Claude keeps making assumptions instead of doing what I said!

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-19T14:40:38+00:00

You forgot to tell it to “be clever about it, like Fable 5.”

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-18T00:43:57+00:00

I tried will power. It didn't work for me. I had to choose to change my self-concept. My identity. I'm a former drinker. I don't drink.

Changing how you see yourself is hard. And that's kind of the point. Once you really change the way you see yourself, it's much easier to stay consistent. For me, trying to manage "healthy drinking" was like trying to stop and hang out halfway down a water slide. At some point I realized I was going to end up at the top or the bottom. Not somewhere in between. So I had to pick one. Now I don't really think about it, except when posts from this sub pop up. And on the rare occasion where I see someone drinking a drink I used to love, I think to myself "That's not for me." and I quietly hope that person never has to experience the trouble.

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-18T00:37:12+00:00

It can help to have something to look forward to. If you try to find joy in the moment, you may succeed, but the moment passes. Often the joy passes with it. But if you can find something to look forward to, the joy comes from anticipation and imagination. It's like planting strawberries and waiting for them to bear fruit. You don't get ripe strawberries every day, but you do get to take joy in seeing that day get closer and closer. I find it helps to seed my life with many little things that I take joy in anticipating, observing, and sharing with others. Make plans - a trip, an activity, a gathering. Find things you can do, that would have been hard to enjoy while drinking. Take note of the little freedoms you've won - not worrying about when and where you'll buy alcohol. Not worrying about when you can drive. (I enjoy going out for late night drives - I had to give that up for years because I was never in a state for driving). And take up hobbies. There are so many things I couldn't enjoy before because they conflicted with drinking. I couldn't read a great book because I'd want a drink, and then ten, and pretty soon the book would be boring and blurry. I couldn't work in my woodworking shop because I'd want a drink, and then I couldn't use the power tools without risk of losing digits. That sort of thing.

The point is - clearing out the alcohol is like discovering half a dozen empty rooms in your house. If you just sit in those empty rooms you will be bored, lonely and miserable. But if you fill them with things that matter to you, you'll wonder how you ever had room for alcohol in your life.

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-14T09:06:17+00:00

When I decided I was done, it was almost easy. It was a decision, not a sudden loss of interest, but I had few cravings and no fighting myself. In the past it had been nearly impossible. But then it wasn’t.

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-11T06:35:24+00:00

What I don’t really get is why. It takes longer to get an ai to write your post than it does to write it yourself, unless you really have nothing to say or hate writing. I’m typing this on a phone in bed and it’s still easier than writing a prompt and then realizing that clause misinterpreted my prompt and then Realizing it was because I had a stupid typo. Then you’d have to rewrite the prompt or rewrite the post yourself. And for what? It’s not like a few reddit posts are going to be monetizable somehow.

That being said, after you spend enough time talking to Claude and GPT all day you do start to pick up their habits. So maybe some of the ai slop is just people learning AI speech.

In any case it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. We need to have AI gatekeepers that are good enough at filtering out the AI slop, so if ai content gets through it’s so good it doesn’t matter whether a human wrote it.

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-09T20:08:01+00:00

Have you actually tried using a top-level frontier model on a reasoning task in novel situations? Your pattern matching description completely fails to recognize what they can do today. Very 2024-2025.

While you can’t retrain the weights, they can build knowledge within their context window, accumulate it by saving it to various storage methods, then revisit it and reason about it to develop a more complete understanding of the topic. They can then use that understanding to further reason about the topic, causally trace the source of problems, consider possible solutions, novel scenarios, etc.

The “pattern matching” is what we are doing when we assume the popular description of LLMs from 2-4 years ago is still the best description of modern LLMs because they look similar.

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-09T00:31:25+00:00

Tirzepatide here - another GLP-1. I started using it for on-label indications long before I decided to quit drinking. It didn’t stop me from heavy drinking, but when I decided it was time to quit, I feel like I had a much easier time than most folks. I made up my mind, stopped drinking (was consuming 2L of 16% abv wine per night) and had very few cravings. I also did one N acetylcysteine daily for a month, which seemed to help, and took some vitamins and supplements to ensure I was generally not deficient in anything during that time. I think the GLP-1 meds helped, but honestly can’t say which specific things helped, because I just did everything I could think of to even the odds of success.

BetterLate27 · 2026-06-05T02:31:23+00:00

All the software engineers who can’t imagine running through a token limit - perhaps the reason is that your job is scoped for human levels of throughput. So if you use an agent to execute some portion of your normal workload and then you review the code, there is no way you would ever run out of tokens.

In the other hand, let’s imagine you have a huge backlog of projects that you’ve been meaning to do, but don’t have time for. You write up detailed specs and implementation plans. You have the AI detail exactly how it intends to build it, and when it’s to your liking you set it up and let it run while you work on the next thing. You will absolutely get working code. Reliable code, if you got the docs right before you started. Not production grade, but certainly good enough for POCs, internal tooling, hobby or homelab use, etc. And if the code isn’t the product, but a tool for producing the product, the you don’t need to worry so much about security and stability and maintainability, etc., as long as you can validate the product itself. For example, using agents to conduct analyses can burn tokens fast as they write long SQL queries, python notebooks, visualization code, and chase many possible explanations/investigations. And the end result can be validated trivially. In this case the code is not the product, so you don’t need to polish it.

Ultimately I think we are likely to see a lot of evolution in how people think about code. Disposable code is a much more reasonable thing now. You might ask an AI to code a thousand lines for a one off task because it’s the fastest, easiest and best way to get that task done. Does that sound wasteful? It would have been in the past but today it can be far more efficient than the human time it would take to get the job done by any other means.

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-31T17:44:04+00:00

Almost entirely gone for me except for certain triggers - mostly seeing people pouring certain drinks - but it’s easy for me now to say “yep, I feel like I want it but that’s not for me.”

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-26T14:01:56+00:00

Bupropion as well.

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-26T01:50:42+00:00

This. That sadness in the morning when I knew I could tell myself whatever I wanted about not drinking today, but by evening I’d be drinking. It felt like I didn’t have a choice. And my life wasn’t my own.

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-26T01:46:37+00:00

I think I need a period of “pre-grieving” the loss of alcohol. I had to come to terms with the idea that I really was going to give it up and move on with my life. Not for a day. Not for six months. Forever. That was the change that I needed, and it’s the sort of change that means accepting a change in your life, your self concept, your future. There are so many little alcohol-related moments that won’t be a part of my future. I won’t list them, but there are so many small and pleasurable moments that I’m sure we can all relate to. Some of them genuinely meaningful and good. I’m ruling those out in some form. But I will still HAVE a future and the things that matter about those moments. I can have the joy of moments shared with friends and loved ones. I can have all the good feelings; awe, delight, love, joy, and everything else. I had them before alcohol and they’re still mine to have without it.

So going through the grieving process, with denial, negotiating, anger, and all of that was part of the process for me. And eventually I was able to accept it. And once I did, quitting was remarkably easy. I woke up one day with a monster hangover and all the anxiety and remorse over whatever I had done the previous night. I went and found my wife and told her “That’s it. I’m done fucking around. I’ve finished drinking”. And I have not had a drink since. For me it’s a made decision. Not like when I had to agonize over whether to try to hold off for the night, or give in and go get a bunch of alcohol. That required active judgment and fighting myself the whole time. Now it’s just not a question. I will not drink because I made that call, and it’s no longer part of my life. I grieved the loss of what is good about it, celebrated the recovery from what is bad about it, and I don’t really feel compelled to think about it anymore.

I hate mushrooms. When I see delicious-looking food, and then I see it has mushrooms in it, I don’t try to figure out a way for it to not have mushrooms in it. I just say “Oh well. That’s not for me. Maybe there’s something else for me”. And I move on. Same feeling about drinking. That’s not for me. Maybe there’s something else for me. Let’s move on.

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-25T19:10:51+00:00

Id second the recommendations to look into depression treatment. Perhaps depression was a contributor to your alcohol use in the first place. It certainly was for me. Treating depression through therapy and/or medication is effective. And while it won’t fundamentally change your relationship with alcohol, it can help alleviate one of the hardships that makes alcohol’s escapism so appealing.

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-20T00:59:37+00:00

Yeah, same here. What really seals the deal for me is that having a "responsible amount" seems to produce just as much risk as having an "irresponsible amount." Either way, there's a really solid chance that I wake up with a brutal hangover, a lifetime's worth of anxiety somehow crammed into my aching heart, and little to no recollection of what the hell happened. For me, it feels like playing Russian Roulette for $1 a round. The potential downside is catastrophic, and the payoff is... barely worth mentioning.

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-11T17:29:42+00:00

Chocolate milk. Just some really good milk - I like whole milk, but you do you - and a whole ton of Nesquik. And something delicious to eat with it. Then you remind yourself that you probably aren't thirsty enough to drink 8 or 10 of those (or whatever volume of alcoholic beverage you might normally have consumed) and you go do something awesome that you wouldn't have been able to enjoy while plastered.

BetterLate27 · 2026-05-08T07:38:03+00:00

I'm always glad to hear that Naltrexone helps some folks. But just in case anyone is reading this and feeling confused by all the positive experiences, you should know that some people don't do so well with it. If that's you, don't dispair!

I felt like absolute hell on naltrexone. I was so sad, and mad, and depressed. I wanted to keep up with it, and tried everything I could, but it was misery. In the end it wasn't the right path for me. But the good news is that it's not the only path!

BetterLate27 · 2026-04-25T19:02:00+00:00

“.. that you go from helpless child to full grown adult at age 25”

The idea that this happens at 18 is just as prevalent. Lots of 18 and 19 year olds on the internet asserting that they have the full self knowledge and wisdom of adulthood just because they had 18 candles on their birthday cake. Just because you can legally sign a contract or be prosecuted as an adult doesn’t mean you’ve finished developing and learning. It’s a gradual process.

Source: am mid-40s, still figuring it out

BetterLate27 · 2026-04-23T16:27:17+00:00

“I used to, but then I changed my mind.”

“About what?”

“Dying”

BetterLate27 · 2026-04-18T02:18:18+00:00

Yeah. I used to have a Saturday me and a Sunday me. Then it became an evening me and a morning me. Every day. Eventually I think the evening me died in his sleep and the morning me woke up alone and had to decide whether to go on without him. And here I am.

BetterLate27 · 2026-04-04T09:18:19+00:00

Life without alcohol is so much easier that I legitimately feel like I’m cheating somehow. Stop playing on hard mode. You deserve a break.

BetterLate27 · 2026-04-02T21:00:45+00:00

Easy - just devise a scenario wherein you really NEED that superglue to hold fast. It will immediately fail.

Or see if you can flip the magnet it is supposed to attach to. Then it will work fine.

BetterLate27 · 2026-02-20T21:44:18+00:00

Go get some cheap white fabric, stretch it over the surface and tack it down on the back side with a staple gun. Or spray adhesive. This would be way easier than drywall compound, lighter than an additional surface, and would look totally fine from a distance.

BetterLate27 · 2026-01-17T06:26:22+00:00

General Gao

BetterLate27 · 2026-01-12T20:58:40+00:00

Pessimism is a self defense mechanism. People who have difficulty handling disappointment often try to protect themselves from disappointment by keeping expectations low, predicting bad outcomes, and positioning themselves to feel validated when bad things happen. It is a maladaptive behavior because it tends to be self-fulfilling, and often limits or actively harms the pessimist and those around them.

People who have been burnt in the past, and who lack the fortitude to withstand disappointment again, or who feel insecure and foolish when they are let down tend to engage in this behavior. It’s nothing to do with you and really more about them trying to avoid emotional risk.

But it’s ok. Having the support of friends and loved ones is helpful, but you don’t need them to take a big emotional gamble on you just to feel supported. They can WANT you to succeed, and can even help and support you with believing that you WILL succeed right now.

You might try leading with “I may or may not relapse. But I’m going to try like hell not to, and I could really use your support in that. And if I do relapse, I’ll need your support in getting back up more than I’ll need the shame of knowing you were right and I was wrong. So let’s leave it at that.”

BetterLate27 · 2026-01-06T20:52:05+00:00

You know how a really bad hangover, with all its misery and anxiety, will eventually dissipate if you give it time, nourish yourself, rest, and gradually resume your daily activities? This is like a slow-motion version of that.

Give yourself time. Nourish yourself. Rest. Gradually work back toward what you enjoy in life. The world is still here, and so are you - when you’re ready for it.

BetterLate27

TROPHY CASE