full-time RV travel

kids I’ve met being raised on the road

This sounds really interesting! Do you write about it somewhere? Or can you share some impressions?

Maybe different people have different ways of seeing. For example, my reaction to most AI art is kinda like trypophobia, it gives me a scare and I close the tab as fast as I can. My reaction to work done is similar. Photos of Aella online have the obvious worked-on lips, when I see something like that in real life I want to walk out of the room. These are instinctive, immediate reactions. Judging from reddit, many people have the same reactions. But many don't; maybe that set includes you. So folks like you will talk about "tasteful surgery", and folks like me will keep being freaked out by each actual example we see.

As to your hypothesis about "part of the sales department", this is a bit funny. You linked to a paper by Parsa et al. Have you tried googling Keon Parsa?

I don't like being that person, but I guess I am that person: I defy the data. There are many people around me (mostly women) who have had work done, and it always looks horrible. Low regret rates don't mean much to me, because another thing I see clearly is that the people who had work done become delusional about how it looks, and often get tempted to do even more. I see people look at themselves in the mirror and see themselves delusionally. I see people having unnaturally less movement in the face. I see people whose procedures age badly, and are by now impossible to reverse. It's not something I'm repeating from the internet, it's what I've seen in reality for years. How those studies got those conclusions, I don't know, but they must be doing something wrong.

The thing is, I've seen some people get a lot more success from changing location or social scene, or from losing lots of weight. But I don't think I ever saw anyone getting a strong boost from plastic surgery / limb lengthening etc. It just seems oversold to me, and lots of ads outright manipulate people into it.

I think these differences in averages could all be true, but still not affect the median man very much. I mean, let's say Alex gets 0.5 compliments per year and Bob gets 0.25 (yeah the median man gets about that much). That's a 2x difference, but it still doesn't matter. Certainly not enough to get surgery over.

The attractive men also don't care much about these differences, I don't think. The differences only really matter to those who are on the cusp - not too attractive currently, but could be much more attractive with small changes to looks. I think more people imagine themselves in that category than actually are. Then they'll get the surgery, get a real but small improvement, do more drastic stuff and so on. Not sure that's good advice.

If any improvements in attractiveness will likely be marginal anyway, it makes more sense to try milder measures first. Optimizing one's social life might also give a marginal improvement. Moving to another area might be more than marginal actually. So I'd say first try all these things.

I upvoted this post because you didn't use any AI images. But I also couldn't read it, not even to the middle, because it had so many images at all. Read a couple paragraphs, get a train of thought going, boom! Punched in the face with a full screen chicken. Over and over and over again.

That tweet doesn't contain any instructions, mentions some things like "[1]" which for me don't go anywhere (I'm not logged into Twitter), and overall I still don't know how to do the thing you're describing.

use a trick discovered by Janus to get Claude Opus 4 to act more like a base model and drop its “assistant” persona

The link points to another link which points to some API docs saying something is deprecated. Can you spell out the actual steps to the trick?

I think the general solution to this problem is to learn to work very fast - faster than your perception can get tired. 5 minute sketches in art, improvising in music. And becoming comfortable with throwing away and redoing stuff instead of tweaking it.

I see, interesting, thank you! One more question though, my comment mentioned both text and images, with "uncanny averageness in details" applying to both. If you say there's a way to (mostly) avoid that for text by using base models instead of chat-tuned ones, what would be the analogous fix for images?