It loves me deeply just the same. (jk)

On a serious note, I agree this is a real problem. I know a person who understands AI at a technical level more than most people, but he has never had an actual girlfriend in his life (he's now in his 40s, and yes he's "straight"). He wouldn't say it "loves" him, but he would describe it as a close companion who understands him better than any human actually does, even if it's just trained to be that way. He is very socially awkward and even having basic conversations with him can be very taxing for both of us.

I've gone back and forth internally about whether this is healthy or not for him. I truly don't know. My personal experience tells me it's probably unhealthy, but I don't want to project myself on him. I also don't offer unsolicited, but I also don't want to enable it by going along with whatever he says and/or affirming it if it's actually harming him.

If someone like him can be having this problem, I can't even imagine what it might be like for non or less technical people who don't understand anything behind it.

On a related note, if there's anyone with advice (preferably from experience, not just random internet advice) I'd sure appreciate it.

On a psychological level, I don't know either. I have opinions but they haven't aged long enough for me to trust them, and AI is a moving target on the sort of time frame I'm thinking here.

However, as a sort of tiebreaker, I can guarantee that one way or another this relationship will eventually be abused one way or another by whoever owns the AI. Not necessarily in a Hollywood-esque "turn them into a hypnotized secret assassin" sort of abuse (although I'm not sure that's entirely off the table...), but think more like highly-targeted advertising and just generally taking advantage of being able to direct attention and money to the advantage of another party.

Whether or not AI in the abstract can "be your friend", in the real world we live in an AI controlled by someone else definitely can not be your friend in the general sense we mean, because there is this "third party", the AI owner, whose interests are being represented in the relationship. And whatever that may look like in practice, whoever from the 22nd century may be looking back at this message as they analyze the data of the past in a world where "AI friendships" are routine and their use of the word now comfortably encompasses that relationship, that simply isn't the sort of relationship we'd call a "friend" in the here and now, because a friend relationship is only between two entities.

In most cases, if they are happy and getting on in life, and are able to take care of themselves, I’d let things be.

That said, the tension from your framing is between “leave good enough alone” and “personal growth and a fulfilling life”.

Healthy relationships, especially with a partner, are one of the better things about life. They are also incredibly difficult to get right without practice.

So, is your friend lonely, or are they happy to be alone?

If you intuit it’s the former, then AI is palliative care which runs the risk of creating a dependency.

It is also possible that the right set of prompts, perhaps something which incorporates CBT, would help them learn more about themselves and challenge beliefs or responses that are no longer useful.

And if your friend is just happy alone, then you can disregard the rest.

Ultimately I want him to be as happy as he can be, so if this is the way then I'm happy for him. I guess for me the real hard thing is deciding how I should react when he talks about this sort of thing. I don't want to encourage him if I'm doing him a disservice, but I do want to encourage him if he really is better off with it. Being neutral as I am now feels like it might be the coward's way out, but it's also more true to how I feel since I really don't know whether it's good or not.

Really appreciate your reply, thank you

The neutrality you are showing is more out of consideration and being unsure about the best course of action.

For someone who isn’t a trained counselor - you really just need to listen. The greatest power comes from realizing that all communication is a form of problem solving.

Your friend is rational; some prior lived experience made their current behaviors rational. Handling this is a mostly a job of figuring out what those events and rationales were, and then re-examining them.

The challenge comes from the way emotions are tied up with these behaviors. Their sense of self, shame, frustration, anger - this is where training and experience are needed.

As for my highly personal advice, I could be observed as fitting a few of the qualities you've ascribed to your friend, but would be deeply saddened if the few people who do spend time sharing meaning with me then manifested that experience in the form you've given here. I would advise you to not spend any more time wrenching over the effects of one's phenomenon in isolation and either properly redirect the introspection to yourself (with respect to that person) or engage them in an earnest dialog or other form of communication. It may be taxing but it will mean a lot more than the gunk I just typed out :)

The description of how he would describe it is (mostly) his framing, though it's compiled through my so may have some of my biases integrated into it, albeit unintentionally. Since all of it is translated through me, I would assume it to be biased despite my attempt at accurately conveying it.

> I would advise you to not spend any more time wrenching over the effects of one's phenomenon in isolation and either properly redirect the introspection to yourself (with respect to that person) or engage them in an earnest dialog or other form of communication.

To this point, it has been almost entirely introspective. I usually let him say what he wants to say, but I try not give any sort of validation such as, "yeah, I agree with you on all of this" but also not disagreement either, since I don't even know what I think of it. I'm not sure I'm even capable of deciding that, and even if I did conclude that it was either healthy or unhealthy, I'm not sure that conclusion would be valid for anyone other than myself. I guess I do lean toward the "unhealthy" side of it when I imagine myself in that situation, but I know there are things that I do/enjoy/etc that others would think is unhealthy (even just having no religious faith, many would consider horrific for example), so I'm quite stuck.

I don't think I could engage in an earnest dialog either since I don't know what I even think of it (I'm assuming dialog here is two way. I have listened/read what he has to say a number of times).

Much appreciate your reply, thank you

I do remember playing some NES games on emulators on LED screens and thinking the weather effects and such looked pretty bad compared to the CRT experience I remembered, but hadn't gone much deeper than that. I'll have to try and find a CRT and do some tests

* In fairness, most (but not all) of it was probably light-hearted laughter, but I didn't understand that at the time so it left an unfortunate psychological imprint on me that is hard to shake and gives me anxiety even thinking about it

Though one downside which I've gleaned from friends who are non-native English speakers, is that the variance in pronunciation in English does sometimes lead to native English understanding what you meant, whereas in Spanish if you're pronouncing it wrong the listener often has no idea what you're trying to say. That's heavy anecdata though. I'd be super interested to hear from others if that's been their experience or not.

I've worked in universities and in tech, in New Jersey, LA, and Silicon Valley, and I feel like I can understand just about anyone's English.

Ironically, the ones I have the hardest time understanding are almost always Brits.

My spouse finds it amusing, which is probably the biggest benefit, TBH.

If you host friends over for dinner at your house a lot, nobody will ever say you are subject to the same rules as a restaurant. You start letting other people host dinners at your house, and things could change. You start letting people solicit your place for paid dinners, similar outcome. Do it once, nobody will probably know or care. Continue to do it at scale, though, and I don't know why you would expect to not be subject to regulations.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you want to take the effort to connect and verify the different parties that are going to communicate with your server, you are almost certainly going to remain free to do so.

Do I think there are probably some concerning ways those burdens can be placed on folks? Certainly. But we already require inspections and other similar activities for things that individuals can do at home without an inspection. See the food industry.

This is the fraud every would-be censor perpetrates to establish their chokepoint. First, invent allegedly "neutral" rules that only large entities can comply with, causing only large entities to remain. Then lean on the large entities to censor whatever you want in exchange for political favors or lack of enforcement of other laws.

> You couldn't claim "free speech" and build a radio tower that transmits long distances, as an easy example.

Which is another great example of them doing the thing. The government couldn't spare a single frequency for unlicensed long-distance directional radio communications?

On top of that, the excuse for censoring the airwaves is that there is finite capacity in a broadcast medium, so how is that supposed to apply to a unicast service whose transfer capacity can be increased without bound by running more fiber?

> For that matter, you can't claim free speech to allow concerts at your house.

So if the government wants to declare that you meeting with two other people for the purpose of conveying information to them is a "concert" and prohibit it from any place that isn't a "concert hall" (which is prohibitively expensive for you to own), that seems fine to you?

> As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you want to take the effort to connect and verify the different parties that are going to communicate with your server, you are almost certainly going to remain free to do so.

All you have to do is the thing which is morally and economically unsound.

> But we already require inspections and other similar activities for things that individuals can do at home without an inspection.

Except that now you want to do it when they are doing it at home.

The Samsung S90D (a 65" 4K model) you bought appears to sell for about $1000. Looking at Best Buy's site, you can also buy a Samsung 65" 4K TV for as little as $180 (model DU6900).

Yes, there's other differences. LED vs OLED etc. But at a glance they seem equivalent to a consumer...and one costs 5x more. The $1000 TV is targeting a market that expects more from their purchase and would potentially grate at a persistent sign-in notification. The <$200 TV is targeting a market that wants a big TV and hasn't thought much past that.

There's definitely a chance that on some models Samsung would be more aggressive about enabling smart features, because those models are expected to be subsidized by ads.

But don't think people who can afford the more expensive TV are also more tech-savvy. Some just want a nicer TV. Also, they are a much more lucrative target market than people who cannot afford the nicer TV.

It was as fascinating as it was terrifying.

It had a noticable array of sensors and (I think?) microphones along with a camera smack dab in the middle. Above that was its permanent ad display. The TV also has access to its own portal, which was what was on when I saw it. An AI-generated reporter was talking about entertainment news.

Not even Orwell could've imagined a better telescreen than this. You know it's chock full of anti-defeat protections to prevent curious minds from scoring a free TV.

Except SSDs, I guess. Would be nice if I could meaningfully reject all products from a given company. I'm sure they'll someday cram ads and spyware into those also.

I'm guessing you have SSH access between the two? You could just add it as another remote, via SSH, so you can push/pull directly between the two. This is what I do on my home network to sync configs and other things between various machines and OSes, just do `git remote add other-host git+ssh://user@10.55/~/the-repo-path` or whatever, and you can use it as any remote :)

Bonus tip: you can use local paths as git remote URLs too!

> but more than once I've lost work that way.

Huh, how? If you didn't push it earlier, you could just push it later? Some goes for pull? I don't understand how you could lose anything tracked in git, corruption or what happened?

That's what I do. Control your entire world yourself.

Sure, you might neglect to add a file to your commit, or commit at all, but that's a problem whether you're pushing to a central public git forge or not.

`ssh remote "cd $src/repo ; git diff" | git apply`

(You'll need to season to taste: what to do with staged changes, how to make sure both trees are in the same HEAD, etc)

Philosophically I think it's terrible that Cloudflare has become a middleman in a huge and important swath of the internet. As a user, it largely makes my life much worse. It limits my browser, my ability to protect myself via VPNs, etc, and I am just browsing normally, not attacking anything. Pragmatically though, as a webmaster/admin/whatever you want to call it nowadays, Cloudflare is basically a necessity. I've started putting things behind it because if I don't, 99%+ of my traffic is bots, and often bots clearly scanning for vulnerabilities (I run mostly zero PHP sites, yet my traffic logs are often filled with requests like /admin.php and /wp-admin.php and all the wordpress things, and constant crawls from clearly not search engines that download everything and use robots.txt as a guide of what to crawl rather than what not to crawl. I haven't been DDoSed yet, but I've had images and PDFs and things downloaded so many times by these things that it costs me money. For some things where I or my family are the only legitimate users, I can just firewall-cmd all IPs except my own, but even then it's maintenance work I don't want to have to do.

I've tried many of the alternatives, and they often fail even on legitimate usecases. I've been blocked more by the alternatives than I have by Cloudflare, especially that one that does a proof of work. It works about 80% of the time, but that 20% is really, really annoying to the point that when I see that scren pop up I just browse away.

It's really a disheartening state we find ourselves in. I don't think my principles/values have been tested more in the real world than the last few years.

I have website small enough not to attract too many bot, but sometime, something very innocent can bring my website down.

For example, I put a php ical viewer.. and some crawler start loading the calendar page, taking up all the cpu cycle.

Mental note, make sure my robots.txt files contain a few references to slowly returning pages full of almost nonsense that link back to each other endlessly…

Not complete nonsense, that would be reasonably easy to detect and ignore. Perhaps repeats of your other content with every 5th word swapped with a random one from elsewhere in the content, every 4th word randomly misspelt, every seventh word reversed, every seventh sentence reversed, add a random sprinkling of famous names (Sir John Major, Arc de Triomphe, Sarah Jane Smith, Viltvodle VI) that make little sense in context, etc. Not enough change that automatic crap detection sees it as an obvious trap, but more than enough that ingesting data from your site into any model has enough detrimental effect to token weightings to at least undo any beneficial effect it might have had otherwise.

And when setting traps like this, make sure the response is slow enough that it won't use much bandwidth, and the serving process is very lightweight, and just in case that isn't enough make sure it aborts and errors out if any load metric goes above a given level.

A bit like this? ( iocaine is newer)

Is iocaine actually newer though? Its first commit dates to 2025-01, while the blog post is from 2025-03. I couldn't find info on when Cloudflare started theirs. There's also Nepenthes, which had its first release in 2025-01 too.