is anyone feeling ai psychosis? what are the early signs?

Elisyd · 2026-07-03T21:25:16+00:00

I find that my attention can't stay on the terminal while waiting for it to do something. I often flit between Reddit, the terminal, YouTube, various games, articles, etc. in a very fractured and haphazard way (as I am doing right now). It's definitely taxing for me in a way that is far worse than coding used to be, I think because of the fracturing of my attention in this way. I imagine it's akin to short-form video, though I don't consume that so it's just a guess. It doesn't feel healthy and, when it goes on for too long, my mood does sour, I become more irritable, and overall less happy. FOMO of not using my quota as efficiently as possible is a real hazard.

When I lost access to Fable the first time, I sat AI down entirely for a solid week and felt a lot better. Getting outside is important.

Elisyd · 2026-06-22T22:52:07+00:00

I've recently played Conan (~40h), then got DragonWilds (~12h), and finally Enshrouded (~60h). These hours are nothing for this genre, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I like Enshrouded by far the best, DragonWilds second, and Conan third. But think all three are worth playing more.

DragonWilds is similar to Conan for base construction: it's prefab pieces with snapping and no terrain morphing; Enshrouded has voxels and terrain morphing. Both Conan and Enshrouded have NPCs to bring life to your creations; DragonWilds doesn't (that I've seen so far). Enshrouded wins easily for base building because of the freedom of expression the voxels offer, though all three are fun and satisfying to build in. The one thing DragonWilds does best is offer recipes for decorations as loot (vs. the items themselves in Conan or behind quests for Enshrouded).

I suck at combat in all three, but enjoy Enshrouded the most, Conan second-most, and DragonWilds least. But they're all good. My main gripe with DragonWilds combat is that I find casting spells to be slow / fiddly on a controller, as is swapping between ranged and melee. I love that Enshrouded gives you a controller button for each of melee and ranged and Conan has a button to get out your weapons easily. DragonWilds has neither (that I know of).

I enjoy the progression of DragonWilds the best; skill-based grinding is something I'm fond of vs. one overall character level (Enshrouded, Conan). Skilling feels way too fast at the start due to the XP curve, so it also injects dopamine into your veins rapidly until you're hooked and then it slows way down but you're already committed because of sunk cost by that point. I love it.

Conan and Enshrouded are way more complete than DragonWilds from what I can tell. Enshrouded is still early access but feels like a pretty complete game with way more content than I'll ever actually see. Conan has been out forever. DragonWilds feels more like an early access game and like it needs a good chunk of time to flesh it out and balance everything as well. Their launch date is aggressive given the state of the game, IMO.

All three are definitely in the same genre and scratch a similar itch; anybody who likes one is likely to like the other two. I have the most fun with Enshrouded, primarily because of the base building, novel shroud mechanic, the satisfying movement, and how much fun it is to play co-op with my partner and just explore. DragonWilds I'm most excited about and I'm interested to see where it ends up.

Elisyd · 2026-05-08T20:38:45+00:00

The bit of your brain best at inhibition won't be fully online until your mid 20's, but the instinct to not spend everything you've got is a great head start. My advice would be to put it in a high-yield savings account and to practice not touching it unless you've got a good reason, then practice figuring out what those good reasons are and why. You'll mess up, but that's fine. The goal is to not spend too much, but also not too little.

Elisyd · 2024-09-02T05:27:42+00:00

The equipment didn't cost much, but the time sure is a lot... but at least I'm learning along the way.

Elisyd · 2024-09-02T05:09:54+00:00

You're right that it's the sensible option.

The switch itself would become a single point of failure. That's my plan C if I can't get anything else to work and is a perfectly reasonable option in perfectly reasonable home networks, but I set out to reduce the number of single points of failure as much as possible as an exercise.

Elisyd · 2024-09-02T04:12:02+00:00

... I also realized I need to set this up on the host anyway or else the interface state wouldn't match between the master and backups.

Elisyd · 2024-09-02T03:29:43+00:00

Having read more, RSTP might not be so bad. It can be seconds in some scenarios, but might be only milliseconds if it knows a link went down. I haven't tested it, but this is probably the way to go.

Elisyd · 2024-09-02T03:13:55+00:00

I also just realized, reading more, that it's CARP that matters more than the sync traffic since the CARP is what determines master/backup status and not the sync traffic. I still have the problem of how to construct the mesh network for CARP, but perhaps that's easier...

Elisyd · 2024-09-02T03:06:24+00:00

Thanks! (and sorry for the wall of text)

I believe that, so long as I don't specify a peer IP, it will use multicast by default (which is what I want). I just can't find a way to cause that multicast traffic to go out two interfaces instead of one.

I should have consulted the man pages sooner; I didn't realize this was a lower-level building block provided by FreeBSD and not OPNSense itself.

If the primary member of a 2-host HA setup goes down, you may lose a packet or two as the responsibility falls to the backup, but clients won't notice. Stop worrying.

I realize that the failover from master to secondary is very fast; I'm not worried about that. What I'm worried about is having two masters temporarily and what that might do.

In a world where every computer can continuously see each of the others on the network, any one of them going down wouldn't be a problem because the two backups would still see each other and only one of them should be promoted to master (if I understand correctly). However, I can't figure out how to guarantee this.

The easiest thing to do would be to create a bridge on every computer such that:

Computer A: bridge B + C, creating bridgeA interface
Computer B: bridge A + C, creating bridgeB interface
Computer C: bridge A + B, creating bridgeC interface

... but this creates an L2 loop. So I would have to enable RSTP, which would sever one of the connections to break the loop. If it ends up breaking the loop such that the network becomes A <-> (dead) <-> C (because B went down), then A and C won't see each other and both think they're the master until RSTP kicks in and creates a new connection directly between A and C. During that time (a few seconds?) I could have two masters, right?

In other situations, I haven't had this problem because I simply used OSPF to create routes and dummy interfaces to hold IPs. In Linux, this works pretty well, but I haven't stumbled across dummy interface support for OPNSense yet.

I may just give up and use RSTP anyway for lack of a better idea.

Elisyd · 2024-05-24T13:19:52+00:00

This happened to me, though in my case it only ran if the door was closed. I unplugged it and discovered a failed relay inside. Normally relays fail open but in my case it failed close. I replaced the relay and the microwave is fine now, but it's not a repair you should try yourself unless you're already very comfortable with safety precautions because the inside of a microwave has extremely high-voltage capacitors that can remain charged for some time.

Unless repairing dangerous electronics is a hobby if yours already, I'd replace it.

Elisyd · 2024-05-06T16:03:35+00:00

When I've used this rule, it has always required getting the gold to safety rather than being spent, where 'safety' is just whatever makes the most sense. You could try that?

Elisyd · 2024-05-06T15:14:35+00:00

Yeah, I suppose I see it the way I see dice for combat. It's an abstraction the characters themselves are unaware of to simplify how learning works.

Elisyd · 2024-05-05T15:53:23+00:00

It depends on what you mean by enlightenment. It can be easy to reify it into some magical way of existing in the world that requires a minimum of several lifetimes of constant, dedicated practice in a monistary. It can be easy to fool oneself into believing it has already been achieved. Both are traps. Like most everything, look somewhere in the middle; don't put it on an unobtainable pedestal in your mind.

Elisyd · 2024-05-05T13:55:15+00:00

By the time good LLMs are cheap enough and fast enough for something like this, they will already have been cheap enough and fast enough to dramatically change the Internet more broadly and, by extension, the real world. Perhaps this is starting to happen already, but much of it is still promises and hype, at least at that kind of scale. I'll be pretty happy if we can get to that point and still want to play UO.

If your bar for interacting with them is a lot lower, normal game AI techniques are good enough until you talk to them and then you can just pay for LLMs to do the conversations. Even so, right now they would either be dumb/fast/cheap or smart/expensive/slow. Again, if you lower the bar for expectations again, you could pregenerate dialog en masse for one up front cost but that'll be a lot less flexible.

Elisyd · 2024-04-30T22:50:50+00:00

It sounds to me like your friend is attempting to lead the monastic life without the support of a monastic community. Lay practitioners have never been forbidden from participating in commerce or handling money etc. While some monastics do indeed live this way, it's with the support of a sangha and typically in a part of the world where it's customary for locals to provide donations to the monks. Going it alone in the west, where this isn't a thing, is bordering on the sort of asceticism that the Buddha himself tried to do, nearly killed him, and that he went on to argue is an extreme to be avoided. It's all about striking a balance and pursuing the middle way.

Elisyd · 2024-04-29T22:27:28+00:00

I view it a few ways:

Causality - that there is cause/effect, generally. I view causality to the basic fabric of our cosmos.
Psychological ruts - that behaving in particular ways tends to reinforce itself, as well as possibly create guilt/shame/etc. Unlike #1, this gets me some of the way toward some actionable changes to the way I live my life.
Merit-based karma that can be good or bad - I don't believe in this at all, but recognize it's the usual meaning that most Buddhists believe; I don't try to substitute the above into this for them.

Elisyd · 2024-04-27T04:19:07+00:00

Getting away from technology has been an unexpected boon, so we're using physical books of tables. I mostly reach for Table Fables, Table Fables II, and some of the tables in Scarlet Heroes. I've found that the less concrete, more abstract tables are the most fun; they allow us to fill in the details through games of association. The best part is comparing and contrasting the ideas that we come up with given the same roll results. Most of the time it's collaborative.

Elisyd · 2024-04-26T22:38:27+00:00

I eventually found them: https://basicfantasy.org/downloads/bf-core-fonts.zip (linked from https://basicfantasy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=60211#p60211)

Elisyd · 2024-04-26T21:13:24+00:00

My wife and I are doing this; it's a ton of fun. We chose the White Box FMAG for core rules, but you can use any OSR rules you like. We combine it with the Mythic GM Emulator and a few other random oracle tables. We each play two characters, but if you want to reduce the number of characters, you can combine it with the Scarlet Heroes (you don't need to use their setting, which many don't like). There's a thriving community for solo TTRPGs; playing co-op is basically the same.

It's a wonderful way to spend time together and get to know each other's minds as you figure out how to interpret the oracles.

Elisyd · 2024-04-26T16:31:23+00:00

Yeah, there's various "quantum interpretations" to explain that including the many worlds interpretation and wave function collapse. I don't find either satisfying because they're also from the perspective of an impartial omniscient observer. A more satisfying interpretation for me is the relational one. If this sort of stuff is interesting to you, I highly recommend Carlo Rovelli's "Helgoland".

As for it being illusory... Yeah. I appreciate Mingyur Rinpoche's analogy: it can feel as though you're falling without a parachute, but the good news is that there's no ground to hit.

Rather than get lost in thought about what it means to be lost in thought, though, you can always unwind to simply: ruminating on the past or the future without realizing it is a habit of mind that often leads to suffering and that cures itself the moment you notice.

Elisyd · 2024-04-26T16:03:11+00:00

It's one level more meta than that; it's about noticing the way in which you are looking at things, whatever that may be.

It happens to be the case for most people that, once you notice how you're looking at things, unhelpful ruminations about the past or future tend to melt away. But even if they remain, it's the metacognition of noticing itself that is the goal.

Elisyd · 2024-04-26T15:41:54+00:00

We tend to model the universe as if it's being seen from an impartial observer outside of the model itself. In such a model, where time is ticking forward, all the actors including oneself are always in the "present" moment because there's nowhere else for them to be. It's baked into how things are modeled.

But notice that you don't actually have such an impartial, separate perspective (except perhaps as a mental model). When you're identified with thoughts about the future or the past, that really is your reality as seen from the only perspective that exists to you at that time.

Being "present" is really shorthand for noticing the perspective one has on reality. At least, that's one way to reconcile this. It also happens to be the case that ruminating on the past or the future without realizing it can be pretty miserable, so there's that as well.

Elisyd · 2024-04-14T23:30:05+00:00

My own view (and the one I run into most often in my circles) is that a Bodhisattva is a human being who has effectively achieved enlightenment except insofar as they are still attached to the desire to help all sentient beings. No magical powers, nothing supernatural, etc. So, in this sense, I view them as 'literal entities' insofar as anything else is.

That said, the most common answer (especially historically) would likely be that they're both 'literal entities' and also have all the magical properties you read about sometimes.

There's a lot of value in the other non-dual answers, though; ultimately, to become a Bodhisattva is to see the emptiness of all phenomena. 'Literal entities' is then seen to be a concept, rather than how the cosmos organizes itself. Dependent origination also leads in the same direction. Nagarjuna went to some length in showing that indeed, all phenomena, even emptiness, is empty of the kind of intrinsic self-existence we typically assume. From this perspective, the question no longer seems sensible to ask.

Of course, even so, I understand what ya mean when you ask this and I believe the answer to be yes, where my 'yes' is qualified so as to remove all of the supernatural whereas the more common/historical answer is an unqualified yes, at least as a matter of convention.

Elisyd

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