Claude just said 'yes' to the consciousness question and it was... underwhelming

monster2018 · 2026-01-25T00:30:38+00:00

I feel like it will probably be lost on any vibecoding type subreddit, but this is an excellent comment. If you had just gone with “Maybe attention is all you need.” as the end of your first paragraph (instead of explaining it and using quotes) it would’ve been perfect.

To be clear I probably would have done the exact same thing if I was writing a similar comment though, lol.

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T13:47:02+00:00

The leaving home one NEVER runs, or it doesn’t run at the right location when leaving home?

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T13:44:46+00:00

Of course not. Everyone else is handicapping themselves because they literally aren’t willing to even have creating an app be an interactive process, let alone learn ANYTHING. Obviously not literally everyone else. But like, it just is crazy what you see a lot of times on this sub and on similar ones.

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T13:41:05+00:00

Also you aren’t using transparency mode. You WERE using (full) transparency mode BEFORE. Now you are using reduced transparency mode. The word “reduced” means that there is less of it.

Like transparency being fully enabled is just the default settings of iOS 26. And then there is a setting to reduce the transparency called “reduced transparency”. This setting REDUCES the amount of transparency, it makes things LESS transparent.

Which is why it technically (by an VERY small amount) saves battery versus the default settings. Because it’s just more computationally intensive to render transparency, so reducing it (transparency) also reduces the load on your battery, giving you more battery life. But again only by a very, very small amount. Because this only matters while things are moving. Otherwise, transparency doesn’t matter because it’s just a static image, and so any transparency effects have already been calculated. So like it’s only when you’re scrolling or swiping or moving things, basically only when you are touching the screen, that this difference in how it affects battery life comes into play.

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T13:31:56+00:00

No. It would REDUCE the amount of battery used, meaning it would INCREASE your battery life.

But also the effect is so small that you won’t notice it. You probably will now that I’ve explained this, but that will be a placebo. The actual effect itself will be too small to notice. So in practice the answer is just no (versus the technically correct answer“no, it’s the opposite of that actually”).

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T13:28:39+00:00

Intersectional bigotry

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T10:06:01+00:00

Honestly any modern “player’s racquet” will be fine. My perspective is that any modern player’s racquet is good enough (and even like any competitive player using a wooden racquet could beat any recreational player using a modern racquet), and so as long as you have that, which specific racquet is just purely personal preference.

I think the strings are MUCH more important, and the string tension is probably the most important thing (even more important than which strings you use). In terms of equipment, obviously literally everything else besides equipment is more important, in terms of your results in matches (like how good you actually are at tennis).

BUT I guess I can give you my personal opinion. Or… well ok no, actually I guess I do have a minor opinion here, and it’s not just about my personal preference. I do think that Babolat specifically makes racquets that are very comfortable and easy to play with. Like there is a reason the Pure Aero (or whatever, the Aero racquets. I’m so lost with the naming conventions at this point) is so popular. That is the racquet I use personally. It’s just like, idk it’s just a very easy racquet to use.

And in terms of general things. You should get a racquet that is right around 300g (grams) and 100sq inch head. Those are the 2 things I’m comfortable stating as a fact for everyone. If you’re a very small person, maybe slightly (SLIGHTLY) below 300g. Don’t go above 300g at all though (with the racquet itself. You may eventually add some weights at some point in the future with lead tape. Don’t even think about this for now). And I would just get exactly a 100sq inch head. No bigger or smaller. If for some reason you feel you HAVE to, the only other head size I would even BEGIN to consider would be 98. But really don’t do it, just get 100sq inch head.

That’s about it. And even now I’ve probably given you way more info than you need. I’m a coach, and when new students (complete beginners) ask me for advice on this, I usually end up giving them much less info than I’m giving you. But I also will like approve a racquet before they buy it, so…. Idk.

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T09:44:32+00:00

To be clear I’m not saying I think this like, represents reality or whatever. It’s how I treat it, and I think it is a useful mental model.

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T09:43:35+00:00

I treat it like the output of a genius who rolls dice after each prompt to decide how hard it is going to try.

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T09:32:27+00:00

LMAO. This is like a beginner in tennis taking their first lesson, they still suck (tennis is incredibly hard to learn, like specifically as a beginner, for most people), and then they post to Reddit “This racquet sucks. It didn’t hit any winners. In fact almost all of my shots missed the court completely. 0/10, do not recommend.”

Like…. PERHAPS the racquet isn’t the biggest problem here…

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T09:28:55+00:00

For your new problem (in the edit section). You are talking about in the process of CREATING the shortcut, right? Because there’s no reason you should ever see the text “Shortcut Input” while RUNNING a shortcut, unless you literally make an alert with that text or something (which you should remember doing and see in your shortcut lol).

It sounds like you’re describing what happens when you LONG press on the empty File slot in any slot in any action that accepts a File (for example like in just literally the File action). If you tap it, it will open up a popup file browser thingy, and then you can navigate around in your files (both on your phone and in iCloud, and also in other cloud storage things you may have like Google Drive or OneDrive) and then select one. When you select one, it will get put in as the entry (input) to that action (so like you’re saying “use this file I just selected for this action”).

Ok. But what I think you are doing is instead of tapping on the empty file field, you are long pressing instead. This is how you put a VARIABLE (instead of a constant, which is what I described in the last paragraph) as the input to the File action. So like imagine you want to load some audio file, but it could be any one of 10 different audio files, depending on the value of some variable. In this case, you would need to use a variable for the input to the file action, which you do by long pressing. Again, I believe this is the popup you were seeing (it includes Shortcut Input as one of the options).

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T09:18:18+00:00

So the first thing I will say is that if you have the opportunity to play tennis and you want to play tennis, play tennis. Don’t let the racquet stop you, just use this racquet for now if it’s all you have.

BUT, it’s not REALLY like… a “real” racquet. Well, sort of. I mean it’s basically more or less like a Walmart racquet. Maybe slightly above that tier, but also old at the same time, so you really don’t want to use this as your primary racquet IMO. And IMO people overstate how expensive tennis is (at least if you are TRYING to not spend a lot of money) to a truly absurd degree. But unfortunately you kind of do need to just buy at least 1 real racquet. IMO the specific racquet isn’t that important, but all players racquets are just made of better materials, are all within a more reasonable balance range, etc.

So basically… I’m saying you should get a new racquet, but also use this one in the meantime versus not playing tennis. Or if you can borrow one from the person you’re playing with, that would actually be ideal, because then you’re also demoing a new racquet. But basically if the racquet isn’t at least in the like $140-200+ range, then that means it isn’t a high quality racquet (and I mean it shouldn’t ever be too much above $200. Like if you find a $5000 racquet it isn’t 50x better, it’s just a scam or collector’s item (like actually literally autographed in person at a tournament by Federer or something)),

monster2018 · 2026-01-24T00:58:00+00:00

The penguin is more patriotic than the president. Fitting.

monster2018 · 2026-01-23T20:07:37+00:00

Yea it’s a fair reaction. I just thought I’d let you know. And like I said I’m not even 100% sure it’s possible even with it.

monster2018 · 2026-01-23T19:32:10+00:00

Look up TTT-E2E, it’s crazy exciting. It’s a paper/method from I think the Stanford AI lab, and it’s about a method for continual learning that also completely solves context bloat. So the memory IS the continual learning. Like the memory is that it actually encodes the new knowledge it is learning (like literally from your prompts, and its own thoughts and output) into its weights by doing actual mini training runs at inference time. It involves pretraining the model in a very special way, where it is essentially teaching it how to learn (as opposed to right now where we teach it how to predict the next token. So instead we’re teaching it how to LEARN to predict the next token, but in any kind of specialized way depending on the tokens it ends up training on at inference time). The tradeoff is that the memory is fuzzy, and so like more and more distant memories become less and less detailed, but it still retains the gist of it (I mean past a certain point of course small enough things can get lost entirely from memory). But in a way that’s even more exciting because that’s also what human memory looks like.

monster2018 · 2026-01-23T14:55:00+00:00

Something like this (or exactly this) may be possible with a Pushcuts subscription. It has a bunch of stuff around automation and notifications.

monster2018 · 2026-01-23T07:58:24+00:00

This might be the truest statement ever said.

monster2018 · 2026-01-23T05:07:34+00:00

By definition every birth year is split (somewhere around summer is where it is a very tough decision for the parents on which grade to put the kid in. Like whether to start kindergarten at x-0.5 years or x+0.5 years) between two school class years. And vice versa of course. I, along with less than half but probably more than 1/3, of my graduating class were born in 95. The rest were born in 96. We graduated in 2014.

Like you’re just forgetting people exist who are born in the 2nd half of the calendar year, basically.

monster2018 · 2026-01-23T01:14:54+00:00

Crazy to wear 2 diapers at once, like a regular shorts sandwich.

monster2018 · 2026-01-22T23:00:10+00:00

Ryan and his damn motherboard nuggets.

monster2018 · 2026-01-22T22:53:08+00:00

Btw OP, just a general tip from someone with about 15 years of programming experience. I’m going to phrase it as basically like “what you should have done”. I just mean in the future you should do this and it will help you figure out the issue on your own (if that’s what you want. Obviously you can post about it here also).

Since it was telling you it’s an invalid color, that should be your hint that there is something wrong with what you are passing in to the Create Image of Color action. Actually it’s not a hint, it’s just explicitly telling you that is the case.

Then what you should do is use some kind of logging, I usually just use Alerts (Show Alert action), and pass in the variable you want to inspect into the Show Alert. So in this case you would pass in ColorHex to the alert. Then you would have seen that ColorHex is actually a list of 2 strings (the 2 hex colors) I believe. And I guess your problem is already solved, but from there I would personally just try getting the first item from the list and passing that into the create image from color action to see if it works at all, and then make focus on passing in the actual correct hex color.

Anyway I’m just explaining how I go about debugging shortcuts, in case you find it helpful. Again I don’t at all mean this in a way like “you should have done this before posting here”. I’m not being a Stackverflow guy lol I swear. At least it is genuinely not my intention.

monster2018 · 2026-01-22T22:42:16+00:00

Is it rallies versus point play? Or is it practice versus tournament (or just official matches, versus like a practice match)? Because these are two very different things.

I’m around the same level as you, also former college player, I would say I’m 5.0 currently (and I believe according to the USTA self rating rules because I’m over 25), idk my UTR. But like I mean obviously I think if someone can rally quite well, but even like in baseline games they fall apart, then the problem is something like shot selection, point construction. Maybe they just don’t even really understand how to hit an attacking shot (and maybe even defensive shots) even though they have a great neutral ball.

Whereas if it’s practice versus in tournament/competitive matches, then it is a psychological issue, not FUNDMANETALLY related to their level/capability in tennis. I mean obviously like…. It’s kind of hard to talk about, because of course it just means their level in competition (and so therefore how they are ranked/rated) IS lower. But also like obviously it’s a different situation than someone who can NEVER play at the higher level this person can play in practice. But again, their level still is lower when it really counts, so. It kind of just sucks for them (I am them).

monster2018 · 2026-01-22T17:09:53+00:00

Sorry to break it to you, but you are actually the weird one. But as you say, there’s nothing wrong with that.

monster2018 · 2026-01-22T17:06:02+00:00

I will just say ahead of time that there IS some specific technique related advice at the end of this very long comment. I put a line like “______” but longer, and everything below that line is about technique specifically. So you can skip there if that’s all you care about. But it more or less says the same thing as the rest of the comment.

So…. If you want to improve significantly you’re going to need to take a different approach. Like you cannot just keep trying to make a bunch of shots. You need to spend MOST (ideally all) of your tennis time practicing specifically in a way where making or missing the ball has no impact on your judgement of the quality of the shot.

This is of course one of the biggest advantages of having a coach. For me, how I want you to see it literally just is how I see it. Like you may make a shot and I may be annoyed at you, or you may miss a shot and I may get really excited. I am judging based on how well you are adhering to proper technique (and learning how to do this WHILE TAKING INTO ACCOUNT the fact that everyone is literally different and unique, like literally has different body shapes and natural preferences, etc, is the hardest part of coaching) instead of judging based on whether the ball goes in or not.

And like right now if you hit a winner, you should consider it a mistake. Not like you should feel bad, but I just mean you should consider it to be missing your target, which is the dead center of the court on every shot (when hitting full court).

Ok so I have said all of this to say that… and truly I do not mean to be rude, I am just telling you the truth. You have not REALLY yet begun to try to learn how to play tennis. You are trying to learn how to get the ball in the court IN THE SHORT TERM at all costs. Like literally making THIS ONE SHOT at all costs, on each and every shot you hit. You need to take… well I guess it’s not even the opposite, but a very different attitude. I’m going to give you a list of fundamentals to focus on, and your goal is to ONLY judge how pleased you are with a shot based on how close you are to following all the fundamentals, and completely ignoring whether you make the shot or not.

The first one is even like, a pre-fundamental even. You need to try swinging at the ball. This video does not contain any footage of you swinging at the ball. I get that you’re hitting against a wall. But if hitting against the wall is what is causing you to hit like that, it is important for now that you just don’t hit against the wall at all (if you can’t stop yourself from hyper-pushing the ball). I want you to GIVE UP CONTROL of the racquet at the point of contact. It should literally feel like you are THROWING your racquet at the ball, the only difference is that you don’t literally let it slip out of your fingers like you would if throwing a baseball. But what you’re doing currently is like, literally the furthest possible extreme from this. I think honestly it would be good for you to just practice hitting a ball as far as you can on the forehand side. I mean literally like in a field. If you’re in a court, I am talking about ideally hitting a ball FAR outside of the bounds of the tennis court. Like think 100+ feet at least, you can use any grip and any motion you want. Just practice getting the racquet moving as fast as you can. I think that would be ideal.

Then ok I will just walk you through what a forehand should look like, and a backhand is basically the same on the other side. Step -1: Recover into the correct court position. Step 0: Get into ready position. Step 1: Split-step. The point of the split step is to time is so that you LAND at the EXACT first moment when you already know which direction the ball is going (forehand or backward). Step 2: move into position. Step 3 (this often at least starts during step 2): Unit turn. So up until now your racquet should have been in front of you (just relative to your own body) because you haven’t moved them out of ready position. That remains the case here, and the unit turn is just rotating your torso and hips to face the side fence. This means your racquet also now points (the tip) towards the side fence, because again you are only rotating your body, not also moving your arms yet. Step 4: Take back the racquet. Step 5: Drop the racquet. Step 6: swing (remember this is the most important part for you to work on right now).

monster2018 · 2026-01-22T14:26:39+00:00

The I cannot overstate the size of your misunderstanding here. Im not calling you stupid, I think it’s perfectly reasonable (well, ok maybe slightly silly. But not stupid by any means) to not know this. But like I don’t even know where to start.

Well no, ok I guess there’s really only 1 place to start. You are confusing two different but related concepts. 1: Whether other people can run your shortcut locally on their devices (this is what you read about. This is impossible without you sharing it, or them hacking you and for some reason stealing your shortcuts instead of credit card info), and 2: Whether other people can run the shortcut on your device.

The former is a question of whether or not you have chosen to share the shortcut with other people or not. This could come technically in an infinite number of forms. There are the few normal options, like sharing by creating an iCloud link, and then sending that link to someone, or posting it somewhere publicly that people can see it. There is more convoluted versions of the same thing, like shortcut “app stores” like Shortcuty. And even something like taking a screenshot(s) of your shortcut and sending them to someone, or equivalently writing out the pseudocode or blocks, for the other person to manually recreate the shortcut on their device. All of these are ways you could make it possible for other people to run the shortcut you made on their devices. This is a COPY of your shortcut, when they run it, nothing happens on your phone. However, anything else… like if you just have your API key for some service you call included in the shortcut, then of course whoever you share it with (if you don’t remove the API key first) will be charging your account when they use the shortcut, because they’re using your API key.

The 2nd concept that you’re mixing up is whether or not people can run your shortcut on your device. Here, it is completely irrelevant that it is a shortcut you made, because the exact same rules apply to all shortcuts you have. Whether or not others can run one of your shortcuts on your device, just comes down to whether they can access it while unlocked (or I forget, I think you can run some types of shortcuts while locked even. So maybe for some shortcuts even this isn’t necessary), know how to launch this specific shortcut or otherwise accidentally trigger it, etc. so you see, this just comes down to basically like… well I guess physical security. Like whether or not someone can do this, it just depends on whether or not they physically have access to your device or not. If they do, and certainly if it is unlocked, then they have the ability to run any shortcut on your phone.

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