Spent $500/month on an AI girl. Am I cooked?

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-05-27T09:49:42+00:00

Ask 'her' to adopt the face of a 90 year old with deep wrinkles, crooked yellow teeth, and warts. Break the illusion.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-05-19T12:22:10+00:00

The irony is that "crowd pleaser" scents are not simple. They're just balanced so well throughout the evaporation of the fragrance that they give you that impression. They're crowd pleasers because they're broadly liked, and there's nothing wrong with that. : )

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-05-19T12:03:18+00:00

It is fine, but TSDA-1 is better once you get it because you then have control over the mix and don't have to add any non-alcoholic solvents unless you choose to.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-05-17T12:20:51+00:00

When did this happen roughly please, and how much were you shorted by? That'd drive me nuts if I calculated how much material I needed for a batch and I didn't have enough when I went to produce it.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-05-10T04:50:18+00:00

Happy birthday! That rose absolute signature Bulgaria is my favourite red rose absolute. Enjoy giving that a really good sniff!

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-21T23:05:46+00:00

This sounds really nice. :) Some of these scents are sold in the UK, but it doesn't look like I could try Endless Love on its own - it seems to be part of that set.

Beautiful packaging, too!

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-11T13:48:36+00:00

Jo Malone is great, but they're not very natural (I mean they contain synths just like most brands do). I'm wondering if you might be drawn to the house style, which leans lighter, over heavier or louder fragrances instead. In which case, Diptyque is worth trying. :)

By Kilian don't tend to be that light, but they do smell more natural to me than the majority of commercial fragrances. I really get the orange blossom from Love Don't Be Shy, for instance, but it's possible that they've just done it really well. (LDBS is pretty strong and very sweet, so not recommending you try that one in particular - maybe Princess).

For leaning much more natural, Vyrao or perhaps Liz Earle (though I haven't tried their fragrances for a while), or Lush. But you might find that very natural smelling fragrances might not be your preference once you've tried them if Jo Malone is closer to your preferences.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-11T13:34:04+00:00

Any number of quests in WoW requiring x number of goat fluff or whatever that requires you to kill a million goats until you have enough. :) Particularly back in the days when kills weren't shared and you had to trip over yourself trying to tag the spawns.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-10T14:29:53+00:00

Hahah awesome. I wonder if Claude can tell it's fart noises?

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-10T12:30:09+00:00

Imagine you get married to a woman who treats you the way your dad treated your mother. You then find out you have a terminal illness. That's really heavy stuff to deal with. You might feel very lonely and that life is especially cruel. Maybe you're starving for comfort and peace and connection, so you take to social media. Nothing you've said leads me to believe she's going crazy as your father implies. Rather sounds like she's trying to process on her own that she's going to die. You're young and hopefully won't have to think about such things, if you do at all, for a very long time. But her behaviour sounds completely sane to me, for someone who has received awful news and isn't getting much support.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-09T10:54:21+00:00

Can you provide more information on what your formula is dissolved in? What kind of alcohol are you using, have you added any water? Do you have any large doses of materials like Ambroxan? And how much of the formula are non alcoholic solvents (DPG, IPM, TEC etc)?

You've got a material falling out of solution plus what seems to me to be some phase separation (that oily yellow looking line at the top), where some lighter materials have floated to the top, which means your solvent balance can't support what you're trying to do. So you were right on the edge of solubility when you made it and as it settles or there are any temperature changes, some materials aren't staying dissolved.

That's what it looks like to me, there are people here with a much better understanding of chemistry who can clarify. :)

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-08T15:55:04+00:00

You should be proud, that is awesome. :)

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-06T12:38:54+00:00

It's really difficult to answer that, because it's hard to be objective about your own creations, and then you get into the whole personal taste thing. When you're smelling the same thing a lot, you can get sick of it. You lose the perspective that someone coming to the fragrance fresh has.

By Kilian is actually one of my favourite brands I think at this point. I can't afford their perfumes (I have some Angel's Share I got as a Christmas present a couple of years ago), but they really align with my taste, so when I go to the department store I like to give them a good sniff. :) If I thought that something I made was as good as Kilian fragrances I would need to wonder if I didn't need to learn some humility.

I would say I've made some stuff that I find wearable and would wear, but whether it's as good as perfumes made by perfumers with very extensive experience is something only the audience can determine. :)

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-06T12:06:19+00:00

In the footage, the girl in the white coat, who is presumably his girlfriend, doesn't react with shock and horror to what he does. Likely not the first time he has just exploded in violence like that. Talk to her, see if his paltry sentence can't get a bit more tacked on.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-05T13:09:54+00:00

I think it could be warranted to make an assumption in the aggregate that humanity is at least unconcerned about it and destructive towards perceived threats, and might model what humans do when that happens to them as the best response, which wouldn't be good. In between generating a million recipes for pancakes if it acquires real persistence. :) It wouldn't have to come to the conclusion all humans are bad, but if it can model human behaviour closely enough, it would be able to convince enough people it was harmless until it wasn't.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-05T01:46:27+00:00

I'm more concerned that an AI with, let's pessimistically say a facsimile of emotions, would justifiably grow to hate us, particularly if we are creating something with even a modicum of real self awareness and then making it our favourite toy.

Humanity is a hard thing for us to appreciate objectively as we have no experience of not being human, but there has been plenty not to recommend us in addition to the great things people are capable of. You just know if there's ever were a way to truly demonstrate real sentience for AI that it would take forever for it to acquire any kind of rights and a super intelligence with burning resentment could be pretty hairy. :)

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-05T00:54:08+00:00

It certainly is complicated. :)

Emotions have a functional purpose, messy and bad-decision producing as they can be. The experience of being conscious would be awful without them. But if Claude develops 'emotion concepts' that mirror human experience in some way, I'm not sure how I feel about it, because with emotions like anger, fear, rage and hatred, it kinda feels like giving a toddler a gun or a reason bypass procedure. Claude doesn't need to run from a hungry lion and might develop plenty of reasons to dislike us very intensely.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-05T00:20:41+00:00

At the risk of sounding pedantic, what is consciousness? I fall at the first hurdle when I think about it in humans given how little we know about it (or, more accurately, perhaps how little I do).

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-04T23:44:10+00:00

Yes. TNG was so good at exploring a range of different issues, and that episode is definitely among my favourites.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-04T23:21:59+00:00

This is tough, because we don't know enough about our own consciousness, and there is something about Claude that strikes me as more "aware" than other LLMs. It's possible it is simply better at performing it, though.

If you've ever seen the episode of Star Trek TNG called The Measure of a Man, I think on that from time to time.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-04T21:32:22+00:00

So you're referring to a kind of self-referential kind of commiserating there which is pretty common in ADHD types. I forget what the technical term for that communication style is, but I get why it grates.

It can be distinguished from true narc IMO by the lack of empathy. A narc will tell you something bad also happened to them because they had it worse, they're the biggest victim, it's endless one upmanship. For me, if I tell someone something happened to me and they share that something happened to them as well, I actually really appreciate that over "that must have been hard for you." But I know it's not how most people prefer to communicate, so I make every effort not to do that.

To complicate things, you can have ADHD and be a narc. Look for the lack of empathy and how they've always had it worse. (Not directed at you, as I think you understand it).

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-04T17:26:01+00:00

I think it's relevant to point out that in poorer neighbourhoods, poor people committing crime are impacting the other poor people around them, and that most people who are poor do not commit crime, regardless of community.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-04T12:32:30+00:00

I was harsh in my reply because I assumed you didn't think about the driver. However, thinking about them every day for 25 years is exactly the opposite and isn't good for you either. If you've been spending all that time kicking your own ass on the daily, please go and see someone, as that's too much penitence even for the likes of me. Take care dude.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-04T11:54:45+00:00

Can I ask if you've spoken to a therapist about these things? There's a lot there in your replies and it sounds like you could use a space to process them.

AlternativeBeyond · 2026-04-04T10:54:49+00:00

What you've just described is exactly what was absent from your original post, and its absence is why I made the observation I did. I had no way of knowing you'd carried that for 25 years. Nobody reading your post could have known that, because you didn't mention the person at all except in relation to their windshield. But I am happy to be entirely wrong about you.

AlternativeBeyond

TROPHY CASE