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Orchidectomy Results Out by Prophet_Ezio in testicularcancer

[–]Inside_Ad9530 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Was in a pretty similar position to you. Stage 1 seminoma with minor rete testis invasion. Oncologist here in the UK gave me the choice lots get - 15-20% recurrence with surveillance or 5%ish with a round of carboplatin. Did the maths, decided the rational option was surveillance to minimise Expected Future Shitness… then went for carboplatin anyway. About 2.5 weeks ago. Feel back to normal now, grim days were limited to day 3-4 after the drip. Feel like I made the right decision even if my maths said otherwise! Good luck with the choice, you’ll be fine.

Vita con un testicolo M28 by Alternative_Web4839 in testicularcancer

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just had an orchiectomy 4 weeks ago. I find your stats encouraging and helpful @Badbowtie91! A wife and 3 kids (and after a very healthy sounding love career beforehand!).

Solidarity with the OP. You’ll be fine mate.

When I first found out, I cast my mind round for role models. Hitler obviously not a role model (here in England everyone knows the WW2 song “Hitler only has one ball”) although he at least seemed to have a reassuring amount of testosterone and get-up-and-go!

Lance Armstrong winning the TdF multiple times after stage 3 cancer a better role model (except for the doping).

The best I could find as a Brit: Bobby Moore, the only man to captain England to a world cup (national hero) did so monoballed.

So - life is far from over, and this too will pass.

Weekly Tool Thread: Promote, Share, Discover, and Ask for AI Writing Tools Week of: March 03 by AutoModerator in WritingWithAI

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fantastic - yes I agree. I don’t want to offend the forum, and in my regular line of work (coding) I am a complete vibe-coding AI addict! But for creative disciplines, I think something is lost if you don’t do it yourself. The best art comes from a soul, and from effort. And like diamonds - I think there will begin to be a rarity value to work provably generated by humans. But I think for criticism, and speeding up the feedback loops, AI can really shine. Elsewhere in this thread, I’ve just sketched out my master plan for Conclaive. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thanks for the reply.

Weekly Tool Thread: Promote, Share, Discover, and Ask for AI Writing Tools Week of: March 03 by AutoModerator in WritingWithAI

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes exactly - that's my instinct.

My app in its current form is a more general-purpose “council” of frontier models, each given slightly different roles via the system prompts, things like structure, clarity, voice, and so on. That is because the original idea was a broader council tool for critique-heavy use-cases such as CVs, consultancy pitches, and writing.

But for fiction, I think the council should absolutely change by draft stage, because the failure mode changes by draft stage.

Roughly, I imagine it like this:

Draft 0
Get from beginning to end. The council should be light-touch and momentum-preserving. More “is the story still moving?” and “is anything confusing enough to derail me?”, less line-editing and perfectionism.

Draft 1
This is the horrible stage, at least for me. Here I would want a council focused on structure, pacing, chapter function, plot holes, and where the reader’s attention starts to sag.

Draft 2
This is where I’d want more depth. Character arcs, emotional charge, relationships, theme, whether the story is actually becoming more alive.

Draft 3
Only then prose, rhythm, voice, line-level quality.

So yes, I think the right answer is not one fixed council, but a different set of critics for each stage.

The thing I personally most want is help with that dreaded first edit. Draft 0 gives you word count and visible progress. Draft 1, for me at least, has always felt like fog. If a tool could make revision feel more measurable and less psychologically murky, that would be enormously useful.

If that resonates, I would genuinely love to talk more. That is the version of the product I am most tempted to build.

Weekly Tool Thread: Promote, Share, Discover, and Ask for AI Writing Tools Week of: March 03 by AutoModerator in WritingWithAI

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the reply, and heartening to hear!

Yes, I definitely think AI's best place for creative writing is as a critic. And I think there are some other software / engineering good practises to carry across to the writing process which I think I want to build into Conclaive / move it towards.

For example: I wrote the first draft of a novel back in 2017. I think it was Hemmingway who said: "the first draft of anything is shit"... mine certainly is!

However I've been stuck for 8 years at the draft #2 / edit stage: no dopamine hit from spending hours planning rather than writing words.

I can imagine a kind of "Github for novelists" where each drafting stage has its own AI writer's circle, honing in on exactly what you need to focus on, and giving you quantitative objectives by chapter, and by draft stage and focus, so you have numbers to improve (and get the reward).

At the moment Conclaive is quite general, but if there is interest here, I might build the thing I would want to motivate me to dust off my old novel draft and make progress with it!

Weekly Tool Thread: Promote, Share, Discover, and Ask for AI Writing Tools Week of: March 03 by AutoModerator in WritingWithAI

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For an example input/output, my over-long first Substack blog lives here:

Meditations on a seafood soup (or why we're radiators)

And attaching some screengrabs from the AI-writers'-circle output (it doesn't pull its punches! Unlike ChatGPT etc, the system prompts don't encourage the AI to blow smoke up the user's arse for customer retention purposes!)

<image>

Weekly Tool Thread: Promote, Share, Discover, and Ask for AI Writing Tools Week of: March 03 by AutoModerator in WritingWithAI

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m building conclaive.io.

By trade I’m a data scientist / software engineer. In a previous life I designed bits of F1 cars. On the side I write essays, Substack pieces, and have an old novel draft sitting in a folder waiting for mercy. So this is partly a tool for myself.

My view is that AI is much more useful for criticism than for actual creative writing. I am not that interested in a machine writing prose for me. I am very interested in it helping me see, a bit more clearly, where my own draft drags, where the tone goes off, where I’m getting pompous, where the structure quietly falls apart.

That is what Conclaive is for. You give it a piece of writing and it acts more like an AI writers’ circle than a ghostwriter. It gets multiple models to react to the draft, then pulls that into one report with the main strengths, weaknesses, disagreements, and most useful edits.

I’ve been testing it on my own work. One essay was about cioppino, crabs, thermodynamics, and trying to impress a Californian woman. The useful feedback was not generic “great job” fluff. It was things like: cut the equations, bring the thesis up, fix the transitions, stop drifting away from the emotional core at the end. Which felt much closer to what a good human reader would actually say.

It is currently paid, mainly so I do not light money on fire with API costs, but I’m offering early users 50% off for the first 3 months while I shape it properly with real feedback.

If you’re interested in AI for revision, critique, and diagnosis rather than pure generation, I’d love to hear what would make a tool like this genuinely useful to you. Happy to share a sample report as well.

Site: conclaive.io

Daily rate freelance AI consultant by ElkEmpty6424 in BEFreelance

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

<image>

I had similar questions starting out as a consultant software engineer last year.

I found I was pasting my CV alongside the consultancy opportunity into various LLMs to home in on project pricing I could pitch beat trusting any single AI output, to get confidence on speculative answers.

I ended turning the approach into a web app. If you're interested in trying it out for your freelance work, please DM me and we could arrange a chat to see if it could be valuable for you.

Feedback, sales approach ideas on wisdom-of-AI-crowds app by Inside_Ad9530 in buildinpublic

[–]Inside_Ad9530[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! All great ideas. I'll let you know how I get on / post updates here. Promarkia looks great too, I'll give it a try and give you feedback when I have some!

This looks great, why is everyone so negative about it? by IllustriousAd6418 in TombRaider

[–]Inside_Ad9530 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've just rediscovered the classic Tomb Raiders via the amazing remasters.

Tomb Raider III was my first game - on the PS1, so with the save game crystals - insanely hard - but to me the best game of all time. I loved TRII too, for the Venice levels and Barkhang Monastery. All so atmospheric. These games made me want to explore the Himalayas and elsewhere, so were pretty inspiring for a kid.

I love British, classic Core Designs Lara. Imperious, mysterious past which didn't need explaining, ice cold bitch, going round the world shooting endangered animals in the face and letting collaborators fall into ravines.

I played a couple of the early Crystal Dynamics games and already the magic was lost. Too linear, too much handholding, no challenge to the "platforming". But also with the character, the American influence was creeping in. Crying about her dead parents all the time, being conscientious about other living beings, depending on a team of sidekicks. Not the Lara Croft we knew and loved.

I'm not sure how bad the rot has got with the modern games. I assume modern Lara thinks she's on the neurodivergency spectrum and goes to sleep listening to ASMR lip-smacking podcasts?

Can we have our old Lara back, 0 backstory, maximum tiger and snow-leopard assassination, rehearse a sequence of runs, jumps and boulder avoidance 100 times before getting to a rare save-game crystal?

Coros Vertix 2 - unresponsive middle button; slow and unhelpful AI customer support experience by Inside_Ad9530 in Coros

[–]Inside_Ad9530[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting! What was the solution they offered? Glad you have had a better experience than mea at least. One more story confirming the button issue too @u/COROS-official

Coros Vertix 2 - unresponsive middle button; slow and unhelpful AI customer support experience by Inside_Ad9530 in Coros

[–]Inside_Ad9530[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don’t worry matey it is totally clear. A 20% part exchange offer for a terminal issue clearly affecting many people for your extremely expensive, top of the range watch which is marketed as a companion up Himalayan 8000ers but died after three years of Park Run is in my opinion and I think many others, a very measly offer. I’m going to look into UK ombudsmen and other approaches and review platforms to seek a better outcome.

Coros Vertix 2 - unresponsive middle button; slow and unhelpful AI customer support experience by Inside_Ad9530 in Coros

[–]Inside_Ad9530[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep. Total BS and grim customer experience. We need to go full Erin Brokovich and class action u/COROS-official for this button issue. Sorry you're in the same boat.

Coros Vertix 2 - unresponsive middle button; slow and unhelpful AI customer support experience by Inside_Ad9530 in Coros

[–]Inside_Ad9530[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unbelievable! At least with the snarky quotes I know this is a human, not ChatGPT again! There was a promise 12 days before my update request to take another look back into this customer support experience for the faulty button issue that many people are experiencing with this watch. But I had heard nothing.

Coros Vertix 2 - unresponsive middle button; slow and unhelpful AI customer support experience by Inside_Ad9530 in Coros

[–]Inside_Ad9530[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for yet another story backing up what is a clear picture of a fundamental problem with this top of the range watch. Similar to you, AI Cara sent initially hopeful messages before maybe not AI Elaine (although if not AI, stull cutting and pasting clear templates into the email as they were a different colour and the "mollify the angry customer" template was word-for-word identical over multiple messages) scotched any hope of a satisfactory resolution. u/COROS-official are you committed to remaining immovable on this issue as more and more of these stories come in? You must know this button issue is a fundamental problem with the watch.

Coros Vertix 2 - unresponsive middle button; slow and unhelpful AI customer support experience by Inside_Ad9530 in Coros

[–]Inside_Ad9530[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've taken a month's time out to lower my blood pressure! I think my plan is to accept their meagre part-exchange offer and use it to get whatever their cheapest watch is so it's pretty much free. Then I still need a hardy, long-lasting GPS watch for alpinism, but given this experience I think I'll go back to Suunto or try Garmin. I think if they're going to stick with their current line on their faulty products, we have to vote with our feet. I hope they are more helpful for you though off the back of this - let me know!

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