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Wellness Wednesday for May 7, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Can anyone recommend me a book on Internal Family System or related modalities that explore multiplicities in your mind and how to address the ones that you may associate with negative behavior? I'm very woo-conscious (for better or worse) and I would like that not to interfere when starting out, as it appears there is something there.

Schwartz (the guy who coined IFS) has some books. I didn’t read it all but liked “You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For”.

Also pretty sure both Bessel Van Der Kolk (The Body Keeps The Score) and Gabor Mate have written about IFS positively in their books.

Thanks for the recommendation! Would you also recommend books by those two authors you've mentioned? I'm mainly interested in addressing an inner critic and not so much real trauma.

Gabor Mate in particular has a very broad definition of trauma. I.e. it’s a lot more than what is typically set down. I would recommend his books, yes.

I have a 7 year old. He's never played a video game outside of a DIY version of online chess against me.

I notice a lot of kids play Minecraft. I've never played it. This is a little odd since the entire reason I have a career is because I wanted to get into game development and learned to program C.

I would like to expose him to video games since I believe they have upside, but I'm pretty worried modern games are crack and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.

He has an excellent attention span right now and we play a lot of card (MTG) and board games (Catan Jr) and I don't want to ruin that. Other families say once their kids play video games they stop caring about all of that other stuff and see their attention spans go to shit.

We homeschool him so he's not exactly surrounded by other kids trying to relate to him re: games but it's only a matter of time.

My daughter is about to turn 4, and her crack right now are sugar and any form of media consumption. For the latter, there are gradations of addictiveness ranging from oral storytelling to getting to watch children's TV shows. My appproach is simply the following - if I notice that she gets riled up about not being given something, and focuses on it to the exclusion of all else, and throws a tantrum when her alotment runs out, and is unusually dysregulated when she does get it, then she just plain doesn't get it anymore. Life is full of things to do, even for a 3-year-old. It doesn't have to be sugar and screens. The reverse side of this coin is, of course, that I need to be available for her all day long. If I tell her she can't get what she wants, I need to offer an alternative. I guess the historical approach would have been to just send her off to play with the neighbors' kids or her siblings, but alas, she's an only child in an atomized society. But in between hitting the playground, playing ball, riding her bike, visiting relatives, going swimming, doing chores together, reading books and playing the occasional infuriating board game, a day can be passed.

I play games myself; more than is good for me I suppose. I would say I have it in check - I only do so after the little one is in bed, and only briefly and up to a pre-set goal (e.g., play one match of Nebulous and take notes, finish that mission in Cyberpunk, concluce war preparations in a 4X game, make one run in a roguelike, etc.) or until a fixed time limit after which I retire to read and/or sleep. Still, not playing games at all would probably be better? I'd get more reading done, I guess, or sleep a little earlier. I doubt I'd use the time productively since I'm usually thoroughly tired by those times of day. But if I had to point at something that playing games does for me, I'd probably come up pretty blank. It's obviously an indulgence.

My wife is addicted to her phone and stares at it constantly. Her favorite parenting method is to switch on the TV or some other electronic media. Lately she's taken to playing PC games again, and does so whenever she thinks the kid is occupied (because I'm around, or the kid is on the toilet, or the kid and me are going outside), and simply continues when the kid is back again and is actually offended and angry when I tell her that this behavior is dumb. Screens are a hell of a drug. I expect this to be a phase on my wife's part, but I really don't see how to maintain any sort of screen discipline when this is what our daughter gets to observe. Oh hey, I'm wifeposting again. Let's stop here.

For video games, I have no plans for her. If she really wants to game at some point, I'lll run the same rules as for everything else - she may, in moderation and with clear limits, but if she throws tantrums about it then I'll put a stop to it again for a good long while before we try again. Is this good parenting? I have no idea.

Don't.

Treat video games as you would sugary drinks, staying up past midnight, sleeping until mid morning. Delay the acceptance of these habits as long as possible, until the likelihood of them becoming habits dwindles and a certain ability to self-regulate has developed. The trade-off is simply not worth it.

I never played video games growing up (well we didn't have them, although I played Adventure and Pong on my friend's Atari), nor even was I allowed in principle to buy comic books, which were seen as brain rotting by my parents. By the time I could buy them on my own I just wasn't that interested.

Others may disagree. My sons now are fixed to their phones and often playing some game which, because of its design, not only pulls in their attention but cannot be, as in the old days, simply paused, without suffering some in-game loss. Predictable tension occasionally ensues.

In any case the toothpaste will make its way out of the tube, it's only a matter of time. In Japan I'd never homeschool as the socialization aspect of school is vital to functioning in society, but I am no longer very savvy how anything works in the US.

Seconded. I would no more introduce a child to gaming than I would introduce them to porn, or gambling, or alcohol. Or social media, for that matter.

Video games are fundamentally synthetic work, presenting you with fake skills to master and providing you with illusory rewards. They are explicitly designed to be much more fun and addictive than any real work could possibly be. And maybe this would be fine if we lived in a post-scarcity world where there was no real work to be done, or if at the very least if you were already financially independent and romantically successful and there was nothing left for you to do but enjoy life. Anything short of that and video games become a permanent drain on your ability and willingness to get things done; "devourers of life’s potential" as jimrandomh called them.

Any purported educational benefits of video games are bogus. All research on transfer on learning is that it doesn't exist. You don't get good at X by doing completely different activity Y that arguably has some kind of underlying similarity to X; you get good at X by doing X and by training under somebody who is better than you at X.

I game, but I would have been better off if I had never been introduced to the hobby. At most, some of the very best video games I have played (Metal Gear Solid, Fire Emblem, Days of Ruin, Cave Story, Iji, etc.) have provided approximately the same level of enjoyment, emotional release, and intellectual stimulation as a great movie or a good novel, except that they took much longer to do so (your average video game takes 20+ hours to beat, compared to 2 hours for a film and however fast you can read a book). At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.

Any purported educational benefits of video games are bogus. All research on transfer on learning is that it doesn't exist.

As an anecdotal counter point: I played through the "Age of Empires 2" campaign at around 13 years old. Not only did it teach me more about history than the entire middle school curriculum, it also awakened my love for history. The combination of both lead to perfect grades in all my history classes till I graduated high school.

AoE2 is an exceptionally well done game, and arguably stands undefeated in almost every metric used to judge a real time strategy game, even today - so this is by no means an automatic result of video gaming. But it is one possible result.

Kerbal Space Program (which reignited my passion for rocketry long after studying mechanics at university) and Dwarf Fortress (which is the source of 99% of my knowledge about minerals, ores and metal smelting) are two other examples I would have no trouble letting my kids play, once they are around... 12?

They are explicitly designed to be much more fun and addictive.

A quote below from your article linked in the above line.

I leave you with a final argument from fictional evidence: Simon Funk’s online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens - not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children. Perhaps the demographic collapse of advanced societies happens because the market supplies ever-more-tempting alternatives to having children, while the attractiveness of changing diapers remains constant over time. Where are the advertising billboards that say “BREED”? Who will pay professional image consultants to make arguing with sullen teenagers seem more alluring than a vacation in Tahiti?

“In the end,” Simon Funk wrote, “the human species was simply marketed out of existence.”

Solid points.

That all said, switching gears to adult stuff.

I game, but I would have been better off if I had never been introduced to the hobby. At most, some of the very best video games I have played (Metal Gear Solid, Fire Emblem, Days of Ruin, Cave Story, Iji, etc.) have provided approximately the same level of enjoyment, emotional release, and intellectual stimulation as a great movie or a good novel, except that they took much longer to do so (your average video game takes 20+ hours to beat, compared to 2 hours for a film and however fast you can read a book). At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.

We're in adult entertainment territory here and I suppose I would disagree with this. Steam tells me I've played Cyberpunk 2077 for about 25 hours or so and I'd say I've enjoyed it a lot more than any movie. Maybe even more than 12x ~2 hour movies, though the median movie is bad.

The art direction in Cyberpunk is top notch and often inspiring and while some of the storylines are camp, some of them are really thought provoking and interesting. It's very good interactive sci-fi and I don't want it to end, though I'm near the end of the expansion pack now.

If I were playing video games 10 hours a week constantly chasing that high I might reconsider the category. But Cyberpunk is like an hour or two every few weeks right now. Seems fine.

At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.

Yeah I hear this. I've only played like 20 hours of the first or maybe second Civilization in my life, when I was a kid, and it taught me a bunch, but I could see how if this grew to 1000 hours between all of the sequels I'd feel like they were a loss.

I suppose in my ideal society I would have access to video games but most people who seem to ruin their lives with them would not.

At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.

Note that Minecraft is also in this category; the fact that it's like this but without any of the optimization/active engagement in the gameplay makes me feel like I'm waking up from the Matrix. I really don't understand why people like this game at all (much less why the modding community exists, to say nothing about its size), though admittedly it's much easier to play with friends who don't have that... anxiety? about it.

Terraria puts more work into being actively entertaining to play and less intrinsically complicated, and it was always the better game.

I'm staring down the barrel of this as well, my daughter is 5. We play a smattering of board games with her, with the occasional concession (Carcassonne, Ingenious, Kingdomino, My First Castle Panic), and she's watched me play some old games (Super Mario Brothers, Gradius, Galaga). I'm trying to plant the seeds of good behavior by choosing games that have a natural end time (1 credit, 3 lives, etc) and then walking away when I'm done. I also emphasize that I finish all my "daddy chores" after dinner, and she has to have her teeth brushed and get ready for bed before she can watch me play.

Lately she hasn't really cared to watch me play anything, and has preferred I read Lord of the Rings to her instead.

My wife has most of the same fears you do about video games devouring her attention, but none of the first hand experience to discern addicting slop from a fun game, so it's all scary to her.

Personally, I think going with old, offline, preferably couch coop experiences is best. Any old two player NES or SNES game or old arcade games. I have a retro lan in my office, and that may come into play at some point, but it's not part of the plan at the moment. I plan to keep it limited, and keep it in person and social within the friends and family. I do want to avoid hard time stops though. I knew kids who's parents put everyone on strict 15m time limits, and it drove me up a wall when I'd be having a really good run in say, Super Mario Brothers, and they booted me off in World 5 with 4 lives left. I do want my kid to have that sense of accomplishment that video games can give you, and not cutting her legs out from under her with arbitrary limits. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it I suppose.

I knew kids who's parents put everyone on strict 15m time limits, and it drove me up a wall when I'd be having a really good run in say, Super Mario Brothers, and they booted me off in World 5 with 4 lives left. I do want my kid to have that sense of accomplishment that video games can give you, and not cutting her legs out from under her with arbitrary limits. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it I suppose.

As a child I was given a restriction of 10 minutes a week with a Gameboy, including starting up the game, and the only game I got was one of the first-gen Pokemon games. It was not fun. I don't think I ever got past Erika before the Gameboy or the cartridge died.

I kind of made up for it by binging the shit out of different Pokemon games later when I had access to a computer and learned what emulators were.

Rofl. 10 minutes per week is a joke. Cruel and unusual punishment.

I'm pretty worried modern games are crack

This is true of many modern games (nearly anything you can play on a phone...) but not all.

and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.

This is true of nearly all games, both modern and ancient. Minecraft is a great way to share a game world with your kids, but unless/until you go down the "making a microcontroller out of redstone" path, it's not an educational game. By far the greatest educational benefit we've seen from any video games is the simple fact that our kids will happily do extra educational activities to earn a little more of the limited "screen time" we allot for them.

MTG and in-person gaming is always going to be less "damaging" than vidyas. I strongly disagree with the other comment here about that. Especially if you're getting them exposed at 7, they'll get over the insane excitement phase before the most important part of their development, and you still have a huge amount of control over when they play (What are they gonna do? Drive themselves to FNM and invest in a $300 booster box? I think MTG sucks compared to 10 years ago but whatever.

Another point for it over modern video games is they're all completely devoid of a social element. Every single one is locked down for no cross-gamer communication. To me this is a point against them - yes you're developing hand-eye coordination and problem solving, but you're doing so in isolation.

I'm a couple of years behind you, but my plan is to replay co-op games with my kids to start and give them single player games to get into. Once they're older I may open up the floodgates for multiplayer stuff, but probably I'll have them scratch that itch with MTG and board. We'll see!

My father made me play and complete some of his "old man" video games before he would allow me to get a gamecube when I was around your son's age in 2001. Mainly it was Dungeon Master for the Atari ST. Things are different now with the always-online attention farming microtransaction slop that we call modern video games - but maybe some older titles/consoles at first. I cant imagine what my brain would be like if I was exposed to something like Fortnite at age 7.

I don't myself play MTG and board games (that much), but I sorta knew guys who did in college. If I am in uncharitable mood , the MTG/Warhammer/tabletop looks almost as bad as gaming. It can be huge time-sink, which can ruin your education / early career transition, it becomes a "hobby" that furthers no other adult life goals, and your peers are likely to play inordinate amount of video games, anyway. Phone media is the technological designer drug, video games are the 80s crack epidemic, in comparison MTG is more wholesome, but in way as cocaine was when they put it into Coke.

I am only guess here, but I would recommend:

(1) Diet of limited amount of computer games, but important thing is not only the time limits but developing the mental muscle to cut off the "one more turn in Civ" getting in way of other more adult priorities.

(2) Try to avoid them starting socializing with kids who are failing at that.

MTG/Warhammer/tabletop looks almost as bad as gaming

There's board games, then there's those. I suspect the people playing things like Dominion or Seven Wonders generally would have a more limited relationship with the hobby than dedicated MTG and Warhammer players.

I do wonder if there is a way to both participate in "lifestyle games" like these without it being an undue weight on everything else in life.

I'm of two minds with regards to this. On one hand I wish that my parents would have been stricter about video games. I sunk so many hours into CK2, Civ, Dark Souls,etc. that could have been spent hanging out with friends in real life (perhaps one of the reasons I don't have any friendships remaining really from this period), learning a language, or just chilling out/running slightly more. On the other hand, these games got me interested in history and geography (CK2, Civ), and philosophy (Dark Souls). Also my ex-girlfriend and her siblings were raised with no video games/social media. It didn't really help at all: she still got addicted to instagram/tiktok, her brother still got addicted to video games in adulthood.

To synthesize, I think some kind of exposure is good to be able to handle the super stimuli in adulthood, but I would recommend some kind of limits to be put in place. My parents let me play video games for 2 hrs Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Sometimes I would go over a little, but these limits were pretty well enforced. Maybe you could do something like this?

Making incremental progress towards my 200 snatch goal this week. Got up to 116 without any lingering pain. Although the next day some of my calluses were developing gnarly blisters that just ripped off without much effect the next time I worked out. I am hitting a limit where around snatch 80 or so, whatever chalk I had on my hands is long since gone, and its wrecking my grip fighting my sweating palms to keep hold of the bell. Also makes the blistering way worse when I have to keep a deathgrip on the handle because anything less just lets the sweat take the kettlebell away. Ordered a chalk bag I can use to refresh my off hand, and we'll see how that goes. If I can get up and over 120 without pain, I'm curious to see what my next plateau will be, since that's where my back gave out hard last time.

Amusing post if you think of the dirtier meaning of the word

[...] If your incremental progress towards snatches lasts more than 4 hours, seek urgent medical care at the nearest Emergency Department. [...]

Amazing finish

That was my initial reading as well

Whelp, negative WW update this week. Wrestling focused class 8pm last night. It's late everyone is tired but we're pushing it. I match up with an 18 year old who's a national level competitor, but I've got 70 pounds on him. I actually typically enjoy rolling with him, it's speed and skill and ferocity against sheer size and strength, like some Planet Earth clip of a Wolverine fighting a moose.

He tried to hit a pretty basic slide by and idk what happened but his elbow caught me in the upper lip and my lip cut open bad. Million to one shot, never seen it happen before. I immediately went to bathroom to look and the sucker was deep, so I cleaned up, told the coach I wouldn't be in tomorrow, and went to an urgent care. Six stitches later, I think I'm on a liquid diet for a while and a couple weeks out of BJJ.

Anyway with a huge ugly cut on my lip, what are some good quotes about scars to throw out there? I've already burned through The Replacements and Fight Club in the gym group chat, and I'm probably going to need a bon mot for everyone I speak to today.

I think I'm on a liquid diet for a while

Do you have a go-to for a liquid diet?

I find Hule Black acceptable if prepared in a blender and given a few hours to hydrate. I wouldn't say it tastes good, but it's not as offensive tasting as some of the bad reviews would suggest. The ready to drink is convenient, but has worse macros for some reason.

I've never been brave enough to try a chicken, broccoli, and OJ blender shake. I have met at least one person IRL who's tried it though, so it's not just a meme. Claimed it was fine. I imagine you can sub cooked rice or oats and bone broth for the OJ carbs.

If you're already going to the trouble of making it in a blender, I recommend throwing in some fruit for extra flavor. My husband will blend up Huel with fresh apples and cinnamon and it's pretty great.

Do you have a go-to for a liquid diet?

Not at all. I typically just use ON protein powder and work from there. Idk if it still hurts to chew three days from now I don't know what I'll do.

I did soylent for a bit, always found the original flavor ("Pancake Batter") to be my favorite. Would unflavored/sweetened be the closest there?

Did you replace real food with it?

I've never tried soylent, but had a coworker who switched to hule. He's the one that told me about it. I think Hule Original is probably the closest. It doesn't have a bunch of sugar like soylent but I think does have artificial sweeteners, if that matters to you.

I replaced lunch with Hule black. For sure saves time over meal prepping, and is very macro friendly.

I thought Huel was pretty good but then they switched all their products to pea protein and just can't stand it. It tastes similar to puke.

Getting sidelined by an injury is the worst. I remember when I was doing martial arts, there was still ample I could do injured. Always something I could practice. Of course I was in my 20's then, healed faster, and had way more drive.

Not sure how that works in grappling arts though, since I've never done one. I always had the impression there wasn't much you could practice if you weren't rolling on the mat with people.

I'm not really sure how this is going to work out either. Depends how it heals up.

Part of me feels like I'm gonna get the stitches out and go right back to it. To a certain extent if I limit positions/moves I'm doing I can reduce the risk of getting hit in the face pretty substantially. So there's a lot I can do with minimal risk of reopening the wound. My buddy and I signed up for private classes with the head coach once a week, and I think I plan to get back to those first, because those will give me the most flexibility to train while just skipping anything risky. I could spend a month or two just working on open guard and De La Riva and leg locks, structuring drilling and sparring around those positions, and spend just as much time learning techniques and drilling full speed, and never be anywhere near a position to get whacked in the face again. Anyway the fear is likely more psychological, but I don't want to tear the same wound open again, it'll be a minute before I fully trust it.

Another part of me feels like I should probably take a prolonged break from BJJ altogether, because it could be months until I can just roll without restrictions/worries. I don't know when I'll feel super comfortable tying up with someone standing, the slide by that ended my night was a super routine move. And it's not that practical for me to totally limit the drilling aspects in the regular classes, because the coaches are just writing their curriculum without reference to me. In general, there's plenty for most people to do around BJJ without actually rolling, though you'll ultimately need to roll to get anywhere. The head coach at my gym is somewhat legendary for, when he started out, showing up to classes for months even though he couldn't train due to injury, just to watch and learn. For me though, it's as much a fitness routine as a dedication to mastering martial arts, and if I can't do the whole thing I might prefer another hobby.

get the stitches out and go right back to it

Do this. Don't worry until the same thing happens at least once more. Until then it's a fluke.

BJJ gets tougher as we age. I don't know how old you are, but there will come a time when you shouldn't feel comfortable tying up with someone standing unless you know them well. And for fitness alone I'd recommend almost anything else if you're mid thirties or over.

And for fitness alone I'd recommend almost anything else if you're mid thirties or over.

I'm curious why you'd say that?

For me it's been a useful change up to my routine, as it's very different from lifting or climbing.

For me (and I think I'm not unusual amongst older guys) it has a negative effect on my physical fitness.

It's enough of a pleasure that the risk of injury and the physical wear-and-tear is something I'm happy to mitigate by lifting and calisthenics (which I don't enjoy). The cardio benefits that were amazing when I started have diminished since I got good enough to be lazy and injury adverse enough to avoid going all out.

I love it, it's a mental escape at the end of a day and it's an attractively simple social group, but there are less destructive activities that I might have developed a taste for.

Bones heal, pain is temporary, and chicks dig scars.

Out of sheer boredom, I decided to cough up £20 for a ChatGPT Plus subscription. I'd heard good (or at least interesting) things about o3 as a model, and wanted to check it out.

It certainly is a trip. o3 is the most busy LLM I've ever interacted with. You can think of it as a highly neurotic coworker, who will, without any prompting, submit a Monte Carlo simulation of weather patterns when you ask it if it's going to rain tomorrow. This can occasionally be handy, and just as frequently, hilarious.

While the Chain of Thought isn't entirely intact (or divulged to you, the user), it's entertaining to watch it scurry about searching things, writing small snippets of code and using its tools. It loves tools.

Google has been so unkind as to remove the version of Gemini (2.0 Flash Experimental) that produced images on AI Studio, in the UK, EU and a few other authoritarian shit holes (that is not an exclusive or). While OAI graciously does out an image or too a day to free users, getting far more mileage out of it doesn't hurt, but is still a curiosity.

I've tried out GPT 4.5, which is a rare mutant of a model, a relic of different times/research artifact more than a daily driver. So far, I've been whelmed, as it didn't do anything particularly impressive even at the task of writing fiction, which it's supposedly great at.

The elephant in the room is, of course, Google. You can use the best model on the planet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, entirely free on AI Studio, or via API. So it goes for the older models, unless removed due to regulatory concerns. If I wasn't curious, there's very little actual reason for me to subscribe to ChatGPT, and that's probably true even for you, the casual user. Even those too normie to have heard about AI Studio have access to the Gemini app, which is finally taking off, and even there, Google hits OAI where it hurts, in the wallet, by making their best models cheap/free.

It's a good time to be an AI aficionado. Don't pay for ChatGPT unless you really want to out of curiosity, there's no other good reason at present.

PS: Anthropic. A meme at this point. Claude does nothing better than the competition, and is practically unusable due to stringent rate limits on the free tier, and suffers from the same even for paying users (going off anecdotal evidence).

As a major, major fan of 3.5, it’s clear Anthropic have missed a step or two in the last six months. And the rate limits, holy cow, even the API randomly drops out frighteningly often. I bounce back and forth a little on my OAI sub, right now I have one because I’ve been doing laying around with the deep research a bit, and voice is handy on car rides or in the kitchen. I almost feel like o1 was better than o3 but needs more testing by me to be sure.

I need to spend more time with Google. Have you used much the feature where you like highlight and edit and interact with passages of your or its old responses? I didn’t quite grasp the mini demo they did so I’m not sure if that’s a genuinely new useful interaction mode or not.

I've occasionally edited my own responses, but never the LLMs. I wonder if that would be helpful for jailbreaks. At some points, when the context window wasn't enough, I'd delete unnecessary responses to clear up space, but with a 1M window now? Never necessary.

The ability to fork chats is clutch, I can tell you. I miss it on every other platform.

Do you usually fork because you're unsatisfied with the response, didn't want to clutter the context, felt you had a natural off-topic you wanted to explore somewhat sandboxed, or something else? I'm trying to imaging the typical use case where it would feel so essential.

Let's say I have a difficult task that needs a lot of comms with Gemini to get it on the same page. Then forks allow for easily throwing that into the context for a variant of that task. Or simply A/B testing.

The first time I made use of forks, it was when I was generating images with Flash, and got it dialed in. I then forked it so as to try alternative prompts and the effects of different details, with the easy ability to jump back and forth.

I've been switching between o3 and 2.5 pro to vibe code a project, and it definitely matches the impressions of others regarding o3's hyperactivity. It feels like o3 was designed to be used by already experienced engineers - it races ahead, giving the next 10 steps all at once, but only in sparse detail. There seems to be an assumption that the user can just fill in the rest. Gemini is a lot more patient, easy to follow for the less experienced

Claude is terrible, I had the paid version and it was very hard to use. o3 is alright but I don't buy any llm hype anymore, I was a paid subscriber to chtgpt until r1 came out. The common factor was that all these models got basic python code wrong beyond the absolute beginner material, even when you used "state of the art" tech.

I've been paying for Plus for about a year now. It is far better than it used to be, but really needs calibration. Talking to ScarJo was interesting while it lasted, but the voices now all annoy me and I never use them.

I have vanishingly low usage for the voice modes. Maybe if I intentionally trained myself to use it, I might have better mileage, but at this point text seems more natural to me as a means of conversing with our alien brethren, and gives me time to collect my thoughts and frame things.