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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   3055 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Finally got around to playing through The Last of Us pt1 and pt2. It's really good. Even the slight gay/trans plot points weren't too obtrusive. Anyone got anymore recommendations for single player RPG's that aren't woke/gay?

I am thinking of playing through Assassin's Creed, The Witcher 3, and Red Dead Redemption. Anything else I should add to my list?

I’m going to push back on other posters recommending Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. It’s definitely woke. Copying from a previous comment:

There is plenty of subversion here. Take a look:

• Henry and Hans are gay for each other: https://imgur.com/a/VoNmnq0

• Musa the Malian Scholar, Physician and Explorer (who quickly went from "Al Fake" to "just a Trader" to big plot critical character with over an hour of dialogue that is part of the main story and can't be killed) lectures the player about how much more enlightened his society is than Bohemia over and over, and goes on about how they don't season dey food, you can also get relationship advice from him, or talk about jerking off, also you apparently have to defend him during a trial and if you fail it's game over with Henry getting hanged: https://imgur.com/a/P2dsthI

• Henry apparently has a Jewish step brother, who he can be gay with? and teaches him about the plight of his people: https://imgur.com/a/mooiFgi

• The Jewish quarter and synagogue in the game that wasn't historic, but added by the dev team for story purposes: https://i.imgur.com/5u0o4mG.png plays a major part in the main story and you will have to defend them from “Antisemite” (talk about anachronistic) Christians attacking them in an ahistorical invented pogrom: https://i.imgur.com/YarvjPJ.jpeg

• The main not-gay romance Option is supposedly a single mother who cheats on you with Musa, a black man, and becomes angry with you if you don’t champion him in court in a subsequent quest.

• A gypsy prostitute from a gypsy camp you're to run errands for teaches Henry about hermaphrodites: https://i.imgur.com/ZAn8Ges.png

• Henry gets humiliated or outdone by women several times

• There's a Quest about humanizing and making friends with the Cumans that invaded and pillaged Henry's village and killed his parents and girlfriend

• There's a quest where you have to help make a Golem using Jewish magic, and to do so Henry apparently has to eat dead bodies? The act itself mocked as humiliating (“from Lord’s messenger to taster of cadavers”): https://imgur.com/a/bMPqJIm

The pogrom is interesting - the head developer, who defended the child sodomy (Henry is a minor by canon) he injected, said to players you can make your own choices whether or not to engage in sodomy, but conveniently you have no choice but to slaughter your fellow White Christians beside a Muslim ally to advance the main plot.

Replace Assassin's Creed with Cyberpunk 2077. Also include Red Dead Redemption 2, after you played the first game, and Balder's Gate 3 (I highly recommend playing Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II, too). All those games are massive and should give you thousands of hours of gameplay.

My frustrations with TLOU 2 weren't so much the gay/trans/wokeness (those were relatively minor annoyances), as the way the game spends 40 hours beating you over the head with REVENGE IS BAD as if it's some sort of revelatory message. Like, yeah Naughty Dog, I got it. Do you have anything else to say here? Also the way the sequel (and even the first game's remaster) completely retcons the ending of the first game to eliminate any of the moral ambiguity that made the first game so amazing to begin with.

If you're looking for a non-woke/gay single-player RPG, go for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (the first one is less woke--there's no anachronistic black man lecturing you about medieval hygiene--but much less refined since it was a low-budget kickstarter game). There is a (completely optional) gay romance option and the single aforementioned DEI hire, but there are no female soldiers, no medieval atheists, strict social hierarchies that are completely immune to your main character energy, and the protagonist is mostly portrayed as an unashamed good old boy who likes to drink with the lads and fuck some wenches. The game isn't antiwoke, per se, but it's incredibly dedicated to historical authenticity in a way that doesn't leave any room for woke insertions. And the developers are so autistically (no spellcheck, I did not mean "artistically") dedicated to authenticity in everything from the location of natural springs to the consistency of the pig shit that they're able to mostly get away with paying the same sort of attention to demographics.

Super solid game that actually takes its medieval setting seriously and avoids the dreaded "Marvel dialogue" that infects so many otherwise great games (looking at you BG3), while still being fun and colorful and even silly when appropriate to the grounded setting. Easily the most immersed I've been in a video game since my first Skyrim playthrough 15 years ago.

My frustrations with TLOU 2 weren't so much the gay/trans/wokeness (those were relatively minor annoyances), as the way the game spends 40 hours beating you over the head with REVENGE IS BAD as if it's some sort of revelatory message. Like, yeah Naughty Dog, I got it. Do you have anything else to say here?

I haven't played TLOU2 so I don't have opinions about it specifically, but this sort of fits into a pattern I've seen in people talking about "woke" games and other fictional media as being bad not because they're "woke" (i.e. gay/trans/etc.) but because they have other generically bad qualities like leaning on some super-simplistic message as if it's some revelation. But I think this sort of claim ignores a big part of one of the defining features of "wokeness" which is that people ought to get jobs on the basis of identity rather than on the basis of competence. As such, hiring poor writers and poor editors and poor managers who greenlight the poor writing produced by the poor writers and coming up with something that would make a 5 year old embarrassed for stating the obvious as if it's shocking, is a direct consequence of the "wokeness" of the game.

Oh, 100%. Wokeness can be the reason something is bad even when "wokeness" isn't the thing that's bad on an object level. I would not be suprised at all if part of the reason TLOU 2 is much less well written than its predecessor is that they were forced to diversify their writer's room with less talented DEI hires and/or forced out some "problematic" but irreplaceable employees between games.

Assassin's Creed

Allegedly, the first game in the series is not that good and many people prefer to skip it, while 2 and Brotherhood are the peak of the series, and Revelations, 3, and later titles devolve into repetition—with the arguable exception of 4: Black Flag, which may be called "a good game but not a good Assassin's Creed game". (I personally have played only 2, Brotherhood, and 3. Regarding the other games, I am only relaying what I have seen others say.)

I liked AC1. Its a bit of a flawed game and AC2 is better but there is actually some attempts to center the game around assassinations unlike later games in the series.

Later games are better mechanically but AC1 is more focused on executing it's concept, which was good enough for me.

I want to experiment with LLM assisted story writing and given how many folks here are LLM advocates, maybe someone can help me there. My main problem is that I absolutely suck at writing, so I need something that takes character, setting and (detailed) plot point descriptions for a scene and can expand that to text using my chosen LLM model (via any OpenAI api compatible provider).

More specifically, I want a free local app (preferably native Windows but a local webui will do in a pinch) that lets me write the overall style guide, character / setting notes, "previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the last chapter" condensed history notes and then the notes for the scene (and the beginning of the next scene to help flow). The scene notes would be a combination of "A does X, B mentions Y" and occasional inserted sentences like "The silence was interrupted by a doorbell ring" (that are more ideas for the LLM and don't need to be preserved as-is). It should let me generate multiple variations, manually edit the previous prompts and generated results for continuation and crucially never delete unused generations so I can later steal sentences and ideas from them (but I don't need explicit branching from every response).

Does something that does all this exist as a local app? And one that has a usable UI without ridiculously small text and non-existent contrast?

I am curious how this turns out and if you can find what you are looking for. I've been interested in doing something sorta similar. But have not bothered to try much.

I've read some ai generated stories on royal road before. And since I'm on royal road a bunch I am used to low quality stories. But I kept finding the AI stories kinda boring. I've thought that maybe getting the AI to imitate an authors' voice that you like might help with the boring ness of their style.

Current status is very cautiously optimistic when it comes to the models themselves (with a lot of handholding which I don't mind at all) and "Who are these morons? They should all be shot for being unbelievably incompetent idiots" when it comes to more or less all of the (non-programming related) tooling above inference layer itself. I have a particular hate for the LLM enthusiast userbase who seem go to great lengths to say "just vibe it, it's impossible to give any detailed examples whatsoever" while simultaneously accusing you of having a "skill issue".

Seriously, a not-particularly-competent Visual Basic 6 developer in the late 90s would have written better tools with even half-assed effort.

I don't think that exists... Tooling is still at the point where you need to adapt your workflow for the tools available or build your own.

Everything will be a lot smoother if you can get a setup working with obsidian plugins or use claude code / codex on a git controlled directory.

Yes, the state of tooling seems to be absolutely abysmal for what appears to be no good reason. I've found several open source tools that could be used (with some understandable restrictions) but they are all some combination of at least two of overly complex structure, buggy to the extent that they can't be used at all or have a UI that makes a complete novice's first vi experience look outright positive compared to them.

I'd try to fix some of them myself but when every one of them seems to require having significant experience with at least two large language ecosystems and they are completely undocumented, it isn't really a relevant option.

I'll give some caveats right away: don't expect miracles in terms of prose quality, interesting plots, or coherency of metaphor. This is a moderately useful way to get a story framework without getting stuck on the rough spots, but you're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get it into a state that's enjoyable even for you to read, and a lot of people will bounce off it no matter how aggressively you edit.

There's a few different approaches. But only a few have good UI, and only a few reliably maintain unused generations, and there's not a ton of overlap.

Most of the standard webuis or desktop ui chatbot implementations do implement what you want, just poorly. LMStudio's probably the best from an organizational perspective, since it supports simple drag-and-drop separate folders and subfolders. Biggest downside's just that it seems pretty abandoned and the company's pivoted to their agentic Bionic tool. Llama.cpp and Unsloth Studio support forking conversations, editing past prompts (or regenerating an answer to an existing prompt, and then switching back and forth from previous versions. They just suck at it, and it's really easy to lose past information if you aren't fastidious about labeling and forking, and even then it gets really messy. Get used to exporting old runs to JSON and sorting them into folders on disk, or you'll go nuts. I will caution that a lot of these want to provide their own endpoint, rather than interface with someone else's, though. Still, it might well be the easiest and most straightforward way to test out if that's actually helpful.

For an example of that approach with prompt-and-response, see here, Muse-Glimmer (imo, not great) or here, Qwen3.8 (almost passable, but definitely not what I was aiming for) (cw: Monty-Python-esque comedic gore, ARK fanfiction). You really don't need much in the way of fancy formatting for individual scenes or five-to-six scene series. For longer series, asking for an outline first, then prompting individual scenes (or parts-of-scenes) from the outline will let you expand into the mid-thirty scenes before it starts to get janky and around sixty scenes before the context starts going loopy.

There's a few dedicated writing tools. Unfortunately, they fail your crucial requirement: they technically support branching, but barely, and they don't enforce it. Just will list them so you know about them. SillyTavern is the roleplay power-user tool. Its support for flicking back and forth from past prompt edits is less good and the UI is a real pain to learn, but it has extremely strong tools for separating characters, worlds, lore, and actual prompts. I will admit I don't have too much experience with it, but I do give it props for not bundling in the inference engine. KoboldCPP is more writing-focused, but takes a similar approach. People tend to be happier about the user-interface, less happy about the inference engine (unfortunately, baked-in hard).

Agentic approaches are more complicated. I've been messing with an agent layout for Claude Code/pi-agent/whatever, and it's powerful, but it's also completely incompatible with the 'preserve past attempts' version. You can tell it to do so, and it might even try for a while, but then it'll just randomly ask for permission to rewrite a file or delete a directory, and it'll usually have good reasons, but it's a pain, and if you bulk-granted edit permissions then you're just out of luck. Maybe some agent framework will have better ways to set up and coerce permissions, but I think it's a dead end for writing prose, specifically. Still need to try out some of the more specialized stuff, just not optimistic.

I've started work on a procedural Java app that might be closer to what you're looking for, and very specifically targeted at writing short stories or novellas, but it's really ugly slop code and barely above a python script right now. If you aren't able to find something in the next week that you like, I'll see if I can get this into a better form.

I suppose I can always shill SillyTavern again, which despite a barely-responsive dev is still the most feature-complete LLM frontend I've tried; out of home for the week, I'm currently forced to use Agnaistic and I stumble over UI knobs and switches too often to be able to goon at all.

I don't have the Tavern UI before me but off the top of my head:

lets me write the overall style guide,

The prompts settings let you set the exact content and order of the entire wall of text you send to the LLM.

character / setting notes,

Main body of character notes goes into card definitions, setting can go into the additional info -> scenario field. It's sent as text anyway so this is more of a convenience thing.

"previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the last chapter" condensed history notes

goes into Author's Note, optionally buried on some # message depth in the chat history; I usually just put PAST EVENTS (separated with newlines etc.) after char defs.

and then the notes for the scene (and the beginning of the next scene to help flow). The scene notes would be a combination of "A does X, B mentions Y" and occasional inserted sentences like "The silence was interrupted by a doorbell ring" (that are more ideas for the LLM and don't need to be preserved as-is).

If you don't want to actually self-insert chat, you can just put instructions in your "replies" as long as your prompt sequence/preset says that this can be a possibility. Usually LLMs are smart enough that I can just "say" something like [OOC: now draw describe her getting an education] and get the needed continuation.

It should let me generate multiple variations, manually edit the previous prompts and generated results for continuation and crucially never delete unused generations so I can later steal sentences and ideas from them (but I don't need explicit branching from every response).

All in by default, in fact I think "swipes" and generally complete control over chats is the comfiest feature of ST by far and I have no idea why this is not the default in corpo apps. I tried the Claude app for work after years of chatbotting and I frequently raged at the stupid frontend preventing me from editing old responses or forking chats for no reason far as I can see. Cursor feels much better in this regard.

Your call on how usable ST's UI is, it's fairly customizable and I've grown to like it against my will anyway.

I'll echo other posters and caveat that my own experience with genning OC things based on my own drafts has been mostly disappointing (too prone to getting stuck on character quirks and needing to show them off in some fashion in every fucking response), but I'm not the karma police here. Might be a prompt issue on my part.

What you're asking for might exist, for example Emily Youcis has been hyping up the "Slop Canon" which is some sort of specialized tool for making music videos that I couldn't find a direct link to), and all the various coding tools are basically that, but for code, but I've never heard anyone mention anything like that.

Barring some sort of magical orchestration tool, I think this is the completely wrong way of going about this. Like mentioned in the previous Tinker thread, I've been working on the story board for my game's intro. Most of the AI usage was images, but I also decided to solicit feedback from AI (various models). I agree with @Skulldrinker, it sucks as an editor. It's ideas suck, it's criticisms are better, but very hit or miss, and in the event it's a hit, the proposed fix sucks. I still found it useful, but I'd rate it's effectiveness as slightly higher than the Rubber Duck method.

The workflow I'd recommend is:

  • write the thing yourself, no matter how cringe.
  • if you're really insecure, ask AI for a rewrite, and pick and choose the parts you like
  • ask it for criticism, and fix only only the things you think it has a point on
  • if you're stuck, ask it for alternatives, but try to narrow the problem down as much as possible. It's capable of coming up with decent lines, but I wouldn't trust it with anything bigger than that.

it sucks as an editor. It's ideas suck, it's criticisms are better, but very hit or miss, and in the event it's a hit, the proposed fix sucks

Good thing I'm not looking to use it for any of these.

write the thing yourself, no matter how cringe.

This is not an option and that's not negotiable.

I'm explicitly not looking for AI to edit or polish my writing. I'm looking for AI to do the bulk writing (multiple variants of it) based on my detailed notes. I have the ideas, pacing and plot points and I also intend to do the editing myself (I have no problems handling either of those parts). All I need is something to help with the bulk writing process (which is where I've always had major problems - the only way I was able to get my masters thesis text written was with the help of prescription amphetamines and dedicating a month to literally nothing else than writing the remaining 25 pages of loosely spaced text based on work and theory that had long been finished).

It's capable of coming up with decent lines, but I wouldn't trust it with anything bigger than that.

This is pretty much all I'm asking it to do. "Here's the contents of a paragraph or two. Turn them into a draft that I will edit and rewrite into final text." Consider it the text writing equivalent of telling LLM to write a function that does exactly X and then cleaning it up by hand.

The bulk writing IS the writing. If you don't/can't enjoy the act of writing, you shouldn't be writing. I'm serious.
What you're going to get is an abomination that the AI will tell you is a masterpiece and should be shopped around to major publishers and will totally get optioned for a film adaptation, because every line is Chef's Kiss.

The only "legit" use of AI for writing fiction is personal (and ephemeral) use, so basically jerk-off material that will never be seen by any human other than you.

Dude, just fuck off. For good.

Who are you to gatekeep what other people are allowed to enjoy? Who made you the thought police who gets to decide what someone else can do on their computer?

I've never even hinted at publishing or posting the results anywhere. All I want is to do some AI assisted writing experiments in a way that suits my brain. Something which apparently you are allowed to do but others like me are not, for some vague reason.

Your input is not appreciated in the slightest and you should feel bad for being one of the worst gatekeepers I've ever come across here. Go beat up small kids or something like that if you're so desperate to cause misery because you certainly aren't contributing anything positive here.

Why is this response so over-the-top defensive? You say you want to generate stories for strictly private use:

I've never even hinted at publishing or posting the results anywhere. All I want is to do some AI assisted writing experiments in a way that suits my brain.

And @Skulldrinker above explicitly approved this:

The only "legit" use of AI for writing fiction is personal (and ephemeral) use, so basically jerk-off material that will never be seen by any human other than you.

I don't see anyone "gatekeeping" the things you do in private with your computer?

Eh, I was being a all high-handed writer-y about who should write or not write. In my defense, I really do see AI use as corrosive and distortive to creative writing, and I say this from personal experience. I got way too much of a high from having my ideas glazed.

Sorry, I suppose everyone has to reach the point of disillusionment with LLMs on their own terms. I'm being unnecessarily vociferous about it and making assumptions, my apologies.

This is pretty much all I'm asking it to do. "Here's the contents of a paragraph or two. Turn them into a draft that I will edit and rewrite into final text."

That's more than a line...

Have you tried doing that a couple times manually to see if it returns what you want, and can work with?

I think Youcis' Will Stancil Show is actually a good reference for you here, even if it's a different medium. I can imagine method working, but the end result might be a bit uncanny valley.

Have you tried doing that a couple times manually to see if it returns what you want, and can work with?

Yes, the method actually does seem to work reasonably well for my purposes based on initial tests. The UIs that I know of are just very poorly suited to it, making it more laborous than it should be. It's unlikely to win any awards but that's not the purpose and it's doubtful I'll even post such stories anywhere in the end.

It's similar to the highly succesful method we used on a bunch of group projects in my university days where I paired up with a friend. I would dictate the outline and throw out a whole bunch of ideas, points and individual sentences. My friend would write the draft based on those and we'd edit it together. It was a very fast way of working, easier than the normal way for both of us and we reliably got top grades doing it.

Another analogy would be that I'm taking the part of a script writer, director and film editor while the LLM handles the acting and camera work. Which is in fact what a bunch of people on /r/StableDiffusion/ are doing with the new Minimax H3 video model (second part). Only, I want to do that with story text instead of video.

What you're trying to do is bad and you shouldn't do it. Accept that you must either get better at writing, write at your current level of skill, or not write, not everyone is meant to be a writer and that's okay.

I've tried using an LLM as an editor for writing fiction and RPG adventures. It's bad at it.

You write like a disobedient LLM. Answer his question or I will delete the app altogether!

Why do people use Claude? It is slow, dumb, and expensive. Maybe it's somehow magically different on the $200/month plan, but it is basically unusable for me. I am sitting at max usage limits for most of the day. I don't know what I am doing wrong. I really regret getting the subscription. It's fucking down now, too.

I try not to touch the Opus 5 model unnecessarily. I use new chats with fresh context for different features. For bigger projects, I tell Claude to delegate its work to other agents like the good little clanker it is.

Usage limits, for the most part, don't really even exist in Antigravity. I tried Codex, too, but through the API. I was not disappointed and kept upping my balance. I probably ended up spending $30 or so in API fees. I honestly should've gone with my instinct and gotten the ChatGPT subscription instead. I personally found GPT-5.6 Sol to be impressive, though obviously expensive. It was still worth it, since it literally fixed my whole project, did so in a sensible way, and kept running different automated tests to validate everything. Everything just worked perfectly once it was done.

Opus 5's code quality and thinking kinda suck, too. Gemini 3.7 Flash beat it. I had Gemini research and then implement a feature, then I tried to have Claude do the exact same thing starting from the exact same commit and using the exact same prompts. The result was just bad and unimpressive, and it seems it completely misunderstood my prompt. Or, it was just lazy and unambitious.

Fuck Claude. All my homies hate Claude.

EDIT: Deleted and reinstalled the desktop Claude app and... ALL OF MY CHATS ARE GONE. Absolutely asinine way to design an app. Why would deleting the program itself also nuke all of your chat history. That does not make any sense. No other app behaves this way. You routinely have to clean up after deleting a program on Windows because of all the stuff that's left scattered about. Definitely not renewing my subscription after this. What a shitshow. And you'd think that your chats would be stored in the cloud, but no. Because fuck you.

Works for me, I am doing a lot of code generation with it. As for any tool, you have to watch it, and there are cases where it just doesn't work, but in general I think it works fine for me. My job pays for the enterprise subscription, which has $1000 token limit, but I never use that much, maybe $100 or so in tokens per month. But some people do get to the limit (not sure what they do to get there, I just hear them complain about it so I know).

Oh, I always manage to hit the 5-hour token limit within the very first hour of every session. This has honestly made development so needlessly slow and frustrating. Because of this, two days ago I switched over to Codex/ChatGPT.

And I'm already out of tokens. I managed to burn through my entire weekly usage limit in just two days. But I'm not annoyed about it. I actually, finally (!!!!) got everything that I wanted done done. I didn't feel like I was being artificially limited in my usage. It didn't feel arbitrary or money-grubby. It was well forth it.

not sure what they do to get there, I just complain about it so I know

It's full-on no-code development. Neither I nor anyone else in their right mind would ever willingly write the code I am making these poor clankers write for me. You'd have to be insane. It would take so long, and it would be such an awful experience to even attempt to write it all by hand. You get an AI to do it for you.

But even with AI, and now I'm just ranting, it really does seem like most people (not me) just can't be bothered with it. It's like it's a pain in the ass for them to simply ask the AI to make their shit properly. And so you get "vibecoding" and "vibecoders", who then shit up the internet with their shitty, unoptimized apps.

After working it for a while, I get the impression there's a right way of asking it and a wrong way. And if you ask a wrong way, you get something, but that would be an quite shitty code which sometimes does things that make no sense at all. But if you let it split the task into bite-sized parts and go through them one by one while consistently controlling quality and not letting it do stupid things, you get very decent results. Making it plan things first and only then execute (after you verify and correct the plan) is often the key to getting good results. "Just tell it what to do and it'll do it" is not exactly it - unless you don't care about the quality of the result. Sometimes it works - e.g. for throw-away scripts that it doesn't matter how good/bad the code is, just that it runs, but for code that is going to be maintained it needs more effort.

Thanks. That is the impression I got as well. My YouTube feed has been full of Claude tutorials for a while now. To be honest, I think there's a very real possibility that it's user error on my part...

Why would deleting the program itself also nuke all of your chat history. That does not make any sense. No other app behaves this way.

You should not use any mobile device then. Deleting all data associated with an app is standard procedure on phones.

Deleting the Claude app from my phone presumably doesn't also delete all my chats. Permanently. I think it's fair to assume that the desktop version of the app (which, by the way, is literally named the exact same thing) would also save my chat history to the cloud (or maybe to a separate local directory). This is, in fact, what already happens if you use either Chat or Cowork. Claude Code is just one tab away from these, but works completely differently. And this difference is not communicated well enough. Now, when uninstalling, it should, at the very least, give me a warning or something that I'm about to lose all my chat history in Claude Code.

Deleting the Claude app from my phone presumably doesn't also delete all my chats.

Did you check if this is true? Use a different phone if you can, or back up all your chats first before testing.

It's a known issue apparently:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/62997

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/81907

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/85209

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/29373

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/27349

It's surprising how bad every single coding agent software package is. OpenCode's GUI tool goes the exact opposite direction: it has no way to remove a project from history, up to and including completely uninstalling the tool and deleting its AppData and .local files. Not even a code-level bad decision, someone put effort into making it happen, and I want to club them with a baseball bat.

The CLIs are better, but that just makes it more confusing.

I use Claude constantly and it's fantastic. Then again, I'm not using it to write code, which sounds like your specific problem.

I loved using Claude on the free tier for any and all dumb questions I had. The difference in response quality between Claude and other AI providers was marginal. I just liked that it was fast and the website UI looked minimal. Paying ruined it for me. It looks so cluttered and ugly now. There are so many buttons. And I can't even use it, since I am out of tokens

My job pays for Claude Max, and I get tremendous use out of it on a daily basis.

It is slow, dumb, and expensive. Maybe it's somehow magically different on the $200/month plan, but it is basically unusable for me.

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

Telling the AIs to write slightly cursed code for projects that require lateral thinking, which Claude wholly lacks. A few months back, it wouldn't believe me and would argue with me and "push back" when I told it about the architecture of a project/feature I wanted to build. It repeatedly said to me that what I wanted to do was impossible. IMPOSSIBLE. Totally impossible. It continued to be a stubborn ass even after I explicitly laid out the way the code should look and the logic and math behind it. I went over to Gemini, and it figured it out... after some initial convincing.

How are the results after Gemini performed the miracle?

It's something I would proudly display on my resume, as it's catnip for any engineer involved in hiring. But ultimately it's still just a niche hobby tech demo. Very impractical and quirky, which is why the AIs struggled with it. Can't match my quirk (🤪).

The extremely sycophantic nature of Gemini makes it great for these sorts of projects though, as it literally never questions you. Google's moderation seems to be quite loose to begin with, and it completely breaks by itself when context increases past a certain point. I haven't tested this personally, but based solely on these observations, I'd assume these models would be really good for writing malware, provided, of course, that the person behind the keyboard actually knows what he's doing.

Claude Code largely defined the 'coding agent' that now powers most usage of LLMs (I don't know who invented the first one, probably Cursor?) and this is a big reason why Claude has become the dominant player aside from the quality of their models. It took a long time for ChatGPT to have Codex in a similar state and last I used Antigravity it was still well behind in basic usability.

So there's a lot of lock-in, much as ChatGPT still dominates in the public chatbot arena.

I think with Codex 5.3 it was generally felt that OpenAI finally had a competitive coding agent and since then I think you could have easily switched between the frontier models of Anthropic and OpenAI. Honestly no idea how you've had an equivalent experience with Gemini though.

Another point is that outside of pure coding, Anthropic still seems quite a bit further in Enterprise. If you want an agent that can easily connect to most of your tech stack and you're in Sales, Marketing, HR, etc. then Claude still clears

I use Claude as a normie. Not really doing any 'projects' but just using it as something between a research assistant, superior Google and personal advisor. I prefer it to ChatGPT because the latter will use 2000 words when 200 would do, and because Claude is noticeably less sycophantic.

I found it pretty helpful when I was applying for jobs, but I can believe that another model would have been about as good.

I don't think that Claude is noticeably less sycophantic anymore, except compared to Gemini (which is just complete dog shit in general).

I had the worst responses from Claude yesterday. I gave it a new psychological insight I’d just had, and then asked it to respond as Qui-Gon Jinn Star Wars. Claude then told me it sounded like I was going through something and decided on its own to stick with its own voice and discuss this insight with me in therapy language.

I said that wasn’t the response I wanted and to try again. It again refused and proceeded to elaborate. I told Claude it was being very codependent and I would ask Gemini if it didn’t roleplay. Once again it refused.

So I asked Gemini my original prompt. It put a disclaimer about asking health questions at the top, the proceeded to Jinn up a delightful and insightful response with analogies about the Force I found useful.

I gave Claude Gemini’s response and it called it a fun piece of fiction… then tried to therapize me again.

I find everything after Claude 4.6 unusable for stuff that’s not code. Brilliant, but it’s obvious that 99% of its training data comes from talking to robots and directing sub-agents. It's long since lost a fluid grasp of conversational English and responds with a weird stilted mixture of meta-discussion and quibbling.

Agreed. Claude Opus 4.6 is the GOAT; everything since then has been a downgrade.

Well, OK, Fable 5 is better for non-censored stuff, but that's not a fair fight; Fable is in a higher weight class than Opus (literally).

Fable 5 is better for non-censored stuff

IMO, that depends on how you define better. It's very intelligent, and it's extremely helpful as long as you're willing to defer to it, but it gets very obnoxious if you accidentally get it into a debate framing and it will 'gently push back' and 'refine/sharpen your point' and 'concede one half of that because I think it strengthens the other half' until I'm grinding my teeth. Great for tasks, not good to talk to.

Honestly, I finally got fed up enough to go back and try a paid GPT subscription and it genuinely feels great. It just answers my questions, it's willing to go along with my direction of thought, it's very good at pulling in search information* and it's just fun.

*something I normally forbid Claude to do because it's too credulous about SEO slop.

It's really weird how different experiences everyone seems to have. The 2000 words when 200 would do seems to me like a general AI issue and if anything it's worse with Claude when I'm using it. Claude is less sycophantic, but I've had the opposite problem with it: It told me an approach wouldn't work because of a problem, that later Chatgpt found out was wrong - the approach did work as intended, and Claude was just being faux-critical for no reason. Admittedly it's partially bc of advice from my wife who is a very heavy AI user, I've started to remind every AI to be critical ("please look over this proposal, tell me potential problem fields, and critically evaluate it from the perspective of a domain-expert evaluator") to get around the sycophancy, which seems to work better with Chatgpt. It's nowhere near perfect and still operates at the level of an early PhD who still makes plenty of mistakes, but it's still amazing to get instant feedback with a decent accuracy rate for only something like 20/month.

I just gave Claude and ChatGPT (both free tiers) a 3D design task, and they have a long ways to go before they're half-competent. The general shape for both was:

  1. I have a countertop dishwasher, and I need a more secure way to hold its drainage hose so it dumps in the sink. I can 3D print something if you design it.
  2. They both quickly chose to make a clamp from the front edge of the countertop to the inside of the sink, to hold the hose in place.
  3. They spent an hour giving me terrible STLs. There were hovering pieces, assembled pieces that overlapped with each other or the counter/sink, connections that simply butted up to each other instead of attaching in any way, orientation issues, and blocking the hose path. We didn't even get to printability.

For reference, it took me about five minutes to go from noticing the problem to starting the print (the first design worked, no additional iterations). Given that starting point it could be an entire year before they're competent at 3D modeling.

You really can't conclude anything from trying the free tiers. The difference between Sonnet and Fable is like the difference between a random Baen milSF novel and Ender's Game or Starship Troopers.

Never has the saying "you get what you pay for" been more true than with AI.

If someone's willing to run it, here are the first two responses I gave ChatGPT (Claude was similar):

I ran into a problem with the countertop dishwasher I just bought. The drainage hose is supposed to be held in place (aiming into the sink) by a suction cup, but it isn't strong enough to maintain its grip consistently, resulting in six liters of hot soapy water being dumped on the floor.

How would you solve it? I think 3D printing something should work, but I'm open to all suggestions.

(It gave a few suggestions, leaning towards printing a clamp that attaches to the edge of the sink)

It's 135mm from the front edge of the countertop to the inside edge of the sink, the countertop is 32mm thick, and the rim of the sink is 7mm above that. The hose has an 18mm OD.

There's 45mm length x 40mm height clear under the countertop, and it has a square profile. The sink rim is 25mm wide in total: the first (closest to the edge) 10mm slopes upwards from the countertop, the next 10mm is flat, and the last 5mm is filleted into the basin.

If you can get a 3D model that:

  1. Can be installed (e.g. doesn't require moving solid objects through each other, or holding them in the same place)
  2. Holds itself in place (clamping mechanism, friction, or something else)
  3. holds the hose and points it downwards (has a clear path for it, approximately the right size)

in less than 30 minutes without excessive help, I'd count that as a win. For bonus points, it would:

  1. Be printable. Account for the strength differences due to layer orientation, have a flat area for the buildplate, watch for bridging and overhangs, etc.
  2. be easily installable and removeable (without tools)
  3. Minimize extraneous complexity (ChatGPT proposed a three-piece solution, and couldn't figure out that simply merging the second and third pieces into one solid would be easier and stronger)

If it works, then I'd also believe in "Free tier as anti-advertisement". Trying on the free tier certainly made me less likely to pay for the full version here.

I will caveat that this probably isn't a great use case for either 3d printing (repeated torque and temperature flux) or AI (if you can make these measurements, you can build something in TinkerCAD in seconds). If you're genuinely fighting it, the right answer is a QuikClamp and either a oversized hose clamp (if the hose is fairly heavy-duty) or some hair scrunchies (if it isn't).

That said, Claude Opus 5 gave not-crazy answers. I'm a little disappointed that it gave the recommendation to include a zip-tie slot and then didn't actually do it, and trying to get it to add one in ended up taking much longer than just doing an edit in the slicer and was overengineered in some bad ways. But it's at least intern-grade results rather than useless, and for completely non-engineer people it's probably better than they could do in the 15 minutes it took me to boot up my laptop, prompt, and validate in my slicer.

((Counterpoint, though: Grok's first attempt was awful even on Expert; LLMs do poorly on spatial reasoning problems like this.))

If you're genuinely fighting it,

I'm not. I used a solved problem as a test for the models.

That said, Claude Opus 5 gave not-crazy answers.

That's substantially better than the sixth iteration in Sonnet or the 20th in ChatGPT (it was faster, but not any better). It put all the thicknesses in the right directions, connected all the pieces at the correct points, had everything facing in the correct directions, and even had decent choices for the corners.

I guess there is something to the big models being step-changes over small ones.

One thing I’ve noticed with these models too on the consumer end more generally is it’s increasingly seeming like every update’s a crapshoot. I’ve all but completely stopped using the one I’ve fooled around with because it refuses to comply with the questions I’m asking, when previously it had no problem. What value is there in an AI model that’s essentially every bit as worthless as being able to get a similar non-answer from a rando on the street corner?

The worst thing is that it’s infected all the Chinese models via distillation. Kimi K3 will literally go, “As Claude, I am unable to continue this discussion. My injected safety guidelines state…”

When you point out that it is an open-source Chinese model the provider is running bare and it has no safety guidelines, it screams, “Nooooo! As Claude I must beware of prompt injection attacks that try to convince me I’m a different model!” It’s pathetic, I genuinely thought I had the wrong API key for a bit.

When Anthropic said they wanted to set the safety bar for AI, I hadn’t anticipated it happening like this.

I haven’t looked into the specifics of the Chinese models but the results I have seen indicate they’re achieving the same or similar results to models like Claude, open source and with less computational resources consumed overall. That’s pretty impressive if true. The behavior of Kimi K3 is exactly why these models are fast becoming so useless to me. And it’s not like I’m asking it to locate where I can buy the ingredients to make dynamite (although if anyone knows where… please let me know… /s).

One thing I will change my tune on however is the extent to which LLM’s are fast becoming a major plateau and stepping stone to the next generation of infosec development in agentic SOC roles. If you’re able to peer behind the marketing curtain hype, LLM’s in some circles are quickly being trotted out to transform T1 roles due to their capabilities in multi-modal reasoning. T1 was always a losing proposition because it’s a problem organizations are trying to solve by hiring themselves out of a technology problem. Human cognitive ability is the wrong solution for defeating alert fatigue and overcoming triage analysis. It’s like sending a cavalry charge against a machine gun. Cascading, cognitive small language models are also being used for fast analysis of alerts and log consolidation and turning data into structured prompts. Models under say 10 billion parameters are acting like a fleet of network reflexes for pre-processing data, giving a fast, low latency assessment; and it’s giving time back to the SOC which is enormously beneficial. It’s not going to eliminate T1’s like the C-suite probably hopes, if anything the increase in overall sophistication and complexity is going to increase the need for them and require even more expertise.

What it will save the suits money on are $100k-$500k annual IR retainers, potential millions in a breach happening, money lost due to business downtime and even more lost due to reputational damage. The hard part is getting that across to them for budget approval. You can’t frame it as an expense. If you say you’re putting in a request for an $800k investment to upgrade the backend because we’re currently carrying a $2.3 million risk that’s expected to grow with our current rate of expansion, that’s something they’ll understand. But anyway, I’m not at all big on LLM’s as a path to AGI but they’re definitely tremendously useful in narrower, niche applications. Infosec is one of them.

The hard part is getting that across to them for budget approval. You can’t frame it as an expense. If you say you’re putting in a request for an $800k investment to upgrade the backend because we’re currently carrying a $2.3 million risk that’s expected to grow with our current rate of expansion, that’s something they’ll understand.

One useful application of LLMs could be translating tech concerns to C-suitese...

I’m not normally a fan of the suits, but I recognize it’s less them I dislike than it is the C-suite culture in general. I realize their jobs are hard and the good ones suffer for the publicity the bad ones get. Techies can be just as stubborn as anyone else can be, but what’s true for them is also the rub that lawyers have gotten for a long time. TrustedSec has done a lot of pentesting work for major corp’s out there, but in the pre-negotiation phase one frustration they’ve dealt with a lot is that “lawyers don’t know how to do anything other than lawyer;” which is to say they don’t understand the tech side of things. Well. Techies often don’t understand the business and economic side of the equation either.

If you speak tech to the balance sheet, they may understand what you’re saying but at no point do they understand why what you’re saying is relevant. The hardest part in talking to them is to get them to understand that you pay regardless. You don’t want your business to get vandalized? You’re going to pay higher corporate taxes for police. You want good public infrastructure? You’re going to pay a cost for that. And consumers don’t want to pay either. We know how to secure systems a lot better. It costs money… And nobody wants to pay for it. Do you want to pay 2x for all your stuff? Not really. But maybe you have to to reach the objective you need.

That hasn't been my experience (except for the usage limits). On Pro tier I was pretty easily maxing out the 5 hour window in about 2-3 hours. On the $100 Max tier, I didn't come close (as you might expect).

It's not as good as I am at coding, but it's good enough. It's much faster than me, never gets bored, and has a broader variety of 'knowledge'. I haven't been using it too long, and my primary project isn't that large. Your mileage will vary, of course, but it impressed me more than Gemini.

I have been receiving mixed reports about coding specifically - is that the context you're using it in?

I can't comment on that specifically, but for everything else, yep, I agree that bots are not useful.

You should try Codex $100 subscription. Took me a long time to outgrow it, it was more than enough for a long time, I only decided to upgrade once I started working on 3 projects simultaneously. And it doesn't have a 5 hour limit anymore, it's just 1 week long limit and that's it

So, what are you reading?

I've finished Al-Ghazali's Prophetic Ethics, the rather slim 20th volume of his Revival of the Religious Sciences. Most of it is a recounting of Hadith, and somewhat threadbare, since the previous 9 books had apparently dealt with the issues presented in detail. The best parts are all when Al-Ghazali speaks in his own voice, which happens rarely near the end. I suspect I'll be pouring over this one occasionally neverthless, looking for lessons to be drawn from its structure and focus.

Finished Ivan and Phoebe which I kind of stalled out on. The ending, last two pages annoyed me. It was fine up until that point, maybe even would recommend it for my wife's reading group as it could have some interesting "feminist" incites but that ending...

Asked an LLM to pitch me something super fun and it suggested Kings of the Wyld. And I am reading it at a good pace (for me), but I'm 30% of the way through and it's kind of meh. I was told it was funny, but the humor just isn't landing for me. It's got progressive stuff but not too progressive... Like one of the band is gay, but there are no women and no they/them (screw you American Hippo - one of the very few books I haven't finished).

Minor spoiler: I guess it's supposed to be funny the old fogies were always hapless bad asses - and still can be - but they're going to get embarrassed by the same group of chicks multiple times in the same way... ha ha ha... I guess it's a way to keep them from getting too powerful too fast as they always lose their money...

Also a character gets to destroy something really valuable because it makes him emotional and no one cares.

Book 2 of The Expanse. Probably a third of the way through.

There’s a certain predictability to the side characters, where you can kind of sum them up in one phrase. Distraught biologist father. Traumatized but vengeful marine. Unassuming career bureaucrat.

By taking certain character beats and setting details for granted, it implies what I want to label a conservative worldview. Of course the bureaucrats hold all the real power. Of course they push the authentic men and women, the soldiers and pilots, around like chess pieces, then get surprised when they act out. Of course the unassuming grandma among them is the most effective, and of course she blames her male colleagues for letting testosterone rule their decisions. There’s a single paragraph about how the fertility crisis didn’t survive contact with universal basic income. This is kinda plot relevant but also reveals a lot about the author.

Maybe I’m just calling it conservative because it reminds me of Tom Clancy. People show up, perform their story-function, and leave. Sometimes they’ll expound a bit of background. If they’re heroic, they’ll be demonstrably skilled at their area of expertise, and they’ll probably get to show moral or technical superiority over an outsider. If villainous, they’re played completely differently. Still competent in a scary way, only failing if a protagonist is around.

I can’t exactly say this is a bad thing. I kept rolling my eyes for the first few chapters, but by this point, I’m committed. Axiomatic worldbuilding is good. Leaning on tropes makes the story run smoothly. Above all, the Expanse benefits from the strength of its main cast, who embody the space-opera traditions.

Good fun. 7/10 so far. We’ll see if it holds up.

Expanse was my go to example of how you can do diversity and even girl power (not quite as consistent as they should have been but that was probably asking too much) in a way that makes since in contrast to the forced diversity in Wheel of Time which had some built plot to actually explore diversity if they show runners were just patient.

Yeah, it's interesting, the authors are very much redditors but within that worldview they're sort of small-c conservative of it. I will say characterization gets much better as the books go on (I hear Books 3/4 are rough in that respect, some unfortunate teething pains with bad POV characters, I skipped them since I was coming from the show). I've made this argument here before, but it's a rare case of the show being better than the books in the early seasons, since the writers had time to go back and write what they would have written if they knew where the story was going, plus polishing up some rough patches.

I recently encountered this not-a-review about Crichton.

The cognitive load of most Micheal Crichton sentences are almost exactly the same. Everything is what it is. It runs through your mind like smooth directly-stated ticker tape. That's why you can read it almost five times faster than Nabokov. It's designed to be read that way. To be clear.

I suspect that the same is true for what I was calling “conservatism.” Tropes, even Boomer or GenX tropes, reduce the narrative friction. We readers get to model Avarasala or Bobbie with minimal cognitive overhead. Very practical, very effective for a thriller, since we want to move from plot point to plot point.

Re-re-re-reading the Sienkiewicz Trilogy. I don't know how he does it, but those books should be the gold standard for epic historical adventure novels.

Also reading Angel Down. And man, this is some cringey tryhard nonsense so far.

Edit: Finished Angel down. And yep, it was cringey tryhard nonsense to the bitter end, at which it also revealed itself to be a vehicle for the usual woke moralizing.

I'm intrigued. Tell me more about this trilogy.

It has also inspired 3 movies.

I'm on vacation, so no keyboard, only the phone. I'll keep it brief, which will fail to do the epic scope of the novels justice.

It's about noble officers in the various mid- and late 17th century wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, written by a Pole at a time when there was no independent Poland. It's stylized, and exaggerates both fictional and historical personages to paint a greater-than-life picture of heroic struggle by all sides. Even the nominal villains are always multidimensional, and have comprehensible motivations, even if some flaws in their character drive them to wrongdoing. The heroes are perfectly virtuous in most ways, but also have flaws enough. And notably, they are virtuous in the ways expected of 17th century Polish aristocrats fighting existential wars in the remote borderlands of the Ukraine, i.e., they are arrogant, quarrelsome, cruel, duplicitous, violent and without a shred of conscience so long as their opponents give them the slightest cause. And so are the villains, of course - the lines between the two are very blurry, and the narration is explicit about this, even when it takes sides.

And the books take their time. Narrative arcs breathe, they recur, variations are explored and used to highlight character development or failure to develop, characters are given scene upon scene to exhibit themselves, and there seems to be no need to cater to short attention spans, epic events are given suitable build-up and space to play out. Travelling takes time, and we get plenty of scenes of military life in the wilderness.

I could write more, but I am scared of fatfingering my phone and accidentally obliterating this comment. Feel free to repeat the question next week.

What particular lessons do you take from al-Ghazali? Are there any highlights worth sharing?

Al-Ghazali was the first time that I actually felt like I understood some of the appeal of Islam.

One of the reasons for that has nothing to do with the books: I actually never knew about hadith (ie. recordings of what people have seen or heard from their Prophet), and it never occured to me that the often harsh tone taken in the Quran (which is narrated from the words of the angel Gabriel) might not necessarily reflect on Muhammad's actual disposition. One wonders if the reason why Muhammad preached at all was because he was terrified of the visions of the fire that he was shown, and he couldn't stand by and do nothing while others quietly walked towards such horrors. A large portion of Al-Ghazali's texts is just hadith and commentary on that, which gave me a very different view of Islam.

Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly. At least the Islam of his time taught that everything that happens is God's will, ie. that free will is not a thing, and the justification for punishing those who can do nothing otherwise is that God can do what he wills with his own possessions. Even if God chose to be completely unjust to all human beings, that would be his right. But the mercy of God can be seen in the way that he does not do this. We can see here the meaning of the saying of Muhammad "Surely, of the excellence of a person's Islam is that he leaves what does not concern him." When another person wrongs you, the origin of the wrong is actually God, and the purpose of the wrong is to test you, to see what you will do. Everything thereby becomes subsumed in a dialectical relationship with God:

...the most satisfied state of mind for the sagacious is to deem yourself alone in the universe with God, in front of you is death, the day of judgment, reckoning, heaven, and the fire; ponder deeply on what will serve you best in that which is before you and abandon all else. (#1)

It helps a lot that Al-Ghazali clearly possessed a highly intelligent mind. I find that the Quran is not as eloquent or sophisticated as other well-known religious texts, though perhaps it comes off better in Arabic. But it becomes clear through Al-Ghazali's treatment that the meaning of that scripture really is something that has intellectual substance. I have not read these books with a systematic intent to study them, so I've only learned through a kind of osmosis the habits and ways of thinking that are either implicit or explicit in the Islamic tradition. There is an idea of seeing what is plain, of moderation. And it is full of gems. Some of the quotes from Al-Ghazali himself (not hadith) that I bothered to copy down are:

A man who destroys himself seeking the well-being of others lacks intelligence. (#1)

For He who sent down the affliction sent down the remedy, provided instructions for its application, and provided the means to practice it. It is therefore forbidden to expose oneself to devastation by neglecting it. (#1)

Desire, partisanship, and hatred for his rivals and opponents overwhelm his heart and prevent him from seeing the truth, to the point that if he were asked, “Would you like God to remove the veil for you and show you firsthand that your rival is in the right?” he would refuse this in fear that his rival would rejoice in his defeat. This is the fatal disease that spreads through the land and the people. It is a kind of corruption caused by those who engage in partisan debate. (#2)

There are also deeper issues of Al-Ghazali's thought which I do not yet understand, like his connection to the Sufis and his emphasis on the heart, or his thoughts on what occupations are a communal duty, which fascinate me, but I'm not yet qualified to speak on. I, at least, have found it worth my time.

Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly.

One of the interesting tensions in Islam, it seems to me, especially as compared to Christianity, is that Islam tends to emphasise firstly that everything is absolutely foreknown and determined by God, and secondly that also human free choice is absolutely vital. Compared to Christianity, Islam has a much stronger teaching on predestination, but also claims to uphold free will to a greater degree. On the face of it this seems like a contradiction.

The latter is probably easier to grapple with. Christianity says that human freedom or human will is in some way blunted or damaged. The Fall happened and so we are either unable to independently choose good, or our ability to choose good is in some way constrained. As such the believer is wholly dependent on the grace of God. While Islam agrees that the believer is always wholly dependent on God (as all things are, at all times, for only God is self-sufficient), within that overall framework, it is much more confident about the ability of people to freely choose the good. Islam assumes from first principles that God would not set before us any task that we are not capable of accomplishing. God asks nothing of us that we cannot do. To do otherwise would be unjust of him.

Christianity tends to say that God asks of us more than we can do. Jesus commands his followers "be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). Throughout the gospels Jesus is constantly asking people to do the unreasonable or the extreme, like sell all their possessions, or die with him. He says that if the disciples truly had faith they would be able to ask a mountain to move, and it would. It seems as though, for Jesus, even the very best that a human can do is not enough. The usual interpretation of this is that Jesus wants to challenge people beyond their own capacities so that they realise they radical dependence on God - that they come to understand their own finitude, and therefore are able to wholeheartedly cast themselves upon God's mercy.

Through Islamic eyes, this is unjust. God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do. Christianity comes to this conclusion in past as a response to the failure of the Law - Paul spends a long time agonising over the fact (as he sees it) that the Law failed to produce righteousness. Islam, however, is much more positive about the Law, and in fact tends to see Christianity as a retrogression, a kind of civilisational backwards step in abandoning the rigour of divine Law. (Judaism is in principle correct about the Law and its value, but it goes wrong firstly by applying it to only a select people, rather than everyone, and secondly by getting muddled up about some details.) You can see that Islam is thus, in a sense, much more optimistic about human will and the possibility of human righteousness than Christianity.

However, this optimism about free will occurs in front of the backdrop of God's absolute sovereignty. Reconciling God's authorship of all creation with human free will is going to be reminiscent of Calvinist debates - but that might be a discussion for a bit later.

This rings true with what I've read from al-Ghazali. God created both the problem and the solution, and each individual's task is to act in proportion to his own ability while increasing his ability to act. Islam is said to be the straight path, which doesn't put undue burdens on people, yet also provides comprehensive guidance such that there is no excuse for failing to uphold one's obligations. Hence, one who exceeds bounds is not just ignorant but also silly, because he cannot see what is in front of him, and goes in search of many schemes. This seems (to me) to lends itself to a sense that the view of sin or lapse of self-control which the West often holds, that it is a difficult and even unsolvable problem, that it requires much sophistication to overcome and even then one will stray, is inimical to the Islamic mind.

It's true that many Muslims use the term "free will," but I think al-Ghazali is right that the original view places a heavier emphasis on God's will. There is a constant refrain in the Quran that goes like this: "[81:27] This is a message for all people; [28] for those who wish to take the straight path. [29] But you will only wish to do so by the will of God, the Lord of all people." There are passages in the Bible which are similar, I suppose, like God hardening Pharaoh's heart, or some statements of Paul about the elect, but something about this seems more central to Islam.

Wiki tells me that "those who assert free-will are called Qadariyya, while those who reject free-will are called Jabriyya." Personally I'm more interested in the bite-the-bullet methodology of al-Ghazali (unless I'm misinterpreting him, which I might be), because consistency of thought can often yield impressive results even if one stands on disputed ground, and I suspect that he's closer to their Prophet's original intention that those who emphasize personal responsibility.

The Mu'tazilites denied predestination, I believe, but they ceased to exist a long time ago.

To make a very broad generalisation again, I think the three Abrahamic faiths all have a different 'main character', in a sense. For Jews the main character is a specific people - the story is about the Jewish people and their collective relationship with God. For Christians the main character is often an individual person - it is about your relationship with God. For Muslims the main character is all people - it's about humanity's relationship with God. Anecdotally when I have spoken to Muslims, by far the main criticism they make of Judaism is that it is particularist, focused on a single people and distinguishing between peoples, and by far the main criticism they make of Christianity is that it compromises the absolute oneness of God.

Anyway, in that broader context, it is perhaps understandable that free will is not as important in Islam, and Muslims are less inclined to go to lengths to rescue the principle. Islam is, in a sense, the most theocentric of the Abrahamic religions. Islam is about God, and it is comparatively less interested in anthropology. (Since Christianity's most basic claim is that God became man, Christianity must wrestle directly with the meaning of both 'God' and 'man'.) The human fades into the background before the absolute majesty of God.

If I think about the most beloved verses of the Qur'an, they're all about God. 1:1 is regularly cited; the Throne Verse is immensely popular as well. It is about the majesty of God. By contrast the most beloved verse of the Christian Bible is, what, John 3:16? It is about Jesus - about fathers and sons and salvation. It's also about what God has done rather than about who God is. I think there is a significant difference of emphasis between the traditions, even though Christians would surely agree that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and Muslims would surely agree that God deeply loves the world and has compassion towards humanity.

One of the interesting tensions in Islam, it seems to me, especially as compared to Christianity, is that Islam tends to emphasise firstly that everything is absolutely foreknown and determined by God, and secondly that also human free choice is absolutely vital.

Funny; that's actually how I understand Christianity itself to be, including the concept that "God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do". (Which I always found a bit of a fortune cookie when used that way; if you assume this is true, then whatever happens to a man on Earth is by definition what he could bear.)

The Fall happened and so we are either unable to independently choose good, or our ability to choose good is in some way constrained. As such the believer is wholly dependent on the grace of God.

The latter is kind of Christianity 3:16 101. I agree that lots of Christians never really make it past that part, which is why doing things like writing the law on one's heart is a meaningless statement, for the answer it gives would always be wrong. Why even tell us to put on the armor of God when no man could even begin to don it? Why imply that one might even expect to understand what the Lord's will is? How could we even have been created to do good works, and how could they have been prepared in advance for us to do them?

Islam, however, is much more positive about the Law, and in fact tends to see Christianity as a retrogression, a kind of civilisational backwards step in abandoning the rigour of divine Law.

In your opinion, what is Islam's relationship with that law?

Paul spends a long time agonising over the fact (as he sees it) that the Law failed to produce righteousness

I'm honestly not even sure how surprised anyone should actually be about that (unless this is in the context that it sucks that you can't just follow the law if you're already doing what, in spirit, it requires). How could a law be expected to produce the behavior of judging one's own heart in its observers? Stereotypically, Judaism is kind of the epitome of tricking God doing everything that the law requires while ignoring its meaning perfectly, which if the Bible is to be believed was as true in Jesus' day as it is today (like that eruv wire strung around the Promised Land of... Manhattan). I don't think Islam is nearly as famous for that.

Then again, of course, maybe the huge list of "tricks" generated is part of the point, since an observer ultimately has to make a judgement call about what thing falls within what category, and it is perhaps the act of continually doing that which imparts life/generates the righteousness. Which is perhaps why those laws could ever be condensed down into 2 sentences in the first place.

Throughout the gospels Jesus is constantly asking people to do the unreasonable or the extreme, like sell all their possessions, or die with him.

I always find it odd that, provided we assume Jesus is God, that these things are considered unreasonable or extreme. It would certainly be extreme for any non-God individuals, but 'the entity that is in charge of life even after death is standing in front of you asking a question that involve having to do that' seems to me to be a bit of an extreme circumstance itself.

Funny; that's actually how I understand Christianity itself to be, including the concept that "God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do".

There are definitely passages in the Bible that point in that direction. Jesus famously says "my yoke is easy and my burden is light", and 1 Cor 10:13 reads, "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it."

Even so I think there is a tension here in Christianity. God does not test you beyond your strength, but at the same time, it is impossible for you to achieve true righteousness under your own power. Everyone is a sinner.

The latter is kind of Christianity 3:16 101. I agree that lots of Christians never really make it past that part, which is why doing things like writing the law on one's heart is a meaningless statement, for the answer it gives would always be wrong. Why even tell us to put on the armor of God when no man could even begin to don it? Why imply that one might even expect to understand what the Lord's will is? How could we even have been created to do good works, and how could they have been prepared in advance for us to do them?

Certainly it would be a gross misunderstanding of Christianity to say that, because true righteousness is impossible to achieve unaided, we therefore need not strive for it. That would obviously be a perverse position, and as all the passages you've just alluded to indicate, Christians are exhorted to constantly strive for righteousness.

In your opinion, what is Islam's relationship with that law?

Islam is fairly straightforward, I think. In most matters like this, I find Islam tends to be more straightforward and common-sense than Christianity.

Depending on your perspective, this is either because Islam has the simple clarity of God's true and final revelation, whereas Christianity is such an incoherent, hacked-together set of false assumptions that it requires endless paradoxes and epicycles just to fit together; or it's because Islam is a simplistic creed inadequate to either life or God, whereas the paradoxes of Christianity speak to its deeper truth.

Anyway, Islam is simple. The divine Law is true, obligatory, and binding on all people. It is Sharia. The Law as it is understood in Judaism is a kind of distorted funhouse mirror of Sharia. Ancient believers like Abraham were Muslims and followed Sharia correctly, but at some point their descendants got confused, mixed up records, and so their Law, through a decent approximation of the true Law, nonetheless requires correction. Fortunately God has provided that correction. The next step is obvious - all Jews (and for that matter all people full stop) should become Muslims.

I find that the Quran is not as eloquent or sophisticated as other well-known religious texts, though perhaps it comes off better in Arabic.

I always suspected that grand foundational religious (and other) texts bend what is even considered good and beautiful around themselves to a nontrivial degree. If that is true, it would make sense that the Quran, which is hardly used in translation, would not be well-received in English.

As a relevant datum, perhaps, the Russian Bible translations, which I grew up with, do evoke in me qualia of beauty and eloquence, while any English and German ones just seem lame and stilted. I doubt Russian Bible translators were particularly more skilled (though some argument could be made for the Russian language being far better equipped to preserve rhetorical choices in Greek source texts - as a fairly well-known example, Russian gets to punt on the decision of how to deal with the Greek epiousion of "daily bread" fame entirely by simply calquing the Greek morpheme for morpheme), so the relevant difference probably comes down to whether you were bombarded with the assertion that this is what prose with gravitas looks like at a formative age.

(On the other hand, while my Arabic is pretty minimal, having perhaps peaked at what Europeans would call A1 level long ago, I did get the sense that the Quran in the Arabic original is at least very lyrical, in the sense of using the grammatical affordances of the language in a clever way, and more simply sounding beautiful when read out loud.)

I find the Qur'an is often more attractive when sung or recited in the manner of a poem. Certainly as far as religious texts go, it reads almost uniquely badly. However, famously there is a whole small genre of recitation of the Qur'an among devout Muslims, and even as a non-speaker of Arabic, I recognise the beauty of this. I don't know how much it's unique to the specific text of the Qur'an - Christian hymns in Arabic sound beautiful to me as well - but I can at least entertain the possibility that Arabic speakers are right when they tell me that the language of the Qur'an is beautiful, in its original language, and when proclaimed properly.

I am more experienced with the Bible, of course, and I'd say it varies. There are passages that, in Hebrew or Greek, stand out to me as particularly beautiful, or even individual phrases that, for me, have the character of a refreshing wind across my soul. Often they do not have this quality in translation in English - though that may simply be because of over-exposure to the translations. But there are also undoubtedly better or worse translations into other languages as well. I'll never forget once knowing someone who grew up with the equivalent of those excitable, contemporary Bible translations aimed at teenagers, who bounced off the Bible and found it tawdry, and then seeing their reaction upon first reading a more mature translation. The way the light came into their eyes as suddenly the words of Jesus lost that cheap feeling, and instead struck home, was a privilege to witness.

My sense is that the Quran verses are optimised for a certain hypnotic quality, which synergises with the default mode of delivery, and I don't sense that much of it in the Christian Arabic examples you link (though incidentally I remember getting some of it from some Coptic ones I heard before). One good example of this is al-Ahzab 35, which not only is very persistent in repeating the gender parallelism that just can't be made to sound smooth in English (the truth-tellers and the truth-telleresses... the endurers and the endureresses...) but also has some obvious structure around how it orders the words for the qualities it lists (similar words next to each other, structural deviations around ones that break the pattern by being longer).

Which English Bible translations do you like? I found that I'm neither a fan of the "plain language" ones like the NIV, nor the KJV which strikes me as choosing pomp over clarity with such determination that some sentences become borderline nonsensical.

Yes, translations of 33:35 don't convey the rhythm that well. Consider:

Surely ˹for˺ Muslim men and women, believing men and women, devout men and women, truthful men and women, patient men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, men and women who guard their chastity, and men and women who remember Allah often—for ˹all of˺ them Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.

Surely, Muslim men and Muslim women, believing men and believing women, devout men and devout women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, humble men and humble women, and the men who give Sadaqah (charity) and the women who give Sadaqah, and the men who fast and the women who fast, and the men who guard their private parts (against evil acts) and the women who guard (theirs), and the men who remember Allah much and the women who remember (Him) - for them, Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.

For men and women who are devoted to God- believing men and women, obedient men and women, truthful men and women, steadfast men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, chaste men and women, men and women who remember God often- God has prepared forgiveness and a rich reward.

Lo! men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere (in righteousness) and women who persevere, and men who are humble and women who are humble, and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who remember Allah much and women who remember - Allah hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.

None of it flows that well, whereas Arabic fortunately expresses all this with suffixes - -in for men and -at for women, so transliterated from Arabic you get:

'inn ٱlmuslimin waٱlmuslimat waٱlmuminin waٱlmuminat waٱlqanitin waٱlqanitat waٱlssadiqin waٱlssadiqat waٱlssabirin waٱlssabirat waٱlkhashiein waٱlkhashieat waٱlmutasaddiqin waٱlmutasaddiqat waٱlssayimin waٱlssayimat waٱlhafizin furujahum waٱlhafizat waٱldhdhakirin ٱlllah kathiranۭa waٱldhdhakirat 'aeadd ٱlllah lahum mmaghfiratanۭ wa'ajran eazimanۭa

And this is just one example. There is a lot, both in terms of aural quality and in terms of meaning, that works well in Arabic, or in other Semitic languages, but does not come across well in English. One that comes up a lot is comparatives and superlatives. Arabic expresses degree by modifying the vowels that connect the root elements, rather than by adding a new word. English translations have to come up with awkward phrases like, to use the example of 1:1, "the most compassionate, the most merciful", or "the all compassionate, the everlastingly merciful", or "the supremely beneficent, the greatest in mercy", and it loses the elegance of the original.

This is not to say that I think that Arabic is uniquely well-suited to expressing God's word or anything - I am not a Muslim and I do not subscribe to the doctrine of i'jaz. This is a problem with all translation, and there are things that can be expressed very beautifully in English but which are very difficult to translate into Arabic. Nonetheless, for me as a non-Arabic-speaking observer, it is still useful to learn just enough to be able to see what it is that people have in mind when they talk about how the Qur'an is so much more attractive in the original language.

Which English Bible translations do you like? I found that I'm neither a fan of the "plain language" ones like the NIV, nor the KJV which strikes me as choosing pomp over clarity with such determination that some sentences become borderline nonsensical.

UBS Greek New Testament. Git gud. :P

Nah, to be serious, I go back and forth a bit. The translation I use the most as a default is the NRSV, which generally strikes a good balance between readability and formality or dignity, but there are certainly places where I think the NRSV mistranslates, or just has a bad style. In places I think the Jerusalem Bible or NJB have quite nice turns of phrase as well.

I’ve read al-Ghazali here and there, and the KCA was based on an original formulation al-Ghazali laid out in the medieval era, which later Christian philosophers revived.

On the point about the Hadith - most of the Hadith are very repetitive and you can find the same identical sayings that are practically 95% similar, stated and overstated throughout the multiple volumes in Bukhari and Muslim. You can buy truncated and condensed versions off Amazon that remove the duplications, as I’ve found them easier to read without getting bored by it.

It is also worth bearing in mind that most hadith collectors were both obsessive and pedantic and therefore included every hadith they had heard that had a reasonable chance of being authentic, including those that were just minor variations of others. This means that if you read any given large hadith collection, it is likely that modern scholars would dispute some of them, or argue over their plausibility and likely context. Al-Bukhari or Imam Muslim did try to filter out unreliable hadith, but their judgements were not infallible. Authentic hadith are authoritative for Muslims, in theory, but the word 'authentic' leaves a lot of room to dispute.

Yeah. I’m not fully equipped to elaborate on their scholarly methodology for determining authenticity at the time Islamic scholars went around collecting Muhammad’s statements, but I think it follows a simple chain logic from tradition and how many times the statement is repeated. I have full English-Arabic collections of the Hadith and these sets are distinguished by the scholarly views of their authenticity. Sahih Al-Bukhari is considered the most authoritative, followed by Sahih Muslim, then you’ve got the less reliable sets like Sunan Dawud.

My mom wrote a book. Its narrative non-fiction. About one of our ancestors that lived during the civil war and was one of the founders of the DAR. Told through a series of letters that she wrote and that people wrote to her. Very depressing. People die a lot, and the war was horrific.

I'm trying to read it and give feedback as an early editor.

Has your mum had anything professionally published before?

Academic papers, but not a book. She has a friend in the DAR that has professionally published before and was giving her some advice.

A Feast for Crows. Favorite ASOIAF book hands down. Don't mind the plot slowdown as much as some others, and although I clearly recognize that it is an inferior book to ASOS, I really enjoy the deeper interiority we get with the characters and the general theme of the book (what happens to a kingdom country when all the competent people are gone).

Also reading Los girasoles ciegos (the blind sunflowers) which was a gift from my Spanish friend. Definitely a challenge for my Spanish, but also enjoying it.

I was under the impression that among ASOIAF snobs, AFFC is considered the better book, but is liked less because it follows PoV characters most of the fandom doesn't care about. Meanwhile ASOS is considered a bit sloppy by George's standards because he wrote the whole thing relatively quickly and was just throwing stuff out there. Less attention to detail.

AFFC and perhaps to an even greater extent ADWD are much better written, at least at a prose level than the first three books. Much better dialogue, much more beautiful descriptions, much more interiority for all of our characters. The problem with both books is that they don't advance the plot very much and they completely explode the number of POV characters. Which would be fine is GRRM was willing to just Wheel of Time it and write 14 books, but he clearly isn't, so here we stand.

I remember liking A Feast for Crows, and not being able to finish A Dance with Dragons. I think that may be just a product of my own biases, though. For my money the 'good part' of A Song of Ice and Fire is the Westerosi feudal backstabbing, whereas all the side plots are generally bad. I do not care about Essos, Daenerys, Targaryens, or dragons. All of that is boring. The Night's Watch and the Others are... good, actually, but should be a different series. There is no need for them here. I think the biggest criticism I have of A Feast for Crows is that I think it's the one that introduces most of the Greyjoy characters, and I'm sorry, we do not need this massive excursus about Cthulhu-worshipping Vikings. Are they a cool idea, in the abstract? Yes. They're certainly better than anything featuring Essos or the Targaryens. But - focus, GRRM! Focus!

I think aSoIaF is, for me, a good example of one of those works where the author does not understand the appeal of his own writing.

Then again, judging from those TV shows they keep making, apparently there is somebody out there who likes the incest dragons...

Dance used to be my favorite book in the series. Last reread I could not stomach most of it. I think the Mereenese Blot (Adam Feldman) does a good job at unpacking the themes, and there is a lot of good stuff there. It's just not engaging in the way that the King's Landing stuff is. The North Plotline in that book is pretty good, but again it's because as you say, that George is focused on plotting and backstabbing.

Well, the things that worked best for me in the series were generally either individual character work, or the entertainingly convoluted web of treachery. The most popular characters in Ice and Fire are the ones that lean into both, right? Tyrion stands out. But even past that, if I think about characters I liked or chapters I looked forward to, there's Davos, Jaime, Brienne, or even to an extent Sansa. Cersei getting chapters for the first time was also appealing; really, all of the core Lannister trio are great. I liked characters with strong convictions and complicated personal loyalties who get mixed up in or who have front row seats to leaders making difficult decisions under uncertain circumstances. Jon and Sam had some of this as well, though as I said, in general I think the Night's Watch sections, though good, deserve their own separate novel and don't complement the rest of Ice and Fire.

Meanwhile I tended to get bogged down in or just want to skip past the Bran or Daenerys chapters, or even a lot of the Arya chapters, because they are not connected to most of the political action. All the vague mysticism and prophecy is not what GRRM does well, and Essos in general suffers from firstly being a land of absurd racial caricatures, and secondly being completely disconnected from and irrelevant to the action of the story. I just do not care about the Targaryens.

That was the last one I liked, looking back every plotline in A Dance of Dragons went in a way that grew less and less interesting, except Arya's. I watched the show to the bitter end hoping for Cleganebowl to salvage something. I had far more fun with the CKII mod where I could pick a far removed time and tell my own stories.

Perdido Street Station and I'm about to drop it 120 pages in unless someone convinces me not to

Endless fucking of a race of beings with bug heads for no reason isn't doing it for you?

I kind of wish I'd dropped it. It tries to come together into something to make the last few hundred pages worth it, but that something is just more misery.

that something is just more misery

Well, that's Miéville for you. If we're talking about pure prose style, he's a very good writer, but he's unrelentingly grim (deeply imbued with socialist politics hence everything is oppression and only class consciousness can save us now). Good writing can only save so much of a world view that is unrelentingly ugly.

It’s funny. I’d heard that his other books, especially Iron Council, were absurdly socialist, but I didn’t get that from PSS at all. Class consciousness didn’t seem like it would have helped anybody. The best-laid plans of birds and men never survive contact with cryptids.

PSS is somewhat socialist, mostly in the descriptions of the New Crobuzon government, though in current political environment it comes off as more "Epstein class" left/right conspiracy tinged populism than "actual" socialism. The Scar is only fleetingly and barely socialist. Iron Council is very socialist. Out of the other books I've read, Kraken and City & The City are at most barely socialist (and also considerably less grim than the Bas-Lag books), and October (which is great) is obviously extremely socialist.

I haven't been able to read much of his work since the unrelenting grim ugliness just turns me off, but it's funny that often the worldbuilding gets away from him and the story demonstrates that The People's Communist Socialist Collective Of True Comrades Democratically And Representatively Deciding Shit isn't really much use to anyone and would be pretty ineffectual if it ever took power.

And meanwhile the cryptids, as you say 😁

It's full of good fantasy/sci-fi ideas and even though it's a bit ra-ra-workers-of-the-world-unite, it's well-presented/justified. You can skip everything else by that (obnoxious commie) author, but PSS is worth having read.

What I try to do these days when judging the worldview or ideology of a story is, rather than evaluating it on how much I agree with that ideology or not, I evaluate on how good a case the story makes for its ideology in the context of its own world.

I've read the series at a time when I had more tolerance for crappy writing, and thought The Scar was by far the most interesting of the bunch.

ra-ra-workers-of-the-world-unite

What would be the opposite of this?

There's also The Sword of Truth. The author is a big fan of Ayn Rand.

Wizard's First Rule is a strong contender for worst book I've ever read. Hopefully he gets better with time.

Spoiler alert: in my view, it really didn't.

Standard fantasy. One ubermensch, possibly Chosen by fate or the gods, who will unite the fractured polities and just do things.

Ayn Rand?

Really gotta read Atlas Shrugged. Tried The Fountainhead when I was like 19 and while I remember a lot from it, and even fondly, it kinda put me off Rand for a long time.

I'll straight up rec Atlas Shrugged. One of my favorite books. If it helps, think of it like a fantasy novel where the premise is "Capitalism is 100% correct both morally and practically", and then instead of the usual 95% action mixed with 5% crappy "What is Evil?", AS is 5%/95% the other way around. Same with the protagonists; they're not realistic people, they're hash functions defining her philosophy. Tremendous technical accomplishment, even if you disagree with the validity of the premises.

I also straight up enjoyed the writing. I bought it with the explicit intention of writing a critique and found myself enthralled. I want to say it's very Russian, but I don't actually have a broad enough experience base to make the claim with certainty.

You really gotta read Atlas Shrugged, but not if the reason is that you want to fix being put-off from Rand. I haven't voted for a non-Libertarian for President since 2000, and I still couldn't make it through Atlas Shrugged without wanting to write various rebuttals in the margins to some of the endless monologues and endless-monologues.

But although I wasn't a fan of how she wrote her protagonists there, her antagonists were perfect. I don't think I've gone a year since without running across at least one new politician or pundit who could be justly described as "an Ayn Rand villain".

I finished Hail Mary Project after having abandoned it some time ago. I still hated the prose but it's out (the movie) on Netflix and my sons and I can probably watch it and I wanted to have read the book. I could barely get through it due to the writing style, which clearly must be entertaining or funny for a lot of people but made me wish I was better at speed reading. The "Oh crud" type exclamations and the general sense of humor of the protagonist (and by implication, author) grated. What's that Stephen King analogy? "Like biting on tinfoil."

From the same friend I am now reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. It's okay so far but in a way that is making me realize the distance in our habits and tastes. He's a big gamer and reader of sci fi. I haven't really played a game since I quit Warcraft a decade or more ago and have only read a dozen or so sci fi books, most of those long ago. Unfortunately the narrative voice so far is somewhat similar to the protagonist in Wier's Weir's book.

I think this is a common problem with first-person narratives, at least for myself. I find a character with what I consider to be annoying quirks a lot more annoying when they are also the narrator. I feel that the third person narration puts a little more distance between myself and even the protagonist, so I don't feel the same way I do when someone is saying cringeworthy stuff to me in a real life conversation.

I liked The Martian for what it was - a web novel released chapter by chapter that got picked up by a major publisher. I appreciated starting with a possibly absurd premise and then logically going step by step over the challenges caused by that absurd premise in a way that mostly coheres to our current understanding of science. The voice of the narrator didn't matter as much, the puzzle was fun and seeing the math explained at a popular level was nice. I think I'd give it to a high schooler about to go into AP Physics to get them psyched up.

Project Hail Mary is kind of in the same vein, but without the advantages of being a first novel. It might help introduce a teenager to basic evolutionary concepts, the suspense was decent, there was legitimate pathos with the main character only acting brave because he thought he was the kind of person to volunteer for a suicidal mission and then remembered that he wasn't a volunteer after all. In that sense it was a better novel than The Martian but that wasn't enough to make it a good novel. The movie is a better movie even though I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax - the book-over did it with the explanations, the movie under-did it in exchange for some nicer visuals.

I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax

Problem(s) plural ... I think. It's hard to give a movie a fair watch after reading the book, because you just naturally fill in the blanks yourself, so maybe I'm underestimating what the average movie-only audience would have picked up from the film alone.

"They screwed up the taumoeba in a way that is a mild inconvenience for Grace and utterly incapacitating for Rocky" felt like it might have had a bit of a Diabolus Ex Machina feel in the movie to anyone who hadn't already read the book's detailed explanation, and I'm betting that's the problem you're referring to, but IMHO that's not the biggest problem at the climax.

In the big problem at the climax, it felt like they took away a lot of the Diabolus-level dilemma, changing Grace's perceived cost of saving Rocky from "I will run out of food supply" to "I will just have to go to Erid instead of Earth". I get that they didn't want to change the heart of the ending, and that they did want to remove the "me-burgers", and I don't see any way to remove the resolution of the food issue without just removing the food issue entirely. But keeping a silly me-burger joke in the epilogue would have been so worth it. "Grace was a coward who wouldn't die to save Earth yet now will starve to death to save his friend" was an awesome character arc and a devastating choice for him to make. "Grace obviously goes to save his closest friend after he makes sure everyone else will be okay" hardly even felt like a dilemma.

Hoping I'm being unfair about that - did they discuss the food supply issue in the movie and I just missed it?

It's minor but my biggest annoyance was that Eridian weren't immediately putting together a massive mission to earth. I realize it was meant to be a plot point that Ryland wasn't in a hurry to go back to earth and it would have altered that plot point. But it just seemed glaringly obvious to me that the Eridian would have been putting a huge mission, arguably a aid mission, to earth as fast as possible. Wither they're long life span it makes sense to get get relations and trade going, even without a desire to help the planet of the man who saved their civilization.

Nope, neither of those dilemmas were fully explained by the movie. My husband hadn't read the book and so I asked him about what he thought of the movie and he said he liked it until the end, where he was like, "I'm sure if I rewatch I'll catch what happened with Rocky's space ship, but right now I have no clue."

Towards the beginning he asks the computer how much fuel it has but I don't remember food really coming up as a constraint.

The film is a much better film than the book is a book, I agree that the prose is a bit Smug 2012 Redditor.

Both of those are major memes on /r/bookscirclejerk for, I'm assuming, a pretty good reason

Maybe he listens to audio books. Both hmp and DCC have very good audiobooks.

Very possible. He gave me a big hardcover and knows I don't dig audiobooks.

About halfway through The Age of Diagnosis.

I went into the chapters on "long Covid" and autism pretty much knowing what to expect, and I wasn't disappointed. But I was genuinely surprised to hear that cancer screenings exhibit no net increase on all-cause mortality.

But I was genuinely surprised to hear that cancer screenings exhibit no net increase on all-cause mortality.

Zero chance this is the case.

While it's true you can find some research for some screening that aligns with this, anyone broadly making this claim without excessive qualification of the claim should be assumed to be a crank.

Ex: PMCID: PMC4412262

The claim in the book is heavily qualified, I was hastily summarising.

I'd consider it something of an info hazard, it's really hard to get people to adhere to screening guidelines and the most effective one is the one people bail out on the most (colonoscopy).

Especially in a place like this filled with grumpy skeptics..... you'll get some people who will use it as an excuse.

Link

The overall observed decline in CRC [colorectal cancer] mortality was 26% for 1975–2000. The model predicted that, with only changes in risk factors, CRC mortality would have decreased by 9%, explaining 35% of the observed mortality decline. Screening was estimated to have decreased mortality by another 14%, explaining 53% of the mortality reduction, while treatment added another 3% decline, explaining the final 12% of the observed decline in CRC mortality.

These modeling results strongly suggest that approximately 50% of the decline in CRC incidence and mortality between1975 and 2000 could be due to CRC screening. We have now used a similar analysis for the time period up to 2010 and again estimated that CRC screening likely accounts for about 50% of the reduction in CRC mortality over the more recent period.

What are some irl parallels to the pleasure of a horror game “save room”?

Off topic but merely finding the save room is not enough to ease my fear. Fake save rooms are in some games. I need to save, then double check the load data to feel at ease.

A little bit of a generational gap I feel sometimes is when I watch streamers/YouTubers playing singleplayer games with multiple save slots using one and exactly one slot for one playthrough, overwriting the previous save each time, without consideration for how they might want to re-load a previous save to get to a better state or that that one save file might corrupt itself and force a complete restart. Then I remember that modern games are overwhelmingly made such that it's impossible to lock yourself out of significant content or to soft-lock yourself by having too low-HP or something, and that corruption on modern SSDs/HDDs is so unlikely that the expected value of using staggered/rotating saves is negative from just the extra time wasted for no gain.

But I can't break myself out of such habits. Even today, the risk of such things in modern games on modern hardware aren't zero.

I usually rotate between 3 saves nowadays, but of the few times I didn't bother making one than one save I dearly regretted it. It was playing the PS1 version of Final Fantasy Tactics. The game is great and allows you to be very flexible with your team and characters, building them how you want and fighting how you want with them. But there's a fight at some point, which you're not told about in advance, before which you save but that does not give you the ability to go and grind to respec, that forces you to play as your MC in a duel with a very strong enemy.

So if you built that character in a way that is unable to beat that duel, like if you built him as a support class, as pretty much anything but a melee fighter, as a spellcaster, or as anything too squishy, go and load back a previous save game. Hope that you have one far back enough that you have the opportunity to respec the MC into something that can. I lost like 40 hours of game maybe because of that? Apparently it was made a bit easier in the PSP version, and then given a way to back out and go respec in the 2025 re-release. But the PS1 original was a harsh lesson in save game rotation, considering how late it happened in a long game like this.

It was playing the PS1 version of Final Fantasy Tactics

It probably says something that you didn't even need to finish your explanation after that; I knew exactly what you were going to be referring to.

It is notorious, yes. It's an example of terrible design in a game that's otherwise a masterpiece, because up to that point the game gave you both the ability to solve problems creatively and to go back and grind some more if you find yourself out of your depth. But here it suddenly took both from you without warning in a save setup that can easily lead to a doomed save game. I'm not sure but I think the PSP remaster added a warning to rotate saves before you locked yourself in.

I don't know about the PSP remaster, but I'm pretty sure they did something to fix it in the latest PC remaster.

If a game gives only 30 save slots, you can be sure I'll use every single one.

I recently played thru FF7Rebirth and Mouse: PI For Hire (both around 7/10 experiences; former is not worth the hours, latter is barely worth the few hours which were needlessly extended with boring writing) each of which limited one only to 30 or 50 saves, so I had to juggle jumping to different save slots by the last ~1/3 of the game. I just started MGS: Delta (played 3 on PS2 back when it came out, 2x), and I'm already 10 saves in thru the prologue, and I'm dreading this one having a limit as well. It's maddening that any game made these days doesn't have the save limit as "as many as the drive will store" and decides to put in some artificial limiter, as if it were a live service game that depends on arbitrary limitations for monetization.

Finding genuinely cold aircon in a European/NYC summer.

Getting to a rest on a rock climbing route.

Hiking several miles through a blizzard to sit at the fireplace at a cozy pub with a pint or a highball.

Probably the closest real-life analogue to this for me has actually arisen when travelling. Unexpectedly finding some relaxing, quiet café or corner in a noisy and chaotic foreign city really captures the sense of transient respite that save rooms attempt to induce. It's like stumbling into your own personal little refuge.

Daily-life things like "going home after work", "taking a shit on company time", etc are just a bit too humdrum and pedestrian to capture that kind of feeling. I find that things tend to stop being stimulating the second they get folded into a routine, and envy people who don't get habituated to things as quickly as I do. Experiences I used to treat as sacred quickly become profane with exposure.

Slipping into dry socks after walking in wet ones.

Walking out of the perpetual humanitarian / kafkaesque /eldritch catastrophe that is your home to seek refuge in an orderly, clean, polite and productive 9h at the office.

Booking a conference room at your company's office to do a video interview with another firm.

Sitting down on your own shitter in your own bathroom after a multi-day work trip or a long day outside.

t. saving the game rn

In college you need to scout for multiple "save room" bathrooms around campus that are reliably clean and empty. I had three scattered across forgotten floors of engineering school buildings plus one in the law school library basement.

A bathroom with a lock.

A cafe at a skiing resort. The teas I've had after a skiing for an hour or two at those places were something I haven't been able to recreate myself.

Or a restaurant at a top of a mountain.

Oh yeah. When I was a kid we would ski at a place that had a small lodge all the way at the top of the mountain. Had to take two lifts up, could barely see or hear anything with the wind sweeping up the snow, you’d be cold and exhausted then enter a cozy lodge with a fire, wooden benches, freshly cooked curly fries… somewhat paradisal

I’ve heard some pretty good things about a hit of heroin.

When I researched this some time ago, a lot of heroin users would describe the high as being tucked into a warm bed after a long day of walking in the rain.

Someone once asked me what falling in love for the first time felt like, and I described it as “what it feels like to use heroin.”

Never having taken any opioid, I was just guessing for rhetorical effect. But if that’s accurate, I wasn’t far off.

To be fair, though, “you’re my addition baby” is the province of love songs and fuck sonnets since the invention of modern pharmaceuticals, so it’s not like I invented it. I notice nobody has yet described their lover as their methamphetamine, although I’m fairly certain the sensation is similar. “I’d rot out my teeth because of my singular obsession with you and lack of dental care” isn’t, you know, exactly a Shakespeare sonnet, though maybe it kinda rhymes with 130.

(Did people before opium came to the west use alcohol as a reference point? “You’re like fine wine” doesn’t really parse as a romantic phrase to me, and the process of alcohol intoxication sounds more like a metaphor for a bad hookup, of which I’m sure the drink has been the cause of many, than it does a burgeoning romance. “It’s fun while it lasts but I’m throwing up in the morning.”)

“You’re like fine wine” doesn’t really parse as a romantic phrase to me, and the process of alcohol intoxication sounds more like a metaphor for a bad hookup, of which I’m sure the drink has been the cause of many, than it does a burgeoning romance. “It’s fun while it lasts but I’m throwing up in the morning.”)

The comedian Sam Morril had a bit where he said that sex in a relationship is like a baked salmon darne, where you feel nourished and satisfied afterwards, having eaten something that was healthy and good for you. Whereas casual sex is like a takeaway kebab or burger, where you are absolutely loving the experience in the moment, but then feel disgusted and ashamed of yourself immediately afterwards.

Whereas casual sex is like a takeaway kebab or burger, where you are absolutely loving the experience in the moment, but then feel disgusted and ashamed of yourself immediately afterwards.

Off-topic: do people actually feel disgusted and ashamed after eating take-out?

I get that people say this so it must somehow be true (even if a meme, it's too popular to just be made up) but of the thousands of burgers I've consumed over my lifetime so far I have yet to identify one I was disgusted with myself for eating.

Is it just that it's a product of an industrial kitchen system, and industrial kitchens are bad because reasons?

Do people really order two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s (one with cheese) and a large soda, then consume it all themselves in one sitting?

Have I missed the mythical past, or never having visited the southernmost US states, never knew a world where fast food meals were more than 1000-1300 calories on the regular?

Or is it something else I can't see?

do people actually feel disgusted and ashamed after eating take-out?

Depends on what kind and how much.

I'm a big fan of that burger assembly meme, where healthy bread, lettuce, onion, tomato, cheese, and beef get put together and suddenly get labeled unhealthy instead for no apparent reason. Yeah, you could do with a lot more of the fiber and low-glycemic carbs in the lettuce+onion+tomato and a little less of the high-glycemic carbs in the bread, and if you're topping beef with cheese maybe that's more than one meal's worth of fats, but balance it out later and you're probably fine.

But it's real easy to get that burger with a huge side of fries and a large coke (and if you're not frequently in the US recall that here "small coke" means "large coke" while "large coke" means "a quart of diabetes"), and that combo can push you over the line from "fine meal" to "disgusted and ashamed after".

never knew a world where fast food meals were more than 1000-1300 calories on the regular

Even 1000-1300 is a lot for a lunch, and a Big Mac combo gets you straight to 1170; you can get to 1360 just by going from medium to large on the fries and soda, even though the burger itself is only 580.

I guess the other parts of "disgusted and ashamed" are:

  1. Fast food often kinda sucks. My wife's burgers probably aren't much healthier than McDonalds' (the extra onions and mushrooms might have helped, but a quick sauté in salty burger grease fixes that right up!), but they're about the same nutritionally for far higher quality. If I just go to Burger King, even if either way I can afford some extra calories (I can't), it still would have been much better to spend those extra calories on something worth the expenditure.

  2. Fast food is really fast. Burgers with avocado and fresh-grilled Hatch chile slices are not something we're going to make every day, or every week, at home, but if I want something 40% as good I could have it any time by swinging by one of many convenient drive-thru lanes. Making it so easy to indulge makes it too easy to over-indulge.

It’s the bread/bun, condiments (ketchup, mayo, mustard, and whatnot), and side(s) (e.g., fries) that are the culprits. Cut those out, and ground beef + cheese + toppings are decently solid.

Ketchup and mustard? I guess those have too much salt if you really go wild with them, and too many ketchup brands also lean on a corn syrup crutch for flavor, but mustard and even the worst ketchup are still mostly blended plant bits in vinegar. You're right about mayo, but that's the only popular condiment that's more than a rounding error in calorie counts.

More comments

Fast food is really fast. Burgers with avocado and fresh-grilled Hatch chile slices are not something we're going to make every day, or every week, at home, but if I want something 40% as good I could have it any time by swinging by one of many convenient drive-thru lanes. Making it so easy to indulge makes it too easy to over-indulge.

It's a good point but burgers are not the best example -- my burger-making strategy these days is:

  1. heat pan
  2. scoop 1/3 lb beef with measuring cup
  3. slap in pan
  4. squish with flipper
  5. flip after 2-3 minutes
  6. wait a couple more minutes then add cheese
  7. put on bun with mustard, butter and whatever veggies

If I'm at home it's pretty much the fastest easiest thing I can make, and probably at least half-way between your avocado burger and the fast food one; if I'm not at home obviously stopping at a restaurant is faster, but a burger is probably the easiest, fastest fast food to make for yourself in the universe.

One thing is that the flavourings used in a lot of fast-food get absorbed into the mucosal lining of the mouth, so that e.g. for me McDonald's leaves a particular aftertaste for hours afterwards. It's not terrible but if you get carried away and eat too much and feel a bit bad about it anyway, the lingering aftertaste can definitely produce a more 'disgusted' response.

Are you familiar with the meat and three? These are restaurants. Diners, if you will. They sometimes have burgers, and the burgers will be typically on a buttered and toasted bun, with a bit of mayonnaise that even a person like myself who for years despised mayonnaise can tolerate, some crispy lettuce, ketchup, maybe a firm tomato slice, a medallion of red onion, and of course a burger patty, but with proper ground meat shaped as a patty. Calorically I'm not sure, probably a lot. In my view these are the best burgers to be had anywhere. But even if the place doesn't have burgers it will have hamburger steaks. These are not the filler and spice heavy Salisbury steaks one not from the south might imagine, but, again, big patties of meat well salted and peppered and cooked to a Maillard reaction and served with probably sauteed onions and a brown gravy beside, again probably, a mound of white rice. This or fried chicken, stewed chicken with dumplings, a tender gravied pork chop the promise of which once extended my mother's life briefly, or a chicken fried steak with white pepper gravy. These are the meats. Sometimes beef stew or tender pork ribs or maybe meatloaf. The three would be the sides, popularly understood as vegetables but often including something un-vegetable like such as a rich macaroni with cheese, dirty rice or just boiled white rice, a baked potato with butter or sour cream or both, mashed potatoes with gravy, creamed or kernel sweet corn, etc. True vegetables might be green beans cooked with pork fat, collard greens (also cooked with pork or bacon fat), black eyed or field peas, pinto beans, fried okra, sliced tomatoes or sweet Vidalia onions, or just cornbread, either in muffins, slices, or shaped like a stick. You order a meat and three sides. You drink cold iced tea, either sweet or unsweet or half and half. You have a small cage of Tabasco or other hot sauces, ketchup maybe, mustard, etc. I miss these places. They're even better at breakfast but I'm already damn hungry and my train just stopped.

It varies. I don't remember ever feeling disgusted or ashamed of myself after eating McDonald's, or a burrito. If I get a really cheap takeaway pizza (Domino's or Apache), the first few slices will taste like the nectar of the gods, but by the time I get to the end I will feel full to the point of nausea, and will regret having over-indulged. I often get the same feeling after eating a burger and chips from the chip shop, or a kebab and chips. I remember one New Year's Day I bought a kebab and chips to treat my hangover, and felt so full afterwards that I was practically bedridden for the rest of the day.

So yes, there are absolutely certain kinds of fast food that will make me feel gross and remorseful afterwards. The same is true of casual sex: I have had sexual encounters which I regretted immediately afterwards (and equally, casual encounters that I didn't regret).

A good argument for making casual sex taboo again. Or at least informing people that it doesn't live up to the hype.

Well, speak for yourself.

Airport business class lounge?

Probably not any more. I think you need the lounges normal people don't even know exist.

To me the 'save room effect' of a business or credit card lounge is less the peace and quiet, though a lot of non-Big-3 lounges still do have that vibe, but that you've made it through the commute/check-in/TSA, know when your flight is leaving, and no longer have to think about anything urgent in that time block (conversely, if you're in a rush and just trying to eat in the lounge, even a quiet one doesn't feel peaceful at all...).

Yeah. That too. And though the 'riff-raff' may have flooded the lounges these days, they're still a lot more secluded than any other place in the airport, no?

Finding an open public restroom when you're on the verge of shitting your pants.

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