Strongly agree with this. I’ve been using Apple’s “mood” log for about two years now, and it is extremely helpful for me to have a concrete view of the history of my general affect.
“This entire month I’ve been feeling good, I want to pinpoint why,” or “it’s clear since stressor X entered my life, my affect is lower; how can I resolve this?”
These long term trends are harder for me to track without data. It might be easy for others, but not me!
My girlfriend migrated to Claude from Gemini and she's not techie at all. She says she likes the answers Claude gives a lot more in general because Gemini is too dramatic. Claude is definitely beyond the tech sphere.
Over the last few years I’ve rotated between OpenAI and Anthropic models on about a 4-5 month cycle. I just started my Anthropic cycle because of my annoyance with the GPT-5.2 verbosity
In four months when opus is annoying me and I forget my grievances with OpenAI’s models and switch back, I’ll report back lol.
My french horn teacher was a new-age "recovering Catholic"[1] and a paid singer for a couple Protestant churches. A job is a job. Personally, I am an atheist but I find a lot of devotional music to be well written and fun to sing, and I enjoy singing it in choir, even if I don't literally believe the words I'm singing.
In any event, you can play organ with a community choir, especially if you can also play piano. We pay our accompanists.
Many organists are not religious but appreciate the creativity and beauty of the music, buildings, and the mad range of incredibly different instruments that are all collectively called organs. Heck, in England, I've often wondered how really religious some of the clergy are...
An acquaintance made some money as cantor to a synagogue around here. He was not Jewish, but I gather that the combination of singing and getting paid felt just fine.
Honestly, even better. It's the wet snow that's especially heavy (and risky for your back), so not having to lift it is invaluable. Only when the snow is considerably taller than the scoop does it begun to show its weaknesses.
What were the main attributes that led to varying states of whelmed?
One reason I love text discourse is that it gives me time to thoughtfully respond. My wife is super witty and can be instantly funny and social when she wants. It takes me more time to match that sociable wit.
My hunch is that wit-rate would be a contributing whelm factor.
Some of them were far more manic in the flesh. Email and Usenet hid aspects of what we'd now call spectrum behaviour or ADHD. That was the over whelm.
Otherwise, I'd say it was that people can be less rounded and interesting than you like in an amicable and two way relationship. It's easy to mistake a dialogue to specific intent online for some kind of connection when it really isn't. If they have 50,000 followers (hate that word) and you mistake being 50,001 for some stronger binding, prepare to be disappointed.
I will say that I've also experienced really good, relatable responsive engagement with my heroes and heroines, it's not uniform. It helps if you can meet them in a room of common purpose, not one solely designed for them to showcase in. Then, they're just ordinary people like you, mostly. If you're careful.
Wit: I have "esprit d'escalier" and so only think of the Bon mot on the way out the door.
“This entire month I’ve been feeling good, I want to pinpoint why,” or “it’s clear since stressor X entered my life, my affect is lower; how can I resolve this?”
These long term trends are harder for me to track without data. It might be easy for others, but not me!
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