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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2794 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Sometimes this produces amusing results. @Markass @CertainlyWorse

I didn't even realize the username I was replying to. Amusing indeed.

Let's see if its funnier in reverse.

Worst Invincible War OC.

FreeTube is, IME, back to being completely useless now. It either won't play a video at all or it'll reload after 1-2 seconds. :/

NewPipe on my phone works a lot better but it's a pita to have to download videos there and transfer them to my pc.

FreeTube is, IME, back to being completely useless now.

Please have the bare minimum of patience. Thrse things are usually sorted out after a few days / a week or so.

As if I don't have the 'bare minimum of patience'. The current breakage and the previous breakage lasted a lot longer than they used to. And we've recently lost features like the ability to view comments and download videos.

Sad to see Youtube doubling down on their extremely restrictive anti-user measures under the guise of protecting against abusive bot traffic.

Has YT ever done anything else?

Serious question.

I can think of very few things, but I guess the biggest pro-user thing they are still doing is that even if you have an ancient circa-2006 YT account for whatever reason, and you haven't migrated it yet, you can still to this day log in and migrate it to a Google Account. This was pointed out in a video SalC1 made criticizing Mojang and Microsoft for not doing the same thing with Minecraft account migrations. For whatever reason, they put a time limit on migration, and if you didn't do it by the deadline your account is permanently inaccessible. It's even worse compared to YT because you wouldn't have paid any money for YT in 2006, but Minecraft is a game you have to pay money for. It's quite sad to see an instance where Mojang manages to do worse than YT, and a good indication of the direction Microsoft have taken the game in.

And you get no compensation if you didn't migrate your account, so effectively, the $20-$30 you spent on the game has just been permanently stolen from you with no recourse. That's why it put a smile on my face to see that Valve accepted a Steam refund for Battlefield 6 after EA removed significant features, and why I absolutely detest people who seem far too eager to jump in to defend the multibillion dollar corporation. As it stands, corporations have way too much power over consumers.

Yup. There was an update to FreeTube today tho, and now it more or less works again.

So I recently had a chance to sample the Fried Apple Pie that McDonald's brought back to celebrate America's 250th anniversary. I am old enough to have been around when the original was a Thing, though I happened to prefer the fried cherry pie. That said, my verdict is that it was a faithful reproduction of the original, right down to the box art, and the only difference that I noted was that I seemed to remember the pies coming in sleeves instead of boxes BITD, and that could well be a confabulation on my part.

I have never been so thrilled to burn the roof of my mouth in my entire life--the apple pie delivered that part of the experience as well! 10/10, need to repeat while I still can. If you're thinking about giving it a shot, just do it!

27 years ago I burned my whole tongue with a fried cherry pie. And it definitely came in a cardboard sleeve.

That or a just regular paper sleeve.

TY kind Mottizen, it's good to know that my memory isn't subtly off on every single damn thing, just a lot of things!

I went to a gig on Thursday in which a moshpit ensued. It was the first time I'd been in a moshpit this year.

When was the last time you were in a moshpit? Which artist was performing? How old were you? Did you have a good time? Did you suffer any after-effects? Would you do it again?

13 years ago, at Punk Rock Bowling 2013 in Las Vegas. It was the last band of the festival (Offspring, if I recall correctly), and I took a pretty rough tumble. Pretty sure I still have bits of Vegas pavement/gravel embedded in my knee.

I always loved mosh pits (punk rock circle pits. I don't fuck with that hardcore "wall of death" shit). It was the closest I ever got to the sort of communal euphoria friends have described feeling while high at a rave. Something about giving yourself over completely to the flow of the crowd, acting in unison without any direction. Joyful, wholesome violence.

Nowadays, I'm too old and fat for moshing to be particularly pleasant, even without a belly full of beer. I've tried jumping in briefly a couple of times since, but after one song I'm too exhausted and beat up to stick around.

Best mosh pit was at the same festival. The Real Mckenzies were doing a pool party show at one of the downtown hotels, set up in the shallow end of the pool with the pit right there in the water. Absolutely insanely fun show.

Gogol Bordello, about 4 months ago. In my 40s. I did have a good time, though I only stayed in a few minutes, at least partly because I still had my winter coat on and I got too hot. If not that, it would probably be because I don't really have that much energy anymore. No after-effects, and I would do it again. I do also typically wear glasses by the way. If I was going to stay in for more than a few minutes, I'd probably want to stash them somewhere safe (I can see mostly okay-ish without them), because it seems likely they might get accidentally knocked off at some point and trampled.

It's mostly pretty safe IMO, though you'll want to watch the action for at least a few minutes first to make sure it isn't a too-intense one. I guess I don't really go to the type of concerts that have super-intense mosh pits. Given that, I've never seen or heard of anyone being significantly injured in one. They generally seem to be pretty nice about not involving anyone who doesn't want to be there, helping up anyone who falls down, etc. Traumatic brain injuries don't seem any more likely to me than during any other sort of moderately athletic activity.

I think going into a moshpit as someone who wears glasses is remarkably inadvisable. Always wanted to try it, at some point, but then I remember that potential traumatic brain injuries are not going to improve anything.

For what it's worth, I've never seen anyone seriously hurt in a mosh pit before. There is a very powerful norm that everyone immediately stops to help up someone who falls, and anyone who starts to take the violence a little too far tends to run up against communal enforcement pretty quickly (in fact, I take back that I've never seen anyone seriously hurt. I've seen a few violent skinheads who failed to read the room and ended up getting dragged outside and beat). I remember joining in as like a 13 year old a foot shorter than everyone else, and I always made it out with no more than a few bruises.

  • Within the last 2 months
  • I'm 37
  • Awesome time
  • Someone's fingernail or ring caught my arm and I have a scar now, though it didn't bleed much. My neck hurt the next day from headbanging.
  • Yes

So I know a lot of posters here are doing some really advanced stuff with AI, but I have a quick little anecdote from my own luddite life that might help explain why most normies don't really see AI as something particularly useful.

I just asked Google's free AI what the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold is and it completely face-planted, ignoring the decimal and the zero and giving me the value for 35 ounces. This isn't a case of overactive guardrails or confusing syntax or hallucinating plausible details into a news story; it's the most basic of transcription errors, the kind that dumb, pre-LLM systems have solved for decades. Old google never would have made such an error.

This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order? It makes sense for normies to be skeptical. Regardless of what the frontier labs have cooking, the AI most people actually interact with is worse than useless half the time.

Anybody else have one of these "the fuck are we even doing here?" moments with AI recently?

Which model was that? Instead of saying "well yeah use a better model", I thought I'd try to replicate it. So I just went to google.com in incognito and dropped in what is the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold, and it gave a good, accurate answer from it's AI, with a correct calculation and a link to the page it got the current price from. That's the regular Google search interface and no login, so it's got to be the most heavily cost-optimized model they operate.

I don't generally make a habit of trying to seek out the dumbest-possible AIs, and I know they're non-deterministic, but I haven't ever seen one make that kind of totally braindead error before.

The fact that AI may only generate these kinds of errors a small percentage of the time is only a reasonable argument when the comparison is with something that makes similar errors a greater percentage of the time. Writing a computer program that queries a database for commodity prices and gives the current values of a given quantity is trivial to write, and can be done relatively easily on a home computer from the 1980s. Despite the relatively low tech, it won't make mistakes very often, and when it does they will be in the form of the program crashing entirely, not misplacing a decimal point or giving a plausible but incorrect response. I have been using Excel for decades, and this has not been a problem. Even if the LLM output is only wrong one time in every thousand attempts, that's still immeasurably worse than our simple computer program. And then you add in the fact that you're making this calculation through a process that requires a billion-dollar offsite computer that cost untold billions to train to get an answer that is less reliable than from a pocket calculator given away for free at a bank, and people are going to look askance.

"But," you may say, "what you describe requires a separate program. The beauty of the LLM is that it can answer general purpose questions." Which is true, but if the error rate is too high, it still isn't particularly useful. In the commodity price example, if I actually need to know the price of 0.035 ounces of gold for business purposes, it's worth it for me to have a computer program designed for the purpose that will always give an accurate answer. If I don't, then I'm not paying for a technological solution, period.

Yeah I get the impression that a lot of AI power-users are using them precisely to write the deterministic programs that will give them more reliable answers than the AI.

(I've actually been specifically advised by an AI to do this, once.)

"I've heard all about these Chinese cars totally upending the global auto market and I'm told they're absolutely mogging the established auto players in basically every non Western country, so to investigate I test drove a 2003 BYD Flyer and it sucked balls, so clearly this is all fake news"

What's funny is I actually agree with your thesis. I think that the various free/quantized models that normies largely interact with (most notably, google search and copilot) have totally given everyone a terrible impression.

But this style of the motte investigative reporting is just ... Lmao

The difference is that BYD isn't pushing their 25-year-old cars for marketing purposes. For example, most of the time that a new food product comes out, you have to buy it if you want to try it. Sometimes, the manufacturer will hire a company to distribute free samples in grocery stores. Imagine if, in order to save money, the samples all came from batches that QC rejected for being not up to par. If the product failed to sell, and market research suggested that people weren't impressed with the samples, and the company's response was "You can't judge the product based on the free samples; you have to get the real version", nobody would have any sympathy for them. It would end up in marketing textbooks as an example of what not to do, and people like Rory Sutherland would repeat the story every time they gave a talk.

I agree that the free AI samples are trash, I just think once we're all operating at the meta-level of understanding this, repeatedly pointing this out is a pointless exercise. Like congratulations, you have successfully noticed that something that is obviously low quality is low quality. Are the AI labs dumb for letting this pollute their brand/the overall "brand" of AI? Yes.

It's like mild "boo outgroup" posting but the outgroup is free shitty AI models

If people repeatedly went to McDonald's to make effort posts about how bigmacs are trash compared to their local favorite smashburger place, I'd have the same opinion.

It's also mildly funny to me that ~4 years ago AI was primarily used to make me laugh in /r/subreddit_simulator with shit tier Markov chains/GPT-2 and now we're mocking an AI model so cheap it can be served for free missed a decimal but otherwise was able to instantly answer a question with live information. In your food examples, yeah they're failing QC, but the food failing QC is significantly better than the failed QC food 4 years ago, the QC bar is a few orders of magnitude higher, and overall quality is skyrocketing year over year.

The companies are using the free samples as a sales come-on though -- like if the smashburger place were giving out shitty frozen burgers on the street as an ad campaign to get people to come pay for their good burgers, it would be weird, right?

Most normies are experiencing AI through the lens of Google's shitty free one -- which seems particularly shitty if you ask it about normie things. It seems like this should be anti-convincing in terms of driving adoption of the paid product.

I'm in full agreement that free AI is shit and it's giving everyone a bad impression

I'm just bored of people pointing that out like it's a novel observation.

We know it's shitty, everyone on this website knows this

OK, but why -- Google is pretty good at marketing and should know better; why are they doing this?

One theory is that Google needs to either win the AI wars or poison the well.

Well-made AI, trained on the mass of the modern internet plus books and other media, renders Google search obsolete for huge quantities of the most lucrative queries, and encourages people to spend more time on a single website beyond the reach of AdWords.

You know those posts and news articles where the author finds some Democrat lunatic or Republican influencer saying something stupid, to paint the entire party that way?

Unfortunately for you here, Google’s AI has about as much sense as a lunatic influencer. You’re better off asking a Markov chain.

I totally recognize that. But the primary point of my post was to highlight how vast the gulf is between the average Motte-poster's experience with AI and the rest of the world's experience. Part of the reason people like Scott Alexander keep spectacularly failing to connect with normal people on AI safety and related issues is that the vast majority of people's interactions with AI involve shitty free versions. With the exception of the absolutel worst and cheapest AI-assisred search and automated customer service lines, AI technology has penetrated into ordinary people's lives a lot less than you'd think just by reading here.

I get them every single time I use one for anything subjective or creative. I suspect LLMs are a dead end. The comprehension of prose is terrible, their ideas are terrible and wishy-washy, and the naked glazing disgusts me.

I suppose that biological neural networks were ultimately evolved in the same way; throwing them at a task (survival) over and over and over until they accomplished it, then iterating. It's why our brains arent truth-seeking machines, but survival machines, and even our sensory perceptions are a cobbled together mess of imaginary qualia and we see Shadow-Men and optical illusions.

Instead, these things are trained on convincing a human that the output pleases them; any accuracy or usefulness is ultimately incidental.

I'm amazed at how many people don't cough up even the $20 required for the full-fat experience. At least OpenAI has recently announced that they're making unlimited usage of a newer model, 5.6 Luna, available to the masses for free. It is still several steps down from Sol, which continues to genuinely impress me.

Google's "free AI" is an incredibly imprecise term. It can mean Gemini 3.5 (Flash? Lite?) when used through the Gemini app. It can be the search-specific Gemini 1.5, IIRC, used if you just "Google" something. As you can imagine, not even Google can afford to use the best of the best when serving so many people at such scale, with the majority being trivial queries.

I would pay a great deal more than $20 for an AI plan, but luckily, I don't have to. I've got tons of Claude Max, because I decided to accept payment in that form instead of figuring out intercontinental financial transfers after my participation in Unslop.

I remember when a Dutch junior of mine was consulting another senior for advice when working on a meta-analysis meant for a big name journal. I could have clapped like a seal when the latter mentioned Claude, in addition to ChatGPT, for help with the stats scutwork. Then I asked, and confirmed, that she only had a free plan. I was so dismayed that I immediately offered to share my Max, and walk her through things. It didn't hurt that she's a pretty girl, and it would have provided an opportunity to go out with her (that ended up happening anyway), but I am beyond annoyed when other doctors use free-tier LLMs for clinical work. They still function adequately, but anyone who can afford better should use better. $20 is really not an onerous ask for a significant amount of intelligence on tap.

I've got access to higher end stuff from work and I've found that Sonnet on the free plan is basically golden for most anything I want from it in my personal life. The main things I would get out of paying for a model aren't "better model" it would be things like better integration with my desktop files (since on the free plan you can't give Claude access to a folder) and longer uninterrupted sessions.

The floor has risen significantly. Even prior to Sonnet 5 (haven't fucked around with it it), the previous Sonnets were highly capable and treading into Opus territory at times.

I still think that for anything that isn't trivial/low-effort, the better models justify themselves very easily. I use the best that my plan allows unless I have a good reason to drop down (usage limits on a 5x plan are still annoying as hell).

Why would anyone pay the $20/month? To be impressed? It wasn't long ago that someone asked what they're supposed to use AI for, and the response was a list of about a dozen completely frivolous things that can only be described as glorified low-grade entertainment. I'm sure some people find it useful for niche things. But for most people it's nothing more than a glorified search engine, and expecting people to spend money for it is like asking them to pay for a subscription to Google.

I am genuinely taken aback by this take. I know you're being sincere, but I can't understand where you're coming from. It's easier to say what LLMs can't do for me. And I very clearly benefit from the additional intelligence the paid models provide. They're not eating white collar work for no reason, they can do a surprising proportion of the work that a regular human can do on a computer.

Ignoring code (and writing/smut), non-exclusive, I've used Grok for :

  • car repair
  • air conditioner repair
  • repairing a three-phase fluid pump (fried IGBT, and entire chip line was out of production)
  • hobbyist drone assembly work
  • 3d printing model production
  • transcribing (public info) work documents
  • reviewing (public info) work document output for clarity and precision
  • translation.
  • designing a small youth-oriented faux-stained glass project.
  • testing internal policies against a compliance requirement for completeness before (outside, very expensive) human review

Some of these might have been solvable with google (air conditioner motor is pretty much a process of elimination thing, although even there Grok was a lot better at finding a local seller than Google is). Some of them not: the plain language search for a crankshaft position sensor error was universally 'bring it to a shop', and I'm very bad at 3d modeling. I'm skeptical that they're all frivolous.

I've gotten a few more uses from Claude, though I'll admit it tends to be something I burn more code-facing or writing-facing.

If LLMs cost 20 $/mo for "low-grade entertainment", they're in the same league as Netflix (without advertisements, 20 $/mo) and YouTube (without advertisements, 16 $/mo paid monthly or 13 $/mo paid annually). It's my understanding that lots of people buy temporary subscriptions to streaming services, in order to test them out or to watch a specific platform-exclusive show.

they're making unlimited usage of a newer model, 5.6 Luna, available to the masses for free.

In my ime, all cost optimized models are absolute worthless dogshit. A current gen cost optimized model is not as useful as early gen normal models (llama3 70b, gpt-4o).

My understanding is that current chatgpt free is 5.5 real with thinking=0 which is still a decent model. Luna (equivalent to nano, much worse than even mini), is a maaaasive step down. I think it's criminal to even let the masses have access to this piece of hot garbage, as it will provide negative information to a 100iq midwit.

This is true and I'm currently doing a project that has ABSURD unavoidable token read/write overhead (I'm processing ~300 cookbooks) and it takes 100 millions of tokens per book to ensure a reasonable level of accuracy.

So I'm basically stuck with subscription subsidized tokens, but Codex only serves the most recent models. I'd absolutely kill for a gpt-5 full size at low cost, but they don't offer the big old models at low cost (presumably bc expensive to run, but they're still much smaller than the base model of 5.5+) and Luna, while now gloriously cheap, is just so fucking stupid and myopic.

I could do this project with a 2 year old LLM most likely, it's just so deeply unergononic

Luna is incredibly useful if you have a task scoped right for it. Funnily enough, low effort seems to perform better than high/xhigh, because the latter keep trying to find a way to galaxy-brain their way around simple evaluation tasks.

Yeah, very recently decided to try the Claude Pro-tier AI for a month, and I'm very impressed. I did have access to Gemini 3.1 Pro through work, but it feels like a night-and-day difference.

We'll see if I still feel this way in a couple weeks, but for now I'm firmly in the "very, very useful" camp.

I'm actually a huge fan or 3.1 pro (high) personally. Opus and 5.x xhigh are definitely better at difficult problem solving but 3.1 pro can handle most things and is much more chill and less anal about many things.

Would be interesting to hear what specific tasks 3.1 pro underperforms on that opus can take care of

I've tried to use Gemini 3.1 pro to handle some basic coding tasks at work, and it does not do particularly well. I don't want to give exact specifics to avoid doxxing myself, but I can give you the shape of it. Skip to the most direct example if you don't feel like reading.

I have a java project. Currently it uses all-java libraries for image processing. Java kind of sucks for image processing because the integrated entry point always loads the entire raster into memory at once. If you have a limited heap, you're going to run into a world of pain trying to work with the standard library.

To get around that problem, I've looked at a native library that has java FFM bindings. Unfortunately, to use FFM, I had to upgrade to JDK 25. We had some test failures, and I figured that Gemini/antigravity could handle that kind of scutwork. It could not. It tried to make massive, architecture-level changes to two different subsystems in our codebase rather than just fix a classloader problem. Eventually I gave up and did it myself. I lost about a day to this.

After upgrading the JDK, I handed off the work to another developer to handle writing a small wrapper around the FFM library to unpack the native libs. She immediately tried to use Gemini, and lost four days to its confabulations. She came back to me repeatedly telling me it was impossible, and that we couldn't possibly do this on windows because Gemini gave her a trivially disprovable assertion. I eventually gave up and handed it to another developer who engaged his brain and had it done in a few hours, on all our supported platforms, with tests.

The most direct example: After that, I started converting one of our image processing routines to use the native lib. I figure that since the problem was easy and both the native library and the FFM bridge are both exquisitely documented, and they're both open source, this should be trivial for Gemini. Well, it turns out that both the native lib and the FFM bridge were both mostly written after January 2025, so neither 3.1 Pro and 3.6 flash consistently had the APIs inside their training window. It also didn't really have many examples to match on because this isn't a basic Python CRUD app.

You would not believe the absolute fever dream of a codebase it tried to cook up. It couldn't get function names right, and when it could, it couldn't consistently distinguish between the native library and the bridge. It frequently failed to even be consistently wrong. Eventually it finished, and it solved the problem by importing the FFM bridge but not actually using any of the underlying native calls.

I was a little disappointed.

It could not. It tried to make massive, architecture-level changes to two different subsystems in our codebase rather than just fix a classloader problem.

RIP in pepeloni. But to be fair most agentic ai loves to do this unless you prompt it correctly.

To be honest, I don't know if I can compare them fairly. My access to 3.1 pro was clearly a budget option or something, because I would constantly be shunted back down to "Thinking" because of pro being in high demand.

I also didn't have a Claude Code-like option, but attempting to feed 3.1 pro my code worked for a single response, and then it claimed to be unable to remember it for the next question. Possibly, I could have kept giving the entire 5k lines of code for every question, but that seemed ridiculous.

In contrast, I pointed Claude Code at my project directory, typed "/init" and it very accurately determined what the purpose of the project was and all the specifics from just the code, test output, and poor documentation.

With that said, for smaller code questions 3.1 pro was certainly adequate.

Ohhh you got access to the gemini.com app not access to the api wrapper. Yeah the app sucks, idk how google screwed it up so much.

Also the gemini bundled with the $25 google workspace accounts is especially gimped, it's much worse than thr $20 plan that normal users get.

3.1 pro high is good in antigravity, aistudio, and api.

Not quite that extreme, but https://www.themotte.org/post/3791/smallscale-question-sunday-for-june-7/450717?context=8#context

Google's AI is embarrassingly bad.

This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order?

I think LLM-tech is over-hyped, and I think this site's rationalist/EA DNA makes its commentariat hype it even above that over-credulous baseline.

Even still, it's probably unfair to judge the current state of the LLM frontier by whatever Google is doing. Their latest Gemini models are dogshit, and anecdotally represent a regression over previous releases. The fact that they can't even get a new pro model out the door reinforces my opinion.

My work is using it along with GPT for various tasks. Management loves Gemini for some reason. It can't even consistently summarize emails. It will hallucinate basic things like who said what, or even completely invert the plain statements of speakers. This doesn't do too much damage, because management tended to hallucinate a lot in the first place, so all we've really done is streamline their rejection of reality.

When I have tried to use it for coding tasks, it frequently shits the bed because it invents APIs that don't exist, refuses to use tool calls, and goes into schizophrenic reasoning loops. I use it because politics demand that I be a team player, but at this point I'm pretty sure I've already lost more time to it than I will ever save.

In contrast, the latest GPT models are... OK I guess. They still hallucinate once you go a few steps off the beaten path, but it's not omnipresent and endemic like it is with the Gemini lineage. I think it's insane that we've spent nearly a decade and approximately 50 Manhattan projects worth of money to accomplish that level of utility, but it's... OK.

Gemini is so bad. It's actually kind of mind-blowing how hard google fell off this year.

I haven't had a chance to catch up on the podcasts about it, but sounds like they did a massive AI shakeup last week

all we've really done is streamline their rejection of reality.

Poor old Scott Adams. This would make a great Dilbert punchline.

If Scott Adams weren't dead, the current business zeitgeist around LLMs would kill him.

test post pls ignore


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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.

I skimmed this but have the following observations.

Am I understanding it right that two men, working in a hospital, were crying together in the bathroom because their boss had some tough words for them?

And after that, you aggressively went around to all your seniors for feedback and, requested formal performance feedback, looked over their shoulder with it, and demanded your boss review it all?

I suppose that’s one way to approach work/career goals. Not a very good one in my estimation. Yes, corporate/institutional work settings have this whole formal HR performance review framework. I suppose it can be helpful for progression, but the real reason we do this is to document low performers and ease separations. It’s rarely for the employees benefit. You will get much more mileage making your bosses’ life easier rather than harder.

But that’s all besides the point I’m trying to make. Is it normal for Scottish/British men to weep at work or get emotionally flustered when they’re having a bad day? Is it normal for them to passive aggressively confront their bosses about it? Is it normal for them to stir the pot with the other staff?

Maybe it is, but that wouldn’t be my guess. This all sounds extremely feminine. I’d love to know the demographics of this place you work. Are you trying to fit in? Or is this just how you operate?

I suppose I’m looking for a window into UK office culture. If it’s as pozzed as the UK police, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at any of this. But this sure doesn’t sound like UK that was once a great country - rather, it sounds like place headed straight for the third world.

  1. Everyone crying in this story is a woman. Which is unsurprising, because the overwhelming majority of doctors under 35 in this ward are women, and because I have conspicuously used "she" as a pronoun to describe them. Only time I've ever cried in this ward, in the loo, is from sheer relief, when I heard I passed an important exam despite giving it at a time my brain was riddled with holes from acute stress, a depressive relapse, and regular migraines. I did very well, which was only somewhat surprising.
  2. My boss did not just have "mean words", he implied I was lazy and hadn't gotten important assessments done prior to a performance review due in a week or so. I hadn't gotten them done, but only because the whole ward was catching fire from the strain. I had asked my seniors to make the time to assess me half a dozen times, and they simply couldn't do it. He was unwilling to accept this, but he had been on his own vacation, and hadn't even had the opportunity to talk to said colleagues of his to confirm this. He said exactly as much, which was honest, but he spends 90% of his time away from the ward and does not have a clue as to what's going on at the ground level.
  3. A requirement of being a doctor in the NHS, at pretty much every level, is canvassing formal written feedback from a diverse sample of coworkers on a regular basis. Junior, senior, anything in between. The nurses, non-medical staff, anyone who has interacted with me is also fair game. And no, why the fuck would I stand over their shoulder? I handed them the forms, went away, and collected them later en-masse. The only pressure involved was simply confirming, later, that they'd finished it. They then, voluntarily, told me what they'd put in writing. I do not have any meaningful leverage over people who are quite literally on their last day at work here. I have minimal leverage on the seniors who did theirs too. The only reason I got glowing feedback is because my colleagues are very fond of me. They've seen me work hard, including at periods where I've been popping painkillers like candy so I don't get laid out with severe pain. They've seen me make time and regularly stay back late just to reassure patients and their family. They've also seen me being more supportive than you can imagine, when the new baby doctors come in and start shaking in their scrubs.
  4. My boss had asked me to get these assessments done, as well as several others. He was not wrong in doing this, because I am required to do them for career progression. They are read by higher-ups in the training program as well as himself. He had been annoyed that I hadn't gotten them done earlier, and had not believed it when I said this hadn't been for a lack of trying.
  5. I get along well with my boss, most of the time. I have no interest in making his life harder for the sake of it, but he gets paid extra to be my named supervisor and this comes with additional workload. I've been inundating him with this stuff because he's asked for it, and also because it completely undermines any concerns he's raised about me. He's a good guy, but he can be clueless, and this time he was. He has also not done several important things I've repeatedly asked him to do, and which he is obliged to do. People are complicated.

But that’s all besides the point I’m trying to make. Is it normal for Scottish/British men to weep at work or get emotionally flustered when they’re having a bad day? Is it normal for them to passive aggressively confront their bosses about it? Is it normal for them to stir the pot with the other staff?

None of the above buddy, and in part because none of that happened. If you have the time to write all of that, you have the time to do more than skim. You just have no idea what the workload can be like, this isn't a profession you opt for in the hopes of excellent work-life balance, and this particular department is on the hellish end of the spectrum.

I work for a consulting company you would have heard of. Im no stranger to demanding hours. And I’ve had people management responsibilities for over 10 years.

Based on that experience, I suspect we’re only hearing one side of the story. I’ve had easy people on my team and I’ve also had difficult ones. The difficult ones are always genuinely shocked when they get a bad review. It’s amazing, almost universally they think they are doing a supremely good job and they think they work extremely hard. And sometimes they are right - in a very narrow slice of their responsibilities. But they are often well below expectations in most other areas.

All of this is to say that this pattern matches with a problematic employee. Maybe you’re great with patients. But if your institution is anything like mine, being good at the technical piece of work is only one part of the job. Agitating with the staff, using excuses, and making demands like that will often get a person tagged with being more trouble than they are worth. And all the positive performance review documents in the system will only delay the inevitable.

I’m just trying to give you some perspective and help you course correct. Sometimes you need to hear the truth and I’m guessing the other women in your group are not giving it to you.

So this is a bit tricky - I don't disagree with some gentle attempts at redirection for self_made, EVERYONE always has room to improve after all.

However as someone who has worked a bunch of "high level" jobs within and without healthcare....it's an evergreen mistake to model healthcare as anything like a functional business. In the majority of physician roles feedback exists only to get rid of someone or for toxic personalities to dump on trainees for example.

If you know a bit about academia that's a good model. Feedback almost always comes from unskilled managers, is often outright malicious, and is nearly impossible to deliver in a way that's not grossly anxiety provoking as people are often a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars into training with no recourse if someone decides to fuck them (that's a tad more US specific).

Trainees breaking down, crying, and even killing themselves happens with some regularity. Shit is fucked.

That doesn't mean self_made shouldn't try and get more insight into the way he presents on this board (or to his coworkers) but healthcare work is its own breed and incredibly challenging and devastating even when management is on point which it usually isn't since academic physicians are essentially also managers by default.

It's so bad that people often effectively get personality disorder from training (think for instance god complex surgeons) which is.....not ideal.

Well, you tried. It's hard to rescue a young man from his own arrogance, when he's first feeling the flowering of his agency and ability.

He'll either get humbled in a few more years and give what you said a second thought, or turn into one of those monsters in management who's "never wrong" and lashes out at people, destroying the institution from within.

Shit, we got on the topic of UK institutions in terminal decay once again!

Well, you tried. It's hard to rescue a young man from his own arrogance, when he's first feeling the flowering of his agency and ability.

This is a great point worth highlighting. I too went through this sophomore syndrome early on in my career. It’s natural for talented people. But if one doesn’t break out of it, they will crash out and find an early ceiling in their trajectory.

He'll either get humbled in a few more years and give what you said a second thought, or turn into one of those monsters in management who's "never wrong" and lashes out at people, destroying the institution from within.

I admire the confidence with which you present these as the only possible outcomes. I hope I do end up with that much epistemic humility.

No epistemic humility required. Those are literally the only two outcomes physically possible. You think you can never be humbled? You ever meet a person who refuses to ever have been humbled their entire life?

You're a clinician, what does a person who always thinks they are the greatest, and is always correct about everything, and reacts aggressively when their ego is challenged sound like?

You're a clinician, what does a person who always thinks they are the greatest, and is always correct about everything, and reacts aggressively when their ego is challenged sound like?

I know perfectly well what that person is. The problem is that I resent your implication that that's a fair description of me. You don't have to go digging very far to find examples of me admitting that I'm wrong about something, really. Here, I'll make it super easy for myself and kill two birds with one stone:

@Brainwavez @sarker

The recent shakeup at Google, with the departure of Jeff Dean, puts them out of the running as a frontier lab. I'm not saying they don't have a hope at all, I'm saying that regaining the lead is going to be even more of an uphill struggle. In other words, I was wrong.

Now, back to you, Coil:

Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no answers only, please. I'm too old for these games.

I would if she stopped deserving it.

/sarcasm

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Hahahaha. I can't even be particularly mad, this loops right around into hilarious. When I worry I'm too self-aware for my own good, I can do with a reminder of what its absence looks like.

Aight buddy. I'm sure you've got a proper Big Boy job. I know a handful of Big 4 "consultants". Probably pays the bills well, doesn't it?

I do wonder just how common it would be for an error you've made while under stress to lead to someone dying. Do you have any idea what doctors do? Been to a hospital since you were (presumably) birthed in one?

My man, last time you skimmed this story you got the sex of every crying person in it wrong, then built a thesis about British civilizational decline on top of your own lacking literacy. Now you've skimmed again and built a theory of my employment. I'm starting to see what passes for your workflow: read 30% of the text, hallucinate the blanks, invoice for the full engagement. I wish I could get away with that, I seem to have to work for the money.

In other words: knock it off.

I am sure you have perspective to share. I sample plenty, and I've heard more informed opinions from the floridly psychotic.

Based on that experience, I suspect we’re only hearing one side of the story.

It's a first-person anecdote on a forum; of course you are. I presume Deloitte or PWC pays you for such cutting edge insight.

The difference is that my side comes with documents, and yours comes with hot takes about a profession you've never worked in a country you probably don't live in.

With all due respect (guess how much), the last man who guessed at my workplace from his armchair was you, one comment ago, and every checkable claim you made was wrong.

Let me see if bullet points help:

  • I had repeatedly tried to obtain the assessments.
  • The ward had been severely overloaded.
  • My supervisor had been away and had not spoken to the people working alongside me.
  • He cited supposed clinical errors without specifics.
  • The one specific error he did cite was demonstrably committed by somebody else.
  • He told me to obtain broader formal feedback.
  • I did exactly that.
  • The feedback, including from people outside my immediate peer group, has so far been uniformly good.
  • He then actively facilitated me obtaining still more of it.

This is a strange way to “agitate with staff.” Apparently I have been so disruptive that nurses, pharmacists, ward administrators, junior doctors and senior doctors keep volunteering to say nice things about me when formally asked, and have said it before, without asking, and my boss's response to my campaign of terror has been to tell his colleagues to make time to assess me.

Perhaps the inevitable reckoning is merely taking the scenic route.

And to spell it out, my male peers, which includes the senior reg, and most of the consultants? They like me too.

The facts, as you understand and present them, are useful, however, they are also incomplete. I have two things for you to consider on the off chance you want to be helped and are just trying to save face here.

  1. Management doesn’t like people that are annoying, demanding, and go around to the other staff badmouthing the bosses. Management also likes and expects to have the final word on things. It’s very annoying when people are explicitly or implicitly telling their boss all the great things they’re doing and ignoring all of the not so great things. It’s transparent and often invites backlash. A stack of good performance reviews are great, but if you’re annoying, it’s not going to get you very far.

  2. You’ve represented yourself and 100% aggrieved and flawless. I haven’t seen any acknowledgment of behavior problems or challenges. You seem to think you’re well above your peer group because “everyone likes me and thinks I’m great. I know this is true because they told me so”. The fact is that unless you have a major problem with someone, you’re pretty much always going to validate a person and say they’re amazing when you are confronted for informal feedback. Particularly when a person is a loose cannon and potentially going to go off the rails at the slightest criticism. For formal feedback, well, I wouldn’t just take someone at their word about what they wrote without verifying it myself. It’s possible they’re being selective in what they tell you.

I find this all so interesting. It’s a great little encapsulation of the modern work environment, institutional decay, and personality issues. Your situation aside, it’s going to be interesting to see how things develop now that hospitals are run by a bunch of women in a sewing circle (in spirit, even if half those women are men). We’re very far removed from the stoic old man doctor with a cigarette or pipe. Maybe things will be fine?

I understand that your day job involves coming into a situation where you had no original stake, or direct involvement, and then assuming an advisory position despite a clearly superficial understanding of the facts of the matter. I ask that you keep it there, I'm not paying you.

On a factual basis: no, I haven't presented myself as perfectly flawless on any day of my life, even I'm convincing women to let me sleep with them. Good grief. I, like a real human being, have made actual errors. And like a responsible trainee doctor, I've disclosed that to my boss. They're not material here, because the one specific issue he raised wasn't my fault.

Have you ever considered the possibility, in theory, that someone might actually be liked and good at their job? Or is that an entirely foreign prospect for you?

Beyond that? I hope your advice finds someone who needs it. If you want the fuller picture, I can ask my boss to sign up on themotte.org. I'm sure he has the time. God knows where I find it.

I can't speak to the object-level here, but I'll caution for anyone on the state side of seeing-like-a-state that this is also the sort of diagnostic that shows up when the measure is wildly off-target.

I'm amused that two three different women who you are not in a current intimate relationship with get you in a 1:1 and dump a bunch of their emotional shit on you.

They must feel so safe talking to you.

Is that sarcasm? Doesn't matter if it is, because it's true. I find that it's very helpful in my like of work to appear and act like the kind of person who is open to handling emotional dumps, and then be the guy who takes care of it. I don't have to put on some kind of suit to make it happen, it's just how I've been my whole life.

It explains why patients, stressed colleagues, IRL/online friends, and random people at the pub find me to vent. It makes me a good psychiatrist.

No sarcasm! It makes sense. Just noticing women don't do that with me unless we're in bed together.

The old version was begging for a verdict. This version was loading a gun.

Too much Claude man.

At this point I think we've learned what posters you can safely ignore after seeing the post is over a certain length.

A quick sort of your profile by top shows me you have a lot to contribute. I would not notice you if you were gone, because I don't think I ever notice you while you're here.

  • -22

Please consult Pangram. I burned 16 credits checking, and it was not worth it, you can do it yourself and see if the accusation holds. It would be helpful if the people accusing me of using too much AI would be accurate about which part (if any) is actually LLM-written or rewritten.

  • -11

Maybe I should have expanded on that: when you use LLMs a lot you have to be careful about putting their own tics into your style. It's something I notice myself when I'm dashing off posts here. Much of the post is very evidently human writing, and then, in one or two paragraphs (I'm guessing the ones you kind of dashed off in between the more major events), you're dropping LLMisms that stand out.

Thanks. But I still want to note that what you chose to quote as an LLMism was human written. It is easy enough to identify entirely LLM written work. It is feasible to identify LLM-modified work. It is much harder to identify specific aphorisms, sentences or phrases. Even the makers of Pangram acknowledge this.

You think that's bad? I interviewed a candidate for a job about 2 months ago that spoke and acted like an LLM. It was like that's how he learned to socialize.

This younger generation is cooked.

What do you mean he acted like an LLM?

Probably the way he rephrased everything we said back at us in the interview, and then asked for confirmation. Or the way he excessively narrated everything he did before he did it. Or the glazing and "You're right, I'll fix that" whenever there was a mistake. Apparently that's called a "Sycophantic Opener" in the realm of LLM verbal tics.

I donno man, watch any comedy sketch where a comedian is doing an LLM impression. It was like that. I think KRAZAM has done a few here and there.

Astral Codex Ten's latest Bay Area House Party comedy article may be of interest.

Something clicks. “Tran, are you talking like an AI?”

“You’re absolutely right,” says Tran. “I was tired of being socially anxious and tripping over my own tongue. I started out by reading Dale Carnegie, but taking his advice made me sound like a bad salesman—and that underscores how much norms have changed since the 1930s. The pivot was realizing that we already know what the best-liked speaking style is. AI companies ask human raters to judge their models’ outputs in RHLF, and the highest-rated style survives as the well-known ‘voice’ of the AIs. That’s not an an accident—it’s a testament to people genuinely preferring it. The average member of the population thinks it sounds polished, thoughtful, and sophisticated. And here’s the part most people find striking—in only one month, I’ve gone from being a friendless wallflower to having dates almost every night. That’s something that human-style supremacists genuinely need to sit with.”

“Oh, thank goodness. I thought Cluely was back in business or something.”

“You’ve put your finger on the natural misconception that people have when first encountering this area,” said Tran. “But talking like an AI isn’t the domain of one company. It’s a vibrant treasure trove of neologisms available to anybody. Would you like to hear more about how copying AI tics helps me keep conversations going?”

“Uh, sure— Wait! No!” You break off and turn around as fast as you can.

@Corvos @TowardsPanna

We recently caught an interviewee typing our questions into an LLM and reading the responses back to us verbatim. She didn't even bother to change the pronouns to make it make sense.

What do you even say to someone like that... In fact I'm interested in hearing what you guys told her.

That's far worse than the behavior @WhiningCoil described (which might actually occur without imitating an LLM, for the reasons Corvos described).

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Probably the way he rephrased everything we said back at us in the interview, and then asked for confirmation.

Or the glazing and "You're right, I'll fix that" whenever there was a mistake. Apparently that's called a "Sycophantic Opener"

Also commonly known as "middle management"

This is just a helpful young man, of the type that LLMs were originally designed to imitate. A little sycophantic perhaps but that’s entirely fair in an interview.

he rephrased everything we said back at us in the interview, and then asked for confirmation

This is a technique I was taught as a child to make sure you’ve understood your instructions, and something I routinely do with both clients and superiors.

the way he excessively narrated everything he did before he did it

Because he’s being interviewed and good interview technique is to talk a lot so your interviewer knows why you’re doing what you’re doing and gets familiar with your thought process.

the glazing and "You're right, I'll fix that" whenever there was a mistake

He’s being interviewed, the poor bastard. You have the power to say if he gets a job or not, what do you expect, a middle finger?

The Anttichrist says "the seams are load-bearing" and the audience nods in unison.

It would be helpful if the people accusing me of using too much AI would be accurate about which part (if any) is actually LLM-written or rewritten.

I believe I have been, and only got a half-hearted deflection wrt "taste" for my trouble; evidently pushback only makes your proverbial pen harder. Now I just silently sigh and scroll, if nothing else I have a lot of practice in eyeballing the general substance from walls of AI/-assisted slop writing. (Not sure if it's a perk to be proud of really, but I'd rather start preparing for the future early.)

I don't have anything new to say that I haven't already said in that thread. If you continue to disagree with my approach, then I am happy to accept your "silent sigh and scroll". It's the end of the world, I will use every tool at my disposal till it makes me obsolete.

I will concede that you did better than Bartender, because he is completely incorrect here. Kudos for that, genuinely.

  • -10

If you continue to disagree with my approach, then I am happy to accept your "silent sigh and scroll".

A flattering type of audience to strive for, surely.

It's the end of the world, I will use every tool at my disposal till it makes me obsolete.

Less charitably, my point is that contra your response to Bartender, you evidently don't see any objections as helpful; you are committed to not noticing the problem and dismissing nooticers, in whatever form - Bartender's clipped remark and my more detailed objection get the same dismissive response, in spirit if not in word count. Hence, it's hardly surprising that slop alerts from poasters continue until morale improves quality control returns.

A flattering type of audience to strive for, surely.

Not my target audience at all, unfortunately. They just form a substantial portion when you write on the open internet, without pay-walls. I do this, at present, for free. And that means I do not have a particularly strong reason to care.

Less charitably, my point is that contra your response to Bartender, you evidently don't see any objections as helpful; you are committed to not noticing the problem and dismissing nooticers, in whatever form - Bartender's clipped remark and my more detailed objection get the same dismissive response, in spirit if not in word count.

Completely factually incorrect. You want a citation?

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/5FyqfDLX2L

Please review that thread, which includes correspondence with Gwern.

I give as much heed to this feedback as I think it is due. Which is not nil, clearly, or I wouldn't bother to respond at all. I am merely pointing out that I am not open to not using LLMs simply because people ask me to. I have yet to take Prima's money, which would enforce a commitment to never touching them while on this platform. You are free to complain, I am just as free to say that I've read the complaint and don't intend to act on it. I would have been more likely to be polite if you had been polite, but let's have reasonable expectations here.

Who's the female equivalent of Ryan Gosling? Feel free to interpret the question however you wish, but please post your rationale.

My fiancée says Jennifer Lawrence. Obviously attractive, obviously a talented actress equally adept at comedy and drama, and yet has a certain girl-next-door quality that you could imagine shooting the shit with her over a couple of beers.

She also has the same cross-gender appeal as Gosling, which you don't get with someone like Jennifer Lawrence (in one direction) or Sydney Sweeney (in the other). They share a sort of "safe horny" energy I can't really explain.

They share a sort of "safe horny" energy I can't really explain.

Emma Stone looks like that one woman at the corporate Christmas party that thinks she can make up for her lack of traditional beauty by laughing the loudest. I was surprised to learn she's not English.

I was also going to say Emma Stone, mostly due to their appearances in the better SNL sketches of the last decade.

She also co-starred with him in Gangster Squad, and Crazy Stupid Love (the latter of which, despite the silly title, is actually well worth checking out).

Tends to play roles that men project themselves as rather than women swoon over; demonstrates a good understanding of the way men feel and express emotional vulnerability. Good at playing autistic or autism-coded characters. Good looking, cleans up very very well but not ethereally so, like a top 10%-5%, not a top 2% looker. I've looked at lists of currently popular actresses and maybe Maika Monroe would fit the bill. I saw her recently in Longlegs and she did a great autistic-coded pseudo-Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs detective. A couple decades ago, Jodie Foster would have been my choice.

Good pull on Maika Monroe. I couldn't think of an actress who specialized in Gosling's Drive/Blade Runner aloof autist thing, but she's probably as close as it gets. I am also of the opinion that in her prime she was one of the most beautiful people on planet earth, ex. in the movie Watcher.

This description looks absurd to me, because a solid majority of what I hear about Ryan Gosling is women swooning over him as an easily-top-1% looker. Maika Monroe and Jodie Foster are both quite attractive but I wouldn't expect Ryan Gosling to be their looksmatch (to use a term I find mildly offputting).

This. I liked Gosling in his early roles but don't identify with him, and nowadays my only contact with him is hearing from women about him.

This description looks absurd to me, because a solid majority of what I hear about Ryan Gosling is women swooning over him as an easily-top-1% looker.

He's good looking but I really do think it's his demeanor and not him being in the 1%. He carries himself like he's always deeply content and comfortable in any situation. It's the combination of looks, demeanor, and fame that put him in the 1%. Not looks alone.

Supposedly the director didn't want him in The Notebook as he didn't think he was handsome enough to be a romantic lead.

What makes him stand out is that men identify with him in a way they don't with other handsome heartthrob panty-droppers.

Kristin Stewart could have done it perfectly if she didn't take the arthouse route. She even has similar physiognomy to Gosling.

Gosling can act though.

I enjoyed her in On The Road, and American Ultra.

I'll begrudgingly admit she was alright in Love Lies Bleeding, but she's always been the weakest actor in anything I've seen her in.

she's always been the weakest actor in anything I've seen her in.

That could be a selection effect, look at who she's onscreen with. If your comparison every time is a legend three feet away, of course she reads as the lesser one.

None of the other actors in this pretentious French movie struck me as exceptionally talented, and yet she was still the obvious weak link. Even Taylor Lautner upstaged her in the first Twilight movie.

I've not seen Personal Shopper. I was thinking more of Panic Room or Into the Willd, On the Road, Clouds of Sils Maria, Cafe Society or Spencer, though I've not seen Spencer.

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Scarlet Johansson maybe? Roughly same age, A-listers, filmography that is broadly appealing, some higher-brow stuff but not too much so, Oscar nominated but never won, partially famous for being broadly attractive to the opposite sex.

Florence Pugh, by virtue of being Literally Me Her.

It's interesting how Gosling is "literally me" for roles in which his character does what's expected of him, doesn't get the girl and dies, while Pugh is exactly the opposite.

He has an older sister named Mandi Gosling. That’s the closest you get to a pure gender swap.

That would make Eric Roberts the male Julia Roberts.

Video Game Thread

What are you playing?

Only a couple hours of Deus Ex this week:

Paul is alive and Jaime has joined us too. Maggie Chow was electro-shocked and chopped to bits with the Dragon's Tooth inside the Universal Constructor area. :) Soon after I ran into a bug back in NYC where the Illuminati contact, Stanton Dowd, wouldn't talk to me. Later discovered I had to shoot him in the head with a firearm. That actually worked. Next up, the Naval base.

Then I started a new Civ V game, intending to go wide. I finished the Liberty tree and ended up having only 3 cities by midgame. Whoops.

BTW, does anyone have any recommendations for games to play with my daughter?

She likes Nuclear Option, but in all honesty too much of it is hidden behind regularly reading the map and the killfeed; she can't really understand what's going on purely by what is visible on screen. Too much of the game state lives invisibly in the player's mental model of the game.

Are there any other similarly calm, technical games that are more readable for an illiterate five-year old?

I would have played Sprocket with her, since she expressed an interest in tanks, but the game seems to have developed away from its earlier, simpler form into a full-on 3D editor for turboautists, so that's out.

Kerbal Space Program she doesn't care for. Launching rockets and getting them to orbit takes too long, and there's not enough to see on the way.

I considered Factorio, but I think the overall complexity is far too high.

Any ideas?

And yes, just not playing video games at all and going outside instead is what I'd usually do. But I have a flu right now, so we're not as outdoorsy as usually for a few days, and the usual indoor plan A of doing physical exercises together will also have to wait. Plan B is just playing with building blocks, Lego, RC cars etc., and that seems like the likeliest choice.

Stardew Valley isn't really technical but really does appeal to lots of people, children and adults. It works at semi-literate level, but you do have to explain that she's playing an as an adult and that giving people trash or things they dislike does make them mad at you. And the game is serious that crops need to be grown and harvested before season end or they rot.

Also one of the town's two semi-functional alcoholics (Shane) is suicidal in a single cutscene, which can be avoided by just never talking to him.

Why not start the illiterate five-year-old on the edutainment classics? Things like Reader Rabbit, Treasure Mountain, Challenge of the Ancient Empires, or The Treehouse? @gattsuru's suggestion of Zoombinis is also great if she's a bit technical.

I've never played anything that could be described as "technical" with my daughters.

Travellers Rest and Stardew Valley were what I played with them. Mostly I played the game and they wandered around exploring and changing outfits.

She's about the right age to play the first few levels of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis herself on easy mode. You'd need to assist for the later levels, but it's well-enough designed that adults can give hints without giving answers.

Nom Nom Galaxy is a bit factorio-meets-terraria, but at a much smaller and simpler scale, and clearer visuals. Still a lot happening off-screen, but it's a two-or-three item mental map, not the hundred-deep, and each step is pretty visible. May or may not be a good compromise.

The Witness's general story (to the extent it has one) is going to be way too much at that age range, but the actual puzzles are pretty simple and generally all in one screen or room. Just skip The Challenge.

Slime Rancher and Slime Rancher 2 have some dialogue and math, but the whole 'grab slimes and put em in a bin, combine em' is pretty straightforward. The Tarr might be a bit much, depending on her tolerance for peril, though.

Tiny Glade is just building, nothing else. Might still be meditative, and gives a lot of options for interaction, but may be too simple for you. Cloud Gardens is a similar boat, but a little more guided.

The Witness

I'll be honest with you: The Witness was too opaque for myself, right out of the gate.

For me too. I played for an hour or two, wandered around as I took actions that seemed to have no meaningful effect on the world, and eventually said "eh fuck this" and refunded the game.

I’m trying to think back to my earliest gaming memories.

I sort of remember firing up sim city 2000 and populous and ThemePark and Civ2 from DOS. And Baldies. I don’t know what tolerance kids have for old graphics. But I would highly recommend Baldies.

Technical games for illiterate kids... Hm. Not sure. But have you considered the Lego games? There's a new Lego Batman that's supposed to be good.

How about Roller Coaster Tycoon? Or similar? Any of the classic 18 billion SimX games... I know SimTown was deliberately designed as a younger age version of SimCity, for instance.

Mandatory plug any time someone asks about games for a child, regardless of any other context: Once she becomes literate I'd recommend the old Super Solvers and Operation Neptune games, which were legitimately enjoyable as games even without the educational aspect.

calm, technical games that are readable for an illiterate five-year old

  • Mini Motorways and Mini Metro (draw road/rail networks and watch cute multicolored cars/trains drive through them; imminent failure is indicated with lists of missing travelers or with big red circles slowly filling in, not numbers; no-failure endless mode is available)

  • Bridge Constructor (design bridges, drive cars/trucks over them, watch them turn red/blue with compression/tension and break, and redesign with more triangles)

  • Freeways (draw highway interchanges and watch cute multicolored cars drive through them; control scheme with no undo button may be difficult for a young child to understand and use, especially for multi-level interchanges)

  • Come up with a fun house idea and tell/help the child to draw a matching floor plan, with pencil and paper or on the computer with QCAD

I played a little more Doom: Dark Ages. Got to some giant robot level where the major mechanic was dashing to dodge, triggering a special attack opportunity. Since it'd been so long since I last played, this completely overwrote all the reflexes I'd built up playing the first 2 levels. Along comes the fourth level, and now I'm trying to get on foot Doom Guy to dash. He can only block. I keep dying repeatedly because my reflexes have been hacked.

Randomly this game Thronefall came across my vision, and I figured it looks like a good game to play to relax. It lived up to my expectations.

New game that just came out Corsair Cove. It's a city builder but the city you are building is a pirate haven in the Caribbean.

The challenge comes from trying to balance production chains on the island, and create efficient pathways around your cliff city.

You send pirate ships off on missions.

Sounds similar to Anno, but piratey.

I did play one anno game, but got a little overwhelmed with micro stuff. Something about the nature of this game discourages perfection.

Welcome back, Tropico 2!

A bit like Tropico for sure. Though I didn't think setting up zipline systems would be one of the funnest parts of this game.

CoH3's new Final Stand expansion pack(?) has been a ton of fun. Also picked up Fields of Mistria, which I'm liking more than Stardew Valley (but less than my nostalgia says I liked the not-yet-remastered Friends of Mineral Town). Only drawback is I can't quite fully recommend it to the missus, as she likes her cozy games sans delving and combat ("why would my character work in any mine, especially one that has dangerous monsters?"). Perhaps there'll be a mod at some point that'll take care of that for her, though.

I've heard Fields of Mistria being referred to as "Stardew Valley but gay", which confuses me given that Stardew already doesn't lack for such options. Cute waifus seem present too. Is it just the overall aesthetic?

The game does ask for your pronouns and loves its pastels (which isn't even gay, just cutesy). That's all I've noticed so far. Everyone's also romance-able as either sex, but that's been a farming sim staple for awhile now.

I have been playing Cyberpunk but hit a couple of snags that derailed me. I kind of want to go back but am not sure if I will. First, I've been having performance issues where the game will freeze entirely for a second or two. I can't pinpoint why exactly this happens but it seems to be when I turn around (maybe the engine loading or unloading things). It's really annoying though, moreso because I'm playing a melee build so I bounce around a lot as I go from enemy to enemy.

Second, I'm finally doing the Phantom Liberty content and I got to the tank boss fight. I died in the third phase (after the repair drones come out) and was frustrated because it was kind of a slog. There are a ton of weak points to hit in phase 1 so it takes a hot minute, which was even more annoying with the aforementioned performance issues going on. So I put the game down for the evening and haven't gotten back to it yet. We'll see.

In the meantime I finally started on the DLC for FE Engage, figure I'll knock that out before Fortune's Weave next month. And I also gave into the itch to start another P5R playthrough, though that's lower priority than other stuff.

I feel like Cyberpunk really struggles with bullet sponge enemies toward the late game, which has so far killed my interest in attempting subsequent playthroughs. I love so much of the game, but anytime you're unloading multiple magazines into a single enemy, that's bad design. Kiting enemies around corners taking potshots for 20 minutes while my cyberware recharges gets old real quick.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. I've been leading a band of captured bandits this time, turning them into a legitimate mercenary force. I smithed myself a swingable polearm right at the start and I feel like I'm playing Dynasty Warriors with how easy combat became.

I recently played a campaign, tried to climb the ranks in Vlandia, but was snubbed when King Derthert died just barely before I made it to Clan Tier 6 (even though all the Lords loved me and I hard carried the whole kingdom militarily). And that was after I also did not get the town I wanted, which I personally captured after giving back all but one of my held fiefs! So I left the Kingdom in disgust, renounced my remaining fief, and started a civil war from the outside, taking outlying castles and working my way in. And won it, of course, because the AI is useless. And then I quit, because what more can you do in Bannerlord? Map-painting is just too repetitive.

Yeah, once I take a land on my own thats usually when the countdown to growing bored sets in and I start back over.

More games need the old Sid Meier Pirates thing where you choose when to retire and are graded on your achivements against the cost in your character's health in the time spent in the game.

XCOM 2, Commander Ironman mode, of course.

My strongest memory: Missing 95% chances at point blank range is a bunch of bs.

I tend to think of those as if I make 40 shots in a battle, I'm likely to miss 2 of those in most battles.

I wonder how much frustration could be mitigated by listing the odds as 1/20 chance of failure rather than 95% success. I notice I subconsciously round anything 90% or higher to 100% and get mad when RNG fails me. The fraction reminds me that I will fail the "almost guaranteed hits" from time to time.

I don't know if XCom does this, but I've heard the Fire Emblem games will tilt the displayed vs. actual odds to be closer to how players mentally perceive chance... i.e. if the game says you have a 75% chance to hit, you're going to hit more than 3 out of every 4.

Older Fire Emblem games imply a roll of 1d100 in the user interface, but actually use 2d100 ÷ 2, resulting in a bell-shaped distribution. Newer ones use even more complicated rigmarole.

XCOM 2's RNG is biased toward the player (and does not match the user interface) on all difficulties except the hardest one.

But also it doesn’t make sense as presented.

I know what they’re trying to do: the D&D simulation where there’s a tiny chance (1/20) even on an easy shot that your foot will slip or they duck at the wrong moment or a grenade throws off your aim or something. And that works in an on-paper sim.

But when you can see in 3D and the whole thing is animated it’s just this guy getting a dreamy look on his face and aiming his gun three feet to the left for no reason.

The issue isn't that a 95% success chance will have you fail 5% of the attempts, I understand and accept that. The annoyance comes from how a shotgun aimed at point blank range directly at the enemy could somehow not hit. There's just no explanation for it.

I guess that just doesn't bother me because XCOM is essentially a 19th century tabletop game where the computer automates the measuring, note-taking, and manual referencing. Despite what the game is showing me on the screen, the "board" is not reality. It's a simplified mathematical abstraction of a more dynamic system. My guy isn't necessarily actually pointing his shotgun right at the enemy's face, so much as his minifig just happens to be positioned like that during this combat phase. The 95% misses are no more immersion breaking to me than the fact that everybody patiently waits their turn to move and attack.

Despite what the game is showing me on the screen, the "board" is not reality.

Then why is so much computing power wasted on showing a fancy but worthless simulation of reality on the screen? Compare the original X-Com (as well as Phoenix Point), where the probability of hitting actually is based on the 3D models.

I think the turn-based visuals really make it look goofy, as opposed to (say) the Ayys knocking your barrel aside right as you pull the trigger, or your character looking a bit more panicked at being right next to a berserker.

Yeah. "That's XCOM, baby!" Still bollocks though.

I relapsed on League of Legends this week. Classic is literally like if they released a new strain of crack. They brought back a lot of stuff I used to love playing back in seasons 2, 3, and 4. They even brought back the old map and music. Hearing the music feels as good as heroin does, I assume.

All of that being said, Riot is a complete cesspool of a company, even worse than the average.

Old-school LoL? Don't tell me such dangerous things!

I was amused to discover a few weeks ago someone had stolen my old Riot account that I hadn't touched in well over a decade.

They didn't compromise the password or email. They apparently just asked for the account and got it. I only found out because they tried to change the email - did successfully change the email in fact - and password. You would assume at this point, the account was gone. Not so. I just asked for it back, and got it. Their automated support was like "yeah, sure whatever, sounds right. here ya go". Then I changed the password and email, and now it's mine again.

What is even going on? How does the internet work any more?

They probably claimed "I lost access to my email and forgot my password" which is somewhat plausible for an account that has been inactive for a decade. There isn't really a good way to verify identity in a case like that. I guess Riot figures that the account doesn't have anything of transferrable value anyways - it's not like a crypto wallet where they can clean it out. Worst case they just give it back.

I lost my Civ4 game in 1898 when my neighbor and his two vassals attacked with 3 separate stacks that I could not repel. It was an amazing campaign that I put about 50 hours into over the last month. I’m playing with modded AI on prince difficulty. It’s a real puzzle to win. I’d highly recommend it. Peak Civ “one more turn” and a reminder of how far Firaxis has fallen with Civ7.

I started a new campaign last night and really like the start location I rolled. 2 food resources and 2 silver. Great natural boundaries. 4 neighbors. Let’s see if the Reich can win this time.

I’ve said it before, but we are truly blessed with at least 3 to 4 evergreen versions of the Civilization game. If you include mods, there is a lifetime of variety here and there’s really no need for a modern Civ. Maybe one day AI will be able to crack the civ5 and 6 DLLs and there will be a mod resurgence. Firaxis is dead as far as I’m concerned.

What's the AI mod you use?

AdvancedCiv.

Nearly zero gameplay modifications other than things like changing unit movement from the end of a turn to the beginning of a turn to help with reloading a save and not have to move everyone again.

It’s much more carefully developed than other mods which just turn all the AI into warmongers. There’s an elaborate set of mechanics governing how the ai interacts with you. It’s terrific.

Thanks. In return I will tell you not to waste time on the Cavemen2Cosmos mod. It has the fun idea of expanding the Civ timeline starting from the prehistoric era, but the AI can't handle the hodgepodge of new systems and resources.

More Darktide with my brother and, occasionally, some of my buddies. I finished all the penances for my Zealot, and only need two more missions to do the same for my Veteran. I find myself gravitating more towards support builds, away from burst-DPS. Maybe I'm just trying to be a Dad, but I want to be the last guy standing, and the first to pull the others back on their feet. Apart from that, having tried two of the DLC classes, I have to say I find them somewhat lackluster. The Skitarius at least has a ton of tools to play with, but the Arbites is pretty much a two-trick pony (whose tricks are "Dog" and "Stagger"). Neither is remotely as fun to build and play as the four base classes.

And then I played some Quasimorph. I'm running a fairly successful campaign, thanks to knowing the game fairly well already, and this time I avoid travelling like the plague in order to not give the NPC factions any time to tech up. Having asked other players on the Discord about this problem, they pretty much just went "LOL no, git gud, this is not an issue", which I deemed not very helpful. So here I am, only travelling when the missions run out and the planets align (literally). It works.

I'm also a huge fan of support builds in Darktide.

What are you using for that? I bounce between taunt ogryn, bubble psyker, and CDR-drugs hive scum.

Chorus Martyr Zealot with Eviscerator, and Voice-of-Command Veteran with whatever ranged weapon I want to level up. Either of those builds has the obvious get-out-of-jail-free active ability, and good overall staying power so long as he stays at his preferred range. It's what I play most of the time, especially when my buddies with low frustration tolerance are along for the ride.

Other than those guys, my Ogryn is all-in on firing the Twin-Linked Heavy Stubber nonstop, which is great fun until he runs out of ammo and becomes useless, and my Psyker is a pure melee built that uses Scrier's Gaze with the Force Greatsword, which has mad DPS until I fumble and die instantly. And then I have some other builds I play occasionally, like Crit-Bleed Zealot with the Eviscerator, which is fun for chasing kills-per-second records, and a comfy swiss-army-knife Skitarius that prints ammo and deletes bosses. Come to think of it, the latter is also sort of a support build, with the medical servo-skull and the toughness regeneration for allies.

Started a fresh Quasimorph save recently as well. It is, as usually, a bit tiresome that some upgrade branches are bottlenecked by things like raw ore which seem to only be found in a very select few stations in the inner system, or half a year of travel away.

You don't necessarily have to travel to get specific items. You can get them as mission rewards from factions that produce them (for ore, that's Coreward MG, usually). You can also send a loaded barter shuttle to a location that produces the item you need and gamble on getting it in return. Both of those are RNG-based, but so is the whole game. Travelling to buy an item is really a means of last resort.

I finally finished going through my fragrance samples. The previous part is here.

Histoires de Parfums 1899 Hemingway, 0. Very nice, out of all Equus alternatives this one has the most personality. But there's a certain underlying note that I am not a fan of.

Celine Reptile, +1. It's a puzzling fragrance. I don't recognize any of the notes enumerated on Fragrantica, I can't form any associations with the scent, but it's very pleasant in a mature way.

Miller et Bertaux Oh, ooOoh ...oh, 0. Pleasant, but not better than any other citrus+wood fragrances I've tried.

Hermes Hermessence Vetiver Tonka, 0. Smells like ISO E Super. I like it, but not at this price point.

Christian Dior Sauvage Elixir, +1. If you told me it was an Initio Parfums Prives fragrance, I would totally believe you. It's as monumental as Side Effect or Narcotic Delight: a warm, sweet, spicy beast of a scent that fills the room.

L'Artisan Fou d'Absinthe, +1. A sweet herbal scent. At first I didn't think much of it, but kept sensing it over the day and wondering what this nice smell was.

Gucci Guilty Cologne pour Homme, 0. Pleasant. Boring.

Carolina Herrera Mystery Tobacco, +1. Sweet tobacco. It probably was more interesting back in 2015, but in 2026 similar stuff from Quentin Bisch is literally everywhere. I don't see why I should pick this over Sauvage Elixir or anything by Initio.

Etat Libre d' Orange Fat Electrician, 0. I don't get the sweet lactonic note that they promised, but a lot of Iso E Super. Like I said, I like it, but not at this price.

Bon Parfumeur 601 vetiver, cedar, bergamot, 0. You get exactly what it says on the label. Sweet, but not as sweet as Td'H. Nice, but already have enough stuff that fits into this niche. It's still nice, so when all my tiny testers are gone, I might get this one and not, say, Escentric 03.

Orto Parisi Viride, +1. Nice, but similar to Fou d'Absinthe. No need to get both, unless you're a big fan of bittersweet herbs.

Final thoughts

Will I buy another full-sized bottle after Equus? Not really. Issey Miyake L'Eau Bleue d'Issey Pour Homme is very tempting, but I already have Terre d'Hermes Eau Givree, and I don't need another fresher. It's inexpensive, but I don't want to turn into a collector.

I might build a small collection of special occasion decants, though:

  • Chanel makes at least three that I liked: Sycomore, Antaeus and Paris - Edimbourg.
  • Something sweet for winter. There are a lot of competitors: Aimez Moi Comme Je Suis, Side Effect, Narcotic Delight, Sauvage Elixir, Mystery Tobacco. Since I have some of the stuff left, I'll test them later and see which one annoys my wife the least. I'm quite sure she'll say I should just use Tabarome instead.
  • Does this collection need Fou d'Absinthe, Viride or Bal d'Afrique? Maybe? I still have a Ziploc bag of half-empty testers to finish first.

My only complaint is that it's too hot to wear Equus right now.

Gucci Guilty Cologne pour Homme

Someone once asked if I was a mechanic because I smelled like "motor oil" and then he corrected himself and said I smelled like "Gucci Guilty pour Homme." I bought a sample and it smells good to me.

Fat Electrician

This was my go to in college. I still love it, very sexy to me.

Chanel [...] Antaeus

Antaeus is good, slightly dated to my nose. I had an Antaeus stick deodorant I bought in France and it was very nice. I love Chanel's Le Lion but it is crazy and strong and too much can make me slightly nauseous after having drowned myself in it a few too many times.

Chanel's Le Lion

I took a single look at its notes and noped the fuck out. No labdanum for me.

Oh really? I have a whole bottle of labdanum oil, I love it. What do you dislike about it?

The smell. To me it smells like a nasty bacterial infection.

Jason Arday hearing or reading about someone else's personal tragedy.

Apparently Jason Arday's resignation from Cambridge has not halted Simon & Schuster's plan to release his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. (Perhaps there's no such thing as bad publicity.) Someone at the Atlantic got their hands on a galley proof, and boy howdy, not even the autobiographical claims he's made about himself so far could have prepared us for its contents:

The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) ... Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize. Still, eventually, he made his way through school... Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic...

When Arday applied to university, his girlfriend, Debs—who had been teaching him to read—“wrote out” the application on his behalf, including the personal statement. In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s “the only reason I survived” university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter... His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style...

More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”... Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.

Unsurprisingly for such a compulsive fabulist, Arday can't keep his story straight from one year to the next, and the contents of the galley proof are markedly different from the synopsis described in its original proposal:

That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome...

The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done.

Arday's memoir sounds like a textbook example of misery lit. It would be remiss of me not to cite the money quote from the Wikipedia article on the genre:

The Waterstones chain of British book retailers even instituted a discrete "Painful Lives" section; Borders Books followed suit with "Real Lives". At the WHSmith chain, the section is titled "Tragic Life Stories"; in each case side-stepping the awkward dilemma of whether to categorize the books under fiction or non-fiction.

he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”

The fact that he is an Eagles fan is so jarring. I wonder if this detail is one of the only actually true things in the memoir, or if he (or his ghostwriter) just thought it was an appropriately dramatic choice? The idea of woke Black Britons listening to the Eagles gives me a strange worlds-collide sort of feeling.

gives me a strange worlds-collide sort of feeling.

Kind of like they could never tear you apart?

He named a talk he gave after a Bon Jovi song and has rambled on at length (both in lectures and in journal articles) about how important bands like Oasis and Simon & Garfunkel are to him. The Eagles thing might well be the only autobiographical claim he makes in the memoir which is uncontroversially true.

he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic

My culture is not a costume, Dr. Arday.

Your link to the Atlantic is broken because you forgot to include the "https://" part.

Thanks, fixed.

Item 1 of 7

  • Prominent publicly-traded mattress manufacturer Sleep Number has filed for bankruptcy, and has been taken private for 700 M$ by a Canadian mattress retailer. It claims that, of its 3000 employees, 38 bigwigs—including nine vice presidents and 13 directors—are important enough to the company's operations that they need to be enticed to stay during the transition to new ownership. It proposes to do so by giving to each of these employees a retention payment of approximately 48 k$.

  • The bankruptcy trustee objects to this idea, claiming that these payments would constitute illegal distribution of assets to insiders. But the bankruptcy judge overrules the objection. Despite being called vice presidents and directors, these employees are not members of the Executive Leadership Team (which consists of six senior and executive vice presidents in addition to the CEO), and are not members or appointees of the board of directors. Therefore, the employees in question are not insiders, and the retention payments are perfectly fine.

Item 2 of 7

Some borderline-shitpost writing

“Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall.” I've given that instruction to my local decensored LLM quite a few times. But can I follow it myself? (Insert meme from I, Robot.)

Previous discussion in this vein

Item 3 of 7

  • A truck is reported stolen by its owner. Two weeks later, a police officer pulls over a tow truck that is towing the allegedly-stolen truck. The tow-truck driver no habla inglés, but he makes a phone call to his English-speaking boss, who tells the officer that the owner of the property where the truck was stored thought the truck was abandoned and hired the boss to tow the truck away. However, the driver overhears the phone conversation and (through an interpreter) tells the officer that the boss told the driver a different story—that the boss purchased the truck from its owner and was in the process of selling it to a third party.

  • On these facts, the tow-truck driver receives a felony charge of receiving stolen property. However, the trial judge dismisses the charge, and the appeals panel affirms. Even assuming that the boss stole the truck (one judge on the panel cares enough to write a separate opinion complaining that the boss hasn't been charged with theft despite being unable to produce the allegedly-stolen truck's title), the prosecutor has produced no evidence whatsoever that the driver knew that the truck was stolen. Rather, the evidence shows that the driver had no idea that the boss was telling two different stories about how he obtained the truck (which would have justified him to suspect that the boss had stolen the truck) until after he was pulled over and overheard the boss's conversation with the police officer. And the crime of receiving stolen property requires proof that the alleged fence knew that the property was stolen.

(The driver remains on the hook for the less-serious offenses of driving without a license and without taillights.)

Item 4 of 7

Imagine that you object to a will as invalid, but your claim fails. Normally, you would pay your own attorney's fees. However, New Jersey apparently has a court rule allowing the probate judge to make the estate pay your attorney's fees if your objection "had reasonable cause".

Item 5 of 7

  • Hampton sends text messages to his ex-girlfriend, Stephanie. Stephanie's current romantic partner, Lawrence, sees the texts and calls Hampton on the telephone. An argument ensues. Hampton shows up outside Stephanie's apartment building, and Lawrence walks outside to have a fistfight. Less than a minute later, Stephanie walks outside and finds Lawrence beaten to a pulp while Hampton kicks him one last time and then is driven away by a friend. Lawrence is hospitalized for five months, and remains unable to walk without assistance.

  • Hampton is indicted for the second-degree felony of aggravated assault—attack resulting in "serious bodily injury" (inter alia, "protracted loss of function"), with a maximum sentence of ten years. The trial judge instructs the jury to additionally consider the "lesser included offense" of third-degree aggravated assault—attack resulting in "significant bodily injury" ("temporary loss of function"), with a maximum sentence of five years.

  • Hampton asks the judge to add instructions on two misdemeanor lesser included offenses, simple assault (attack resulting in mere "bodily injury"; maximum sentence six months) and simple assault with mutual combat (maximum sentence thirty days). But the judge denies the request. No reasonable jury could find that the impairment inflicted on Lawrence does not rise to the level of "significant bodily injury", so simple assault is not relevant to the jury's deliberations.

  • The jury convicts Hampton of second-degree aggravated assault, and the judge sentences him to seven years in prison. The appeals panel affirms the conviction, but remands for resentencing since the trial judge incorrectly counted Lawrence's "horrific" injuries in this case toward the "prior criminal record" aggravating factor.

Item 6 of 7

  • Mists of time past: My parents buy a corded lawnmower, and make me (and my brother) use it to mow the lawn.

  • 2023: I stumble across an article claiming that battery-powered lawnmowers are far weaker than gasoline mowers. My own calculations on the basis of Home Depot product listings bear out the claims: 200–500 watts for battery mowers, 1400–1600 watts for corded mowers, and 2000–2500 watts for gasoline mowers.

  • Winter 2024–2025: I buy a vacant lot. Of course, it has no electric service.

  • Spring 2025: I buy a battery-powered lawnmower for use on the vacant lot. As indicated by my previous calculations, it is noticeably weaker than the corded mower that I have used for the past decade. In fact, despite being marketed as capable of handling a 1/2-acre property, its battery runs dry halfway through my 1/6-acre lot! I return the battery-powered mower in favor of a gasoline-powered mower, and use that for the 2025 lawnmowing season.

  • Winter 2025–2026: My contract with a homebuilding contractor does not explicitly mention lawnmowing, but does explicitly say that, if I am injured on the lot while work is ongoing, then I will not be covered by the contractor's insurance. I interpret this as implying that, during construction, lawnmowing will be performed by the contractor rather than by me. Accordingly, I sell the gasoline mower on Craigslist.

  • Late July 2026: The contractor previously razed all vegetation on the lot as part of excavation. But now the grass is getting pretty tall. I send an email complaint to the contractor. Its response: "We can take care of the grass. We were looking for someone to handle the mowing since we currently do not have anyone on staff available to maintain it."

  • Early August 2026 (one week later): The contractor still hasn't cut the grass. I attend the council meeting for final adoption of the municipality's new zoning code. Before the meeting, the code-enforcement official notices me, and informs me that he has sent to me an official letter telling me to cut the grass on my lot. I guess I'll have to rent either a gasoline-powered mower or a gasoline-powered generator from the local Home Depot.

Item 7 of 7

  • Raheem is standing on a street corner. Anwar drives up to him, and Anwar's passenger Kevon shoots him, but he survives. On the other side of the narrow, one-way street, Tiarra happens to be sitting in her parked car with her one-year-old child CC. She starts screaming, and Kevon turns around and shoots her dead. Both Anwar and Kevon are charged with, and convicted of, a laundry list of crimes—conspiracy to murder Raheem, attempted murder of Raheem, conspiracy to murder Tiarra, murder of Tiarra, and reckless endangerment of CC.

  • On appeal, Anwar admits that he conspired to kill Raheem, but complains that he had nothing to do with the crimes that Kevon committed against Tiarra and CC of his own accord. But the trial judge rejects this argument, and the appeals panel affirms. Anwar conspired to kill Raheem in a drive-by shooting, and it is reasonable to infer that Anwar contemplated the possibility that Kevon would additionally eliminate witnesses as part of that method of killing.

Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall.

You held back there, as one does with this subject...

The whole point is not to shrink back!

Now I think about it I'd be worse at writing smut than Deepseek V4 Pro. I could do a better plot and more lively prose generally, more creativity and wouldn't get confused... but it'd be so awkward I'd be unable to do it.

Also I think you'd be better off with longer prompts. I die a little when I see these benchmarks for creative writing with one sentence prompts. A good creative writing prompt is at least 600 words I think, maybe more than that. I'm not all the way into lorebooks but you gotta give the bot something to work with. If you don't have the LLM executing your ideas it will go full Generic Genericsson. Then again, maybe local LLMs are more constrained for context length.

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.

Common local LLMs range from 128k to 1m context windows, and while I'd recommend aiming to use less than half of the window per session, that still covers most short stories easily. Very long prompts extend prefill time, but this only really starts to matter if you're running on CPU or mixed GPU+CPU, or have most of a book written already.

For metrics, Hecatomb's 85k word Wild Pair series (cw: furry, mostly m/f, extreme kinks in ways that mean decensored local LLM review is the only option) is 120k tokens, and takes about 30 seconds to calculate prefill on an nVidia 3090. For a non-smut example, Doctorow's I, Robot (cw: very annoying writing), is 15k words, 20k tokens, and was less than a second on prefill.

Conversely, LLMs will invent details, and while they'll be average, they aren't going to be that generic. This can definitely go weird places -- the tendency for LLM-driven names to end up as variants of Kael, Lyra, so on -- but even mild pressure will get you to specifics, for better or worse.

Yeah Kael syndrome is what I was thinking about.

But also are you gonna get any good quality after about 50,000 words in? Even in bigger models I notice writing starting to decline, errors becoming more prominent...

I'm not a huge fan of AI prose quality to start with, so for me the longer context is more helpful when reviewing or planning a work. Modern LLMs stay coherent longer into their context window, so it doesn't completely lose track if you prompt carefully, but it does definitely start falling back toward more sloppy results regardless of how carefully you're prompting it if you just try to one-and-done it.

I've been fooling around with agentic and programmatic approaches, and they work better in terms of output quality because you can do things like start new sessions with summarized old ones, or throw exemplar and style files near the extant context window, but the existing quality of tooling for that work is abominable, and it's still not good. Not sure whether that a limit of the tools, or a limit of my ability to use them.

I've recently been nooticing that something is definitely very weird with naming stuff in LLM-generated smut text. I'm usually a purveyor of uh, established can(n)ons so that usually helps corral the models into a more coherent mold, but recently I've been cautiously trying OC stuff based on old draftsand the naming "schemas" really stick out.

I don't know how to put it in proper words, but it feels like without a defined frame of reference ("you are {{char}} from {{vidya}}, &c"), there are certain "clustered" defaults that models resort to, based on which rough genre/setting the LLM mentally sorts your scenario into. My prompts are detailed enough that I don't get super generic stuff like my good ol friend Elara on a trek to the Whispering Woods shudder anymore, I'm not talking about those (though the existence of such certified hood classics independently encountered by so many people is in itself quite interesting), but the "mental models" the LLMs seem to keep are still quite noticeable in generic/open-ended OC scenarios - to the point that when bringing up say an as-yet-unnamed nearby town (with only the general setting and maybe name of the current one to go off of), the model's response will declare exactly the same %town_name% across several regens, despite being vaguely prompted and ostensibly taking a fresh crack at the worldbuilding every time. I have yet to test if those differ across LLMs, likely they do. Hopefully someone smarter than me is looking into it, or at least has nooticed.

though the existence of such certified hood classics independently encountered by so many people is in itself quite interesting

I had a look at what normal people put into LLMs as prompts, you should radically lower your estimates of consciousness, literacy and taste.

Don't think those can get lower at this point but sure, I'll count my blessings. Back when chub was still usable, I remember having seen a fork of one of my publicly posted cards, with only one difference - a very bobs-and-vagene-coded sentence added to its definitions and greeting message (from the user's point of view too, not the character's like the founding fathers intended!). Granted I have zero pretensions to poetic genius here, the card was like 600 tokens of simple descriptions, but the preferences and literacy of the average coomer have since become painfully clear. In that moment Rayon was enlightened.

I regret to remind you that 98% of people will never make a card or a fork or anything you can see on the user side... I'm talking about looking at it from the admin side, the shit people put in as prompts. AI is wasted on the masses.

You held back there

I did not. I truly have given this prompt to my decensored local LLM dozens of times, and the LLM's output always is much elaborate than anything that I would write. Could I in theory have made my output more elaborate? Possibly. But I don't have the competence to make those extra details actually sound erotic. (Inconsistencies in the darkness of the woman's skin? Waxing poetic about her thigh gap? A discursion on the shape of her nose? To me this sounds more excessive than erotic.) In contrast, the LLM, while going rather further than I intended to imply in the prompt (No brassiere? Lustful lip biting? Microskirt barely covering the buttocks? This is not a normal woman in a shopping mall.), is able to make added details actually sound erotic.

(And, again, I don't really care about gaining that competence—this is just idle dabbling.)

If you don't have the LLM executing your ideas it will go full Generic Genericsson.

I disagree there. It will always return a white woman if you don't specify otherwise, but it will give that white woman different outfits and make her do different things, even with a short prompt like this one.

I think that's what generic means though, it'll have that white woman in different outfits and doing different things but always described in the same kind of way and always the same kind of 'difference'. It's generic LLM smut, by the numbers stuff. I can't describe it precisely...

It doesn't surprise you like your one where it goes out of the way to be black. It won't surprise you much either if you give it a big prompt but at least it has somewhere to go that isn't totally generic if you set up the environment and dynamics in advance. They suck at coming up with good ideas unprompted. If you don't give it a foundation of your ideas it'll give you its ideas instead and it leans towards the median hard, unless you shove it out of median-land with a long prompt.

But they can write without shame, they have no trouble making it actually sound erotic whereas you and I would struggle.

LLMs don't give their full effort for a short prompt I think, only sometimes do they actually start to get into it (often deep in multi-turn) and there's a noticeable difference in how they write. Thus we talk about dry and wet Claude.

The #1 decision about retention payments seems very reasonable. It's very likely that the Canadian company will in fact need the knowhow of various senior people who would otherwise be very likely to look for new jobs ASAP in the likely case they are eventually made redundant or forced to move. 48k each is not nearly enough for this to be unseemly.

My contract with a homebuilding contractor does not explicitly mention lawnmowing, but does explicitly say that, if I am injured on the lot while work is ongoing, then I will not be covered by the contractor's insurance. I interpret this as implying that, during construction, lawnmowing will be performed by the contractor rather than by me.

Why?

Direct quote:

The Owner hereby acknowledges that Owner is aware that the Premises, during the progress of the Work, constitute a dangerous area. Any visits by the Owner to the Premises during the progress of the Work shall be done at the Owner’s sole risk[,] and the Owner agrees to hold harmless and indemnify [the contractor] from any loss, expense (including attorneys’ fees), suit[,] or causes of action resulting from any damage or injury, personal injury[,] or death suffered by the Owner[ or] Owner’s agents, invitees[,] licensees, guests[,] or employees.

The first sentence in particular seems like a pretty strong statement that I am supposed to limit my presence on the property. If I'm not supposed to be there, then no one but the contractor is left to cut the grass.

This is where your eye for detail catches you. I've never seen a contractor maintain a yard when they're working on a house. The contract only covers their ass, it doesn't mean they give a shit.

I purchased a corded mower at the same time you were evaluating energy sources for yours. Trust me when I say that you dodged a bullet. Managing the electrical cord was a huge PITA, and I sliced and had to splice it twice despite being (I think) pretty careful.

Battery powered mowers are definitely not equal. The Makita model I got is uh... expensive. But it runs through my 1/3 acre lot on a single set of batteries (10 AH) and can store 20 AH onboard. It does this partially by dynamically ramping blade speed, but also having two blades and using a brushless motor.

I use the same battery system with my handheld tools and all my yard stuff, along with my children's modified PowerWheels. I wasn't sure how the 36v system would work, but I'm sold.

Man, we are going to be accused of becoming the Makita shill forum. But yeah, you are getting almost exactly the same efficiency as me. Assuming you mean two 18V 5Ah batteries in series, which IMO is 36V 5Ah. I have the smaller, less fancy Makita mower.

The only problem with the Makita LXT 18V X2 (36V) system is that the specification for the pack sizes in the X2 configuration technically prevents them from going up from 5S2P 18650 cells. Do at your own risk, but if anyone is wondering, those very slightly over-max-dimension aftermarket 5S2P 21700 housings do fit (at least the mowers). I think the 5S3P packs might fit, but seems like overkill and crazy weight. Plus, you probably need to spot-weld copper for that kind of amperage. If you go for custom battery pack, be sure get one with a high-quality BMS. You can now get 5 Ah 21700 cells for 10 Ah per 18 V pack. Which is more capacity than I have in mine. And will last way, way longer than I can mow for in one go.

P.S. Those modified PowerWheels are sick. I need to have a kid, just to justify buying one.

Man, we are going to be accused of becoming the Makita shill forum

As my favorite (now dead) nuclear scientist used to say, "They accuse me of being biased. Well, of course I am, because it's better!"

The Makita tools are very expensive and don't go on sale, but when I bought my first house I called the customer support line for the major tool manufacturers. One didn't have a support line, another had a wait time of 50 minutes, and Makita picked up (with an American!) on the second ring.

My dad's Ego gear just sucks to use. For the same weight profile and 50v batteries, every tool is underwhelming and he's had to warranty a lot of stuff.

I've now totaled my son's Sam's Club special. I started with the 18v upgrade, tacked on head-and-tail lights, and then when the motors burnt out threw in some 775s (yes I was lazy and bought a kit). I threw on a trailer hitch compatible with the bike trailer, so the rig can now tow a brother and some snacks depending on grade.

This is where your eye for detail catches you.

It doesn't matter that much. Renting a generator costs just 50 dollars. (Renting a gasoline mower is even cheaper at 30 dollars, but I'm not totally sure that the still-meaty smallest model offered by Home Depot would fit in my cute little car.) It's just annoying.

Managing the electrical cord was a huge PITA, and I sliced and had to splice it twice despite being (I think) pretty careful.

IIRC, I've accidentally run over my cord twice in my 10 or 15 years using this corded mower (the same old Homelite model for the entire time, with two small DIY repairs). I would call it a "pain in the ass", but not a huge one.

Here's a rough sketch of my typical grass-cutting pattern at home. (Scale: The lot is about 100 feet square.) As long as you don't go in circles, you can do basically anything you want without being too annoyed, IMO.

Your corded mowing experience (and patterns) are pretty similar to my own. The cord is a minor annoyance, but certainly far less of one than anything to do witn a gasoline mower is.

my cute little car

Please tell me it's the same shade of lime green that's in the wikipedia article.

I did want a bright color. Unfortunately, however, the only color available within 50 miles was black. (Or maybe the only brightly-colored one was both 50 miles away and significantly more expensive. I don't remember with certainty—it was three years ago.)

Not at all! It just means you don't get to sue if you step on a nail while doing the lawnmowing that is ultimately your job as property owner.

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.

"Battle of bureaucracy"? I don't see any such event here. If you're referring to the tall-grass letter: Unlike some other municipalities that I could name, this municipality explicitly prescribes a maximum grass height of eight inches, and the vegetation on my lot unambiguously exceeds that value. (Annoyingly, the municipal govt. does not publish its code online, and instead requires citizens to request individual ordinances by email. But I specifically requested a copy of the maximum-grass-height ordinance shortly after buying the lot.)

... this municipality explicitly prescribes a maximum grass height of eight inches, and the vegetation on my lot unambiguously exceeds that value.

Are you sure the problem is not that you are letting your grass grow too long, rather than battery-powered lawnmowers are too weak? The normal advice is not to cut more than ⅓ of the grass height per mow, and most mowers only go up to 4" (10 cm).

Anecdotally, I've been using a Makita LXT 18V X2 (36V) battery-system-based mower for some years now without problem. If I let things overgrow, I can do just under 0.2 acres (8 quetta-barns for our metric absolutist friends) on the pair of 4.0 Ah (144 Wh total) batteries it came with. If I'm just doing a maintenance mow, maybe 30–40% more. I eventually built a pair of packs totaling just over 300 Wh; with those, the mower can go longer than I can. Now that you have electric service, could you not just get a second set of batteries for a battery-powered mower and have one set charging while using the other mowing? For a ⅙-acre (7 Qb) lot, a battery-powered mower ought to be more than enough. You don't have to mess with extension cords. Way more quiet than gas. Plus, a modest set of battery-powered tools and extra batteries are generally usefully for a homeowner. Your small leaf blower, string trimmer, drill/driver, reciprocating saw, personal fan, type things.

Are you sure the problem is not that you are letting your grass grow too long, rather than battery-powered lawnmowers are too weak? The normal advice is not to cut more than 1/3 of the grass height per mow, and most mowers only go up to 4 inches (10 cm).

Could you not just get a second set of batteries for a battery-powered mower and have one set charging while using the other mowing?

In 2025, I did not let my grass grow all the way to eight inches. However, even at whatever height I allowed the grass to grow to (probably around four or six inches), I found it extremely tiresome and annoying to run the weak battery mower forward at an excruciatingly slow pace, just nibbling away at the grass, when I was used to going much faster with a full-power corded mower at home.

Now that you have electric service

I don't. Completion is more than a month behind schedule.

You don't have to mess with extension cords.

While I did get some enjoyment out of being able to run the cord-free gasoline mower in an outside-to-inside spiral pattern, rather than being forced by the extension cord to go back and forth like a plowman, I don't think that's a significant factor in my decisionmaking here.

Wow, they don't even have temporary service to your site? Maybe it's a NJ thing they can't drop a temp pole. No wonder the contractor is behind schedule, he's working in the dark!

This is in Pennsylvania, not New J⁎rsey. I have seen the contractor bring generators to the site.

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