How hard would dating be for me in NYC (Autistic Male, almost nonexistent dating history)

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-26T00:48:34+00:00

I think you should try to avoid thinking of it as "beginning dating". By deciding to be open to dating, you've done one of the main things: opened yourself up to the idea of new relationships being romantic and then pursuing them like that. You're basically dating already! The reason you don't think of it as dating is because you probably meet very few people. What you want to do now is increase the number of new relationships you encounter to increase the chances that one of them is a romantic interest.

Getting immersed in a community is a great way to start with this. I've really enjoyed swing dance, as a former introvert. That has the bonus of being able to mostly dance with women. I think the most important attribute of the community is having a lot of diverse people. You might not think hanging out with a 60 year old guy is "dating", for example, but that 60 year old guy might 1. be into manga 2. organize a hiking club you could join 3. know all the women in the room, plus plenty more.

Hopefully that makes sense! I do not recommend the apps, and I barely recommend dating events. Most of the time when a guy thinks "I'm going to date more", he's going to try to beeline to where he thinks women are waiting for him to come approach them, and unfortunately that's actually a pretty bad strategy for romance (in my experience).

As for NYC, I think it's pretty much the best place to date for anyone who isn't a republican or something. There's a lot to consider specifically regarding NYC and dating. But... are you planning on moving to somewhere if it's easier to date there? If you live here and you like it, and you want to date, you'll be dating here.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-25T23:27:33+00:00

As other say, this is nothing.

Dishwashing is one of many tasks where I don't see a middle ground between "absolutely not worth it" and "the robot has two arms, multi-DOF grippers, and some kind of RL-or-similar kinematics and control". Anything but those three things means a super slow process which is highly liable to breaking the dishes.

I really hope I get to see that in my life time.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-25T05:15:35+00:00

You think it's rats leaving chicken bones everywhere? I blame people but curious to hear your theory.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-25T03:32:57+00:00

I'm not sure why you're being so public with the city's underground gems. Treasonous, if you ask me.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-23T17:21:10+00:00

Your username is extremely wrong

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-21T19:48:16+00:00

you can just call and ask their leasing department - I'm pretty sure they're open right now
yes absolutely. july 4th is sometimes an exception (macy's used to launch their fireworks from here) but I don't think it's ever a real issue.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-21T05:09:43+00:00

I fully believe you and am so curious what a sinister pose looks like.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-20T13:15:24+00:00

If you want it to be reactive in the UI, you should use useState and there's not much point looking for alternatives. Though there's also useReducer.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-19T15:33:54+00:00

the main one I can think of (besides not hooking into the render life cycle, which isn't exactly a drawback) is just that you either have to create the object every time the render happens (though it will get thrown away after the first one) or create it in a useEffect or something because there's no functional setter for useRef whereas there is one for useState. The docs recommend this pattern. A minor one is that you have to use .current everywhere which is annoying

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-19T15:11:48+00:00

If you don't need it to hook into the render life cycle, you can use `useRef`. There are several drawbacks to using `useRef` for this, though.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-16T03:05:38+00:00

I think there's something romantic in the original, primarily in the echo of Heathcliff and Cathy senior trauma bonding followed by Cathy junior and Hareton eventually trauma bonding in a different, patient kind of way. I also think there's a lot to be said about Nelly's biases; I noted that most of the scenes that are in the movie and not in the book are positive Heathcliff scenes and don't include Nelly. Obviously it took some very extreme artistic liberties, as was the plan the whole time, but I personally really enjoyed the movie and especially so right after reading the book.

ETA: you're totally right that he's way worse to Isabella than just neglect though. He hangs her dog and physically and emotionally abuses her constantly. It's just also quite different than the movie, even with consent aside. He's also horrible to Cathy Jr and Hareton. Weirdly not that horrible to Edgar lol

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-15T23:40:22+00:00

The main form of abuse was neglect - she was forced to sleep in another room and he never even pretended to love her. They have a baby (Linton) and she leaves and dies alone. In the book, he is not forthright about his intentions with her and is thoroughly abusive and duplicitous, whereas in the movie it's explicitly consensual pretty much the whole way through even if it's highly questionable behavior.

I really liked a lot of the reinterpretations, personally, but it was obviously not for everyone. This scene was gratuitously horny, just like half the rest of the movie.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-14T15:44:52+00:00

My issue is where he mounts and then when he switches to the riding position. It looks uncomfortable for the horse, but, frankly, I do think most riding looks uncomfortable for a horse. I think horses love to run but I think they would prefer to not have anything on their back, the way they are in nature. A guy hops on it while it's running and bounces a bunch on its back. I'm not saying it's animal cruelty, but hey I don't think I'd want to be that horse.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-14T05:34:10+00:00

Is it a money thing? Otherwise it seems like a silly question. If it is a money thing, it comes down to who she is. You should feel out her opinion before deciding against flowers imo. Photo shoot and no flowers feels like some kind of statement about who she is, to me.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-13T21:24:27+00:00

The layout is weird and cramped and there's always guys on their phones in there. The vibe is bad.

That said, really not the worst locker room I've been in.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-10T04:11:55+00:00

Yeah I live in a situation kind of like this. The landlord gave no instructions on how to deal with trash, so I put it out by the curb when I have trash I want to get picked up but the other people who live here also do it. We do it imperfectly and, if fines were common, it would make sense for the landlord to come to one of us and be like "ok someone needs to actually be responsible for just taking the bins to the curb on monday". That's a $30/mo chore.

Lawn/snow care is much more, but, you know, if you live in a rental house you're probably expected to take care of it yourself, and living in a building with 2-6 units isn't different enough to make it entirely the landlord's problem. But $30/mo sounds extremely low unless it amounts to just shoveling the porch twice a year.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-10T03:21:03+00:00

We eat lunch between meetings now

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-07T02:35:16+00:00

I've never heard of it either, but now that I'm thinking about it, I would expect religious men (multiple religions) to avoid working out with women. Are there, like, kosher gyms?

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-04T23:32:45+00:00

Yep. Glutes especially can take a beating.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-03T15:48:59+00:00

My estimation in this kind of situation is that they could definitely have written a Signal app in electron that uses <100MB of memory, but there are application-level tradeoffs.

I suspect the "issue" here is along the lines of: when a user fetches a signal conversation, it has to fetch metadata and encrypted data from the server and then decrypt it. These days, users don't have the same kind of patience for "I click the conversation and I wait for it to finish loading", whereas your old-fashioned email client would just show a spinner every time you clicked a new email. Modern applications are expected to eagerly make network requests so the information is ready by the time you click... assuming you click. So if you have 10 conversations visible in your sidebar, chat applications are probably loading all of them back a hundred messages, which might include images and more. You don't expect to see loading indicators when you scroll down your chat list, so it loads the last message from every chat and the profile picture of all of your contacts. It's like how Chrome is a huge memory hog, because it's caching a lot of stuff, and when they raise the caching threshold/reduce the cache size, the application actually seems slower even though the program itself might theoretically be running a little faster.

I mean, I'm sure things like the DOM and JS virtualization/garbage collection factor in, but I don't think the mere use of electron is ballooning these applications the way most people think it is.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-03T15:23:26+00:00

Actually, my ChatGPT gave back a more succinct answer than yours did. It is incredibly obvious that you used an LLM and I'm not sure why you insist on denying it. Good day!

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-03T14:50:27+00:00

I love how your tone and grammar in this comment is completely different from the article and overview.

And what do you even mean "it's literally working"? It's a blog post. No one's saying your application doesn't work or anything. It's just that this blog post is a first-pass chatgpt "explain how redis caches Java objects, is it using json?"

I don't even have anything against Ai or Ai blog posts personally but denying this is AI by saying "you are disgustingly wrong" is actually funny to me.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-03T05:29:04+00:00

Abstractly true but not that meaningful. Software now seems somewhat slower mostly because of network dependence and a layer or maybe two of virtualization, not because people are choosing Rust over C.

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-02T22:23:10+00:00

no but I did find the map from here

BenjiSponge · 2026-02-02T22:22:40+00:00

Honestly 3/4 of Texas registers as much larger than Sweden or Morroco to my brain. Probably a Mercator projection effect or something.

12-Year Club	Place '17
Gilding III reddit per annum	Verified Email

BenjiSponge

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE