site banner

Wellness Wednesday for January 14, 2026

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).

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

You are starting to write like a guy who reads LLM output and thinks "Yeah, that's good writing!"

I disagree! I do not think that the majority of LLM output is worth reading. That is not the same as LLMs being incapable of good writing. Getting something decent out of them takes effort. Not some kind of overcomplicated prompt engineering nonsense, but more effort than bad actors take.

To illustrate, I can truthfully claim that Xianxia as a genre is sloppy trash (most of it is) while simultaneously arguing that Reverend Insanity is peak fiction. The selection process is what allows for a recommendation.

are absolute crap in terms of writing style (* cough * Reverend Insanity * cough * )

As you can see, we have irreconcilable differences. Pistols at dawn?

Note that I am not saying you're doing the same thing, just... I think you know you're outsourcing too much to AI, and now you're getting pissy when people point it out.

I really can't win. If I stay quiet and ignore things: avoidant behavior. If I just say that, yeah, I've used AI, that is a no-contest. If I actually take a stand, then suddenly the lady doth protest too much. Nah, this lady has principles, and is willing to argue them.

AI detectors are themselves not that reliable, since the ability to detect AI writing is a moving target, so posting "An AI detector said my writing is 100% human" is probably not that convincing to most people. (Just as many people have had the displeasure of seeing something they know they wrote themselves tagged as "almost certainly AI" by an AI detector.)

I have heard claims that Pangram is better than most. For example, it's batting 100% here, admittedly, for a single sample. To the extent that people have used AI detectors on me in an attempt to shore up their argument that I'm using AI (in a post where I allude to the fact I'm using it), then I feel entitled to use them myself. If it works, then you believe in my probable innocence, if you believe it doesn't work, then you had no reason to consider me guilty beyond what I've already confessed.