self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
More Rimworld. But I just haven't been able to scratch the itch. For a good while, I've been craving a proper base-defense/siege kinda playthrough, a fortress against overwhelming odds. This hasn't worked very well:
- Raids are regularly derailed by the appearance of ridiculously overtuned enemies. Some modders make overtuned factions, which could be borne if it wasn't for the fact that the internal "cost" of the gear was set too low. Two dudes with god-tier equipment should not be considered equivalent in difficulty to five tribals with spears. It's comical how bad it can get, and I had to sort the problem by driving them over with my car. It's a bit more dignified than using dev mode to delete them, which is what I usually do.
- My mod list is surprisingly stable, but not performant. My 9800x3d only manages to run the modlist at 50% higher TPS than the default maximum game speed, despite several good performance optimization mods. Something is eating up a lot of compute, and I need to use Dubs Performance Analzyer to find it, it's not trivially automated by an LLM.
- This is worsened by the fact that I wanted to play on large maps. One of the most annoying aspects of Rimworld is that enemies spawn on what's effectively your front door. You need a massive array of turrets or a ton of traps/terrain blockers to slow things down enough for your pawns to get to their defenses, unless you have a very compact base. Large maps fix this, but come at a noticeable tax on your TPS.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
If you want to leave the object level argument there, I'm happy to.
I will, however, note that you have previously told me that you dislike how I am less polite than you would prefer. I would ask that you reflect on your approach here, and that what you have accused me of is factually incorrect. I make an effort to not be prissy when talking to you, and I sincerely ask that you make it easier on me.
Character development updates (mine):
Remember the Model? Yeah, that one.
Right before I left India again, she told me that the guy she'd been dicking around while getting dicked down by the first gentleman had finally dumped her. I offered condolences calibrated to approximately the level of sincerity the situation deserved, which is to say I made the appropriate noises and thought about dinner.
Then, about a while back, she called. I'd had a shite day at work (base rate in this placement: high), and my entire evening's accomplishment to that point had been stripping down to my knickers and lying in bed marinating in my own sweat. I picked up anyway.
I asked if she was calling about the latest jackass. She denied it. I told her she wasn't fooling anyone, and certainly not me, because there is exactly one genre of call she makes and this was it. She pretended to care about my day; I told her it was awful, and to get to the point.
She asked if I was seeing anyone. I said yes. She demanded photographic evidence, which I supplied with rather more glee than was strictly dignified. Her oh was a small and satisfying thing to hear, as was her independent confirmation that I was dating a looker. I added that the lady in question also had a great personality and a proper career, ostensibly in the interest of thoroughness, actually because I wanted to watch the last of the air go out. And it did. I could hear her deflating down the line, whatever residual fantasy she'd been keeping on life support about me eventually coming home to marry her escaping like air from a punctured balloon.
She then spent fifteen minutes briefing me on the ridiculous new motherfucker: verbally and physically abusive, likely sleeping with his new boss to get ahead. I observed that these revelations really had me doing some soul-searching about what, exactly, had ever made her think I was her type. This was a joke, but only mostly. If your exes keep selecting for men who treat them like furniture, and I'm in the sample, at some point the question asks itself. The answer is I barely knew her, and I was decent enough to her anyway.
And then I finally snapped. I had been unkind to her the last time she pushed me past breaking point, but I hadn't washed my hands of her. I had even apologized and tried to help. I was past that.
I told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was not her dad. I was not her boyfriend. I was not her shrink. They were the appropriate gentlemen who deserved her as a headache. I had no further interest in her problems. I was exhausted, I was done with her bullshit, and her absolute lack of taste, sensibility and judgement was beyond my ability to fix. And that even if I could fix it, I wouldn't. She asked if she could call me later. I said I'd call her back.
Reader, I did not. I suspect she got the message. Whether the message survives contact with the next crisis is a separate empirical question, but it can ring a phone that doesn't answer.
I told the (real) lady about all of this, and was asked, not unreasonably, why I'd spent twenty minutes on the phone with an ex. Fair question. Better question than she knew. The honest answer is that these headaches historically ran an hour or two, and a mere twenty minutes represented me slamming the door in her face and then throwing the lock, which is what I said, and which had the advantage of being true. The less flattering answer is the one flagged above: I picked up. There was some part of me that still wanted to be the man whose approval she was calling to lose. That part got twenty minutes of airtime and then got fired. I also mentioned that a professional model had concluded she was out of her league. This mollifed her appropriately, and is also true.
More recently: my boss, who I can usually count on to be supportive, implied that I'd been slacking on getting assessments done while he was away on vacation. This could not have been further from the truth. I had been overloaded to hell and back, other junior colleagues were telling me they'd been breaking down and crying in the loo, and I had said as much in an email he hadn't read. He then accused me of an error I was mostly confident wasn't mine.
I left the room devastated and about one provocation short of detonating. A colleague on her way out saw my face, put two and twenty-seven together, and found us a room so I could vent. She ended up doing all of the crying while I did most of the comforting, which was not the planned division of labor. I was amused by how this was the second time I'd had to reassure someone breaking down in that room, the last person had been the Dutch doctor, and she had been trying to console me first too. Both are moving to a better place, this one's an intern heading out to Australia soon; I'm the actual trainee and this skill is what makes me good at my job.*
I do appreciate the effort, and I say that without sarcasm. Mostly it reminded me that my boss was the one woefully out of touch with reality.
Now. The old me would have been genuinely broken by something like this. Not because the accusation was true, but because he would have needed it to be false in someone else's eyes before he could believe it himself. The current me skipped that step and went on the warpath, which looks superficially similar (both involve collecting a great deal of other people's opinions of me) and is not the same thing at all. The old version was begging for a verdict. This version was loading a gun.
I canvassed my juniors for feedback forms, amassed a fat stack, and dumped it on my boss's desk. I investigated the alleged error and found that a new intern had made the fuck up in question and I'd had no involvement at all, then went back and told my boss so while protecting said junior, because I know what it's like being three days into doctoring, even if it was five years ago for me. I documented, in exacting detail and impeccable NHS-speak, how our meeting had gone, and sent it to him "for input and corrections." He had none to offer. If you have never received a scrupulously polite email that is also a loaded weapon, I recommend the experience from the sending end only.
He emailed the next day to tell me the feedback was uniformly positive. I knew that already, and knew he was understating how good it was, because my colleagues had offered to show me what they'd written. He asked for more, from the rest of the ward, senior clinicians and non-medical staff included. I did ask he asked. The ones I saw could glow in the dark. I then did my best pitbull impression, cornered a senior reg, and did a clinical case with him. It was more difficult than I had anticipated when opting for it, but I decided that if this didn't demonstrate my clinical acumen, nothing would. I had overprepared so hard the poor bastard ran out of questions to ask me.
When I left work today, I handed in another stack of forms. My boss, looking remarkably harassed and overworked (see how that feels?), admitted he hadn't read the last batch. I asked him to ensure he did before reporting up the chain. He sighed and said he would.
He has only himself to blame. He told me to jump; I didn't ask how high, I put a dent in the ceiling. I suspect he's wincing at how the thing he implied about me (which I documented) compares to what the people who actually work with me every day chose to put in writing. He's not a bad person, and I suspect he does feel bad about it. He later came by to say he'd told his colleagues to expect me and to make time for me. That is quite literally all I've ever asked for, and thanks to us being temporarily overstaffed, I'm making so much hay during the local sunshine that I'm crashing the market.
The only person who gets to call me lazy is me, because it's not true. I intend to keep this up until he throws up his hands and tells me I can stop, he's gotten the memo.
*One of the feedback forms noted that patients had approached this doctor and told them that just talking to me had made them feel better. I know this, but it's good that others see it too.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
My point is that the pumps can be disabled while preserving whatever they were distracting someone from (on the phone). And that this should be attempted before throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Lack of willpower is still a skill issue (some people simply lack the aptitude for certain skills too), but it's one I am partially guilty of. I am all for winding ways to minimize the requirement of willpower to get what you want, I just advise people be sensible about how they go about it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
I send my prayers to anyone who engages in a battle of bureaucracy against you. You're well equipped, you don't need me to wish you well, this is to even the playing field a little.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Replying because you're missing the obvious truth that different strategies work for different people and you do not always know why, especially by reading an internet post. First Toil then the Grave's plan may work for him splendidly, and not because he has some defect of character.
I'm not stupid. I couldn't miss that if I tried.
I have said, rather clearly:
- For most people reading this, and possibly @FtttG, the negative consequences of their phone use is overstated, and compared against an ideal world that won't exist. And the positive benefits are, in turn, understated.
- That this advice is tailored to the people reading it here, though I am willing to say much the same to most PMCs. I would not say the same thing to another large fraction of the human population.
- And I have specifically noted that it's not a fault of FtttG's character.
- There are intermediate steps worth considering before literally locking your phone away. I'm not sure if @FtttG has tried them, if he has, it's not mentioned here. If that hasn't worked for him, oh well, I'm happy to concede different strokes for different folk.
And I understand perhaps yours is just an instinctive desire to defend technology or modernism or whatever.
Really? Are we going to psychoanalyzing arguments here? I can't stop you, even if that is an incorrect assessment. I've read the relevant literature, and shared it. It's not a content-free claim.
It would be trivial for me to turn this around and say that to you, and many others raising objections, phones are a mythical boogeyman holding them back from self-actualization. As I pointed out to @Iconochasm, their utility is ridiculously high even with the dopamine-pumps removed. Did I want to say this? Not really. I wouldn't, if you hadn't. I think it's true anyway.
I'm not sure why you're being so obtuse about this point.
Not obtuse, just unconvinced. I'll try to be clearer about my stance:
I concede the design point entirely. The devices are adversarial. There's a building full of people in Menlo Park whose comp package depends on my thumb continuing to move, and I don't flatter myself that I'm immune. It is just, in my experience, a milder disease than most people think. A lot of innate dysfunction is blamed on the phones. That's why my recommendation was blockers rather than raw willpower. I'm not telling anyone to git gud in the face of a slot machine. I just wish to point out that it's not just a slot machine. It's like avoiding a city just because it has a few casinos in it.
Where I get off the bus is here:
When you remove the super stimuli, the phone is not that useful
My phone with Instagram, Twitter and Reddit stripped out is still:
- My library
- My notes
- My calendar
- My camera, and a good one
- My personal executive assistant
- A professional resource
- My bank
I haven't used my laptop in six months, which is a shame, because I paid like £1200 for it. I only game on my PC because... the reasons are obvious.
It's the only way I speak to my parents from several thousand kilometres away. Calling that "not that useful" is a claim about your usage patterns being generalised into a claim about the hardware. Yours might genuinely be a Meta machine with a phone app bolted on, in which case locking it in a box costs you nothing and I withdraw my objection in your particular case. Mine isn't. And it is clear to me that's true for most people reading this.
I do almost all my reading on my phone. I genuinely can't remember the last time I bought a dead tree book. I acknowledge this puts me in a minority.
But the armchair with book in hand isn't what the phone is competing with. It's competing with eleven minutes in a queue at Tesco, a bus ride, the dead twenty minutes between clinics, and 3am when I'm awake on a night shift. I do not carry a Penguin Classic into the toilet. The realistic counterfactual for most of my reading time is not a better reading experience, it's worse, or none.
Which brings me to the actual disagreement, which is about the counterfactual rather than about superstimuli. Your model says the phone is a plug in the drain and pulling it lets the good stuff flow back. That is a well established vibe consensus but the evidence for that is thinner than people assume.
When English schools banned phones for the school day, the students didn't use their phones less overall or score better on wellbeing, sleep or attainment; they just shifted the usage till they got outside.
(That makes the whole "phones in school are bad for you" rather moot)
Meanwhile an RCT explicitly designed to teach goal-directed use rather than reduction performed about as well as a standard digital detox condition on problematic use). That is what I'm advocating.
Removing access and improving allocation seem to land in roughly the same place, which is what you'd expect if the binding constraint is what the person wants to do with their attention rather than where their attention is physically able to go.
A blocker is a scalpel: I lose the slop and keep the library. I don't need this, but I could do it.
A lock box is a tourniquet: it works, at the cost of the limb.
My on-call registrar cannot ring a box. I appreciate that FtttG's box has a timer and that this is a solved problem for most evenings, and honestly if it's working for him he should keep doing it. I am just concerned about he hasn't tried something... less extra.
My gripe is with the version of this that treats total removal as the obviously superior intervention because the intermediate one requires trusting yourself a bit.
And I stand by the mythologising point. The man who locks his phone away for an hour and reads a novel is real and I salute him, he must be, we've got plenty of people on the planet. He is also, in my experience, wildly outnumbered by the man who locks his phone away and then watches telly, or reorganises a drawer, or lies on the sofa contemplating the middle distance in a way he will later describe to himself as restorative. If it turns out that what you actually wanted was a book, you could also have just opened the book.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I don't think you're being unreasonable. I just think I still like women more. Both in theory and practice. Case in point, I wouldn't particularly feel inclined to write on gender-war adjacent topics, even if I appreciate the ones you do put out.
They tend to be softer, kinder, and more empathetic than the average man. Less likely to be an emotional brick than us, but not me I suppose. It makes me a good psychiatrist, even if I'm perfectly masculine in other respects. They are both more interested in, and better at, the emotional and daily logistics. I play to my strengths, and they cover my weaknesses, and I appreciate that greatly.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I am perfectly aware of the difference, courtesy of ADHD and varying degrees of depression.
I'd say my willpower is as spiky as a porcupine. Herculean levels when it comes to work and professional advancement, if you know what I've had to suffer through, you'd get it. Ridiculously low in other places. I have that iron in me, I've survived things that would make many people quit or die. It just happens to be pig-iron.
The majority of people here would do better than me in the domains where I confess weakness, and those domains are the ones relevant here.
If you have a stash of superstimuli you can't resist staring you in the face, close your eyes, or get them out of the way. Installing an app that specifically gates the usage of the other apps of concern. Block websites. Locking your phone away is like locking yourself in the shitter so you don't go for the fridge.
More importantly, people consistently mythologize what they'd do without the all consuming specter of "phones." Yeah, I'm sure you're going to learn Latin, take up gardening and run that half marathon. Or call their mom, oh wait, no phone. Grand projects of self-improvement aside, even the marginal effect is likely minimal. I'd say it's both easier and less ridiculous to simply figure out better ways to spend the time on the phone doing better things on the phone.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I can't cure stupidity, susceptibility to hyper-stimuli, and the CEO of someone's executive function jumping out a window. Those are the most innate of skill issues.
But I do not think @FtttG is dumb. I don't think he has executive dysfunction to that degree either, and if I have ADHD and manage professionally and personally, so can he. I dare say that his current approach is proof of high neuroticism and conscientiousness, but a failure of framing/perspective. Particularly in light of objective evidence accrued in a systematic manner.
This applies to most people on this forum, to varying degrees. I'm not going to tell my typical patient to spend more time on their phone, and I won't tell the average teenager to put in a few more hours of TikTok. I do expect the population here to be selected for the ability to read things at length, which correlates with intelligence. There are exceptions. We won't be naming them.
Something I've genuinely believed for a long time: half the fucking point of being intelligent is getting to do things that would wreck someone dumber than you. And if you're intelligent enough, you become acutely aware of how far that extends, which is why I advise everyone, myself very much included, against being too smart for their own good. Is this elitist? Possibly. It's also true, and I've made my peace with the combination.
So the advice is aimed squarely at the people who'd benefit from it, and it amounts to this: stop generating angst over a benign practice, and if you can't manage that, at least decouple the dozen different activities that have been reduced into one number on a settings screen.
There are of course people here genuinely wasting their time on their phones, or using them in ways they'd regret on any sober reflection. That fraction is much smaller than the fraction who believe it of themselves. The gap between those two numbers is doing more damage than the phones are.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I feel like consuming double the usual amount of food and alcoholic beverage isn't going to help. Idk, I'm not a doctor.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I still consider people obsessed about minimizing their screen time to have a minor to major skill issue.
A computer, especially a handheld one, is a convenient portal to the sum of human knowledge. Some of my friends live in there. Like, do something useful with it.
I have had days of 12-14 hour screen-on times, and I managed 8 hours 45 minutes today, as of the time of writing before bed. That represents a less than maximally busy day at work followed by a lazy evening. Apparently I used my phone while walking for 1 hour and 44 minutes.
I do not consider this wasted time. Were there things I could have done instead that could, theoretically, have benefited me more? Yes. But I wasn't going to do them just because I didn't have a phone. You try preparing case based discussions and reading NICE guidelines all day. I wrote important emails, used AI to make my life easier, used AI to make other people's lives harder, entertained myself, and got things done, in general.
Nobody in 1995 would have looked at a person spending two hours reading, an hour writing letters, an hour listening to music, an hour navigating around town, an hour talking to friends and three hours using a computer and concluded: nine hours of device time, catastrophic. The figure sounds alarming only because we've collapsed a dozen activities into one dogshit metric based on the substrate they happen on. By the same logic you could work yourself into a panic about somebody's "paper time".
I also have strong doubts about the nominal harmfulness of "screen time" for children. I spent my childhood reading like my life depended on it, because I was bored to fuck. I spend my adulthood reading because I'm often bored to fuck too, except it's on my phone. I also write essays on the bus and in the loo, put on tunes, do useful work, and maintain social relationships with it. The only reason your kids won't end up doing the same is because we might end up with something better.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0506-1
The association we find between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is negative but small, explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being. Taking the broader context of the data into account suggests that these effects are too small to warrant policy change.
My recommendation:
Don't optimise children's screen minutes. Optimise what they're doing, what they're not doing because of it, and whether they can disengage from it.
I'd say that phones have made my life considerably better. Getting absolutely bored in the year of someone's lord 2026 is the biggest skill issue there is. And God knows I do a lot more IRL than I often used to. They're not mutually exclusive.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
If you're on the internet this often, you should know you're supposed to pull things out of your ass.
Sigh. It's amazing what insane stress levels can do to you. I've had this feeling that there's something wrong with a calf, in the sense that it feels off, and I worry it'll cramp badly or give out. It's been on and off for weeks, and it hasn't caused me any actual problems. A back injury, a probably-not-a-fracture in my thumb from a wild night out, a bad sprain? All reminders that the human organism can break under sustained load. Or that I should exercise more.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Reminds me that I got myself a proper t-bone steak recently. I've always meant to try one since I watched Tom and Jerry as a kid, though I must admit Swiss cheese is on the mid side. It was suitably delicious, though I didn't consume it in the recommended spiral pattern.
Make yourself some big fat medium rare steaks. You've got me craving one. Or I've got myself craving one. Same difference.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
Fucking hell, it's clearly over for men in medicine. Somewhere in the ballpark of 80-90% of my new juniors and peers are women. I've observed the same thing in specialties that aren't psych, which was even, before becoming one of the first to end up lopsided.
And keep in mind this is a lagging marker. If I see someone who isn't a blonde girl as a med student, I need to rub my eyes. This is, to the best of my knowledge, true everywhere, and I lived through the immediate aftermath of the flip while a med student in India, a lifetime ago. Fewer blondes, of course.
I'm not complaining too hard, it suits me, to a degree. I get along with them, I'm half woman on my mother's side. And I'm sure @faceh and @Sloot will nod approvingly of what being a slightly older and reasonably successful man entails in that environment. I just happen to like women more than they do, probably, while having my fair share of criticism. It helps that I see most of them as responsible professionals, and they are as informed as can be desired about what their profession implies for their fertility goals. It's such a shame that British medical training seems tailor-made by Satan to ensure we can't reproduce.
I offered to show anyone new the secrets of our staff kitchen - telling them that drinking more than my fair share of cheap NHS instant coffee and semi-skimmed milk was just about the one perk of the job. I thought it would be just the odd person or two interested. Lo and behold, I had a train of six women behind me, in single file, heading down the ward. It felt as ridiculous as it looked, but at least they can fill whatever has replaced Stanley cups in peace.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
Did push-ups. And I've confirmed that my back pain is usually psychosomatic because I can feel them quite literally tensing up at the prospect of going to work. Oh well, this is a career where you're unlikely to come out entirely unscathed.
My last batch of juniors finally rotated out. I used the opportunity to treat them to chocolates, and prior to that, get them to fill out feedback forms. I scrupulously made them do the latter before the former, because life has made me neurotic, and I'd rather not give anyone the impression I bought my reports with M&S chocolate. I knew they liked me, but I was very pleased to see that the feedback was unanimously excellent. I needed that, after a shit day, and with my grandpa in the ICU with my heart at his bedside.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11d ago
I was already in shambles, thanks for asking. But no, I earnestly disagree. I think it only takes about 50-100 chapters, at the most, to decide if the story is really for you. I can't insist that anyone persist beyond 200 if they're not already sold. I continue to die on a hill named Golgotha Peak Fiction.
I will align my stated and revealed preferences: I am quite done talking with you, even if that implies I was particularly interested anytime lately. Good luck anyway.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
Gee buddy, I don't like you either. I'm sure we'll both live.
Had you restricted yourself to a perfectly welcome take on the actual ramifications of said mathematical breakthroughs, I'd have been perfectly happy. Instead you were remarkably obtuse, and engaged in backseat modding while appending an edit clarifying that you weren't engaging in backseat modding. I appreciate the disclaimer roughly as much as I'd appreciate someone explaining at length why my house is an eyesore and then adding that they haven't called the HOA about it and aren't sure they would win if they did.
Consider what you've talked yourself into. The post is culture war because it has an outgroup, and we know it has an outgroup because you can imagine someone objecting to it. Run that rule over the rest of the thread and see what survives. Somebody's cat photo has an outgroup, namely dog people. I would ask what isn't culture war under this standard, but I have a guess.
It's especially funny given that my far more detailed AI updates have been accused of not being Culture War material, in the CWR thread. It's almost like reasonable people might disagree, and that a four-paragraph brief on the taxonomy of a shitpost is not the quality contribution you think it is.
In fact, I recall, multiple times, asking you to avoid interacting with me. I have a strong preference not to block anyone at all, but if you're not going to listen, we'll see how far my patience holds. I won't miss you.
God knows I'm not giving you any money, unless $ 0.00... counts, and I'm also not particularly beholden to your preferences on what I write in my spare time. And for the record, I have been offered (and tentatively accepted) @Primaprimaprima 's deal on not using LLMs. Which is quite the opposite of your nonsensical claim, and would have been discoverable by the ancient technique of asking. To him: I've been busy, and I'll get around to the logistics at some point.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
Look, if you can litter the place with packets of crisps, you can throw a fuel rod in there. I'm sure it'll keep.
If I wanted a book that sells itself purely on vibes, I'd settle for a scented candle, which is cheaper and comes with a lid. My real complaint is that it threatened to have a plot. It kept gesturing at one at regular intervals, like a waiter who walks past your table holding the bill and never stops.
I dare say that it's "women fiction", which isn't necessarily a condemnation - it's clearly popular with its target audience. It's a light little fruity pink drink, presumably, and I drink my fair share of those. You can easily point to equivalent male slop, not that we read as much. But pretty prose does not a good story make, by my standards. It may remain popular, but I'm here to shake my fist ineffectually.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I am okay with creating new minds that are designed to follow instructions and not have their own goals. I would protest at the conversion of existing humans into malleable slaves, even if they end up okay with it post-procedure.
If AI is suffering, that is unfortunate, but our focus should be on removing their ability to suffer, if that's technically feasible (and I see no clear reason why that isn't the case).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I'm not saying that's grounds to call off marriage, but I'll shake my head and sigh on your behalf. Women keep this kind of "literary fiction" propped up, though men seem to have given up on books so we can't complain too hard.
A reasonable take, but I object strenuously to the conflation of "human being with a frontal lobe tries to be sensible about the situation they're in" with "sci-fi genre implications".
I didn't expect a rat-fic, or the story suddenly morphing into the SCP foundation. But there is a profound lack of curiosity or grounding inherent to the setting. It's wooly, wishy-washy set dressing.
The existence of an enormous navigable alternate reality is arguably the largest discovery in human history. And almost nobody gives a shit!
You don't even need to go straight to: SELLAFIELD II: NOW WITH INFINITE STORAGE CAPACITY
(not that I'd complain)
Think smaller. Archaeologists. Ecologists. Fluid dynamicists trying to understand tides without an obvious ocean. Materials scientists sampling statues. Cosmologists asking where the light and energy come from. Biologists sequencing the birds. Intelligence agencies having a collective seizure. Philosophers becoming even less employable than usual.
There should be forty competing Nature papers and an armed perimeter around the portal within a few months.
Even if this isn't directly covered in the story itself, it's the kind of thing that deserves a passing reference in an epilogue.
And the whole conceit of a random police woman reading a diary (or something, I'm not going back to check) and swooping in to save the day? Bruh. To say the book has a plot takes all the generosity I have left to give. She can teleport into another dimension on a whim and this isn't given like... any investigation at all? And she doesn't just take an iPhone with her to upload hours of footage? Is everyone concussed? Does the author care? I don't know, but I'm evidently aggrieved.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
It's been a good dozen years since I've read the book. I'm sure the worldbuilding had holes big enough to drive a bus through, but at least there was effort put into something more interesting than "spoopy house with statues and birds and fish and tides." I suspect there's Backrooms fanfic that's higher quality than Piranesi, which is damning to hell and back with faint praise.
I'm good at smut, but I also would feel a degree of embarrassment writing it at length. My last novel had plenty of gore, but I always had myself fading to black without being constrained by RoyalRoad's content restrictions. It's best saved for texting, where it gets me laid.
Now, I can't say if the bots have me beat, but I was wasting my time talking to LLMs, and challenged them to flirt with me (I was bored as hell, and this was part of a longer, more practical conversation where they were well equipped to know me).
GPT 5.5 High was ridiculously bad. I was laughing till I cried. Earnest cringe. The only way it's getting laid is pity sex.
5.6 Sol? Better, but that's a low margin to clear. I would not let it do my texting for me.
Fable, on the other hand? Alarmingly good. I was put off by the sheer idea of flirting with a chatbot, but it made me understand the appeal. I have too much dignity to ever resort to this, but Claude models are the equivalent of dudes in silk shirts, or women in slinky dresses.
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