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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   1724 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A Return To Factorio

I am interested in doing another factorio run. In October 2024 the factorio space expansion was released and in the months that followed a couple members from TheMotte joined in to work together at completing the game. We were successful in reaching the endgame, building a ship that could survive the rigors travel and ultimately making it to the outer solar system location. @xablor and @Southkraut were the main co-op players during the campaign. Some other jumped in briefly (or relatively briefly since that time might have still been a dozen hours).

It was mostly a vanilla run with limited mods added. Until we reached endgame and got interested in just adding a bunch of mods, but by then I was a bit burned out and done with things.

I would like to do a run this time with mods. Specifically Krastorio 2 Space Out, and all of the recommended planets and additional mods suggested in the readme for that Mod.

Why a modded Krastorio playthrough?

The main reason is that I am more certain of completing it. I've done a full Krastorio 2 playthrough on factorio prior to the spaced out launch and it is one of only two overhaul mods I've completed. The other one was the space exploration mod (which got converted into the expansion).

Additional reason is that I think it adds more features to the game while mostly leaving the challenge level intact. With other mod overhauls I've found that I quickly get annoyed if it is more difficult than the base factorio game with little added feature content. I don't want artificially more complex recipes that have the same results. If I wanted to gate factorio's features behind more difficulty I'd just up the science costs in the game. Ultimately I like the base game factorio difficulty, and I don't want to add to it.

I also don't want to do another vanilla run through. Even though it has been a year and a half since I completed a vanilla run through, I suspect I'll get bored with all of the same challenges. Unless those challenges are on the path to unlocking new things.

I am open to discussion of other mods being added. With the caveat that if it increases the base difficulty of the game I'll need more convincing.

What/who I'm looking for

People interested in collaborative factorio gameplay. Playing together at the same time would be nice, but is not necessary, we can set up a document exchange and pass the file back and forth if play times don't align.

I'm not planning to start the playthrough immediately. I'll probably post in the next friday fun thread as well to gauge interest. I think it would be neat to have enough players to run this as a 24 hour thing. Five players at a time would be fun and a new experience.

I might also be recruiting from another gaming community I am a part of, a Starship Troopers Extermination light mil sim company.

@xablor and @Southkraut were the main co-op players during the campaign.

I wish! I jumped in for exactly one brief session and never made it again. The honor of inclusion in that list belongs to someone else.

I thought maybe you built part of our train system. Maybe that was a different german that loves trains a lot. I know xablor was better with trains than I was.

I offered to, but never got to that part. Yeah, trains appeal to teutonic autism.

I have an always-on server with gig fiber (and own space age) if you need someone to host the multiplayer

That does sound fun, does this cost you? And would you also be interested in playing along with us?

No, the only cost is a minuscule amount of electricity. I would probably join in, time permitting. I've tested the headless multi-player server in the past. It works well and has a nice feature that it auto-pauses when nobody is connected.

Running while no one is online would have been the main thing I was worried about. That auto-pause sounds awesome.

Oops, sorry for commenting in the wrong place with a query! Thanks for this, truly impressive feat of patience and stubbornness.

Anyone been using Xitter recently? The algorithm change is causing a lot of Japanese posts to show up on my feed. Further, the autotranslate has allowed for some of the most frictionless communication between Japanese and American users ever. This is the most fun I have ever had on Xitter. I urge everyone to try it while we're still in the honeymoon phase and before it gets changed.

Update: It seems that a lot of Japanese users have been getting annoyed because American Evangelicals have been proselytizing toward Japanese Twitter users. Theological debates have broken out. It seems that many Japanese people are annoyed with the holier-than-thou tone of the Evangelicals.

Man I even made the rice cooker pancake due to this trend. It was okay, not the best thing I've ever eaten.

There was a tweet once along the lines of “Japan is Wakanda for white people”; I have to admit that I’m guilty of suffering from this view. So I can’t help but feel a sense of dismay towards this development. With the language barrier between the Anglophone internet and the Japanese internet torn down, all of the sludge from our side can freely diffuse into their previously-pristine reservoir, making one big globally-homogenized slurry. Your update sentence being an example of that.

(Of course, I need no reminder that sakoku ended a good 150 years ago, and that Japan’s culture is far from insulated from the West’s. And I don’t need any wake-up call to tell me that Japan isn’t some perfect weaboo paradise, and that its internet has plenty of its own toxicity (like “anti-“ threads). But still! There are levels to cultural connectedness.)

I think Noah Smith's take that Japan is "France for Millennials" fits the data a little better.

It is admittedly a pet peeve of mine just how irredeemably exoticised Japan has become in the public imagination (largely because I cannot stop seeing it blow up on virtually all of my feeds), and as someone who's been interested in East Asian history and culture for a while, the senseless glazing gets tiring.

There's this idea of Japan as this uniquely Galapagos-like nation stemming from a lot of misconceptions about sakoku as essentially blocking out foreign influence, when in reality Japan maintained contact with the outside world through not one, not two, not three, but four trading portals (Satsuma, Tsushima, Matsumae, and Nagasaki) that brought them directly and indirectly into contact with external ideas, and they would not have used the word "national seclusion" to describe their foreign policy at the time - their foreign policy was in reality not very much more isolationist than China, Korea, or Ryukyu, who all maintained comparable trade restrictions. The word they used at the time was the much softer term of kaikin (maritime restrictions), and it was a word they actually borrowed from what the Ming called their own foreign policy: haijin.

This kind of trade restriction was a common grammar of East Asian foreign policy and there are striking similarities between the Japanese system and the Canton system. It did not wholesale prohibit foreign ideas from making its way into Japan, hell, ample Western influence even shows up in Edo-period art; you can see Western perspective techniques and pigments like Prussian blue making its way into ukiyo-e, including the works of famous artists like Hokusai. They would not have been a "pristine reservoir" even during the years of sakoku, though it would certainly have accelerated after the Meiji period.

Is it isolated? Sure, to a greater degree than Western countries are from each other, but I would argue they're not different from most other Asian countries in this regard (in fact I regard them as more receptive to Western import than most Asian countries apart from Korea). Japan has been obsessed with The Amazing Digital Circus recently, there's always been crosstalk. I'd argue the draw of Japan to a lot of the West is largely because it's culturally similar enough to offer a certain degree of relatability, whereas a China or Malaysia offers such a great degree of cultural distance that it can appear impenetrable and off-putting.

Thanks for this; I was familiar with rangaku and the Dutch trading ports, but I wasn’t aware of how the policy fit into a broader East Asian model (or the Prussian Blue fact!) and I do always appreciate having any oversimplified assumptions of mine corrected.

Only tangentially related, but on the topic of Edo Japan, I happened to read yesterday a paper written by a Japanese historian weighing in on the Anglophone discourse about how the Edo era provides a successful example of gun control policies (which America ought emulate). There was a book written in 1979 by an American professor (of English, according to the paper, not history) arguing that there were approximately no guns in Edo-era Japan, and that the resulting level of peace in society was due to this voluntary society-wide abandonment of the gun. It’s thus an existence proof of a society that made a choice (one that America could make as well) to put away guns, so naturally, this book ended up cited quite a bit (even in the past decade) in “mainstream” discourse about American gun control.

Only problem is, as the paper’s author shows, this book was just wrong: guns were rather widespread in Edo-era Japan (to the point of being a primary weapon used on both sides of one particular rebellion, albeit one that happened relatively early on), even if their use was heavily regulated by government (like violence in general, rather than gun violence qua gun violence; the author paints a picture of a government with a rather large state capacity and a willingness to use it). So the causality here is less “no guns -> no guns fired in anger -> peaceful society” and more “large state capacity -> no guns fired in anger -> peaceful society”.

Anyway, I bring this up not due to any object-level concerns, but rather because to me, this seems like another example of Wakandaism, where Westerners like me invent their own image of Japan to serve as a (fictional) example illustrating why their politics are correct. (There’s gotta be a better word for this than Wakandaism; maybe Orientalism?) You pointed out correctly that Edo Japan wasn’t untainted by the corrupting influence of the West, and apparently it also wasn’t untainted by guns either. At least, that’s my read on it.

Anyway, I bring this up not due to any object-level concerns, but rather because to me, this seems like another example of Wakandaism, where Westerners like me invent their own image of Japan to serve as a (fictional) example illustrating why their politics are correct. (There’s gotta be a better word for this than Wakandaism; maybe Orientalism?) You pointed out correctly that Edo Japan wasn’t untainted by the corrupting influence of the West, and apparently it also wasn’t untainted by guns either. At least, that’s my read on it.

I pretty much agree, yeah. Though Orientalism seems to imply that this viewpoint is one unilaterally imposed on Japan by Westerners; while that can be the case and it perhaps was in the example you offer up, I'd note it can be a two way thing where the romanticism is sometimes the intended outcome. The current-day Wakandaism of Japan was partially stimulated and encouraged by Japan itself in the post-war period to rehabilitate their global image from being that of an imperialistic enemy-state (see "Cool Japan"). There were both economic and geopolitical incentives to produce cultural exports, and there was government interest in using pop-culture diplomacy as a branding strategy (especially in the 1990s onwards).

The fact that there are weeaboos is not surprising; many things that Japan produced with its newfound economic power were massively intended for foreign consumption, with local Japanese elements downplayed for that reason. An early example of extremely successful Japanese cultural export was NHK's "Oshin", which was aired in many countries essentially free as a soft power gambit, with care taken to not trigger a sense of "cultural invasion". The kawaiiness and globalised nature of Japanese media was a way to make the product maximally approachable and unthreatening to international audiences (see the concept of mukokuseki (無国籍), or statelessness). These trends eventually also ended up spilling over into the local media landscape - in this light, the notion of Japan as an untouched land is a bit ironic. It's sometimes hard to know if the Wakandaism stems from people wanting to promote an untainted view of Japan because it legitimises their politics, or if it's the other way around and people attach their politics to something already high-status and exoticised for legitimacy.

South Korea seems to be undergoing a similar trajectory, gaining a huge amount of soft power by consciously adopting international idioms for broader appeal. And this is not to say I think this media is bad at all - I quite enjoy a good amount of Japanese and South Korean media. OTOH, a stark counterfactual is China, who in spite of economic success failed to develop significant soft power overseas and never really appropriately globalised their media (I actually really like many Mainland Chinese media properties, and this is not to say China absorbed zero foreign influence either, but there's a certain obstinate insularity to Chinese media; appreciation often relies on a preexisting understanding of a foreign cultural meta).

Orientalism

That seems reasonable. Lots of older writing does similar things with imperial Chinese bureaucracy - projecting the author's ideal society onto a distant exotic land. And the original orientalists did the same with the "golden age of Islam" version of the Middle East.

I tend to think of the general phenomenon as "utopian foreign" for lack of a better term, after seeing a bunch of similar thinking in old media about Europe/America in other languages.


(Funnily enough, the only weeb I know in real life is a black DBZ fan. But that's obviously regional.)

"... Japan is Wakanda for white people...”

Lol. What does that even mean? Japan and American culture are very proximal but it's a misnomer to not think of them as insulated. There's some bleed over with a mutual fascination between one another. My ex-girlfriend once described Japan as a society of "polite xenophobes." I think I understood what she meant.

I think the meaning is that Japan is some idealized version of what a European society would look like. Rules-based, polite, and homogenous. Of course, the Wakanda comparison breaks down when we realize that Wakanda was made up by people trying to sell comic books and Japan is a real-world place with a real-world culture and society.

You’ve got it backwards, I think.

Glorious Nihon was also made up by people selling comic books. Er, manga. The average weaboo is vastly overconfident in his knowledge of Japan.

Wakanda was made up by people trying to sell comic books and Japan is a real-world place with a real-world culture and society.

The joke of the original tweet (as I understood it) was the implication that the weeaboo’s idea of Japan is also made up, even if not quite as fictional as Wakanda.

I agree on some level, but on the other hand, it's nice to know that true cultural exchange is still possible. I think that overall the effect will be positive.

Hopefully so. It’d be interesting to see what might come from this meeting of cultures on the Anglophone side of things in the long term. (Given that lots of 2000’s-era Anglophone internet culture was directly lifted from or inspired from the Japanese, maybe there will be a similar rebirth of creativity.)

Be the American the Japanese imagine you to be.

redtail_hawk.wav

This but without the hint of irony.

They like Fighter Jets Barbeque and Baseball I like Fighter Jets Barbeque and Baseball now we can all talk about Fighter Jets Barbeque and Baseball.

Be the American the Japanese imagine you to be.

How do the Japanese imagine Americans to be?

I have extended family that live on the far east coast of the US. Whenever we talk, they can always recount stories of people there asking what it's like being from and living in California and they always reply, "... Uh. Normal?," but when they get into it they usually find out what they're really asking. A lot of Americans think people from California bleach their hair blonde, all own surfboards and talk in one of those "duuuude...," type vernaculars that come right out of a 1980's B movie. It's actually quite shocking to them when they find out that isn't 'at all' how Californians sound like. There's even a big cultural divide among different parts of California. When I go back home to where I'm from, people I know can detect certain changes in me and they ask if that's what people in the Bay Area do. So I still have to code switch a few different ways depending on where in California I am. There are things I see people do in the Bay that would definitely get your ass kicked if you did them where I'm from, or at least would have everyone stop and look at you. But it's normal and acceptable there. And there are things I've done in the Bay that had people call the cops on me because of behaviors you're taught in provincial areas of the state that you're not supposed to do. They've been to and travel through the Bay on a regular basis, but not enough to learn the minute, personal idiosyncrasies of the people that live there. When I once saw Eliezer, I remember someone remarking that he sounds like a "male valley girl." It made me burst out laughing because "you're not supposed to talk like that."

America is actually a lot of different subcultures in a way. There's this weak idea of what we are as a national culture but it's nowhere near as strong as a national culture of somewhere like Russia. Not even close. Russians are 'extremely' nationalistic and patriotic. America isn't culturally all that unified. If you just look at football teams for instance, I know several people in California who love the 49ers and hate the Raiders. The other half love the Raiders and hate the 49ers. Why? Because the 49ers are from San Francisco, that's the Mecca of "faggot land," or weak effeminate men to them. Why do they love the Raiders? Because back in their heyday, the Raiders were the bad boys of the NFL. They were truly out to injure and hurt people. They were hyper-masculine and played like gangbangers. They had a live fast die young attitude. I know places and people where that mindset still persists.

There are things I see people do in the Bay that would definitely get your ass kicked if you did them where I'm from, or at least would have everyone stop and look at you. But it's normal and acceptable there. And there are things I've done in the Bay that had people call the cops on me because of behaviors you're taught in provincial areas of the state that you're not supposed to do.

Examples?

Where I grew up:

You don’t interject over people in conversation at all. You speak when spoken to. I’ve seen people openly yelled at and be told to “shut the fuck up,” in front of massive crowds of people for doing that. Precision of language was something I always remember. People hated dealing with others who could never be held to anything they ever said. I remember getting into an argument with someone in the Bay Area over something he said and at one point he goes, “… look if you want to take a fine tooth comb to everything I’ve said then go ahead but…,” and I remember replying, “… so what are you saying then? That I shouldn’t listen to you or take anything you say seriously?… Do you just talk out of your ass everytime you open your mouth or something?…” I was replying to exactly what this guy was saying. If he doesn’t mean what he’s saying, then I don’t even know what this exercise is.

You eat at the dinner table with the rest of your family. Not doing so would get you grounded at the very least. When it’s time to eat you come and you come now. You were told in advance when dinner was ready.

You’d walk to work or school with a black eye if you talked back to your parents. You obey those above you. Complete independence was not a thing. Whether you’re 13 or 35, you live with your parents or spouse, you’re under curfew. This one I can remember being somewhat malleable. There were kids when I was 12-14 walking back from parties with their friends at midnight, back home. Provided you could only prove you were being responsible to the fullest, you had a lot of latitude. And most ‘definitely’ in contrast to the Bay Area, the kids of the region I’m from were far more mature and respectable than the kids there, by a long shot.

You don’t associate with the other gender freely except within narrow limits. I saw ass kickings regularly over this kind of thing.

You show respect to everyone. No matter who they are, what they look like or where they come from and people were obliged to return the favor in kind. The way people behave around here would earn them black eyes, bruised cheeks and bloody noses visible to everyone when they step outside.

You ‘always’ make good on your promises and obligations, regardless if that means having to burn down your own house to achieve it. You always deliver on your promises to others. If you owe money or a debt to someone, you pay it absolutely, in full ahead of time and go far out of your way to take care of things for them if they need it.

Just a handful among many.

I find it somehow thrilling that somewhere in the American heartland there's an honor culture that's halfway between me and the Taliban.

I read an analysis a few years ago that did the political demographic split of the region I’m from and we’re almost ‘perfectly’ split between Republican and Democrat, something like 50.x% - 49.x%. But even so, red and blue mean different things in different places. In the Bay Area I’d be considered blood red if I openly expressed my views, even though I’m far from Republican. In the Midwest I’d be considered solid blue even though I’m far from them too. The kind of “right-wing” I am you’d find in a place like Russia or the People’s Action Party in Singapore. “Authoritarianism” and “collectivism” are not pejorative terms in my political vocabulary. It was core to the functioning culture we had growing up. You can have it in both good and bad ways. But they exist all over the place.

But there are pockets that develop their own unique subcultures all across the US. The bonds are no longer as strong as they used to be due to technology and at the time I was growing up, lots of changes were taking place as well, but I was definitely raised with the old guard mentality and so were my peers. The way it was once put to me was our locale was a group of cultured thugs. It made me smirk at the time but in retrospect it was accurate. Our community produced a lot of very intelligent young kids who had to grow up in an area that was tough to live in, especially with the changes that were happening at that time. They weren’t just street smart, I met a lot of IQ smart people there who had this… "thuggish" edge about them. The only thing I know how to liken it to is someone like Bane from the Batman franchise. Although he wasn’t represented entirely accurately in the later film based on the comics, Nolan nevertheless did a good job getting Tom Hardy to play the part. Bane was a gangster who was a genius. He wore lab coats, contributed to various scientific fields and moonlighted as a gangbanger. If you crossed a geek with a gangbanger, you’d get a lot of the kids we had. They could talk physics with you, how to fix a car, British history, were very well read, etc., and they’d gangbang, get into fights, go to the gym, play rap music and hang out with the people they grew up around. It was normal to us, but I can see how people in the Bay Area would find it strange.

But your characterization is also quite accurate.

Where are you from? A lot of this reminds me of like the culture of Philly or Jersey area but I feel like east coasters interrupt each other constantly. Northern Appalachia maybe? I'm guessing you're in your 40s or older?

America is actually a lot of different subcultures in a way. There's this weak idea of what we are as a national culture but it's nowhere near as strong as a national culture of somewhere like Russia. Not even close. Russians are 'extremely' nationalistic and patriotic. America isn't culturally all that unified.

It's funny how it looks like the exact opposite of what I see observing from Russia.

Consider it a western prejudice if it isn't true. I've never been there, but based on what I've read about the place that's certainly the impression I've got. Russia is also a very diverse place. Even more diverse than the US in some ways.

I'm curious about what's so fun about it?

To be honest, it's refreshing from the normal spew of raw sewage that Xitter provides normally. The Japanese are enthusiastic about niche parts of American culture, and it's very fun to meet their enthusiasm with mine for their culture. I had a chat with some Japanese people about popular conspiracy theories in Japan. Apparently a large minority of Japanese people believe that after WWII, the royal family was replaced by other high ranking nobles who sided with America. I taught them about the reptilians that run our government and businesses.

I wouldn't say that Japanese culture is perfect, but what's on Xitter and showing up on American timelines is generally polite/respectful while also being humorous. It's a refreshing change from political outrage slop and video bait.

Even my Today's News feed is filled with "Japanese X users discover American culture." I'm so happy I was able to be here.

For those in the law world:

  1. Is there actually a major imbalance between liberal and conservative students in top law schools?
  2. If so, how much does this affect the relative competitiveness of clerkships for, say, Sotomayor vs Thomas?
  3. Is the prestige of a SCOTUS clerkship enough for ideologically liberal students to still desire to clerk for a conservative judge (or vice-versa)?
  4. Is there any stigma among elite law circles to having been associated to a judge that is disliked among them, or does the clout of SCOTUS overall override any possible stigma?

  1. Yes. It's not quite as lopsided as undergrad, and most of the students are too career-focused to put much effort into politics, but it's your standard default center-left PMC environment with mandatory DEI sessions and all that. If you include all the closet conservatives keeping their heads down, I'd put the ratio at 80/20. Open conservative/libertarians are maybe 10% at most.

  2. The liberal judges/justices are more competitive, but less so than you might think for two reasons: a) many conservative judges are perfectly happy to hire liberal clerks (much moreso than the other way around); and b) in my experience, conservative students are more likely to both want to clerk and have been encouraged to clerk because of the federalist society's focus on creating a pipeline of future conservative judges. The judiciary's status as the only American institution to have resisted the Long March means clerking tends to be a bigger deal on thr right than on the left, so there's actually more competition to clerk for conservative judges than you would expect. The main thing making conservative judges easier to clerk for is conservative judges tend to be based in "less desireable" locations. Not many coastal liberals want to spend a year in Texas or Georgia.

  3. Yes. I'm sure there are some who are mindkilled enough to refuse to work for a Republican under any circumstances, but for everyone else, if a Supreme Court justice offers you a job, you take it. A former Supreme Court clerk can generally expect their pick of any job they want with upwards of $200k signing bonus, and will be more preftigious than all of their coworkers for their entire careers. That's not the sort of resume line you turn down.

  4. Outside of the extremes like Alex Kozinski, no, not really. Clerking for Thomas or Kavanaugh will probably close doors at certain NGOs. Van Dyke is not well liked or respected in democratic circles. But clerking is clerking, and it's rarely going to hurt more than it helps regardless of who it's for.

As I understand it the liberal justice clerkships are much, much more competitive than the conservative ones, so some ambitious students do swap sides for their own gain. But the overall pool or spaces is so low that even among the best ‘conservative’ (real or fake) HYS law students (or even just Yale ones, as I understand that’s the best) the odds are still slim.

Is the prestige of a SCOTUS clerkship enough for ideologically liberal students to still desire to clerk for a conservative judge (or vice-versa)?

I know that was true at least up through Scalia's tenure.

Decided to try out Claude's general image editing skills using natural language rather than tools directly to see how far they had come. Since it's Easter time I thought I'd make something topical. I think it turned out pretty good in the end, definitely easier than doing things manually and certainly less mentally taxing compared to writing the code and aligning everything yourself.

/images/1775249071331354.webp

Claude refused to make a "Track AIPAC" poster for Pontius Pilate. I had to use Grok instead.

It came out better than I expected, though you can still tell that I used the Ted Cruz one as a template.

Claude probably refused to libel Pilate as having received 30 pieces of silver. He did it as his duty as a civis romanvs.

"Am I German or Autistic?"

http://german.millermanschool.com/

(I am neither German nor autistic, but it's good to confirm, through a psychometrically validated instrument that I'm a regular dude. Uh, I don't remember my results but I think it was 38% German and like 10% autistic?)

I got 49% German and 24% autistic.

I have a lot of German ancestry on both sides (and I'm Swiss (Basel) on my mom's side which is like luxury German.) I also have a ton of engineers among all my uncles and one of them seems sort of autistic but might just be "German." I don't know. I usually mildly dislike Germans and Austrians who I have met in my life, who I tend to interpret at pedantic in a way that reminds me of my mother. An Irishman I once met in Greece described Germans as "corny" and I have always thought, yes, that's the word for Germans ever since. I prefer the parts of my family who are Scots Irish because they don't tend to ground their nonsense in the self righteous superiority of my more Germanic descended relatives and embrace more openly the messiness of unknowability which the German wants only to stamp out. Of course I am making most of this up from my attempts at picking out cultural traits from my travels and cross matching with my family tree. I am descended from Mayflower pilgrims on one side and the most recent immigration I'm descended from was the Basler in the 1840s on the other so trying to unwind current day traits from my mangy puddle of Americanized Euro genetics is imprecise at best.

I find it fascinating the degree to which "narcissism" and "autism" traits overlap. One of my best friends' ex boyfriends is a programmer and I can't tell if he's autistic or a narcissist. I have never been close or even spent much time with anyone who has openly told me they are autistic or even "on the spectrum." I have met in passing strange loud children whose caretakers have told me these children are "autistic." I suspect autism is a side effect of being raised in bizarre urban or suburban environments which are at once overstimulating in their social excess and understimulating in their artificiality and distance from nature. Was it Tao Lin who claimed that at current rates, everyone in America will be on the autism spectrum in 100 years or something like that? I don't know. Sometimes when I'm in East Asia I believe that everyone around me is autistic. I don't mean that in an offensive way at all as I love East Asia and spend as much time as I can there but the efficiency that even grocery checkout ladies operate frankly reads as autistic to me compared to everybody else.

51% German, 48% Autistic. As someone who is diagnosed with Autism, I thought my other score would be higher.

30/30 for me

I’m normal - which is great, I’m Polish - need a Slavic version

33% German, 47% Autistic. Which is weird, because normally I score weirdly low on Autism tests.

42% German, 44% Autistic, not sure where the rest went. Redneck maybe.

Scores are independent on the test and don't need to add up to 100% (hence why some users scored "58% German, 47% autistic").

58% German, 47% autistic. More German than some actual Germans here scored.

Back in highschool my autistic friend told me that I'm half autistic. Clearly not normal, but not so far as him or my other autistic friend who were formally diagnosed.

I got 36% German and 51% Autistic. So close to half that it made me chuckle. I know this isn't a real diagnosis, and that the 50% wouldn't even necessarily translate properly, but it still made me take notice.

29% German and 69% autistic.

That's... about right.

When I got diagnosed a few years back, the practitioner said that I had "a lot of well developed coping strategies".

When I got diagnosed a few years back, the practitioner said that I had "a lot of well developed coping strategies".

There are only so many sincere compliments we can give without running afoul of the code of conduct. I'd take it.

Is that code for "you don't act autistic"?

There's a small irony in asking him to interpret that

I would guess they were saying you seem pretty well adjusted and capable of gracefully navigating life in a way that many other autistic people struggle with.

My family did the best they could to beat it out of me and I guess it mostly worked.

Probably? It's a reasonably diplomatic way of saying so. I'd also assume they meant that you are functional and successful despite the diagnosis.

31/29. I already knew I'm not German but it's reassuring that I'm not autistic either, even if do open and skim through instruction manuals.

Your Result: Neither; Somehow. German: 38% Autistic: 27%

I'm somewhat surprised by this, considering that I felt distinctly annoyed multiple times during the quiz that there was no back button to let me return to a previous answer to change it. That should have made me Autistic, or at least German.

We are apparently the exact same amount of German @self_made_human, which I guess is one more thing for you to worry about.

Sigh. I guess it's time for me to look at foreskin reconstruction options.

Result: Both. 53% German, 49% Autistic.

Huh.

40% German, 60% autistic. I'd quibble that I've been specifically tested and found not, but like Corporal Nobby Nobb's "I Am A Human, probably" certificate, that doesn't really help. And given that I've already Wittgenstein'd at other posters here, I can't complain too much about being called Wittgenstein.

I'd quibble that I've been specifically tested and found not

Was it a concern at one point that led to evaluation?

Not strictly.

I'd had a couple traumatic medical experiences in an environment that Strongly Encourage Therapy for them, and the specific office my parents went with had checks through a variety of classically under-diagnosed conditions. Some of them were perfunctory - two or three questions involving a wooden puzzle cube stick in my mind that I've since learned were developmental disability tests, for example - but the autism-adjacent stuff ended up going into more thorough testing. This was back when Asperger's was still a diagnostic option, so not unreasonable, but I was just a standoffish kid that didn't pay attention to social queues cues, rather than being unable to notice them.

I was just a standoffish kid that didn't pay attention to social queues

Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean cues, not queues.

But I did chuckle imagining young gattsuru just cutting in line with such frequency that clinicians decided he should be assessed for autism.

two or three questions involving a wooden puzzle cube stick in my mind that I've since learned were developmental disability tests

Oh, like the IQ test pattern blocks, or something else? The blocks I had to assemble in patterns were what I remember most about when I had to take an IQ test for gifted education when I was young -- I don't think I did so well on that part.

Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean cues, not queues.

Thanks, yeah, that's right.

Oh, like the IQ test pattern blocks, or something else?

The Kohs Blocks (or some descendant) were one, and there was also a simple test involving wood blocks with cubic outlines and a challenge to guess how many cubes the whole contained that I can't the name of.

36% German, 64% autistic. This sounds about right. No actual German ancestry though.

teutonic 'tism is peak coconut culture and kept the ancestors safe from dying in the winters, your peachy genetic framework can likely never comprehend having to prioritize strict discipline

I think 38% German is a very respectable amount: it corresponds to me being punctual (mostly, don't @ me @fttg) and generically responsible. Any higher and I'd lose the sense of humor, and what else do I have going for me?

36% German, 22% autistic.

Like @SubstantialFrivolity and @Southkraut I often found two or three of the answers a reasonable fit. This was somewhat of a whiplash given the last few four-choice tests I've taken were pre-interview screening tests where one of the four was a clear fit for me or the "correct" answer the firm was looking for. For example:

You have an important deliverable due to your boss tomorrow but you're running behind schedule. Do you:
A) Reach out to him proactively and discuss if there can be flexibility around the deadline, evaluating the tradeoffs between punctuality and the quality of the deliverable.  
B) Tell him your grandmother died and go on bereavement leave. 
C) Call in a bomb threat to the office building first thing tomorrow morning. 
D) TOP him and become the new boss.

I'm only exaggerating slightly.

The correct answer would be D, of course.

It's always the longest answer. Always. Except for professional ethics exams. Then it's always the second most ethical answer.

It annoys me that test writers seemingly haven't figured out how to get around this hack. Followed it from high school through the bar and it's never failed me.

The correct answer would be D, of course

I did not know that you graduated from casual competitive misogyny to homosexuality, but that is hardly uncommon either. Ah, the things I've heard catty gay men say about women... if I said half as much, I'd be in the lockup (not that I want to, I think women are pretty and caring and smell nice, and I constantly fraternize with the enemy).

I did not know that you graduated from casual competitive misogyny to homosexuality

Excuse me, this is a lazy, uncharitable characterization and disrespectful to my professionalism.

It's not competitive homosexuality; it's creative, strategic networking for accelerated career growth opportunities.

53% German, 47% autistic. Like @Southkraut I agreed with three of the answers to most questions. Genetically I am 1/8 German (7/8 Polish), so I guess the one great-grandparent's genes are working real hard in me.

36% German, 13% Autistic.

I’m very slightly surprised I scored this high on the German scale. I will also interpret the autism score as indisputable proof that ADHD should not be placed anywhere near the autism spectrum.

Funnily enough, a good friend of mine once described me as the most engineery person he knows (and being an engineer himself, he knows plenty).

I will also interpret the autism score as indisputable proof that ADHD should not be placed anywhere near the autism spectrum.

I mean, that's the standard psychiatric consensus. And an opinion I share. They are very distinct clinical entities, though there definitely exist large numbers of people who are "AuDHD" in the sense they have both conditions. But that isn't special or worthy of a distinct diagnosis, anymore than someone with ADHD and depression has ADepressionHD.

But that isn't special

Well, try telling them that.

Even worse are the people who apparently have diagnosed (or suspected?) BPD, and then openly brag about it. Even on dating profiles.

Well, try telling them that.

My time and patience for arguing with people being idiots is, sadly, quite limited. Especially when I'm not getting paid to do it. I don't recall an actual patient who showed up and demanded that something out of the ordinary be done for them because they have both diseases, but it's early days yet.

Even worse are the people who apparently have diagnosed (or suspected?) BPD, and then openly brag about it. Even on dating profiles.

Even worse? My man, that's even better. In the sense that I will selfishly give them points for being honest and waving a red flag at onlookers. I can tell you from experience that you do not want to know what it's like to date a BPD woman, especially one who was undiagnosed and wouldn't accept my suggestion that she get assessed for it. If people express their most obnoxious personality traits and then are proud of it, anyone still lets them into their life is too dumb to deserve much sympathy. Or perhaps they really value passionate hate sex, I can't judge too harshly.

what it's like to date a BPD woman

”Don’t stick your dick in a crazy” was invented for exactly this.

I fucked around and found out. Being charitable to myself, it was a learning experience.

Not even twice.

If you know you know.

Your patterns are cultural, not neurological. You have internalized a set of values — precision, order, directness, the moral weight of punctuality — that the German philosophical tradition worked out with unusual care.

Kant's categorical imperative is basically this: act only according to principles you would want universalized. You live by this, probably without having read Kant, because you have absorbed it through some combination of upbringing, temperament, and the fact that it is simply correct.

You are difficult to work with in the ways all serious people are difficult to work with. This is not a diagnosis. It is a compliment.

German 27%

Autistic 67%

help?

Nah, you’ll be fine. You’d have more reason for concern if you were 67% German instead.

40% German, 60% Autistic (Wittgenstein).

Unreasonably pleased that it adds up to 100.

Very German/autistic of you. I'm glad everything is working as expected.

(I would have enjoyed that too, albeit probably only 1/6th as much)

CategoryRating
German47 %
Autistic58 %
OverallWittgenstein

You have, apparently, both the cultural formation that produces systematic people and the neurological substrate that makes systematic thinking feel like breathing. This is either a significant advantage or an explanation for certain recurring difficulties in your life. Probably both.

Schopenhauer also fits here. So does Ramanujan, though he wasn't German. The category isn't German or autistic—it's people for whom the gap between how things are and how they ought to be is not an abstraction but a constant, low-grade irritation.

My mother tells me that I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at some point, but she doesn't have any of the court files to prove it.

I doubt that I have any German heritage, though my mother does hail from a former Danish colony.

Just show me the formatted table post and not the username and I could've guessed it was you.

This website's Markdown implementation does not support the fancy hyphens-and-pipes table syntax that Reddit's implementation supports, so users are forced to type the table HTML manually—and that's a good thing™. More people should learn (X)HTML. Typing HTML in a plaintext editor often is more relaxing than typing in a WYSIWYG text editor.

  • You don't have to mess with Character Map or AutoCorrect in order to type en and em dashes, subtraction, multiplication, and division symbols, directional quotation marks, etc.; and you don't have to guess at what specific character a horizontal line is when you see it long after you typed it. Instead, you can just type a character reference (picked from a default list in HTML or a fully custom list in XHTML)—& ndash; & mdash;, & minus;, & times;, & div;, & ldquo;, & rdquo;, etc. (without the spaces)—and it will remain perfectly legible in the plaintext forever.

  • You don't have to mess with invisible section divisions and style changes, constantly having to guess whether Word has actually done what you wanted it to do. Sections are clearly visible elements, and styles are clearly visible classes. Nothing is ambiguous.

  • I think there was recently a discussion here regarding how learning a second language enables a person to better understand his first language. Likewise, learning HTML enables a person to better understand what Microsoft Word is trying to do behind the scenes while you clumsily interact with its interface.

Entirely within my expectations, ngl. I do think Aspergers deserves a place in modern psychiatric taxonomy, when up to 80% of people with autism have learning disabilities, then it at least served as a convenient shorthand for those of normal or above average intelligence. Well, I don't get consulted on either the ICD or the DSM, at least not yet.

When I was younger my friends swore that I was autistic because I was never afraid to say ‘anything’ to anybody. It was made worse by the fact that I spent a lot of time growing up in the hood. My friends were afraid I was going say something that was going to get us shot. I’ve been jumped before a number of times by over a dozen people. But it wasn’t uncommon with most of us, we all got into several fights. Once you’re in hell, only the Devil can help you out. You had to fight to establish yourself in the pecking order among the boys and even if you didn’t gangbang (which I didn’t), you still had to be affiliated with the clique, just to get by and survive. I can remember doing homework in the hospital with bruises all over my body once when people used to come and visit me. One of my friends, she still makes fun of me when we have the opportunity to hang out, because I have this habit of walking I sometimes slip into that she calls my “ghetto strut,” and she grew up in the same area I did and we've known each other for decades, so she could immediately tell where I was from. The influences sometimes still rub off on you.

Socialization was always one of those things that was difficult for me because I had no capability to be fluid with it. I improved enormously as time went on, but things still seem rigid at times as if I’m searching for the appropriate or correct answer that speaks to the moment, and there isn’t a lot of natural flow to it. I tend not to pickup on context very well. If someone comes up to me and restarts a previous conversation we had from the point we last touched upon, I’ll have ‘zero’ idea what they’re talking about unless they clarify things prior to picking it back up (e.g., “so about earlier,” “to answer that question you asked awhile ago,” “remember when you said X earlier today,” etc.).

Never been diagnosed in any way. But my friends were always fascinated by things I could do and gifts they thought I had; and they wanted to know why I was the way I was. Much of it is projection on their part IMO. They’d always have me take these personality tests, and in a couple instances paid for the exams for me to take; and had me do all these really complex mental challenges. I never liked doing them though and always got tired of it, and after awhile I think they finally picked up on it. It’s why I eventually stopped trying so hard in school and only did just enough to get by. I’ve never liked being the center of attention and just wanted to be left alone to pursue the things I liked.

I do not think that being a nerdy (possibly) autistic boy in an actual ghetto is ever a fun time, so I'm sorry you had to go through that but very happy you made it out intact.

I wouldn't even particularly advise you to go get a formal assessment done, at least if you don't see a need for it. Other than closure, for someone like you, all we can really offer is a label and (perhaps) a stronger case for workplace adjustments. If you're already doing fine and feel functional, what's the point?

If you're already doing fine and feel functional, what's the point?

I'm not the person you are responding to, but in my case it was incidental. I went seeking treatment for PTSD and they wanted to sort the tism out first.

Thank you.

Again, I'd never been officially checked or diagnosed with anything, and some people just have general personality quirks. Not everyone connects the same way. If I did have it, I'm pretty high functioning and most people wouldn't suspect it. But even as I've gotten so much better, it's still never one of those things that never comes naturally. Socialization in general is one of those things that always gets easier the more you do it and everyone has bad experiences. How you succeed and in what environment depends very much on whether individuals find 'their people' and group or not. It feels much more natural and at home in the company of close family and friends. I've also strangely never had any problems speaking to large crowds or groups. I can do that with ease when others typically run away from the stage or podium.

It feels much more natural and at home in the company of close family and friends. I've also strangely never had any problems speaking to large crowds or groups. I can do that with ease when others typically run away from the stage or podium.

That's fascinating -- me too. I hate smalltalk and I struggle to make connections with a stranger, but I love public speaking even if it makes me nervous. My father is the same way, he is a teaching professor and an extremely animated one, but also extremely introverted and hard to get to know.

I've found, for me at least, it's about feeling in control. I have two ways coping with social anxiety: either curling into a ball and waiting out the clock until I can leave, or making myself the center of attention. Either way, I'm controlling how the rest of the room gets to interact with me.

Hm, interesting. I think for me, maybe for my dad, it's that the situation is structured and in public speaking you're given 'the floor' and people are socially expected to pay attention to you, or at least pretend. So it's an environment where you don't have to fight for airtime. I guess I also like it because it's a situation where you're permitted to monologue without interruption about a topic, which I always find enjoyable. Even if I have to improvise -- I enjoy improvising more than most people enjoy reading a prepared speech. It's like jazz.

But it's the back-and-forth and the fighting for airtime and the having to engage in real-time with ambiguous social dynamics that I find hard to deal with. It's difficult trying to figure out how to say something that's bland enough to not offend but interesting enough to achieve rapport, and then follow up, in real time, with a useful reply that continues that pace, with someone I don't know well.

That’s awesome. You and I are identical in this way. I wonder what explains people like us.

For me, it's about being able to control how others are interacting with me. Whether I'm in the spotlight or on my phone in the corner, it's better than trying to react to small talk. Small groups is just chaos and I hate them.

I obviously am not an illustrious doctor, but it appears to me that the ICD has more or less retained Asperger's syndrome in its table of diagnoses.

6A02 = autism spectrum disorderFunctional language
Mildly impaired or not impairedImpairedCompletely absent or almost completely absent
Disorder of intellectual developmentAbsent6A02.0 ≈ Asperger's syndrome6A02.2—
Present6A02.16A02.3 ≈ childhood disintegrative disorder6A02.5

In the sense that that it recognizes {no intellectual deficit plus some generic autism traits} as a sub-category? Yes. But Aspergers was handy. We got rid of it without a handy epithet to replace it.

It would be like replacing "mild depression" with "depression without suicidality, severe anhedonia, psychomotor retardation..." You have replaced a convenient and pragmatically helpful diagnosis with a more unwieldy one, with no clear benefit.

I am obviously am not an illustrious doctor

Don't worry, neither am I. At least the illustrious part.

psychomotor retardation

Sir, we do not say this anymore lest the cancellation gremlins come for us.

Seriously? Because in the UK, it's still the most common term (with only a minority opting for psychomotor slowdown). I don't think I've ever seen anyone get PC over it so far IRL.

Retard was never quite ubiquitously PC-banned, but there was a lot of spikiness. I grew up in the 90s and 00s in an area with such a spike, such that calling someone a retard or something retarded was probably about equivalent to calling a gay man a faggot. I was quite surprised when I grew up and encountered people in my professional life calling things retarded in the office.

I think it's probably retreated a bit such that it's not considered quite as offensive here anymore, but certainly almost no one ever says it in casual conversation. The last time I heard it in a social situation was a friend's gf who had recently moved into the area, which prompted the friend to stare daggers at her and compel her to shut up.

I've noticed a bit of hubbub in the PC circles due to the distress at this word becoming more common again. Ironically, I feel like this is an example of moral progress: in the 90s, we naively thought that it was morally correct to discourage the use of that word. 30 years later, we've realized that, like slavery or human sacrifice, such a notion was just a primitive belief by a less moral culture that we've outgrown.

Retard was never quite ubiquitously PC-banned, but there was a lot of spikiness.

I'd say it was. Perhaps not will-get-you-fired-banned, but will-get-you-banned-from-fora-and/or-unfriended-banned for sure.

Retard was a highly banned term for half a decade although it is slightly coming back now. PSR got caught in that (with PSR being the way to maintain the term).

Unhoused and undomiciled are still in a fight for supremacy over replacing homeless, although "person of" language may yet sweep in.

… psychomotor retardation...

That almost sounds like a term for road rage.

Good example of specific popular words obscuring the meaning of widespread technical terms.

Retardation is used in a lot of science contexts to refer to slowing or obstructing "retard the motion of..." The most popular usage the slowing of brain referred to as "retarded" as become primary.

Psycho refers to mental stuff in general, but "psycho" (thanks Hitchcock!) now means the one thing...

Quite the opposite. It's most commonly seen in depression, though anabolic steroid abuse does lead to depression, sometimes.

Basically, you know the intuition that depressed people seem to move and speak slower? It's quite true, at least when the depression is severe enough.

42% German, 24% autistic. The fact that the two figures are mirror images of one another is pleasing to me, which probably means I should be awarded an additional 5 autistic points.

51% and 49%. Sounds about right.

I was thinking of tagging you, but the bit works best when you show up of your own volition.

Yeah, that test was made for me. I could agree with easily 3 out of 4 possible answers for each question.

What's the stupidest computer bug you've ever made/seen?

I was having problems in a script because 0.12 < -3.45 when you compare the strings alphabetically.

Far and away the most frustrating ones are when I misspell a variable exactly once in an awkward spot.

Although, R has this thing where the logicals (booleans) TRUE and FALSE can also be replaced with T and F for conciseness (you can pass something like ‘param=T’ without typing the whole thing, which is awesome) … but T and F unlike TRUE and FALSE are not reserved key words! Once I accidentally assigned (capital) T or F as a variable and that was a nightmare to figure out why random things were breaking all over.

The other infrequent but annoying thing is “factors”. In data analysis often you have categorical variables with preset and limited values. You can make these into “factors” but really it’s stored as a named integer vector. Say we are storing HTML codes, 200, 404, whatever. You might in some common analyses cases treat them as strings, and categorical, although obviously they are maybe still ‘numbers’ in your head. If you aren’t careful, you might accidentally write ‘as.numeric(HTML_codes)’ but that will return the integers that are used as internal representations, (like 1,1,2,4,1) rather than the numbers (really strings) themselves. Because they aren’t strings anymore, they are factors as a data type, and R decided rather than have a special unique data type they would just implement it as an integer with metadata (the actual “value” eg “200” is stored as a “name” attribute). Honestly there are good reasons for that, but still a major gotcha. (A very common package import makes this a lot less mistake prone but sometimes coding in a hurry you might forget)

I ran into a bug once in a unique ID generation scheme because the system clock ran monotonically backwards for thirty seconds, then started marching forward again.

Writing a mitigation was actually surprisingly fun. It's not often you have to explain to a reviewer why the "didTimeTravelHappen" variable is in there.

That's what you call self-documenting code. didTimeTravelHappen is there to tell you if time travel happened. Obviously.

Was this Javascript or Python?

lol, I wish. It was in Macro Script Command Language (and not even the latest version of it). I use python whenever possible at work, but still end up spending a lot of time on ladder logic, MSCL, or other strange programming languages.

That’s a good one. I’ve definitely caused it…more than once.

The problem is that it works perfectly fine for anything between 0.01 and 9.99.

Is there somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user?

Is there somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user?

Here.

Mine is missing "Introductory Texts to Rationalism".

Also also, so many of these links are dead. People delete comments. Smart people. Cool people. These will not be marked, and you will be depressed about it.

Now that all the links are in one place, any chance you can have Claude submit them to the Wayback Machine and archive.today? Or just download them to a local archive and upload it somewhere for preservation?

Mine is missing "Introductory Texts to Rationalism".

It... looks like maybe that entire roundup did not get included in /r/thethread, actually! So none of those entries would show up here.

Now that all the links are in one place, any chance you can have Claude submit them to the Wayback Machine and archive.today?

I certainly can't. Someone else probably could.

But actually there was a point at which @ZorbaTHut scraped a bunch of them, and for several years now the full text of all AAQCs has been automatically archived. That is what led in part to the Vault, which project unfortunately hasn't had any forward motion in years. But Zorba does already have a database with much of the content archived. It's just a question of being able to actually do something with it.

Ok so I could abuse my privileges as a moderator of /r/anime to reobtain the stuff from pushshift https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/14ei799/pushshift_live_again_and_how_moderators_can/ but it will take a bit for me to regain pushshift access since they switched to a new system

I have two in June 2023 but it only picked up the second one.

I wouldn't be too bothered but of the meagre 3 QCs I have that is the only one I consider as actually insightful.

Sorry about that!

One thing I have discovered is that the parser Claude made me did not pick up any AAQC awards if there were in-text [brackets] used when linking to the AAQC in the roundup. Sometimes these were used (as with yours) to edit the text a bit, but sometimes they showed up in the formatting for other reasons (like stripped links that left the brackets behind). I think that is the main category of missed AAQCs as there are probably a few dozen that ended up getting reported like this. I tried to catch as many as I could but by the time I finished this up, I had decided that I probably could have done the whole thing faster by hand, and it would have been substantially more precise. Alas, I squandered my time vibe coding, instead.

But, I have edited yours in now.

I don't think you, or the general user, can do that. It's in the mod log and our per user moderation history, but even there it'll lump multiple AAQCs together if they were in the same month.

I don't believe there is. Claude made meaningful progress on retrieving the data and aggregating it for me, but then I hit usage limits and it bombed out. Someone paying for premium would be able to do an audit of the past 2 years or so.

Time to hop onto the repo and make a PR!

Someone paying for premium would be able to do an audit of the past 2 years or so.

If all you want is a count-per-user, I would think that one could use the wiki to very quickly assemble a list. You wouldn't even have to follow all the links.

EDIT: I have a "max" Claude account (for a little while), I don't find it very useful so I almost never use it but if there's something someone else wants me to do with it for the forum, I'd at least take that under advisement...

I think it would be handy to have a per-user list too, and I am too broke/cheap to pay for Max.

Interesting, Claude says reddit is blocked from its network so it can't do the work directly. But it is building me a tool for this, or so it claims. I am already in way over my head, so. I will report later whatever I manage to pull off, here...

Civil-engineering problem of questionable importance: What is the best definition of "intersection"?

The illustrious lawyers among us will recite the legal definition (1 2): the area within the extended gutterlines of the intersecting roadways. Or, more exhaustively (the green lines in this example PDF, a rendition of this cursed location):

  • For each point where a road's gutterline stops running parallel with the road's baseline: From the point, draw a line parallel with the road's baseline. The largest shape enclosed both within such lines and within the gutterlines is the intersection.

But this definition obviously is terrible. It's wildly underinclusive, as it fails to include the large area of pavement between those extended gutterlines and the rounded corners of the intersection. And it can produce nonsensical results on oddly-shaped corners (as illustrated on the southeast leg of the example).

Civil engineers and avid pedestrians may prefer this definition (the blue lines in the example):

  • For each point where a road's gutterline stops running parallel with the road's baseline: From the point, draw a line perpendicular to the road's baseline. The largest shape enclosed both within such lines and within the gutterlines is the intersection.

However, this definition can be rather overinclusive on corners with large radii (as illustrated on the north leg of the example).

One of the more questionable achievements of my civil-engineering career was coming up with a third definition (the pink lines in the example):

  • Within the intersection, draw as many inscribed circles as possible, each osculating (tangent to, touching, kissing) three corners of the intersection. (Generally, the number of circles will be equal to the number of legs on the intersection minus two.) The largest shape enclosed both within lines joining intervisible tangency points and within the gutterlines can be considered the lower bound of the definition of the intersection.

  • For each tangency point: For each road baseline visible to that tangency point: From the tangency point, draw a line perpendicular to the baseline. The largest shape enclosed both within these lines and within the gutterlines can be considered the upper bound of the definition of the intersection. Typically, use the upper bound to determine paving limits.

  • If you need to pave farther up the side road (e. g., in order to paint a crosswalk or construct a curb ramp), just move your paving limit up the side road accordingly (still perpendicular to the side road's baseline).

Finding the center point of each inscribed circle requires an iterative solution with the parallel-offset tool, since CAD software does not have a function to find it automatically. But, IMO, this definition does a great job of drawing something that at least looks good intuitively. It still can be considered underinclusive, but it serves as the least inclusive solution that doesn't leave huge lacunae (unlike the first definition). If you want to be a little more inclusive, you can do so easily (without having to go to the extreme of the second definition). And, unlike both of the first two definitions, it works well, not just with the clean lines and arcs of proposed gutterlines, but also with the ragged line strings of a survey of existing gutterlines.

Pragmatic addendum to the third definition:

  • In rare situations, a leg of an intersection may have two corners with wildly mismatched radii, causing the triangular area of difference between the upper bound and the lower bound on that leg to be very large. In such a situation, use your engineering judgment to determine whether the lower bound, or even the first definition, rather than the upper bound, should be used as the paving limit on that leg.

The small, boring box (1 2*) that will serve as my glorious custom house is approximately halfway through its two-month construction schedule.

  • Photograph 1: Foundation walls; sewer pipes

  • Photograph 2: Slab; wall framing in progress; air compressor for nail guns

  • Photograph 3: Walls without siding; siding ready for installation

  • Photograph 4: Fancy roof trusses, eliminating the need for interior bearing walls; water pipes and electrical wires in ceiling

  • Photograph 5: Wall framing; electrical boxes

I think I overheard one of the workers joke that his shed is bigger than this house. 😈

*For room dimensions, I measure to the face of the drywall, while the contractor measures to the face of the stud. Any other discrepancies between these two drawings should not be considered material.

Months ago, I posted about how (1) South Seaside Park, a discontiguous and neglected neighborhood of Berkeley Township, had won in court the right to secede from Berkeley Township and be annexed by the contiguous municipality of Seaside Park Borough, but (2) the Seaside Park Borough council still needed to vote to accept the land transfer. Now, the Seaside Park Borough council has finally voted in agreement.

  • Mostly-paywalled news article
  • Annexation-impact study conducted by a contracted consultant (finding that annexation would decrease the property-tax rate in Seaside Park Borough by 8 percent, from 1.774 mills to 1.631 mills annually)
  • Video of council meeting
    • 5:22: Start of relevant discussion
    • 15:25: A councilor mentions that, despite widespread criticism of the impact study, she did an informal sensitivity analysis on the figure of 8 percent using a spreadsheet provided by the consultant, and "we can be off by quite a bit before it turns into a negative scenario".
    • 16:45: The mayor discusses the fact that, regarding topics that the state's sloppily-drafted neighborhood-secession statute fails to cover (e. g., debt transfer), advisory judicial opinions on those topics are not available, so Seaside Park Borough will just have to negotiate in good faith over those topics with Berkeley Township, and hope that no lawsuits emerge from those negotiations.
    • 25:39: A representative of Berkeley Township points out more sloppy drafting. South Seaside Park is defined in the secession petition as including only the inhabited part, so that's the only part that Seaside Park Borough is annexing. But Seaside Park Borough, as part of annexation, has copied-and-pasted a Berkeley Township ordinance that imposes a particular zone, not just on the inhabited part, but also on an adjacent state park that will not be annexed. (See the map that I drew previously. In drawing that map, I erroneously assumed that South Seaside Park included the state park, but it actually does not include the state park.) Seaside Park Borough's lawyer says the error will be corrected.
    • 36:11: The petition organizer makes a speech.
    • 40:58: A person points out that annexation will overturn the budget that Seaside Park Borough just adopted. The mayor explains that, after annexation, Seaside Park Borough will have to get permission from the state government to adopt an amended budget.
    • 1:43:18: The big vote

Holy smokes I didn't realize you were actually building the house. I've been vaguely skimming your posts re: housing code and such as you I guess worked through the challenges you wanted to solve.

Very excited for you that it's actually coming together. Please continue to post construction updates. I'm very curious to see the end result of what was clearly a lot of careful consideration.

Input: Three interesting items

Output after 30 hours: Not only zero upvotes, but also zero downvotes

I feel compelled to give voice to my confusion. Did everyone see the first item, find it yawnworthy but not sufficiently objectionable to deserve a downvote, and just minimize the entire comment without even looking at the second and third items?

Did everyone see the first item, find it yawnworthy but not sufficiently objectionable to deserve a downvote, and just minimize the entire comment without even looking at the second and third items?

Yes

Your comment actually got me to go back and to read it, and that intersection is actually hilarious and an absolute monstrosity.

Your explanation/analysis is incredibly dense/written by an expert for an expert and as someone who likes civic design but who's expertise stops immediately at "likes civic design" I wanted to take something from it, but didn't really get anywhere.

In general, to be frank, I find some of your deep dives profoundly captivating and interesting, and some to be incredibly not interesting to me. I do not think you should change your posting habits at all however. You are quite smart and insightful about the things you like, and as the audience we can pick and choose what to engage with.

Speaking only for myself, I was distracted by the German/Autism quiz, followed the link, and didn’t read any further posts until coming back to this page just now. Plus it’s a holiday weekend, so a lot of people are probably busy.

Wouldn't an intersection be, any space where cars travelling on multiple roads could legally cover?

That fails to include shoulders and neutral areas.

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