latenightnoir

I swear, there's nothing more cathartic than having an ugly-sob session brought on by some of the vistas in DS3, or by seeing the slowly growing family of lost souls in Majula. And that first time you realise just how (needlessly) wrecked the world is in the first one... *chef's kiss, exquisite suffering!

I still don't understand how a game can empathise that well with despondency, but it absolutely does. All of them do, but the Dark Souls installments especially.

Oooh, thank you for the clarification and I apologise for the confusion!

We really are losing a lot of our personality as a species by using generated imagery, yes... It's, unfortunately, been a general trend over the last couple of decades in pretty much all things, architecture especially imho (referring to "average" buildings, not the ones specifically designed to be crazy, which are cool, but far and few between...)

Genuinely, the only problem I see with the development of LLMs and AI in general is that said development has a massive tumor on its back called Corporate Interest. That's pretty much the one and only cause for absolutely every destructive, shady, or downright immoral aspect tied to these things nowadays...

As tools in and of themselves, yes! LLMs have an immense potential not of replacing people, but of helping people get stuff done faster, which in turn would give us a lot of extra time to polish the everloving spit out of the stuff we make!

LLM/AI research should be 100% non-profit and democratised, with well-established guidelines and full transparency, as I see it. This is a huge step in our development as a species, and Altman-likes are not the people who should be in charge of it.

Edit: as for VLMs, I kinda' see them as a fad, to be honest. It still irks me when anyone adds "art" to anything artificially generated at the moment, but I get the feeling people will tire of the novelty once the need for genuine art will cease being satisfied by the above-mentioned.

Heck, my favourite therapist (a very, very empathetic and honest person) retired from psychotherapy before hitting 30 during the Pandemic because they couldn't take the influx of destabilised people. I can't even imagine how much more horrible and immediate the situation in the States is right now...

Sincerely wish you and your clients as much peace and safety as humanly possible in these conditions!

It all started with my grade school Civics teacher... :)) Partly kidding, long story short, it's a combination of not caring about updoots and not liking to vote for myself:))

Oh, this most certainly adds a lot of context, I'm sorry...

It just hit me, I think it may be more appropriate to think about (actually helpful) therapy as placing those drops of water into a bucket, and there are times when that accumulated water doubles itself (breakthroughs, realisations, etc.) More like an investment of sorts.

At least, that's how it felt as I went through it. It never had a regular progression, it was always about leaps and bounds, then falling on my ass again for a couple of weeks, then snapping out of it when something I'd discussed 6 sessions ago finally clicked into place.

Melatonin helps me sort of "enforce" a bed time. Whenever I realise I'm itchin' for a binge, I pop 5mg of melatonin and I'm dozy within 30-45 minutes. And it's not the full system shutdown you get with sleeping pills, it just brings about that organic "need to sleep now, will continue tomorrow" feeling.

Also, aging "helps." I'm in my mid 30s and have noticed that my bed time has become progressively earlier - used to pull 6 hours of sleep (usually 2AM-8AM) without issues in my late 20s, now I feel almost hungover if I don't get my 8 hours and/or wake up after 8AM, and need to compensate with naps for about a week.

I haven't needed to wake up earlier than 7AM regularly for over a decade, though, so YMMV with these specifics. But I still do recommend giving melatonin a shot. The only caveat I have for it is that it may mess with your blood sugar levels, so 100% consult a physician beforehand if you have such issues.

You're right, he's a very complex asshole, indeed!

Oh, agreed, it very much depends on the interlocutor. I was mainly thinking of an average phone call, but I've had people with whom I used to spend hours upon hours just chatting over the phone or, as you've said, voice chatting during work.

But that, to me, requires a high degree of familiarity, to the point where I don't need to think about what they meant when they said that in that particular way, because I already know their "tropes," so to speak.

Because he's an insecure and greedy child.

Agreed, both "mommy issues" and "daddy issues" are pretty much unofficial monikers for abandonment issues overall, which are generally caused by unstable relationships with either one or both parents.

The symptoms don't seem to be related as much to the parent's role, but to the minutiae of the relationships themselves, which can look the same in many cases whether it be an inconsistent relationship with the mother or the father.

Edit: I don't say this to minimise OP's issue, to be clear, quite the contrary - familial abandonment issues suck the soul dry overall...