s will to power in its most unforgiving form.
The will to power is not mere survival or dominance over others; at its apex it is the drive to impose one’s own meaning on existence, even when that meaning is written in self-destruction.
It is like Empedocles and the volcano.
Empedocles does not leap to escape mortality; he leaps to overreach it, to force the cosmos to acknowledge his claim, even if the price is erasure.
The penguin would rather perish as itself than endure as something lesser.
Yeah, this is using nihilism in the colloquial sense that is closer to a synonym of “aimless” or maybe “doomed”. The penguin can’t possibly be a nihilist except for in the sense that all animals are nihilists
>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.
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.
That's because few people played Quake, it got elitist really fast. I had the same issue with it. I had zero issues with CS, though, finding a match was pretty easy. PUGs aren't a thing of the past, PUBG players used to do them for example.
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.
What you describe is entirely normal in my experience learning lots of stuff and teaching many others. It might help you to let go of the idea that learning is a linear process where you master one topic and move on to the next. As I learn more I'm continually getting a deeper understanding of basic material I "mastered" decades ago. I often tell my students I don't think their understanding is complete but it is sufficient to move on, and the later material will help them get a better understanding. And it does!
> that learning is a linear process where you master one topic and move on to the next.
It's closer to true in mathematics than most other places, but not very close to true.
It's amazing the "layer cake model" of mathematics learning is such a strong idea even among many mathematics teachers.
On the other hand, sometimes a missing concept like cancellation in fractions or just poor proficiency in arithmetic rears its head and makes doing later stuff very hard. Once a student gets used to being and staying confused, it's often game over.
> Once a student gets used to being and staying confused, it's often game over.
I think this is a very good insight, that somehow eluded me. Many many people are OK being confused about things, and I never considered that it's something they learn, but it makes so much sense.
When do you do exercises, do you refer back to sections in the book or examples? If so, this is a bad habit. Try to do exercises without looking back. This will force you to use your memory. Also don't be too quick to check solutions for things you're stuck on.
Everyone who does mathematics feels the way you do when learning something new. It's a normal feeling. Don't get disheartened. Push through it.
Sounds like you'd really like MA. It will drill you on things until you actually know them. There's no green checkmark as such either - everything will be tested again spaced repetition style. You will be slowed down until you can actually use the previous concepts properly.
Mostly sympathetic here, but your duolingo comment is a bit too harsh. Anecdotal counterpoint: my high-schooler used duolingo last summer to skip a year of instruction and get into AP Spanish as a junior, and got into the Spanish National Honors Society, and earned a fluency certificate. (I know most high school language classes churn out students who can't speak a lick, but her school is excellent and she has working fluency - which she credits largely to using duolingo to catch up.) IOW, YMMV.
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.
as an introvert who is uncomfortable to expose themselves to much i prefer more formal dancing, that is, where the rules of how to move are predefined and you are all learning those exact moves without having to be creative in any form. (once you learned a couple of traditional dance moves you can take them to somewhere where more creativity is asked for)
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.
>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.
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