#oneaday Day 537: Old dogs

Since I've exhausted both Death in Paradise and its spin-off series Beyond Paradise for the moment, I was looking for a new "detective" show to watch. I considered the other Death in Paradise spinoff, Return to Paradise, but thought I fancied something a bit different. And BBC iPlayer was certainly keen to provide suggestions.

I settled on a show called New Tricks, which I hadn't heard of before, but which apparently first aired all the way back in 2003, and concluded its complete run in 2015. I've watched two episodes so far, and while it's a very different sort of show to Death in Paradise and Return to Paradise, I've enjoyed what I've seen so far.

New Tricks (at least initially) follows the semi-disgraced Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman) of the Metropolitan Police who, after a botched hostage rescue in which she shot a dog and the person she was supposed to be rescuing flung himself out of a window, paralysing himself when he landed on a car several storeys below, has been placed in charge of the fictional "Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad", or UCOS. This is a branch of the Met specifically tasked with re-investigating unsolved "cold cases", with the officer in charge, initially Pullman, charged with wrangling a small group of retired former officers in the hope of their insights being able to put the various cases to bed once and for all.

Conceptually, it's a tad silly, particularly since the initial lineup of old men all initially appear to be somewhat comedic caricatures. There's Brian Lane (Alun Armstrong), who struggles with severe mental health issues and an obsession over the case that ended his career on the force; there's Jack Halford (James Bolam), who talks to his dead wife when no-one else is around, but is otherwise the most well-grounded of the bunch; and there's Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman, the only constant member of the cast throughout the entire run of the show), who is a bit of a geezer and a "naughty boy", in his words, with a string of failed marriages behind him and a somewhat unorthodox approach to following the rules. The characters are all introduced as each having their own sort of "thing" that defines them, but just the initial two episodes shows that there's clearly potential for some interesting character work going on.

What I've found quite fun about New Tricks so far is that it blends quite a few disparate elements and comes out feeling quite coherent. There's the obvious conflict between Pullman being a modern police officer (by 2003 standards, anyway) — and a woman, at that — and these retired former officers, all of whom are set in their ways to varying degrees. And then there's the friction between the private lives of all the characters and their professional responsibilities. The show is, on the whole, somewhat on the "gritty" side, with the struggles the various characters encounter all being somewhat realistic and relatable rather than the easily resolved fluff or material for comic relief that the Paradise series tended to favour, but there's also plenty of comedy inherent in the whole situation — particularly when Pullman shows herself to be the sort of woman who takes absolutely no shit from anyone.

The fact that the show premiered in 2003 with a 90-minute pilot before going into full production in 2004 is an interesting consideration, too. In some respects, the way the show is presented makes it clear it's from a different time — and while I try not to think of 2004 as being too much "of a different time" to right now, the fact is, it was over 20 years ago — and it's quite pleasant to return to that world. I'm not talking thematically or in terms of societal norms displayed in the show, obviously, but rather literally the way it is presented. It has a theme song, for Heaven's sake, and one sung by one of the cast members (Waterman), at that! What was the last show you watched that had a full-on theme song — and, more to the point, one that had been specifically composed to include the show's title as part of its lyrics?

Anyway, that's about all I want to say about it for the moment. I'm looking forward to getting to know the series a bit better. I'd actually never heard of it before, somehow, but I guess if it ran for twelve seasons, it must have had something to it, no?

Or, to put it another way: it's all right. It's okay!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 533: Enshittified parking

The wife and I made the silly error of deciding to go into town today. We thought we'd go get a Currywurst from the German market, plus she wanted to enquire at a music shop about some various bits and pieces.

We were having second thoughts when we got up, because it was dark, miserable and raining outside, but we thought "ah, no, we should go out, it'll do us good to get out of the house".

Reader, it was not good. Apart from the Currywurst, that was good. Although £9 for it was absolute daylight robbery, but I guess that is Just What Things Cost Now. And my wife did at least get the information she wanted from the music shop.

The rest of the trip was a miserable, rain-soaked experience, but probably the most irritating thing about the whole experience was what they've done to WestQuay parking. Instead of taking the tried-and-true approach of giving you a ticket, then you popping said ticket into a machine and paying for how long you spent in the car park, they have decided to make it all "technological", now requiring you to have your number plate scanned by ANPR when you enter, then before you leave, you have to remember to scan a QR code from a poster and pay on a website. Because that is somehow much better.

I will grant you that during busy periods, it could be frustrating to have to queue up for a ticket machine when you wanted to leave. It was frustrating when the ticket machine broke, too, or it ate your ticket, or any other shenanigans that might have occurred. But that's why they had the little man on the end of the "help" button to help you out.

The main issue with the "pay by phone" option they have chosen to go with is that there is no fucking phone signal inside the car park. Nor is there any Wi-Fi. So if you forget to scan one of the posters that is outside on the way back to the car park — or, indeed, if you took a route back to the car park that did not pass by one of these posters — it's an incredible pain in the arse to do something as simple as paying for parking, something which we have all been begrudgingly doing for many years at this point.

Of course, the whole thing has almost certainly been done in the name of collecting data on people who use the car park — they take your number plate when you enter and your name when you pay, so that's fun. They will probably try and spin this as somehow being "more convenient" when in fact it's several orders of magnitude more annoying than the old way of doing things.

But hey. We've made everything else worse with technology. Why should parking be left out of the party?

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#oneaday Day 532: Knackered

I'm absolutely exhausted, and I'm not entirely sure why. I guess this week has been a bit of a busy one with a trip to the office, and just before said trip I was ill, so I think I'm probably still feeling the lingering (after)effects of being ill. Or possibly just still being ill. Either way, it's 8pm and I just want to go to bed, so as soon as we've had some dinner, that's what I'm going to do.

Everything just feels so tiring these days — mentally, more than anything. I am beyond tired of the revolting end-stage capitalism hellscape we live in right now, and long for the AI bubble in particular to pop, if only so people can stop posting screenshots of Google's AI summaries and think that doing this, in any way, proves any sort of point. That and it would be super-cool if all the software everyone uses goes back to being functional and useful rather than having fucking chatbots everywhere.

It's frustrating. I was listening to Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron talking about the whole "enshittification" thing earlier, and their conclusion is that as individual consumers, there unfortunately isn't a whole lot that we can do to stand up to this nonsense, because it's all happening at a corporate or even governmental level so far beyond the scale of one individual, it's impossible to do anything about. They do, however, note that that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do; they cite the example of attending Town Hall meetings and voicing your concerns about financially and environmentally ruinous data centres being constructed. Even so, though, this seems largely like an American thing — I don't even know if "Town Hall meetings" are a thing here — and, again, it's hard not to feel like a little ant about to be crushed by corporate authoritarianism.

I'd ignore all this shit completely if I could, but it's everywhere — and particularly getting its tendrils into things I actually care about, such as the creative sectors and particularly video games. The new Call of Duty is absolutely riddled with AI art, for example; Ubisoft's latest Anno game has "placeholder" AI art loading screens that definitely aren't just being called placeholders because they got caught; and it seems like every day, a new corporation decides that yes, the absolute best thing to do, despite the general public reacting universally negatively to it every time it happens, is to pivot to an "AI-first" approach, inevitably laying off swathes of the workforce in the process.

I thank my lucky stars I have a stable (I hope) job in the middle of all this, and that AI doesn't interfere with my job any more than having to ignore annoying sparkly buttons in social media management tools and occasionally telling people off for getting ChatGPT to "write" minor things when I'm right here and can do that for them in a matter of seconds without burning a fucking lake down.

God. The "future" sucks. It's a cliché to say at this point, but we really have taken the exact opposite lessons from "cyberpunk" and futuristic dystopia literature than were intended by their authors. We have all the negative aspects of a corporate-dominated end-stage capitalism hellscape, and none of the cool stuff like consumer-grade bionic arms and sex robots. (Well, okay. They're almost certainly working on the sex robot thing, though if it ends up being LLM-powered I'm not sure anyone is going to want to fuck ChatGPT.)

Is it any surprise I'm knackered when just existing through all this nonsense is draining the life force and will to live out of all of us? Probably not. So I'm going to enjoy my KFC and then go to bed.

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#oneaday Day 529: A different hotel

It's time for my monthly visit to the office, though this time things have been a little bit different for various reasons — not least of which is the fact that I'm staying in an unfamiliar hotel, as my usual place was full. This new place seems nice, if charmingly dated, though it is twice the price of my usual place. It's all getting expensed though, so no problem.

I actually have tomorrow off, which will be nice, as it's Andie's birthday and I won't have to brave the M25 in the middle of rush hour.

Today I elected to listen to some "criminal records" on the journey, because I just felt like it for some reason. My cheese of choice was Louise (Redknapp, nee Nurding), a fairly disposable pop singer that I primarily bought two albums for because I fancied her. Also I ended up quite enjoying them both, particularly the second, Woman In Me.

I was interested to discover that Louise had done some more albums after the two I was familiar with — including one from around 2000, and another that is quite recent. I actually really like what I've heard of the 2000 album, Elbow Beach, so far, but I haven't yet listened to the latest. I think that will be the accompaniment to my drive home tomorrow.

I've always had a soft spot for cheesy, disposable pop music, particularly from the mid to late '90s, because it's tuneful, it's catchy, it's uncomplicated and it plays well as background music you don't have to concentrate on too hard. As a teen, I did the majority of my music listening while doing homework in my bedroom, so it's always been a good accompaniment for doing anything that might be a bit tedious or repetitive — hence why I'm enjoying it so much as a soundtrack for driving.

It's also nice to be of an age where you don't have to make any apologies for what you listen to. I'm sure some of you are silently judging me for having owned two Louise albums in the past (my CD collection went to Music Magpie a long time ago though) but I don't care. Silly fluff it may be, but there's a place for silly fluff, particularly in a world that feels increasingly devoid of joy in the current moment.

Anyway, I'm typing this on my phone and getting annoyed at autocorrect, so I'm going to leave that there. I am looking forward to a nice sleep in this comfy bed, and then a leisurely drive back with some cheesy pop blaring tomorrow.

Maybe they'll have released the Epstein files by tomorrow!

#oneaday Day 528: Autumn plague

Andie and I were ill all over the weekend. Nothing serious — and thankfully not COVID, which we were both concerned it might have been — but the kind of cold that is just enough to be moderately debilitating and make you want to stay in bed for a good 75% of the day.

I think we're both over the worst, but we've both been left exceedingly exhausted, as neither of us have slept very well for the past two or three nights. Hopefully tonight will allow me to get a decent rest, as tomorrow I have to do a long drive for the monthly trip into the office — though it should (should!) be moderately less stressful as I'm driving down in the daytime in order to attend in the afternoon, and then I have the following day off work completely.

With all that in mind, a proportion of today has been spent napping, and I suspect an early night will follow. I genuinely couldn't keep my eyes open by the end of the morning's work, and so my lunch break was spent not eating and watching some TV, but just napping. It was nice.

A middle-of-the-day nap is not something I really started doing until a few years ago, and I'm aware that it can mess up your sleep schedule and all that business. But sometimes it's just nice to allow yourself that moment of peace and quiet, to shut down for a bit and attempt to replenish your depleted energy reserves. It doesn't always work, of course — sometimes waking up after a nice nap leaves you just wanting to nap a bit more — but at others, it can be just what you need to refresh yourself a bit. A power nap, or whatever.

For some reason, I find it much easier to fall asleep for a nap in the daytime than I do at night-time. Part of this is the mind's tendency to ruminate on things last thing at night, but I'm not exactly immune to that in the daytime, either. And yet still I find it much easier to nod off in the middle of the day than at night-time.

Perhaps part of this is down to the fact that from university onwards, I was a bit of a night owl. I have particularly fond memories of being up late one evening pootling about on the Internet, receiving a message from a friend of mine who said that they were going to the beach, and heading off for a thoroughly pleasant evening of night-time beach foolishness with said friend and some other mutual acquaintances.

There was also the period around 2010 or so where I was Going Through A Difficult Time, shall we say, and as part of that process I completely ruined my body clock to such a degree that I was going to bed at 5AM and not waking up until 12 hours later. Not my proudest moment, but also I think the support I was receiving at that time is what helped me get through that particularly difficult period, as incompatible as it may have temporarily made me with a "normal" existence.

Maybe I just like sleeping. I do like sleeping. Regardless, I'm going to sleep relatively early this evening in the hope that I feel a bit more human tomorrow, because right now I feel like a sentient pool of sludge.

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#oneaday Day 527: Dangerous toys

Do kids play with toys any more, or are they just plonked in front of a tablet or smartphone as soon as possible, and left to it? I guess in many ways this is the same question as people were probably asking twenty or more years ago, only with "tablet or smartphone" replaced by "TV or computer".

I occasionally think back and have fond memories of playing with toys as a kid. I was fortunate enough to have parents who would buy me cool things for birthdays and Christmas, but who were disciplined enough to not cave in to my every demand at other times, thereby helping me to understand the concepts of Enjoying What You Have and Delayed Gratification. On top of that, I have a brother ten years my senior, which meant that I had a bunch of cool hand-me-downs that I was able to enjoy. They may not have been the latest and greatest, but I still enjoyed playing with them, regardless.

I had all sorts of different things. I've written about Manta Force before, and that was definitely a favourite. I was also very fond of Scalextric and the Hornby train set we had — though both of those were something of a "luxury" option that only got taken out on particularly special occasions and/or when we could convince my Dad to go up into the loft.

There were smaller bits and pieces I have fond memories of, too. We had a big brown plastic box full of Lego, for example, and I used to enjoy fitting together the big "road" pieces from some sort of city set, and attempting to build buildings and cars to go into these scenes. Among this Lego was a beautifully constructed house that (I assume) my brother had built at some point in the dim and distant past, and I could never quite bring myself to take it to pieces — I never quite managed to make something quite as elaborate as that myself, but I enjoyed the attempt, and the tactile nature of just putting the pieces together.

One set of toys that stick in my mind oddly vividly is a collection of sci-fi themed-toys from a firm called Britains. These were distinctly 1950s "retro" in style, but I always thought they were pretty cool as they were modular — in other words, they came apart, and you could slot them together in different ways to make your own custom spaceships and vehicles.

They didn't really do anything by themselves, but for child me, they were a powerful spark for the imagination. Much like I did with Manta Force, I would imagine myself being among the little toy soldiers and their vehicles, playing out a story in my mind, not even thinking about the possibility of getting lead poisoning from these solid-metal models.

I sort of miss that, and I do often find myself wondering if today's kids have any concept of what playing in that way feels like. I, likewise, find myself wondering quite how many adults of my age take a bit of time now and again to disappear into an imaginary world, helped along by a few potentially toxic props. Because, after all, isn't that all people are really doing with a train set or Scalextric track?

Note to my wife: don't worry, I'm not about to start collecting 1980s toys. I absolutely do not have the room to do that. But I am thinking about maybe getting the old Scalextric out again for an evening or two…

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#oneaday Day 522: Bravo Eurogamer

Just recently, Eurogamer published a review of Arc Raiders, the latest multiplayer craze, and ruffled more than a few feathers when the reviewer, Rick Lane, dinged the game with a 2/5 star rating, primarily due to the game's apparent use of generative AI to create many of its voice lines. The developer, Embark Studios, has form in this area, with its previous title, The Finals, also featuring AI-generated voice lines.

The reviewer's justification for giving the game such a low score was not simply "AI bad" — it was because, from an artistic perspective, getting a soulless robot to voice the human characters in your game that is about robots who have taken over the world and forced humanity underground feels just a little too incongruous to be able to pass without comment.

And I agree. I also firmly, strongly and resolutely believe that the use of generative AI in video game development is an obnoxious, odious, wasteful, exploitative and ethically reprehensible practice — and I have a firm policy that I will absolutely not engage with a game that appears to have been tainted with generative AI garbage. It's why I didn't play The Alters, it's why I haven't played the latest Everybody's Golf, and it's why I won't touch Arc Raiders. (In the latter case, it's also because I suspect I won't like Arc Raiders, but that's beside the point right now.)

I've been disappointed at quite how many people I've seen handwaving away this aspect of Arc Raiders in particular. Indeed, the Eurogamer review has a comments section that is at least as much of a trash fire as you would expect, because Video Game Good, and you're not allowed to take a firm ethical stance about something in a review because then the Gamers™, the good little consumer piggies that they are, will get mad that you said their Favourite Forever Game This Week was perhaps not to your taste for a perfectly valid reason.

The unfortunate thing with Arc Raiders is that its use of AI and machine learning (which are different things) is a bit shrouded in uncertainty right now. Some folks say that its generated voice lines are fine because it's actually just a fancy text-to-speech system; some folks are taking this argument further in order to weaponise disabled people and accessibility features; some are saying that it's fine because the actors the voices were trained on were aware of what they were signing up for.

But regardless of whether or not Arc Raiders' voices were generated by supposedly consenting voice actors, or if they were the product of the more environmentally disastrous end of generative AI, the entire thing rubs me the wrong way. The really stupid thing is that the generated voices in Arc Raiders are for things that voice actors could have very reasonably just recorded — things like vendors, NPCs and suchlike — and Embark's justification for using generated voices is that it's "quicker". On top of that, the results are markedly, obviously inferior to using an actual voice actor recording the complete lines, so one has to question if cutting corners in this way is really worth it.

Embark's not a small, frugal indie company, either. They have the resources to be able to afford voice actors to do a proper job. They're just refusing to. And regardless of the tech that produces the not-very-good end result, it sets a poor precedent to do that.

The arguments in favour of generated voices aren't very convincing, either. The most common one that comes up is that "one day we'll have games where every NPC conversation will be AI-generated, and you'll be able to talk to them about anything!" And to that I say: I absolutely do not want that.

When I'm playing a game that has characters in it, a narrative, a setting, all that stuff — I want to experience the vision of the creators. I want to enjoy something that someone else has created, with a clear vision and purpose behind it. I want to be able to reflect on the way a writer composed a piece of dialogue; how a character's mannerisms tell us more about them; how the tone of the whole piece gives a feeling of coherence to the game as a complete creative work.

If you're AI-generating your dialogue, you get none of that. You get a hodgepodge, incoherent mess that is easily exploitable — and, indeed, we've already seen that numerous times already, whether it's Darth Vader saying fuck or a character in the latest HoyoVerse game apparently having no idea who they are, what their background is, what their personality is or what is around them.

I refuse to accept the "genie is out of the bottle" argument. We've been making video games for 50+ years at this point, and the reason the medium has continued to endure is because of human creativity. We have seen incredible advancements in storytelling, mechanics and the overall craft of making all manner of different games over the years — and the AI glazers seem to want nothing more than to just throw all that experience away in favour of some "vibe coded" garbage with AI-generated dialogue and synthesised speech.

Couple that with the fact that AI is insanely wasteful, growing increasingly likely to make the worldwide economy crash, disastrous for the environment and taking valuable resources away from doing things that might actually make life better for people who really need it to be better? Nah. Don't need it. Don't want it. And will not support anything made with it, no matter how much you argue "no no no, but this is a good use of it, actually."

I say bravo to Rick Lane of Eurogamer for having the balls to stand up and say "no" to this garbage with a thoughtful and well-considered critique. If only we could see a bit more of that kind of thing, and less of this sort of rubbish.

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#oneaday Day 521: Everyone got really old

It's almost certainly a turning point in your life when people in the public eye that you've always thought of as being a similar age to you, perhaps a few years your senior, start to look old. Or perhaps it should be more accurate to say, start being cast in the role of older characters.

It's happened to me twice in the last week, and both instances occurred while I was spending my lunchtime watching Beyond Paradise. For the unfamiliar, this is the Kris Marshall-fronted follow-up to Death in Paradise, where his Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman character returns to the UK with his fiancée and begins a new life in the fictional Devon town of Shipton Abbott (in reality a Cornish fishing village named Looe). It's a fun show, but the specifics are beside the point for today.

Much like Death in Paradise, Beyond Paradise is a show where you will often see relatively famous faces putting in a guest appearance for an episode. I'm not talking about tedious celebrities who are famous for the sake of being famous (or, God forbid, "influencers") — I'm talking well-known, well-established actors who you will have almost certainly seen in something from the last 20-30 years.

In two episodes I've watched this week, I was mildly dismayed to see how much Mark Heap (who I will always think of as Brian from Spaced) and Caroline Quentin (whom I suspect most people will always think of as either Dorothy from Men Behaving Badly or Maddie from Jonathan Creek) have apparently aged. I still think of both of them in terms of their most famous roles, which are kind of timeless in their own sort of way. And so, despite seeing them in the credits of the show, I had to double-check that the characters I thought they were playing were, in fact, the actors I thought they were.

It was Mark Heap's episode first. He was playing an affluent middle-aged widower who lived in an old house with a lot of history, and he was haunted by visions of his departed wife — helped along by a criminal element, of course. When I first saw him, I thought "I vaguely recognise that person, who is it…? Is it Mark Heap? No, it can't be, he looks too old…" — and then the credits rolled, and I realised that it was, in fact, Mark Heap. It became a bit more obvious once the episode proper started and he got a few more lines, as he still has his very characteristic delivery and mannerisms.

Caroline Quentin was almost unrecognisable when I saw her playing a middle-aged farmer matriarch. She had completely obscured what I think of as her particular characteristic mannerisms, so it took me a lot longer to clock it was her than I did for Mark Heap. But again, she seems to be doing a great job.

I know it sounds harsh to say that people "look old", but it's not really about the individuals themselves. Both Mark Heap and Caroline Quentin are excellent actors, and it's good that they are clearly still getting work and settling into roles that suit them well as their career continues. I can imagine the acting business becomes considerably more challenging once you hit a certain age, so I have all the respect in the world for people I was watching when I was in my teens still getting acting jobs to this day.

No, what it's really about is the growing sense of consciousness that time is passing, that you can't go back, and that things continue to change around you as you continue on life's journey. Some of those changes are for the best — even if they might not seem like it at the time — while others can be painful and lead to regrets. And seeing things like actors you recognise looking visibly much older than they were the last time you really noticed them? It brings all that into focus, and inevitably makes you wonder if you've done the right things, if there are still things you "need" to do, and quite how much time you might have left in which to do all of them.

It's a little maudlin, I know, but I suspect it's something that everyone, once they reach a certain age, has to start coming to terms with. Nothing stays the same for ever; nothing lasts forever. You just have to enjoy everything you love — people, places and things — while they are here with you in the moment, and to continue enjoying the memories you have of those things for as long as you are able.

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#oneaday Day 513: Unnecessary replacements for things we already had a perfectly good name for

There's probably a more succinct way of putting that title, but in the interests of what I'm about to talk about, I thought I'd be perfectly clear. Today I would like to talk about the phenomenon, particularly in the "business" sphere, of completely unnecessary, arbitrary replacements for concepts and things we already had a perfectly fine, functional and clear name for.

My biggest bugbear in this regard is holiday. Time off work. Between these two terms, they cover pretty much everything anyone needs to know about you taking some time away from your job. "Holiday" tends to imply that you're going somewhere, while "time off" just suggests that you're not going to be working for a few days, for reasons that are, frankly, nobody's business but your own.

Both terms are, to me, interchangeable — I will use "holiday" for a single day off when all I want to do is bum around the house in my pants, and "time off" for a week away at Center Parcs. It doesn't matter. Both effectively mean the same thing, both are well-established words that we learn the meaning of at an early age, and there is no need for any other terminology to replace them.

So please explain to me why so many people insist on saying "Annual Leave" (or, worse, "AL"). Not only is this annoying business-speak, but it also feels inaccurate and dishonest. Because, to me, when you say something is "annual", you're suggesting it happens at the same time every year. So, instinctively, whenever someone says they're going on "annual leave", it suggests to me that they are going to do so at the exact same time every year. Which tends not to be the case. They are going on holiday, or having some time off work. There's nothing "annual" about it aside from the allowance they have for such periods of time off work.

Likewise, I also despite "Personal Time Off" or, more commonly, "PTO". "PTO" already has a meaning, and it is "Please Turn Over". In its fully spelled-out definition, it is unnecessarily specific. If you are having a holiday or some time off work, it is implied that is already "personal", because you have no obligation to share your reasons with your employer. As such, there is no need to state that you're taking "Personal Time Off". Just "Time Off" is fine.

It's all part of the obnoxiously insincere, obsequious way that people talk to one another in the workplace — the LinkedInification of language. It's the same concept that sees people starting the day or an email with "Good Morning Team" (or, worse, "Team,") rather than addressing you in a more sincere, personal sort of way. It's the same reason people say "Can you send me a full brief?" instead of saying "Please tell me exactly what it is you want."

If you know, trust and even like the people you work with, there is absolutely no need to communicate in this way. I would wager that office workers who address one another casually without resorting to business-speak at any point are, on average, significantly happier and less stressed at their job than those who speak like an AI-generated LinkedIn post. Because communicating clearly and in a way that expresses your personality is an inherently more honest way to be — and that, in turn, encourages you to be honest with your colleagues.

So fuck "Annual Leave". Go on holiday. Take some time off. Do whatever you want. Just be honest about it.

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#oneaday Day 510: Another great Eddy Burback video

There's a lot of absolute garbage on YouTube, but there are a few folks out there who do some truly special work. One of those people is Eddy Burback, who makes maybe two or three videos a year, but they're always very high quality, both in technical terms and in terms of the amount of research that goes into them. You may recall a while back I was rather taken by his video about giving up the smartphone life.

Today, he put out a new video called "ChatGPT made me delusional", and I sincerely recommend you set aside an hour or so of your life to watch it through in its entirety. Not skip through it at 1.5x speed, not "have it on in the background". Watch it. Because I think it is important.

Here it is:

Burback's aim for the video was to understand the phenomenon of "chatbot-induced psychosis" or "AI psychosis". This is where vulnerable people, already struggling with matters of mental health, would turn to large language model chatbots such as ChatGPT and use them as a form of "therapy" or as a substitute for actual human contact. There have already been some incredibly tragic results, as anyone who has ever read any science fiction would have been able to predict a mile off.

To explore how this might happen, Burback presented ChatGPT with an obviously ridiculous hypothesis based on complete fabrications: that he was the smartest under-1 baby of 1997, capable of producing great works of art, having in-depth philosophical discussions and demonstrating a deep understanding of complex mathematics. It took him two statements to convince the chatbot that this was the undeniable truth, and things just escalated from there.

Burback presented the chatbot with suggestions that his friends and family might not understand his brilliance, and it recommended he flee into the middle of nowhere and break all contact with them, including stopping sharing his location data with the person he trusts most in the world: his twin brother. He continued feeding the chatbot with increasingly ridiculous, obviously delusional statements and deliberate, complete and utter nonsense, and at no point did it attempt to deter him from the path it had set him on.

It was only at one point — the day when OpenAI controversially swapped its "4o" model for GPT-5 — that the chatbot had a momentary blip in feeding into his "delusions" (and, to its credit, suggested some psychological help facilities in the neighbourhood), but Burback pointed out that it was very easy for someone who was paying for the service to just switch it back to the old model, which seemingly finds it impossible to say "no" to the user.

What was particularly eerie about the whole situation is that Burback was using the premium voice feature on ChatGPT, which has clearly been designed to sound as "human" as possible, even going so far as to add realistic inflections and non-fluency features to the things it is saying. (It also pronounces emojis as completely unrelated sound effects, which somewhat detracts from the "humanity" of it all, but still.) In other words, it wasn't hard to see how someone suffering from real, genuine mental health problems might feel like they really did have a person in their phone who was willing to listen to them, tell them they were always right, and repeatedly give them some really, really bad advice.

It was actually kind of horrifying. The way the bot continually escalated into increasingly outlandish behaviour — culminating in him chanting mantras under an electricity pylon, wrapping his entire apartment in tin foil and tattooing a symbol into his thigh — was genuinely frightening.

I know we can all have a good laugh about how the chatbots get things wrong sometimes, but Burback's research here demonstrates that it doesn't just get things wrong (and I apologise for using this sentence construction, given its indelible association with AI writing, but it's an established turn of phrase for a reason) — it offers genuinely dangerous advice with minimal guardrails in place. And it does so without thinking about it or understanding why it might be dangerous — because it's not actually thinking or understanding anything at all. It's constructing sentences that, based on the data it has Hoovered up from across the Internet, it thinks are the correct responses to the things the user has been typing. It is, in essence, an extremely advanced version of the old ELIZA program on classic computers.

And it can go fuck itself.

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