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